Cultural Revolution

November 30, 2021

Xi Jinping manipulates history on his way to a third term

China’s Xi Jinping has already served longer than any U.S. president other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And Xi is likely to pass FDR in just a couple years. The Chinese president and Chinese Communist Party general secretary has secured the support necessary for a third term—expected to be followed by a fourth and even fifth one, should Xi, currently 68, live long enough. Continue Reading...

July 31, 2019

Simon Leys on Christopher Hitchens, Mother Teresa & “The Empire of Ugliness”

One of my favorite contemporary writers is Theodore Dalrymple, whose essays I first discovered in The New Criterion about 20 years ago. He wrote that one of his favorite writers, who also had a pen name, was the essayist and critic Simon Leys who died in 2014. Continue Reading...

July 01, 2019

The ghosts in Xi Jinping’s China Dream

Early on in Ma Jian’s new novel the main character has a vision: I saw elderly men and women smashing rocks against the ground under the steely gaze of teenage Red Guards. Continue Reading...

May 24, 2016

5 facts about China’s Cultural Revolution

This month mark the fiftieth anniversary of the China’s Cultural Revolution. Here are five facts you should know about one of the darkest times in modern human history: 1. The Cultural Revolution — officially known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution — was a social and political movement within China that attempted to eradicate all traces of traditional cultural elements and replace them with Mao Zedong Thought (or Maoism), a form of Marxist political theory based on the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong, the Chinese communist revolutionary and founding father of the People’s Republic of China. Continue Reading...