China’s courage to restart its market economy in 1978 was – as we now know – also a response to a cunning question that reform architect Deng Xiaoping asked his Politburo at the end of 1978: “What do we really know about the world out there? How far have we distanced ourselves from it? What […]
Zhao Lei, Vice President of the Institute for International Strategic Studies at the Central Party College of the Central Committee (中央党校), has apparently learned from foreign correspondents in Beijing: Whenever they despair at the ideological gibberish of Xi Jinping’s lengthy speeches, they count which term he uses most often. That is probably what matters.Zhao Lei […]
Hong Kong kungfu superstar Bruce Lee (Li Xiaolong) also made a name for himself as a Chinese patriot. In the action flick “Fist of Fury” (精武門), Lee played a karate fighter in 1920s Shanghai. When strolling through the park in the British settlement on the Bund, an Indian guard denies him entry, pointing to the […]
When the People’s Republic was founded in 1949, it came with the matching currency: Its people’s money (人民币), the renminbi. However, its new leader Mao Zedong remained at odds with the socialist currency all his life. As a Marxist, the ideologue would have preferred to abolish all money. Even in 1976, the year of his […]
Yan Mingfu (1931-2023) died in Beijing on July 3 at the age of 91. He grew up, baptized in a Christian family, in southwest China’s Chongqing. At 18, Yan joined the Communist Party, studied Russian and became Mao Zedong’s chief interpreter. He accompanied the chairman at his meetings with Soviet leaders, translated Beijing’s bitter dispute […]
The “Great Green Wall,” a more than 4000-kilometer-long protective wall against soil erosion in northern China planted in 1978, is an ecological success story. So is the reforestation of agricultural land by converting fields into forests and meadows (退耕还林还草).Beijing’s campaign of reforesting vast areas of arable land (退耕还林) started in 1999, recalls Gao Juncai (高俊才), […]
Why and how did a boy who had to watch as a child how the despot Mao Zedong politically persecuted his father and exiled him from Beijing, later become himself a Maoist and dictator who oppresses others?China experts puzzle over such zigzags in the life of current CCP leader Xi Jinping. Was he never filled […]
Every time Xi Jinping is elected as leader, the submission ritual of the Communist Party follows. In 2013, 2017, and most recently at the end of December last year, Xi summoned the Politburo for a special “criticism and self-criticism” session.With it, Xi also gave the starting signal for the nearly 100 million party members in […]
For the Chinese, “losing face” is a misfortune. Why? A German psychotherapist knows the answer: everyone has a “true face.” But in a dictatorship, it is far “too dangerous” to show it. Beneath “the mask worn on display, simmers a pent-up emotional potential of existential angst, murderous rage, hatred, deep pain, and often bitter sadness.”The […]
What is the connection between the translated name for “Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs” (白雪公主和七个小矮人) and the characters for the date “May 35” (五月三十五) or with the Chinese term “The Driving-In-Reverse-Emperor” (倒车帝)? Why is China’s urban youth and the country’s middle class attracted to three new alleged sciences, involution (内卷), lying flat (躺平), and […]
