The Good Communists – Or, China’s Liberal Reformers Versus History

1: The Li Keqiang Blues When good-hearted Marge Simpson is unwilling to lie to customers to sell real estate, her boss Lionel Hutz gives her the following advice: “There’s the truth,” he says, shaking his head disapprovingly, “and the truth!”, nodding vigorously. Similarly, we might say there are Chinese communists (shaking head disapprovingly) and Chinese...

Hungry Ghosts – Finding The Past In Modern China

“Resolutely prevent not believing in Marx and Lenin and believing in ghosts and spirits.” – The Central Committee of the Communist Party, Opinions on strengthening the Party’s political construction, Xinhua News, February 27th, 2019   Above an ancient kiln, dating back over a thousand years, was the incongruous shape of a smokestack. Below at the...

Add Oil! – The Tragedy of Zero-Covid

You see, they say, we told you so. Socialist utopia has failed once again – the fantasies of Xi Jinping, insane autocratic chairman for life, that he could stop hundreds of thousands of his own people from dying for no good reason, have been defeated, and now it is so that China will have to...

US Imperialism And Quake (1998), Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Strogg

“Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie.” John Carmack once said, when id’s Tom Hall was getting too caught up in the deep lore of hit 1995 classic shooter Doom during development. “It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” In 1996 id Software released a game called...

Politics In Command? – China In The New Era And That Interesting Little Thing That Happened In November 2022

“The largest protests in China since Tiananmen Square”. You heard about those? The ‘A4 revolution’, the ‘White Paper protests’, as it were – the birth of a new Chinese youth movement, the heir to Tiananmen and May 4th, the moment where someone finally dared to say “down with Xi Jinping”. For a few magical days...

The Billion-Yuan Question – The Everyday in China, Socialist Modernity, And Why I’m Bored of Talking About Billionaires

“What kind of socialist country has billionaires?” If you want to discuss the question of where China is going – if you really want to – then this is the question it seems you have to face. There’s no way around it; whether you’re trying to defend the People’s Republic from the left as a...

Goodbye, Land of Snows – Or, Several Irreconcilable Perspectives on Tibet

-encounters with paradise- Once I was in a restaurant and I was reading a book – Penguin’s Buddhist Scriptures, a cool little anthology of various texts from across different schools of Buddhist, edited by scholar Donald Lopez – when the waiter took an interest in it. He was a young, Han Chinese guy, tattooed and...

The Danger of the Safety Valve – The Kuomintang, The Labour Party, And The Downsides Of Effective Opposition

I read an article a while back about the relative decline of the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, in Taiwan – widely-documented as a party in trouble owing to a multitude of factors, from its own corruption and incompetence both in office and out, its dirty role in Taiwan’s dictatorial past which it has never...

Schrödinger’s Emperor – The Decentralised Party-State And A Truly Historic Cultural Revolution

1: The Mountains Are High And The Emperor Is Far Away It’s one of those Chinese phrases: the mountains are high and the emperor is far away. Neat. What’s it mean? It means that whatever is said from on high in Beijing doesn’t always make it to the most local of local governments; it means...

Singing Red and Smashing Black – The Weird Legacy of Bo Xilai

"Not even the worst TV scriptwriter would come up with something like this." – Bo Xilai, at his own trial For people who know modern Chinese history, it’s a very easy shorthand to reduce some of the last century’s most pivotal themes only to dates and events – 1949 for liberation or tragedy, 1958 for...