Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Chapter XXVIII, Part II 檄   The month of December in 1972 brought to a culmination a process that had unfolded during ‘the coup year’ of 1971.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium Chapter XXVIII, Part I 赤字   ‘The tyrannical King Li of Zhou was reviled by the people’ 厲王虐，國人謗王。 This is the first line in ‘The Minister Counsels King Li Against Suppressing Criticism’ 召公諫厲王弭謗, an account by Zuo Qiuming 左丘明 in Discourses of the States 國語 Guó yǔ (c.… Read

Readings in New Sinology 斅   In May 2005, I published Towards a New Sinology, a short manifesto born of long years of study, experience and thought. Later that year, a reader recommended that I familiarise myself with the ‘Symposium on Chinese Studies and the Disciplines’, a panel organised for the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Washington, D.C.,… Read

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