Rana Mitter

Rana Mitter teaches Chinese history and politics at Oxford, and is a fellow of St Cross College. A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World appeared in 2004.

The term ‘Liberation’ (jiefang), usually granted a celebratory capital letter, is still commonly used in China to describe the Communist Party’s victory in 1949. In the West, too, it was for decades a mainstay of academic writing, marking the absolute dividing line between the ‘old’ China of backward practices and the ‘new’ China of socialist...

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