For the thousands of foreign visitors who travelled behind the ‘bamboo curtain’ to visit Mao’s China, hospitality workers – guides, drivers, waiters, chambermaids – were unofficial ambassadors for the new socialist state, and the state knew it.
It is the most powerful political party in the world, controlling China’s future as well as its past, but was the young CCP in control of its imperial destiny?
In The China Question: Eight Centuries of Fantasy and Fear Ho-fung Hung watches the West swing from Sinophilia to Sinophobia and back again.
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.
British servicemen overseas bought sex, sometimes in brothels run by the British army. In the 1970s they began to talk about it.
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.
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?
On 13 September 1971 a plane carrying Mao’s anointed heir crashed in Eastern Mongolia. What really happened to Lin Biao?
As Late Imperial China sought to rebuild as a modern state from the ashes of war, a new national post office was born.
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.
