Notes from ChinaFile
02.01.24![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/55166_sm.jpg?itok=n3Roswrj)
“It’s Too Convenient to Say That Xi Jinping Is a Second Mao”
The Chinese Communist Party, an organization of over ninety million members, remains opaque to many outsiders, even within China. Wall Street Journal reporter Chun Han Wong spent years in Beijing documenting social, political, and economic changes...
Conversation
12.02.22![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/54426_sm2.jpg?itok=qpuCrMXD)
Jiang Zemin, 1926-2022
Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin died on Wednesday at the age of 96, shortly after anger about the zero-COVID policy had boiled over into a wave of protest last weekend. Jiang took the country through the boom years of the 1990s, a time now...
The NYRB China Archive
03.10.22![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/53871_sm.jpg?itok=HF-Mwdbt)
The Uncompromising Ai Weiwei
from New York Review of Books
As I read 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, I felt as if I’d finally come upon the chronicle of modern China for which I’d been waiting since I first began studying this elusive country six decades ago. What makes this memoir so absorbing is that it...
Books
05.22.19![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/books/system/jude-book-cover.jpg?itok=uuJHJ_7L)
![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/assets/images/books/covers/blanchette_redguards_comp_5.jpg)
China’s New Red Guards
Oxford University Press: Ever since Deng Xiaoping effectively de-radicalized China in the 1980s, there have been many debates about which path China would follow. Would it democratize? Would it embrace capitalism? Would the Communist Party’s rule be able to withstand the adoption and spread of the Internet? One debate that did not occur in any serious way, however, was whether Mao Zedong would make a political comeback.As Jude Blanchette details in China’s New Red Guards, 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. Centered around a cast of nationalist intellectuals and activists who have helped unleash a wave of populist enthusiasm for the Great Helmsman’s policies, China’s New Red Guards not only will reshape our understanding of the political forces driving contemporary China, it will also demonstrate how ideologies can survive and prosper despite pervasive rumors of their demise.{chop}
Viewpoint
09.04.18![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/49081_sm.jpg?itok=wVjdnS3D)
Peak Xi Jinping?
The adulation of Xi Jinping, China’s State President, Party General Secretary, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, has yet to reach similar lofty heights as that of Mao Zedong. However, on September 3, the official Beijing media took a...
Viewpoint
01.23.17![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/trumpmao.jpg?itok=amrVrMn6)
The Chairmen, Trump and Mao
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 groundswell of mass support, both men...
Viewpoint
09.08.16![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/gettyimages-163399711.jpg?itok=N_hYTlFe)
Mao the Man, Mao the God
Mao Zedong was dying a slow, agonizing death. Diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in July 1974, he gradually lost control of his motor functions. His gait was unsure. He slurred his speech and panted heavily. The decline was...
Sinica Podcast
03.16.16![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/gettyimages-454926990.jpg?itok=rtB-y8fB)
Everything Old is New Again
from Sinica Podcast
Members of the Politburo are rarely praised for their dancing skills, but consider Xi Jinping’s almost flawless execution of the political two-step: first casting himself as the voice of liberal moderation in the face of Bo Xilai’s mass propaganda,...
The NYRB China Archive
03.10.16![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/gettyimages-3095216.jpg?itok=GQyPG5ag)
China: The Benefits of Persecution?
from New York Review of Books
During decades of reading and reviewing books on China I have learned a great deal, even from those I didn’t like. Only a few have surprised me. Mao’s Lost Children is such a book, and those like me who believe that the Mao period was bad for China...
The NYRB China Archive
11.19.15![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/gettyimages-167345638_0.jpg?itok=TCvf-oYM)
China: Novelists Against the State
from New York Review of Books
Can writers help an injured society to heal? Did Ōe Kenzaburō, who traveled to Hiroshima in 1963 to interview survivors of the dropping of the atomic bomb on that city eighteen years earlier, and then published a moving book called Hiroshima Notes,...
Infographics
11.05.15![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/all-the-presidents-statues_3.jpg?itok=gH_KlOD-)
All The Chairman’s Statues
from Chinese Doodles
Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and the founding supremo of its People’s Republic, is not a man who has retreated from history quietly. During the last decade of his life, during the Cultural Revolution he unleashed in part to...
Features
06.16.15![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/walder_program_screenshot.png?itok=fzrAbXEq)
Does Xi Jinping Represent a Return to the Mao Era?
Following is an edited transcript of a live event hosted at Asia Society New York on May 21, 2015, “ChinaFile Presents: Does Xi Jinping Represent a Return to the Politics of the Mao Era?” The evening convened the scholars Roderick MacFarquhar and...
The NYRB China Archive
05.15.15![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/zhang_ailing_1954.jpg?itok=53-KN7pI)
Mao’s China: The Language Game
from New York Review of Books
It can be embarrassing for a China scholar like me to read Eileen Chang’s pellucid prose, written more than sixty years ago, on the early years of the People’s Republic of China. How many cudgels to the head did I need before arriving at comparable...
Caixin Media
05.05.15![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/xi_as_song_jiang.jpg?itok=aeMgmxXa)
A Byronic Hero for China’s Supremo
A little known vignette about Xi Jinping’s fondness for Song Jiang, a fictional hero in the 14th century classic novel The Water Margin, gives a peek into the private thoughts of China’s most powerful man. For someone born with a red spoon in his...
Viewpoint
11.07.13![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/83627592.jpg?itok=I086Rh-x)
Deciphering Xi Jinping’s Dream
On November 9, the Chinese Communist Party will host its Third Plenary Session of the Eighteenth Central Committee. This conference will be a key to deciphering the ruling philosophy of the new Chinese leadership, who will run the country for the...
Media
11.01.13![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/cultural_rev_node4263_small.jpg?itok=5PO7Flw9)
Apologies for a Horrific Past
On October 9, a farmer named Zhang Jinying appeared on the television show Please Forgive Me, a program usually dedicated to public apologies by unfaithful husbands and wayward sons. But the sixty-one-year-old Zhang’s apology had a depth and a...
ChinaFile Recommends
10.04.13Mao’s Little Red Book to Get Revamp
Guardian
The re-emergence of Quotations from Chairman Mao comes amid an official revival of the era’s rhetoric. Xi Jinping has embraced Maoist terminology and concepts, launching a “mass line rectification campaign” and even presiding over...
ChinaFile Recommends
08.29.13The East is Still Red
Foreign Policy
China’s Left believes that only a stronger Communist Party could solve the country’s problems of corruption, inequality, and moral torpor. Those on the Right believe unbridled state power is actually the problem, as China learned during the Mao...
ChinaFile Recommends
08.29.13At Bo Xilai Trial, a Goal to Blast Acts, Not Ideas
New York Times
In a delicate balancing act, China’s leaders aim to simultaneously parade Mr. Bo as a criminal and silence his most vocal supporters while avoiding tarring the leftist policies he championed or alienating important revolutionary families.
ChinaFile Recommends
06.11.13Xi Jinping Appears More Maoist Than Reformer So Far
Los Angeles Times
During his first months in power, Xi has proven himself more hard-line than his recent predecessors. He has tightened censorship in academia and the media, and spearheaded China’s territorial assertions in the South China and East China...
Viewpoint
05.13.13![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/119736979.jpg?itok=E3dB5QQp)
Maoism: The Most Severe Threat to China
Ma Licheng (马立诚) is a former Senior Editorials Editor at People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s most important mouthpiece, and the author of eleven books. In 2003, when Japan’s then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine...
ChinaFile Recommends
09.05.12Searching for a People
China Story
The disaffected characters of Pirandello’s work offer us perhaps a way to understand the complaints and parodies of Communist Party rule that abound on the Chinese Internet. If unelected rule had previously allowed China’s party-state to claim...
The NYRB China Archive
06.21.12![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/119737115.jpg?itok=nWXz8Ht8)
China: Politics as Warfare
from New York Review of Books
Mao’s Invisible Hand is one of those books that make one feel good about scholarship. It describes inner workings of Chinese Communist society about which few nonexperts know anything—it may even surprise the experts—and it will interest anyone...
The NYRB China Archive
06.29.89The Incredible Shrinking Man
from New York Review of Books
Just before the recent demonstrations in Beijing and other cities, which shook the Party to its foundations, a rumor ran through the capital: Mao Zedong’s body, embalmed and mounted in the ugly Memorial Hall which disfigures Tiananmen Square...
The NYRB China Archive
02.17.66![](https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/styles/system/public/assets/images/article/system/103934098.jpg?itok=Th4hGHc-)
How to Deal with the Chinese Revolution
from New York Review of Books
The Vietnam debate reflects our intellectual unpreparedness. Crisis has arisen on the farthest frontier of public knowledge, and viewpoints diverge widely because we all lack background information. “Vietnam” was not even a label on our horizon...