How, why and when capitalism was restored in China
Part 8 of China in the age of American decrepitude The overthrow of capitalism in China in the early 1950s took place under very unfavourable circumstances. From nearby Korea, US […]
Category Archives: Maoism
The long and torturous road to the Third Chinese Revolution
Part 7 of China in the age of American decrepitude When the sudden decline of US industry in the 1980s and 1990s opened the possibility, for the first time in […]
The death of the revolution in China and its re-birth – told in a brilliant new novel
The generation of workers and peasants who made the Chinese revolution in the course of the bitter fight against Japanese occupation in the 1940s has largely passed away. So have […]
Shanghai and the holocaust
Jewish communities have existed in China for at least a thousand years, since they arrived as traders along the silk road. The European explorer Marco Polo, visiting Beijing in the […]
A visit to the museum of propaganda posters in Shanghai
I have never been very keen on Maoist poster art – not even in the period of my life when I was attracted to Maoism – and I probably would […]
China, class collaboration, and the Indonesian killing fields
Third part of an investigation of the background to the 1965 massacre of up to a million Communist Party supporters in Indonesia, described but not explained in Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary […]
China 1927: precursor to the slaughter in Indonesia
Second part of a commentary on the catastrophic 1965 slaughter of the Indonesian workers and peasants described, but not explained, in Joshua Oppenheimer’s film ‘The Act of Killing.’ The histories […]
The strength and weakness of ‘The Act of Killing’
The recent documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer, ‘The Act of Killing‘, provides a chillingly intimate portrait of some aging thugs who, nearly fifty years ago, took part in one of the […]
A worker at large 