Market Stalinism – The Danger Of Limited Revolution

What’s the limit of a revolution? That’s the question that keeps coming to me – in a decade or more of continuous international stagnation, in which everything in many developed countries is largely the same, but shabbier, as it was in 2008 or so, we can find that outside of that developed bubble things have...

Whose Party-State Is It Anyway? – The Republican Period, The War, And Peanut Vs. Monkey King

"One can imagine Chiang Kai-shek's ghost wandering around China today nodding in approval,” Oxford historian Rana Mitter wrote in his Modern China, “while Mao's ghost follows behind him, moaning at the destruction of his vision." Chiang Kai-shek? The guy Joseph Stilwell called 'Peanut' and ‘Cash-My-Check’? Loser of the civil war and the loser of Taiwan?...

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...

Seeing Red – On Chinese Nostalgia And Two Visions Of History

Recently I visited a gentrified little place near where I live here in Panyu District, Guangzhou, and I had a little thought. This place was built out of a repurposed Mao-era factory. It was a small neighbourhood, a local commercial hub for shopping, eating and taking selfies and cute videos for social media, with hipster...

A Sad Portrait of Mao Zedong – the Cultural Revolution and the Howling Void

“It’s just like the Cultural Revolution!” is a cliché often heard in talk about Chinese politics. Today we see it used to describe Xi Jinping’s policies of artistic censorship, political crackdown and focus on ideological work – we’ve also seen it used to describe Carrie Lam’s Hong Kong under the National Security Law, or to...

Short Fiction – Become Like Dongshan!

Comrade, I respectfully report that our field trip to Dongshan Industrial Machine Production Facility Number Three yesterday was without incident. We set off early in the morning from the Party headquarters with three comrades in order to investigate the recent disturbances in the area, and we arrived at the factory compound within half an hour....