Does The Cultural Revolution’s Brutal Legacy Haunt President Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream’?

Today’s China is nowhere near the point of another Cultural Revolution, and the 50th anniversary of the start of that traumatic era will go unmarked in official circles. Chinese leaders “are frightened of the Cultural Revolution,” says the historian Frank Dikötter. “They think that’s what might happen if you give ordinary people a say.” Read […]

Rate this:

Deng Xiaoping And China’s Treatment Of History

The new 48 episode series, which began airing on August 8, is the first officially-sanctioned dramatization of Deng’s rise to the position of paramount leader from 1976 to 1984 during one of the most tumultuous periods in contemporary Chinese politics. Befitting its subject matter, the series appears to have buy-in at the highest levels: It […]

Rate this:

Remembering A Chinese Liberal Hero

Twenty-five years ago yesterday, a senior Chinese politician named Hu Yaobang complained of dizziness at a meeting in Beijing, and asked to be excused. Moments later, he collapsed with a fatal heart attack. The 74-year-old Hu, one of China’s most senior leaders just two years before, was dead. What happened after that is history. Read Here […]

Rate this:

The Game Changing 8% Story

For over a quarter century, the one figure that dominated discussion of China’s economy was this: eight percent. Beginning in 1982, when leader Deng Xiaoping established the percentage as necessary to quadruple the size of the country’s GDP by 2000, China has seldom failed to achieve it—even in 2009, when the world was enduring the worst downturn since the Great Depression. […]

Rate this: