Communist Party Of China

Dear Mr. Xi Jinping: Hello! I am an old woman from Beijing, more than 80 years old. My name is Wang Xiuying. On the 95th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party China (CPC), I would like to discuss the issue of the CPC’s legitimacy. As everyone knows, the CPC was established under the...

Like layers of haze and smog, Mao Zedong's ghost continues to linger over China today. Agnes Smedley (1892-1950), [1] Mao’s Western confidante, using her feminine intuition, noticed that there was a door of Mao's that was never open to anyone. As a matter of fact, Mao had more than one door. Let us...

“Farewell to a classmate leaving the countryside to work in the city.” Drawing by Hu Ping, 1972. Courtesy of Hu Ping. No event has had a bigger influence on me than the Cultural Revolution. First, it is because the Cultural Revolution was a major event in its own right. Second, it is because of my...

This book demolishes one of the last surviving myths about communist rule in China: that there was a “Golden Era” from the time of “liberation” in 1949 until the launch of the Great Leap Forward in 1958. For too many people outside China, the idea has prevailed for too long that this was a period...