‘Red Dawn Over China’ by Frank Dikötter review
Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity by Frank Dikötter is a balanced account of the violent years between Kuomintang and communist rule.
China
The British Empire’s Brothels
British servicemen overseas bought sex, sometimes in brothels run by the British army. In the 1970s they began to talk about it.
Tibet: History Across the Himalayas
How can historians of Tibet – a region whose history is tightly controlled by the Chinese authorities – gain access to its recent past? Comparing newspapers from either side of the Himalayas might offer a way in.
Written in the Stars: How Old is China?
Chinese astronomers and the European Jesuits who worked alongside them found evidence of China’s antiquity in the heavens. Others were sceptical: how old was China really?
The Lin Biao Incident
On 13 September 1971 a plane carrying Mao’s anointed heir crashed in Eastern Mongolia. What really happened to Lin Biao?
Delivering the Chinese Post Office
As Late Imperial China sought to rebuild as a modern state from the ashes of war, a new national post office was born.
‘The Worlds of Victor Sassoon’ by Rosemary Wakeman review
Rosemary Wakeman’s The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918-1941 is a tale of three cities linked by globalisation and a singular global citizen.
China’s Communist Comic Books
How did the People’s Republic of China cope with a literary canon filled with un-communist ideas? Comics called lianhuanhua were the answer, at least for a while.
On the Spot: Gina Anne Tam
‘What is the most common misconception about my field? That China has “5,000 years” of continuous history.’
How the Communist Party is Closing China
Forty years of opening and reform persuaded a lot of people that the Chinese are not really communists. But modern China was modelled on the USSR, and its leaders want to revert to their Leninist roots.