Mid-term Scoring Guidelines

The scoring guideline below provided should be viewed as a reference tool rather than a strict checklist that must be followed to achieve a high mark. Your essay will be evaluated holistically, including the coherence of your arguments, the clarity of your expression, the depth of your insights, and the overall effectiveness in developing the argument.

Primary Source: China and the League of Nations

High-level Indicators

• Explains V. K. Wellington Koo’s diplomatic mission at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, situating it within China’s post-WWI geopolitical position and national interests
• Articulates why the nascent Republic of China viewed League of Nations membership as strategically advantageous for a newly sovereign yet vulnerable state
• Analyzes Koo’s deliberate invocation of Confucian philosophy and explains how appealing to shared philosophical principles served China’s diplomatic objectives
• Considers how a smaller, weaker state like the Republic of China could leverage cultural and philosophical soft power to assert its interests within a Great Power-dominated system
• Explores the apparent contradiction between Confucianism’s late-19th-century critique as an obstacle to modernization and its continued prominence in early-20th-century Chinese foreign policy
• Identifies the limitations and potential failures of the League of Nations and Wilsonian internationalism
• Compares or contrasts Confucian concepts of universal peace (Tatungism) with Kantian frameworks for perpetual peace, examining their respective strengths and weaknesses as models for world governance
• Addresses the domestic political reaction to Koo’s speech, particularly the impact of news that German-held Chinese territories would be ceded to Japan rather than returned to Chinese sovereignty
• Recognizes Koo’s analogy between the Spring and Autumn period (when “might makes right” dominated inter-state relations) and the post-WWI international order and its main contradition: the persistence of power politics despite emerging calls for universal peace

Low-level Indicators

• Provides minimal context regarding World War I, the Versailles Peace Conference, or the broader geopolitical circumstances motivating Koo’s mission
• Treats Confucianism as marginal or ornamental rather than central to understanding Koo’s diplomatic strategy
• Overlooks the question of semi-colonialism and China’s fundamental quest to restore full national sovereignty and equality among nations
• Fails to acknowledge contemporary Chinese intellectual critiques of Confucianism or the ideological tensions surrounding its invocation
• Provides little analysis of the challenges Koo faced in representing Chinese interests within a system dominated by victorious Great Powers
• Misses or ignores the connection Koo draws between historical feudal disorder and contemporary international anarchy, and what this analogy reveals about the perpetuation of power-based politics

Secondary Source: 1644 Historiography

High-level indicators

• Analyzes why the Chinese state feels compelled to directly intervene in online historical debates about the Qing and Chinese history more broadly
• Considers what these interventions reveal about contemporary concerns regarding national unity, territorial integrity, and political legitimacy
• Contextualizes Qing conceptions of universal rulership (tianxia) and the “Ruler of All Under Heaven” within the broader East Asian tributary system
• Explains how the Qing’s differentiated policies toward various imperial constituencies (Han Chinese, Mongols, Tibetans, Uyghurs, etc.) shaped both historical realities and modern interpretations of these regions
• Recognizes and critically examines the fundamental tension between China’s ideological claim to historical and civilizational continuity and the actual ruptures in political regime, ethnic composition, and national identity
• Traces the historical evolution of Chinese nationalism’s relationship to the Qing: from early Republican anti-Manchu sentiment and ethnic nationalism, through the “five races under one union” framework, to the post-1949 invention of the “Chinese nation” (zhonghua minzu) as a composite multi-ethnic community
• Explains the significant shift in official Communist historiography regarding the Qing: from depicting it as a weak, incompetent regime unable to modernize or defend China against imperialism, to recognizing its crucial role in consolidating and preserving China’s frontiers
• Examines whether the rising popularity of the “1644 historical perspective” correlates with contemporary socioeconomic conditions — youth unemployment, economic stagnation, and social malaise in China, and considers how emotional investments in historical grievance narratives function as outlets for real-world frustration and anxiety
• Critically evaluates the essay’s invocation of “scientific and serious” historical scholarship as a counterweight to emotional and politicized interpretations
• Probes the tension between legitimate scholarly rigor and the essay’s own normative agenda
• Explores relationship between the state and the intellectuals in contemporary China – specifically, whether the call for “inclusive and integrated historical narrative” represents genuine academic objectivity or a state-endorsed master narrative masquerading as scholarly consensus

Low-level indicators

• Dismisses the essay’s argument for an “inclusive and integrated historical narrative” as mere propaganda without engaging substantively with the historical and political stakes involved
• Demonstrates minimal familiarity with modern Chinese nationalist thought or the historical trajectory of how Chinese nationalism has grappled with the Qing legacy
• Fails to recognize the sensitivity surrounding Qing history in contemporary China and what that sensitivity implies about specific state anxieties: Specifically, Was the Qing a “colonial” empire? Were the Manchus “sinicized”?
• Fails to engage with the question of who defines Chinese civilization, who belongs to the Chinese nation, and how these definitions serve contemporary political purposes
• Demonstrates insufficient understanding of how the Qing’s multi-ethnic governance model (association, indirect rule, etc.) relates to modern territorial claims and minority policy (assimilation, etc.)
• Provides little analysis of the role of social media and online discourse in amplifying historical revisionism or the state’s corresponding need to manage public historical consciousness
• Lacks engagement with the performative dimensions of patriotism in contemporary Chinese online spaces and how historical grievance narratives function within that ecosystem

Multimedia Source: Empress Dowager Cixi

High-level indicators

• Situates the 1905 examination abolition debate within the sequence of late-Qing crises: the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War, the 1898 Hundred Days’ Reform, the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, and the Boxer Protocol
• Explains how each crisis shifted elite attitudes toward institutional reform and constrained Cixi’s policy choices
• Recognizes that the TV series represents a deliberate rehabilitation of Cixi’s historical reputation, departing from republican-era historiography that condemned her as a reactionary obstacle and critically reflects on what the series’ sympathetic portrayal reveals about contemporary historiographical debates and the intended audience
• Analyzes the genuine complexity of Cixi’s shift from conservatism to reform, identifying both external pressures (Boxer Protocol restrictions, foreign coercion) and internal institutional logic (rebuilding elite recruitment after devastation)
• Accurately represents Qu Hongji’s argument: the examination system is foundational for cultivating moral character and ethical leadership, qualities that technical schools cannot replicate
• Recognizes that Yuan Shikai and Zhang Zhidong deploy the Boxer Protocol as a pragmatic argument: exam abolition is structurally necessary, not merely ideological, since northern provinces already lack examination pathways
• Understands how reformers strategically invoke precedent, external constraint, and empirical counterexample to overcome conservative resistance
• Analyzes how Cixi uses rhetoric of urgency (“time is not on our side”) and pragmatic incrementalism (“test it out somewhere unimportant first”) to mediate between competing factions
• Considers how her position as a female ruler operating in a male bureaucratic system may have enabled her to transcend faction-specific loyalties or limited her power
• Connects Cixi’s advocacy for female education to broader late-Qing debates about women’s role in modernization, and whether her emphasis on female schools represents genuine commitment to gender reform
• Analyzes how the sudden removal of the examination pathway disrupted the “lower gentry” class and contributed to the fragmentation of local elite authority, namely whether there were connections between examination abolition and the subsequent rise of regional military strongmen (particularly Yuan Shikai) as alternative power centers
• Recognizes the dialogue as dramatized representation, not historical fact, while considering what historical claims the scene advances through its narrative choices

Low-level indicators

• Provides minimal discussion of the self-strengthening movement or how late-Qing crises (Sino-Japanese War, Hundred Days’ Reform, Boxer Rebellion, Boxer Protocol) shaped reform debates
• Fails to explain why the exams were suspended in 1898, restored by Cixi, and again abolished in 1905
• Treats Qu Hongji’s defense of examinations as merely reactionary without seriously engaging his philosophical position regarding moral education and institutional foundations
• Fails to recognize that conservative resistance rested on genuine concerns about administrative decay and elite fragmentation
• Shows little awareness that the excerpt is from a television drama series rather than a historical document, missing its significant revision of earlier historiography that condemned Cixi as embodying Qing decay
• Overlooks how reformers invoke the Boxer Protocol as an external constraint that transforms exam abolition from ideological preference to administrative necessity=
• Fails to examine how Cixi’s gendered position may have inflected her rhetorical authority and capacity to mediate factional disputes
• Presents her shift from conservatism to reform as simple capitulation or ideological conversion, missing genuine internal contradiction
• Provides minimal engagement late-Qing modernization dilemmas, in particular the tension between tradition and modernity
• Treats Cixi’s advocacy for female schools as incidental, failing to connect it to broader late-Qing debates about women’s modernization role, such as other figures’ positions on female education (such as Qiu Jin’s more radical feminist vision)
• Provides minimal discussion of what happened to the “lower gentry” class after examination abolition or whether new schools adequately filled the administrative vacuum (e.g. connecting institutional decay at the local level to the rise of military strongmen and broader state fragmentation in the early Republican era)