Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium An Announcement 陰魂不散   Mao Zedong was born on 26 December 1893. At a banquet organised to celebrate the occasion in Zhongnanhai in 1966, the seventy-three year old Mao is said to have raised a glass to toast the ‘all-out civil war’ 全面內戰 that he and his revolutionary comrades had engineered that year (see 戚本禹回憶錄).… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Appendix XXX 缺席 ‘The Chinese intelligentsia is missing in action!’ This sentiment is expressed by a small, disparate and embattled number of independent-minded individuals in the People’s Republic of China.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium
Appendix V 有目共睹   As we observed in You Should Look Back, the introduction to Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium, the year 1979 was of outsized significance in the history of post-Mao China.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Appendix XXIX 孤傲   Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium is the title of China Heritage Annual 2022. The series marks Xi Jinping’s first decade as China’s party-state-army leader.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Appendix XXVIII 週而復始   In early March 2020, we published an interview with the Beijing sociologist Guo Yuhua 郭於華 under the title The Political Manipulation of People is More Toxic Than Any Virus.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Appendix XXVII 謔   *** On 8 December 2022, The New York Times reported that: A day after China’s ruling Communist Party announced a broad rollback of the “zero Covid” restrictions that had smothered the economy and transformed life in the country, the propaganda apparatus on Thursday began the daunting task of promoting an audacious revision of history.… Read