The Little Red Book, a talisman of 20th-century Maoism, may have fallen out of favour in China after the Cultural Revolution, but its popularity with collectors shows no sign of abating. The book, officially entitled Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, was given its popular name due to the bright red cover of mass-produced editions. A rare prototype version is about to resurface in a sale by a west London auction house of hundreds of artefacts from the Cultural Revolution, where it is expected to fetch more than £30,000. The early…
Tag: Mao Zedong
Tania Branigan’s Red Memory wins 2023 Cundill history prize
Guardian leader writer Tania Branigan has won the 2023 Cundill history prize for her book Red Memory, about the ongoing trauma of China’s Cultural Revolution told through the rarely heard stories of the people who lived through it. Branigan will receive $75,000 (£60,984) as part of the award, which is the largest cash prize for a book of nonfiction in English. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Montreal on Wednesday evening. Judging chair and historian Philippa Levine said that Branigan’s “sensitive study of the impact of…
Isabel Crook obituary
The pioneering anthropologist Isabel Crook, who has died aged 107, was the last survivor of that generation of sympathetic westerners who joined Mao Zedong’s rural revolution and stayed on after 1949 to build a “new China” – with mixed fortunes. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) her husband David Crook was accused of spying and imprisoned for five years, while Isabel was locked up for three years on their college campus. The couple retained their belief in the post-Mao leadership of the Communist party until, horrified by the Beijing massacre in…
Yan Mingfu, Who Tried to Defuse the Tiananmen Powder Keg, Dies at 91
Yan Mingfu, the son of a Chinese Communist Party spy who became Mao Zedong’s interpreter and a negotiator who sought to defuse the standoff between the party and student protesters occupying Tiananmen Square in 1989, died on Monday in Beijing. He was 91. His daughter, Yan Lan, confirmed the death in a statement in the Chinese magazine Caixin. She did not specify a cause, but Mr. Yan had endured a succession of illnesses in old age. “Dad passed away peacefully, putting a full stop on a life filled with tumult…
Kissinger at 100: Statesman or war criminal? His troubled legacy – in pictures
Kissinger with the founding father of Kenya, President Jomo Kenyatta, during his whirlwind tour of Africa in 1976. Over two weeks in April, Kissinger visited six countries, also meeting presidents Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, William Tolbert of Liberia, and Senegal’s Léopold Senghor. Despite these visits, critics said Kissinger was more interested in white minorities in southern Africa, with whom he had more sympathy. Photograph: World Politics Archive/Alamy The Guardian
China Fines Comedy Company $2 Million For ‘Insulting’ the Military
Beijing fined a Chinese comedy studio around $2 million on Wednesday for a joke that compared China’s military to stray dogs, a reminder of the ever-narrowing confines of expression under the country’s leader, Xi Jinping. The Beijing Municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau accused a popular comedian, Li Haoshi, who is employed by the studio, of “severely insulting” the People’s Liberation Army, China’s military, during two live performances in Beijing on Saturday. The authority said his joke had a “vile societal impact.” “We will not allow any company or individual to…
A tragedy pushed to the shadows: the truth about China’s Cultural Revolution – podcast
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A tragedy pushed to the shadows: the truth about China’s Cultural Revolution
From a distance, you might have mistaken them for teenagers, though they were in late middle age. It wasn’t just the miniskirts and heels on their slim frames, or the ponytails and flaming lipstick, but the girlish way the women held hands, stroked arms, massaged shoulders, smoothed sleeves and straightened bag straps, giddy with affection. Their makeup was heavy, with boldly pencilled brows, and their long hair tinted black or dyed brassy blond – recreating a youth that had never been theirs to enjoy. Auntie Huang was wistful as we…
She Witnessed Mao’s Worst Excesses. Now She Has a Warning for the World.
In 1955, not long after Ms. Chen joined the Central Film Bureau, Hu Feng, a well-known Chinese Marxist writer, was detained for penning a report arguing that literature should allow for greater expressiveness. His words triggered a purge that rippled through Ms. Chen’s circle of friends and colleagues, some of whom were accused of being part of Mr. Hu’s “counterrevolutionary clique.” Then, unexpectedly, Mao began to welcome criticism of the party, urging a “hundred flowers to bloom,” a phrase meant to encourage people to speak up and criticize the party’s…
The Chinese Dream, Denied
The narrow alleyways of Haizhu district have long beckoned to China’s strivers, people like Xie Pan, a textile worker from a mountainous tea-growing area in central China. Home to one of the country’s biggest fabric markets, Haizhu houses worker dormitories and textile factories in brightly colored buildings stacked so close that neighbors can shake hands out their windows. Once a smattering of rural villages, the area became a manufacturing hub as China opened its economy decades ago. The government had promised to step back and let people unleash their ambitions,…