Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
What the world remembers about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were the students. But above all, it was a mass workers’ uprising for socialist democracy.
Public discourse on the 1989 Tiananmen Democracy Movement has been dominated by two narratives. The most prevalent interprets the movement (...)
The Communist Party of China led three revolutions of world-historic significance in its short 100-year-history: national liberation, the “Cultural Revolution,” and China’s rapid capitalist transformation.
July 1, 2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Community Party, one of the most (...)
A new generation is fighting back
The great 1989 democratic movement started as a student movement and then made common cause with the workers who joined the movement with the slogan “down with guandao” (bureaucrats involved in market speculation). The regime then realized that there was grave (...)
The Chinese revolution is one of the major events of the twentieth century. Taken as a whole, it covers the entire period from the aftermath of the Russian Revolution to the end of the 1960s, when the People’s Republic descended into the conflicts of the ill-named “Cultural Revolution”. (...)
Abstract
Lu Xun was a giant of modern Chinese literature and a fellow-traveller of the Chinese Communists, to whom he saw no alternative at a time of rampant fascism and the threat of war. However, he was also an admirer of Trotsky, although this fact has been expertly hidden from sight for (...)
In only two countries – Sri Lanka and Bolivia – did Trotskyists ever rise to prominence in national politics, and they did so in remarkably ‘unTrotskyist’ ways, not least by joining Popular Front governments. In the communist parties of China and Vietnam, however, Trotskyists (...)
Despite its massive length, Julia Lovell’s Maoism: A Global History doesn’t offer us a clear way to understand Maoism and its legacy.
Fifty years ago, a remote Chinese region, Dao County, was caught in the violence of the Cultural Revolution. In some weeks, thousands were murdered. Most victims (...)
Excerpt from “Red Dust,” part 2 of our economic history and will soon be for sale via AK Press. The complete contents will also be published on our website for free this summer.
By the mid-1980s, a small but increasing number of urbanites had broken out of the iron rice bowl of the danwei (...)
Last week we published reflections on the 30th anniversary of China’s ‘May of the Masses’ [see below]. Here Charlie Hore reflects on the massacre of 4 June and its aftermath.
‘Since the early 1980s, the Communist Party’s greatest fear had been of a Polish-style Solidarity uprising led by organised (...)
The Last Secret: The Final Documents from the June Fourth Crackdown, edited by Bao Pu, Hong Kong: New Century Press, 362 pp., HK$158.00.
When Chinese law professor Xu Zhangrun began publishing articles last year criticizing the government’s turn toward a harsher variety of authoritarianism, it (...)
Deng Xiaoping was one of the most important Communist leaders of the twentieth century. Celebrated by the West for his pro-market reforms, leftists should be more skeptical of his accomplishments.
Review of Alexander V. Pantsov with Steven I. Levine, Deng Xiaoping, A Revolutionary Life, New (...)
Reviews of Prophets Unarmed: Chinese Trotskyists
in Revolution, War, Jail, and the Return from Limbo. Edited by Gregor Benton. Haymarket Books, 2017 · 1,269 pages · $55.00
In the early 1930s there were more Trotskyists in China than anywhere else outside Russia. The defeat of the Chinese (...)
It’s 40 years since workers, students and school-students broke the oppressive regime that had come out of the Cultural Revolution in China and forced a change of direction on their rulers with mass protests in the spring of 1976. Charlie Hore looks back.
1976 was a pivotal year for China. In (...)
At the request of the Tiananmen Mothers, Human Rights in China (HRIC) is issuing the following essay by the group to commemorate the victims of June Fourth on its 26th anniversary. Quoting Premier Li Keqiang’s March 2015 speech that Japan’s leaders today bear historical responsibility for Japan’s (...)
At the beginning of his essay ‘Two Revolutions’, published in NLR five years ago, Perry Anderson described its aim as an explanation of the contrast between the historical outcomes of the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions. His attempt would involve, he went on, reflection on four levels: (...)
“There is irrefutable evidence that the rotten heads of the United Departments plotted to instigate a Second Shanghai Riot! They cannot get away with it!” (ca. 1967, via chineseposters.net)
At the end of the Qing dynasty and in the early twentieth century, a significant number of Chinese (...)
This week marks twenty-five years since the People’s Liberation Army slaughtered hundreds, possibly thousands, of unarmed civilians while cracking down on the student-led protest movement in Beijing.
The Chinese government has marked the occasion, as it does every year, with a campaign of (...)
PEN Atlas contributor Gregor Benton looks at revolution, resistance and the Beijing University literature class that harboured three of China’s best-known intellectual and political adversaries, in light of his forthcoming translation of Mei Zhi’s prison memoirs F: Hu Feng’s Prison Years. (...)
SHANGHAI — Guo Xicui, a Chinese woman who filed a lawsuit against the Japanese government seeking reparations for wartime sexual slavery, has died, a source who knew her said. She was 86.
Guo died Tuesday of an unknown cause at her home in Yu County, Shanxi province, the source said Thursday. (...)
The election last week of Xi Jinping to the chairmanship of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), together with six others who with Xi constitute the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the party, represents entrenchment of what the Chinese Marxist intellectual Au Loong Yu has called (...)
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