Search results for Chinese Political History

Deng Xiaoping’s Hidden Face: The Calculated Silence Behind China’s ‘Reform Era’ Architect

Deng Xiaoping, who served as the Chinese Communist Party’s de facto top leader from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, is officially celebrated in the People’s Republic as the...

How China Became the First Airtight Empire

Beijing rewrote two slogans before it sealed the country – once to rewrite history, once to prewrite the future.

Facts About Chinese History That Make it the Craziest Civilization

The Roots of China’s Communist Revolution

Insights from Frank Dikötter

From Mao to Xi: Li Rui’s Diaries Expose Brutality, Cover-Ups, and the Cycle of Dictatorship

A U.S. federal court in Northern California ruled on Tuesday, March 31 that the original diaries and private correspondence of Li Rui, Mao Zedong’s former secretary, will be preser...

What’s Driving Anti-Qing Sentiment in Contemporary China?

A patriotic film backfired because a growing number of Han Chinese don’t see the Manchu-origin Qing dynasty as a part of their history.

One Hundred Million Defy the Odds: 27 Years of Resistance and Survival in China

Under Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule, two legal paradoxes persist that many citizens have come to accept as normal — yet they raise profound concerns upon closer examination. P...

Zhang Guotao: He Helped Build the Chinese Communist Party and By 1927, He Already Had Doubts – Part I

On a spring morning in April 1938, Zhang Guotao stood at the Mausoleum of the Yellow Emperor in Huangling, taking part in a solemn national ceremony honoring the legendary ancestor...

450 Million People Have Quietly Quit the Chinese Communist Party: The Numbers Keep Rising

Most Chinese citizens never decided to join the Chinese Communist Party. The decision was made for them. In China’s schools, children as young as six are enrolled in the Young Pion...

CCP Rewrites Hong Kong History in Museum Reopening

Analysts say the changes reflect the Chinese Communist Party’s effort to replace Hong Kong’s original historical understanding with its own narrative, downplaying colonial-era conf...

Jiang Zemin’s Secret Pilgrimage and a Monk’s Prophecy About the CCP’s Fate in 2026

Jiang Zemin climbed to the top of the Chinese Communist Party by endorsing the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and the weight of that choice never left him. In his own mind...

Was Xi Jinping inevitable?

China’s Secret Police Are Targeting Young People Who Refuse to Work Hard — and History Shows What Comes Next

China’s Ministry of State Security, the country’s primary spy and political policing agency, has declared that young people’s refusal to work hard is a national security threat orc...

From Confucius to Tsinghua: Trump invokes history to anchor China-US future

Against the backdrop of ceremonial grandeur at the Great Hall of the People on Thursday, US President Donald Trump leaned on centuries of shared history to set the stage for the fu...

12 Ways the Cultural Revolution’s Lingering Shadow Continues to Haunt China

Nearly 60 years after the Cultural Revolution began, many of the political and ideological mechanisms that fueled the movement continue to shape modern China today

A Trip Through China (1917) | Blair University Archives

Step into a vanished world. A Trip Through China is a rare surviving fragment of Benjamin Brodsky’s ambitious ten-reel travelogue, filmed across China in the mid-1910s and original...

The Christian Church in mainland China since 1949

The history of the Christian Church in mainland China since 1949 is a story characterised by times of dramatic upheaval, near destruction and martyrdom, and unexpected revival.

Li Rui Archives Win Landmark US Court Ruling Against CCP Efforts to Reclaim Diaries

A Seven-Year Campaign Defeated On March 31, 2026, a U.S. federal district court in California issued a landmark ruling, concluding one of the most significant transnational legal b...

The CCP Betrayed Everyone Who Helped It Win China’s Civil War

Within a year of winning China's civil war on the strength of surrender guarantees, the Party launched a quota-driven campaign to kill the soldiers who had laid down their weapons

How Stalin Humiliated Mao Zedong in Moscow — and Why Mao Never Forgot It

In December 1949, Mao Zedong boarded a special train and traveled for nearly two weeks across Soviet territory to reach Moscow. He had come to celebrate Stalin’s seventieth birthda...

Ancient China laws punished men for crying; people with messy handwriting forced to drink ink

Ancient China’s legal system was never only about crime and punishment. It was also a mechanism of imperial control, used to protect the throne, discipline officials and regulate s...

Zhao Ziyang’s Five Proposals Terrified the CCP Elite and Sealed His Fate

On May 16, 1989, the five proposals that Zhao Ziyang placed before his Politburo Standing Committee colleagues set off a sequence of events that ended in tanks on the streets of Be...

Why China’s Internet Is Reopening the Case Against the ‘Qin System’ of the First Emperor

In niche corners of the Chinese internet, discussions of the very first dynasty stand in for critiques of today’s China.

History of chilli peppers in China: first used as ornamental plants, later as ‘poor man’s spice’

It is not an exaggeration to say that chilli peppers and spicy food are available on pretty much every street in China. The pungent, heat-infused foodstuff is so ubiquitous people...