赵老师来函

Zhihua,

Thank you very much for your update and congratulations on the first successful session -- a discussion of what's going on in China, together with somebody's paper and some reading material, sounds a great combination of activities! After all, as I suggested in class, political economy as a theoretical framework is meaningless unless and until it is connected to the real world. As a matter of fact, given the global perspective that political economy is, you may also related our discussion to what is goin go right now in the world: for example, the US Financial Crisis and the US state's bailout effort -- which, in the words of somebody I had dinner with in San Diego last Thursday -- was a form of "socialism for the rich".

Also, I have been reading some articles in Li Bin's 马克思主义新闻观拓展读本 and I found many of the articles are very relevant to our course content. In particular, 王绍光's article on democracy goes very well with my discussion of different notions of democracy and 房宁's article on socialism goes very well with our discussion of consumerism and advertising -- so, if you are going to show the video No Logo, perhaps you can ask people to read Fang Ning's article before hand - thus, to bring the discussion to the level of not just critique of advertising and consumerism, but to the level of the relationship between material production and ideological production, between 客观 and 主观，as well as issues about the meaning of socialism.
...

Best,
Zhao