“... In​ July 1978, Hu Qiaomu, a sociologist who was working in Deng Xiaoping’s Political Research Office, issued a dire report on the Chinese peasantry. Hu wasn’t known as a supporter of radical reform, but he nevertheless called for something to be done to mitigate the effects of the socialist industrialisation programme ...”

“... anywhere in the world this year. The trouble is that these speeches are in code. Also, since Mao, China’s leaders have tended to adopt a technocratic, deliberately anti-charismatic public manner. Hu takes that about as far as it can go; he makes Jiang Zemin look like Iggy Pop. To decode the speech, therefore, one ...”

“... Similar conflicts persist today: Jonathan Spence tells us how in 1975 radicals attacked Deng Xiaoping’s modernising policies by criticising the ti-yong policies of a late Qing governor-general. Yet the dilemmas are now more complex, since three rather than two sets of values are involved. Can China modernise while remaining simultaneously Chinese ...”

“... the giant plaster and styrofoam ‘Goddess of Democracy’ that faced off the portrait of Chairman Mao over the Gate of Heavenly Peace and became an instant icon. The foreign press sometimes described it as a Chinese Statue of Liberty, a misrepresentation that was turned back on the students in official propaganda. The ...”

“... up from lampposts in the city centre, some bearing pieces of cloth scrawled with the words: ‘Deng Xiaoping, Son of a Bitch.’ It was the work of the Partido Comunista del Perú-Sendero Luminoso. Sendero (or Shining Path, as it’s referred to in English) was an ultra-orthodox Maoist group which had a few months earlier launched an armed insurrection ...”

“... and healthily,’ she protested. My father’s line was always the same: ‘Thanks to Chairman Mao, I have a Shanghai beauty as a wife.’ Some were unhappy in the rural areas, and horribly mistreated; others look back on it as an idyll; but all were consigned to a bleak future. By the 1950s China’s population growth ...”

“... Young Wei it was who, raised as a Red Guard, Looked back on his achievements with remorse. With Mao set to cash in his Party card Deng and the boys announced a change of course. The Student Wei invited ten years hard Saying they’d got the cart before the horse: If freedom came ...”

“... safest option therefore is to position oneself at the far end of this story, roughly a year after Deng became paramount leader in 1978 and opened the way for a revolution in the arts, quite likely the last thing on his mind. First to the revisionists, survivors of the Cultural Revolution known as Scar artists, who used socialist realism to assess the extent ...”

“... alongside Communism, according to the principle of ‘one country, two systems’ devised by Deng Xiaoping, China’s supreme leader and the true architect of the Agreement. Hong Kong people would rule Hong Kong, and to emphasise this the Agreement promised an elected legislature after 1997, something the British had never seen fit to introduce in over a ...”

“... China was not only poorer than most African countries but suffering from a massive famine. Mao Zedong and his colleagues decided to import vast quantities of wheat as a way to address the food crisis and, more radically, to change the staple of their 800 million countrymen: wheat has a higher nutritional value than ...”

“... moratorium helped to preserve Western illusions about the virtues of the Revolution. Only after Mao’s death did things become sufficiently kaifang (open) for accounts of what had been going on inside the country to reach the West. Suddenly the much-vaunted cruelty of the Chinese was no longer dynastic and elaborate: the ...”

“... Cold War and McCarthyite atmosphere in the United States was attributable much more to events on Mao’s periphery than on Stalin’s; the deadly question ‘Who Lost China?’ was the weapon employed to suggest a stab in the back and thereby to impale the foreign policy liberal internationalists. The cause of Indian ...”

“... has proved more vulnerable to the virus than any other. It may not be a ‘paper tiger’, as Mao said, but it has been far less effective than South Korea, Taiwan or Germany – or even Spain or Italy – in confronting the virus. While Trump was threatening to provoke a war with Iran in early January, he was warned of ...”

“... and 70s no longer looked to Lenin, as their fathers did in the 1930s: they sought inspiration in Mao, Marcuse, Bakunin and Trotsky. The change was reflected in student unrest in Europe and America, and in the emergence of groups like Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigades and the Weathermen. Even those in the West who continued ...”

“... a particularly exciting treatment of Asia and China from the time before the Warring Kingdoms to Mao and Deng Xiaoping, ends with today’s European Union. Antinomies deals with Gramsci alone; essentially it is a reprint of a long essay published in 1977 in New Left Review. Both books ...”