On 18 December 2018, the Chinese authorities commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the December 1978 Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Party. During that momentous meeting, Party leaders formalised a decision to abandon key elements of Mao-era policies and instead focus the nation’s energies on the economy and improving the living standards of ordinary Chinese.… Read

Translatio Imperii Sinici (II) It is a lazy commonplace for ‘China Experts’, ‘China Savants’, 中國通 and a host of others deft at spinning a tale and making a buck by offering gimcrack insights into the People’s Republic of China to focus on the evanescent details of the moment rather than grounding their observations in the long term.… Read

Translatio Imperii Sinici (I) China Heritage Annual 2019 takes as its theme Translatio Imperii Sinici — the transfiguration of China’s imperial power, politics, mindset and culture throughout the modern era. The title is an adaptation of the medieval Latin term ‘translatio imperii‘, literally ‘the transfer of the power or authority to rule and command’.… Read

China Heritage Annual 2019 On 4 July 1945, Mao Zedong asked the educator and progressive political activist Huang Yanpei (黃炎培, 1878-1965) what he had made of his visit to the wartime Communist base at Yan’an in Shaanxi province.… Read

Dog Days (VIII)   This latest addition to Dog Days — a series of canine-themed articles, essays, translations and art works marking The Year of the Dog (16 February 2018—4 February 2019) — takes as its theme China’s most famous ‘stray dog’ 喪家狗, the pre-Qin thinker and latter-day Sage, Confucius.… Read