“... McGuire’s engrossing book. She is not the first to approach the history of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China in tandem, yet Red at Heart offers a highly original exploration of Chinese communism, putting the experiences and emotions of the young radicals who lived and studied in revolutionary Russia at the centre of the ...”

“... movements. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, China retreated from the world. When Deng Xiaoping came to power in the late 1970s, he asked his countrymen to focus on domestic development. China should ‘keep a low profile and never take the lead’ on global issues, he warned. Beijing wasn’t strong enough to expose itself by taking a world ...”

“... in stereotypes of Asians; ‘brutal’ is another, at least since Genghis Khan, with Pol Pot and Mao reinforcing the image in our time. The broad distinction between the static or indolent East and the dynamic, progressive West goes all the way back to Herodotus and Aristotle. Trotsky, however, made specific reference to ...”

“... an end to the limited relaxation of the Hundred Flowers period; he was men rehabilitated under Deng Xiaoping as ‘the earliest founder of the Communist organisation in Beijing ... October 1920’. However, as Schwarcz observes, political rehabilitation ‘is not the same as self-rehabilitation’. Zhang was anxious both to justify himself to himself, and ...”

“... people, crushing all individual challenges to the often arbitrary power of the centralised state. Mao’s heirs, who allowed China’s citizens more room for economic initiative, did not break with the imperatives Liang Qichao had identified: to mobilise China’s resources to make it truly autonomous and secure, and to ...”

“... Beijing sent officials to be trained in Singapore, but Peter Sloterdijk’s line that statues of Mao will one day be replaced with ones of LKY now seems a dated exuberance. The meritocratic ideology of Singapore has begun to show signs of wear, and its elite seems incapable of regenerating itself as that of the PRC ...”

“... fundamentally once again. By mid-1934 Chiang Kai-shek’s Fifth Extermination Campaign had made Mao’s base in the Kiangsi-Fukien border area untenable. In October Communist forces broke through encirclement, and began the Long March. A year later, after tremendous losses, a small remnant arrived in Yenan. While the KMT ...”

“... advocacy in advance. The other, still more far-reaching, was the transformation after the death of Mao of the command economy in China in the Reform Era presided over by Deng Xiaoping, with the arrival of the household responsibility system in agriculture and the ignition by township and ...”

“... a year less on radio when he left than when he began. In terms of BBC morale, Dyke may have been Deng Xiaoping to Birt’s Mao Zedong. But in terms of the rush to market, he was Yeltsin to Birt’s Gorbachev. It becomes increasingly clear that BBC reform exemplifies those elements of ...”