Books
05.22.19

China’s New Red Guards

Jude Blanchette

Jude Blanchette details how contemporary China is undergoing a revival of an unapologetic embrace of extreme authoritarianism that draws direct inspiration from the Mao era. Under current Chinese leader Xi Jinping, state control over the economy is increasing, civil society is under sustained attack, and the Chinese Communist Party is expanding its reach in unprecedented new ways. As Xi declared in late 2017, “Government, military, society, and schools, north, south, east and west—the Party is the leader of all.” But this trend is reinforced by a bottom-up revolt against Western ideas of modernity, including political pluralism, the rule of law, and the free market economy.

Books
03.23.18

Curating Revolution

Denise Y. Ho

How did China’s Communist revolution transform the nation’s political culture? In this rich and vivid history of the Mao period (1949-1976), Denise Y. Ho examines the relationship between its exhibitions and its political movements.

Excerpts
11.06.17

The Past Is a Foreign Country

Xiaolu Guo

On Wednesday, November 8, the Chinese-British writer Guo Xiaolu joined the Asia Society’s Isaac Stone Fish in a conversation about the difficulty of existing...

Viewpoint
01.23.17

The Chairmen, Trump and Mao

Geremie R. Barmé

The January 13, 1967 issue of TIME magazine featured Mao Zedong on its cover with the headline “China in Chaos.” Fifty years later, TIME made U.S. President-elect Donald Trump its Man of The Year. With a...

The NYRB China Archive
01.19.17

When the Chinese Were Unspeakable

Ian Johnson
from New York Review of Books

The Xiao River rushes deep and clear out of the mountains of southern China into a narrow plain of paddies and villages. At first little more than an angry stream, it begins to meander and grow as the basin’s 63 other creeks and...

The NYRB China Archive
01.13.17

China’s Hidden Massacres: An Interview with Tan Hecheng

Ian Johnson
from New York Review of Books

Tan Hecheng might seem an unlikely person to expose one of the most shocking crimes of the Chinese Communist Party. A congenial 67-year-old who spent most of his life in southern Hunan province away from the seats of power, Tan is...

The NYRB China Archive
10.27.16

China: The Virtues of the Awful Convulsion

Ian Johnson
from New York Review of Books

For decades, Beijing’s Beihai Park has been one of the city’s most beloved retreats—a strip of green around a grand lake to the north of the Communist Party’s leadership compound, its waters crowded with electric rental boats shaped like ducks...

Books
10.11.16

The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China

Raised to be “flowers of the nation,” the first generation born after the founding of the People’s Republic of China was united in its political outlook and ambitions. Its members embraced the Cultural Revolution of 1966 but soon split into warring factions. Guobin Yang investigates the causes of this fracture and argues that Chinese youth engaged in an imaginary revolution from 1966 to 1968, enacting a political mythology that encouraged violence as a way to prove one’s revolutionary credentials.

Viewpoint
09.08.16

Mao the Man, Mao the God

Sergey Radchenko

Mao Zedong was dying a slow, agonizing death. Diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in...

Sinica Podcast
08.31.16

What Is Cultural About the Cultural Revolution? Creativity Amid Destruction

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more
from Sinica Podcast

This year marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, a chaotic decade of...

Media
05.18.16

My Uncle Was a Red Guard in the Cultural Revolution—He Isn’t Sorry

Lishui is the nickname for my uncle, a farmer who has lived all his life in the suburbs of Tianjin, a big city in northeastern China. Whenever people talk about Lishui, my mother’s older brother, they always say: “Lishui is a nice...

The NYRB China Archive
01.26.16

China: Surviving the Camps

Zha Jianying
from New York Review of Books

By now, it has been nearly forty years since the Cultural Revolution officially ended, yet in China, considering the magnitude and significance of the event, it has remained a poorly examined, under-documented subject. Official archives are off-...

The NYRB China Archive
12.18.14

China’s Brave Underground Journal—II

Ian Johnson
from New York Review of Books

In downtown Beijing, just a little over a mile west of the Forbidden City, is one of China’s most illustrious high schools. Its graduates regularly attend the country’s best universities or go abroad to study, while foreign leaders and CEOs make...

Collecting Insanity

Every country has a past it likes to celebrate and another it would rather forget. In China, where history still falls under the tight control of government-run museums and officially approved textbooks, the omissions appear especially stark. An...

Though I am Gone

(Vid) Wang Jingyao chronicles the murder of his wife, the first victim of the Cultural Revolution. 

Soul-Searching Former Red Guard Won Praises on Weibo

Liu Boqin’s public apology for his acts during the Cultural Revolution received widespread accolates from Chinese netizens. On Sina Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, an overwhelming majority of commentors applauded him while saying, other Red Guards...

Media
05.31.12

Godwin’s Law with Chinese Characteristics

Hu Yong

This winter writer-blogger-race car-driver Han Han found himself facing charges of plagiarism from celebrated fraud-buster Fang Zhouzi. Both Han and Fang have huge followings among China’s microbloggers. And their personal disagreement soon...

The NYRB China Archive
11.11.10

How Reds Smashed Reds

Jonathan Mirsky
from New York Review of Books

July and August 1966, the first months of the ten-year Cultural Revolution, were the summer of what Andrew Walder, a sociologist at Stanford, calls “The Maoist Shrug.” Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife, told high school Red Guards, “We do not...

The NYRB China Archive
04.19.73

Up Against the Wall at Tsinghua U.

Ross Terrill
from New York Review of Books

Some Chinese refer to their lives before and after the Cultural Revolution as if that storm of the Sixties were a religious conversion. Like John Bunyan writing with enthusiastic horror of his unregenerate days, the cadre or craftsman today says...

The NYRB China Archive
03.28.68

The Great Wall

John K. Fairbank
from New York Review of Books

China is so distant, big, and complex that each Marco Polo nowadays tells a different tale. The authors of the three books under review—a cool Swedish journalist, a passionate Chinese true-believer, and a philosophical Frenchman—give very...