Mao Zedong
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American Maoism May 16, 2023
Those of us who care about the survival of ordered liberty are daily faced with a conundrum: Do we painstakingly chronicle the constant assaults on the life of the mind and civilized norms and risk the charge of being one-note Johnnies? Or do we turn...
Mao's Mango Cult May 03, 2023
Mao’s Mango Cult provides a fascinating slice of the history of China’s Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. The short chronicles the peculiar story of how mangoes became a venerated item in the country after Mao Zedong regifted a box of the titula...
Confessions of a China Apologist April 24, 2023
“Yes, I do have a political agenda,” writes the political scientist Daniel A. Bell close to the front of his latest book. “I aim to de-demonize China’s political system.”How does one prettify the ugliest regime on earth? Bell, once communist China’s ...
You Are Old, We Are Young December 22, 2021
Julia Lovell, a professor of modern China at Birkbeck College, University of London, writes at great length and with abundant detail about the enduring influence of Chairman Mao’s brand of political revolutionary thought in her new book Maoism: A Glo...
Ai Weiwei's Life of Dissent November 01, 2021
In 1957, the year of Ai Weiwei’s birth, China’s leader, Chairman Mao, launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, a purge of intellectuals whose work was deemed critical of the state. By the end of the year, about 300,000 people had been rounded up, the maj...
China's Regime Rewrites World War II History May 28, 2021
With a clarity informed by thorough research, Rana Mitter reports on World War II’s growing importance in China’s popular culture and official self-representation. American readers may find his account in China’s Good War perplexing, for much in the ...
The Cultural Revolution's Awful Truths January 26, 2021
In china, history long occupied a quasi-religious status. During imperial times, dating back thousands of years and enduring until the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, historians’ dedication to recording the truth was viewed as a check against w...
A Chinese Guide to Our Cultural Revolution January 15, 2021
Ge Fei is one of China’s most celebrated contemporary novelists, and his seminal work Peach Blossom Paradise has just been translated into English for the first time. The novel is surprisingly traditional for a writer who has a reputation for being e...
The Coming Global Backlash against China January 04, 2021
The Chinese Communist Party’s leader, Xi Jinping, is the most powerful leader in Communist China since Chairman Mao. Yet, Xi’s outward strongman image is a veneer over his inner insecurity. When he came into power in late 2012, China’s economy had sl...
Maoism Exported July 28, 2020
As if parodying the era’s radical chic, a 1967 issue of Lui magazine (France’s Playboy) included a supplement illustrated with quotes from Mao Zedong and scantily clad women assuming militant poses inspired by the Red Guards of China’s Cultural Revol...
Dictators: The Great Performers September 20, 2019
The paradox of the modern dictator is that he must create the illusion of mass support while turning the population into a nation of terrorised prisoners endlessly condemned to faking enthusiasm for their oppressor. Frank Dikötter, a brilliant histor...
Around the World With Mao Zedong September 09, 2019
In recent years, China has spent a small fortune trying to influence the world through “soft power” — relying on language, cuisine and culture, rather than the conventional hard tools of aircraft carriers, spies and satellites. It has done this mainl...
The Enduring Influence of Mao Zedong March 29, 2019
The names of the 20th century's bloodiest dictators are synonymous with evil. Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin: even to joke about them is in poor taste. Yet one tyrant's name has a milder impact. Indeed, many still revere him. His face is on almost every ban...
The Children of the Revolution December 26, 2018
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, wrote James Baldwin, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable. This observation has been confirmed many times throughout history. However, China's Cultural Revolution offers p...
From Mao's Little Red Book to Xi's Big White One May 16, 2018
Looking back to the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, when China was controversially selected to be the “guest of honour” nation, I find that the back and forth over dissent and freedom of expression (which fascinated me then) seems less interesting than som...
