Seoul YWCA's China Study Club

Absorbed in Chinese History

"There are three women; Song, Ae-ryung who loved money, Song, Gyung-ryung who loved China and Song, Mi-ryung who loved power. Which woman's life attracts you?"

The audiences, in the middle of the lecture about Chinese modern history, were questioned this interesting question above. It was asked in order for them to freely imagine with the question asked about Song sisters that cannot be missed to talk about the turbulent Chinese history at the beginning of the 20C.

Since the last fall in 2010, Seoul YWCA started a China-studying group with some experts of Chinese history for people to have a chance of learning China properly with various angles that has been described as an ‘emerging economic powerhouse’. In this year, 2011, it has been focused on studying in Chinese modern history and Social problems. HyunSa, Kang, who is in charge of the Chinese modern history part of the lecture and is a senior researcher of Asiatic Research Institute of Korea University, was quite impressed by the students being so eager for study more than the students who took his classes at university.

Although That China has more than 1.3 billion population and extensive domain overwhelms most of people over the world, it always brings negative reputation and prejudice for China and Chinese that, in the past, some products made in China have been poor in quality and that people tend to think that Chinese might have low sense of citizenship. As the study group was on its second semester, we were getting to realize that we cannot just underestimate Chinese history. Moreover, we had sympathy for Chinese having gone through such a hard time under the communist. 

In the movie called ‘Life’ that we watched together in the class to help us understand Chinese modern history better, the main character said to his grandson that a chick becomes a chicken, a chicken becomes a goose, a goose becomes a sheep, a sheep becomes a cow and when a cow grown up, you become a full human-being.” This is the aspects of Chinese who never give up hopes, even though they lost their children and live with endless poverty.

This group is originally designed to grow up our perspectives on China without any prejudices and stereotypes. In terms of this, it is expecting how far this group would develop in good ways.