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Thinking the Unthinkable

Exploration of the oeuvre of Ci Jiwei, one of the most original social theorists of the contemporary Chinese world. Diagnostics of national consciousness, from Maoist utopianism to a nihilism numbed by consumerist hedonism. Might rising living standards—and the ‘equality of conditions’ already achieved by the Revolution—engender a Polanyian semi-democratization, in the Party’s own interest?

Party and State in China

Unlocking the conceptual monolith of the ‘party-state’, Nathan Sperber sets the evolving relationship between the CCP and the vast governmental apparatus through which it rules in comparative historical context—revealing novel features of the Xi Jinping era.

A Dissipating Glut?

Can Biden’s green fiscal stimulus kickstart a sustained dynamic of capital accumulation? Replying to critics of Riley and Brenner’s ‘Seven Theses’, Aaron Benanav defends and extends Brenner’s account of the long downturn, charting the epochal implications of shifts in demand, from agriculture to industry to services.

The Roar of the Elephant

What might shed light on an enigmatic film in the absence of the artist? Sensitive reading, via literary underdrawings, of Chinese filmmaker and novelist Hu Bo’s masterwork, An Elephant Sitting Still. J. X. Zhang detects a ‘structure of feeling’ distinct from that of Sixth Generation cinema.

Paths not Taken

Joel Andreas on Isabella Weber, How China Escaped Shock Therapy. Reconstruction of the tight contest between ‘big-bang’ and ‘dual-track’ market reformers in Deng’s PRC, weighing generational experience, Western proselytising and the classical Chinese tradition.

Meanings of June Fourth

J. X. Zhang on Wang Chaohua, Conglai jiu meiyou jiushizhu. A participant’s clear-eyed reflections on China’s 1989 pro-democracy movement, three decades on.

Wuhan Diary

Notes from the epicentre of the pandemic, taken from the film-maker’s remarkable multimedia postings under lockdown in Wuhan.

The Land Question in 21st Century China

What does the PRC’s opening to global agribusiness presage for the hundreds of millions who still farm its land? Shaohua Zhan sets out the positions that define the most contentious issue in China today.

East and West

The chaotic Anglo-American reactions to COVID–19 contrasted with the seemingly more successful East Asian regimes, in all their variation.

May Fourth Manifesto

A resounding call for labour rights and democracy on the centenary of the youth uprising of May 1919, swiftly removed from the internet.

China’s Credit Conundrum

Interviewed by Robert Brenner, Victor Shih discusses the one-off factors that enabled China’s rise as workshop of the world and its subsequent dependence on state credit as driver of growth. Contradictions between the conditions for political and financial stability, as the Xi regime superintends an unsteady slowdown.

America vs China

Introducing a triptych of perspectives on the PRC, as the drumbeat from Washington grows louder. Is the American imperium now so vast, so overweening in its demands, that any rising power must grate against it?

The CPC and the Ancien Régime

Roots of the PRC’s legitimating ideology in the longue durée of Chinese history, as source of the Party’s confidence that it need not imitate Western models in the coming century. Peter Nolan sets out the view from Zhongnanhai on the desirable relation between market and state—a potential alternative to the current world order?

Ronald Coase in Beijing

On the eve of the financial crisis, Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing posited the advent of a world-equalizing market state in China. Christopher Connery now takes a sardonic look at the country’s ‘institutional economics’ through the eyes of an idiosyncratic English Hayekian.

Belated Reunion?

One of China’s greatest modern writers, Eileen Chang reframed its traditional fictional forms to grapple with post-1919 realities: decline of the Qing aristocracy, price of female emancipation, devastation of the Sino-Japanese war. Jiwei Xiao asks how publication of her long-suppressed last novel alters understandings of Chang’s work.

China’s First Revolution

Wang Chaohua on Qin Hui, Zou chu dizhi. Sources and consequences of the Revolution of 1911 for China’s history, in the telling of one of its most original political thinkers. Could changes of state ever be separated from transformations of culture?

Little Big Man

Rebecca Karl on Alexander Pantsov & Steven Levine, Deng Xiaoping. Formation and modus operandi of the Number Two Capitalist Roader.

Riddles of Yellow and Red

The bitter oppositions of Thai politics can seem strangely lacking in ideological substance. How might they be explained? In one of his last lectures, Benedict Anderson considers a crucial but overlooked factor: divisions within the country’s Sino-Thai communities.

Capitalisms After Communism

A leading Hungarian sociologist revises Weber’s notion of prebendal and patrimonial regimes to classify the new capitalist orders of the former Second World. Are governments from Budapest to Beijing now converging on the same models of politicized economy?

A Footloose Scholar

The descendant of Dutch bargees, Jan Breman has been investigating workers’ lives for half a century, travelling from rural Gujarat to the Javanese uplands and now coastal China. The social relations patterning control of land and labour framed in historical perspective, from colonial plantations to the globalized informal economy.

Scholarism on the March

Interview with the eighteen-year-old leader of Hong Kong’s radical school students. Joshua Wong discusses his personal and political formation, the battle against Beijing’s patriotic education syllabus and the Umbrella Movement’s three-month occupation of the city’s streets in the fight for democratization.

The Party and its Success Story

How should the balance-sheet of Chinese Communism be assessed? In a rejoinder to Perry Anderson’s comparison of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, Wang Chaohua delivers a critical verdict on the record of Mao’s utopianism and Deng’s pragmatism, and the bleak legacy of the crushing of popular aspirations in 1989.

Goethe’s Nightmare

Barry Schwabsky on Winnie Won Yin Wong, Van Gogh on Demand. How different are Shenzhen trade-painters copying Western artists from the conceptualists using them?

The Spectre of Global China

China’s overseas expansion has unsettled Western commentators. In this striking ethnographic study, Ching Kwan Lee investigates the labour regimes, investment patterns and management ethos of the PRC’s state-owned firms on the Central African Copperbelt, in contrast to the giant multinationals. Surprise findings include Zambia’s first SEZs and a distinctive, quasi-Weberian ethic of ‘eating bitterness’.

China’s Rise Stalled?

Hung Ho-fung on Michael Pettis, The Great Rebalancing. A Wall Street insider’s sceptical look at prospects for an orderly recalibration of the world economy.

Imperial Archipelagos

While China’s maritime aspirations have been widely criticized, little attention has been paid to the UN compact that guarantees Western imperial powers exploitation rights over vast expanses of the world’s oceans.

A Traveller’s Glance

Object of fierce controversy when first shown, Antonioni’s documentary Chung Kuo—filmed in the PRC during the Cultural Revolution—has since been largely overlooked within his oeuvre. The director of L’avventura as failed Marco Polo, whose patient, humanizing gaze left a record of China’s past that is belatedly being rediscovered.

Sino-Seismology

Joel Andreas on Martin King Whyte, Myth of the Social Volcano. Empirical survey of attitudes to inequality in the PRC, offering comfort for Beijing.

Power in the Frame

Origins and mutations of the PRC’s independent documentary movement. From vanguard to grass roots, and from passive observation of a country in flux to a politicized, activist cinema, turning its lens onto the workings of power.

Paper-Tiger Finance?

Hung Ho-fung on Carl Walter and Fraser Howie, Red Capitalism. Two Wall Street China hands assess the PRC’s transition from plan to market.

The Citizen Camera

A feminist filmmaker discusses the role of documentaries in China’s civil-rights protests. Activism and the digital image, from village struggles in Guangdong to the courtrooms of Fujian, via the plains of Henan and Sichuan’s earthquake zone.

China’s Multiple Revolutions

Beneath the dramatic social, political and military turmoil of China’s last two centuries, Mark Elvin suggests, lay a series of existential crises amid the collapse of established pillars of authority, whose most vivid expression can be found in two largely forgotten novels of the 1920s and 1970s.

Uncertainty in the Enclave

Portrait of Hong Kong’s contested political scene. With democratizing reforms blocked by an entrenched alliance of CCP and local magnates, an increasingly radical populace seeks to break the deadlock. Might the PRC’s hyper-capitalist region be its weakest link?

On Mao’s Contradictions

Tariq Ali on Rebecca E Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World. Level-headed exploration of the Great Helmsman’s life and legacies.

A Shanghai Model?

Assessment of Huang Yasheng’s iconoclastic account of the PRC’s economic reforms, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. Did the 1990s witness a turn away from rural entrepreneurialism towards a state-led model favouring coastal elites?

The Politics of China’s Path

Responding to Andreas, Huang Yasheng offers a different chronology for the rural economy’s decline, and stresses the direct impact of political choices made in Beijing on the pace and direction of capitalist development.

Concepts of Nature

Landscapes of Ausonius, mountain retreats of Xie Tiao, mediaeval paradise-gardens: can underlying similarities of deep structure and social function be traced in the work of classical European and Chinese writers? A panoramic cross-cultural comparison of approaches to the natural world.

Global Competition After the Financial Crisis

China’s largest firms remain small fry by comparison to Western MNCs. As the tectonic plates of the world economy shift, a sober assessment of its persistent asymmetries.

Poetics of Vanishing

Cinematic portraits of China’s breakneck social and economic transformation, as seen from street level at its provincial margins. Zhang Xudong on motifs of disappearance, demolition and mobility in the films of Jia Zhangke.

The Future of the Past

Assessment of Wang Hui’s landmark Rise of Modern Chinese Thought. Can the seeds of an alternative, non-Western modernity be located in the worldviews of earlier thinkers? Zhang Yongle observes constellations within a millennial philosophical firmament.

Two Revolutions

How to explain the opposed outcomes for communism in Russia and China, after 1989? Classes and leaders, anciens régimes and external settings, examined in comparative perspective.

America’s Head Servant?

Against predictions that China will soon replace the US as the world’s dominant economic power, Hung Ho-fung argues that the PRC’s export-oriented growth and vast dollar reserves have trapped it in a subordinate role—to which much of its elite remains committed.

Misconceiving Asia

Achin Vanaik on Bill Emmott, Rivals. Contending Asian powers as arbiters of the 21st century, through Western establishment eyes.

The Great Himalayan Watershed

From Asia’s mountainous heart flow rivers on which half the world’s population depends. Pomeranz examines the complex interaction between human water needs, fragile ecology and vast infrastructural projects—and the far-reaching consequences of their conjugation.

Caring for the Nation

Henry Zhao on Gloria Davies, Worrying about China. The range of contemporary disputes among Chinese intellectuals, and what they characteristically have in common.

Changing Colours in China

The nature of China’s present socio-economic system has for some time been hotly debated. Reflecting on Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing, Joel Andreas traces the path of property relations, social services and income distribution in the PRC since the late seventies, reaching unambiguous conclusions.

The Historian as Haruspex

Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing proposes a bold new political-economic patterning of China’s rise, America’s decline. Mark Elvin examines the assumptions behind narratives of divergent West and East, and the parameters that will define a reconfigured world order.

Tibetan Questions

The leading historian of modern Tibet discusses the background to recent protests on the Plateau. What has been the evolution of its culture, modern and traditional, under the impact of the PRC’s breakneck development and market reforms?

Casino Colony

The transformation of the former Portuguese enclave of Macau into East Asia’s gambling capital by an alliance of local elites and Las Vegas entrepreneurs, under the approving gaze of Beijing. A frenzy of construction, rising inequalities and rampant corruption as outcomes of a neon-lit decolonization.

No Forbidden Zone in Reading?

For a decade, the monthly review Dushu has published some of China’s most incisive debates on the country’s culture and economy. Zhang Yongle’s survey relates the journal’s trajectory to the PRC’s dramatic development course and ruptures within its intelligentsia.