Covell Meyskens
@cfmeyskens
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Historian of China. Book on Mao's Third Front. Writing book on Three Gorges Dam. Study Chinese domestic & foreign politics, STS, & Cold War.
Joined May 2014
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Pinned Tweet
Mao's Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China is now available for order
@cambUP_History
. Enter the code MTF2020 at the checkout to receive 20% off through March 31, 2021.
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Chinese territory forcibly ceded to Russia in the Treaty of Aigun (1858) and Treaty of Peking (1860), roughly 350,000 sq mi
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Kevin Rudd claims Xi is a Marxist-Leninist. He isn't. Does Xi promote the proletariat at home? No. Does Xi call for global proletarian revolution? No. Xi is not a Marxist-Leninist. He's a triumphal nationalist seeking China's "rightful place" in the sun
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Commentary on China continuously cycles between "ah China is going to take over the world" and "China is a paper dragon and collapsing." We've clearly entered into the latter phase once again.
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Xiaobing Li's book "The Dragon in the Jungle: The Chinese Army in the Vietnam War" has not received the attention it deserves. That China provided 430,000 troops to Vietnam between 1968-1973 makes the geopolitics of the Vietnam War look rather different.
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The causes of the Qing's dynasty collapse have finally been discovered. Hooray!
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To gauge Chinese censorship of history, I'll occassionally look at how Baidu entries for big events and people have changed. The changes for the Great Leap Forward are rather striking. A few years ago, there were extensive discussions of the famine. Now there is nothing.../1
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So Hans Morgenthau, the father of IR, was into Zhou Enlai, right?
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Kevin Rudd claims Xi Jinping is a Marxist when he isn't Does Xi ever talk about class or class struggle? No. Does Xi ever talk about revolution not in the past but promote now at home or abroad? No. Xi is a triumphal authoritarian nationalist not a Marxist
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No Xi is not a 2nd Mao. A few big differences. 1.) Does Xi promote revolution at home and abroad? No. 2.) Were Xi's first few decades engaged in war and revolution? Nope. 3.) Is Xi heading a very poor country that has just experienced decades of war? Nope
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That famous meeting of Marx and Confucius that you weren't taught about in school.
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Tenured! Thank you to everyone who has provided support and advice from grad school to academia!
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Really can't believe that my book is coming out at the end of this month on Amazon Kindle and in May in hardback. Thanks to all the colleagues and people
@cambUP_History
who have offered guidance along the way.
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There are many estimates of how many died in the Great Leap Forward. Many historians put the death toll at around thirty million. Even if the actual number is lower, it takes a rather perverse political logic to count the death of a few million as a policy win.
NO, MAO DID NOT KILL 50 MILLION CHINESE DURING THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD
This factoid entered conventional China wisdom at least 50 years ago, and there it remains, suffering not at all from lack of evidence. It's an "everybody knows" fact. Actually, there have been many estimates
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"I love you. If our love has to end, I hope it only ends when we finally pass through early-stage socialism."
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The famine doesn't even exist. There are no estimates of deaths. There is no discussion of the famine's causes. There is nothing but a big historical void and euphemstic talk of "economic damage." Such is the historical nihilism of the CCP today /2
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Happy to share my new article. DM me for a copy. "After empire?: Cold War scholarship on Mao’s China" Abstract: This article examines how Anglophone scholars approached the question of Maoist China’s relationship with empire between 1949 and 1976.../1
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My book is now out in the UK and on Kindle. Thanks to everyone for all their support over the years.
Out today from
@cfmeyskens
'Mao's Third Front' is of 'major interest to historians of China, historians of the Cold War, historians of
#communism
and military history.
Further details of the book
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Truly sad to hear that Jonathan Spence has passed.
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I am very excited to share that my book, "Mao's Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China," is now under contract with Cambridge University Press. Thanks to all who have lent their support. I could not have done this without you!
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I just got to laugh that this debate included no historians of the Cold War. Not of China. Not of the United States. Not of East Asia. Not of Europe. Not of the world. No historians of anywhere at all!
1/ Whether you are a Cold War historian or a casual observer of the news, I commend this written debate to you. In a series of crisp exchanges, four leading experts make their case for whether the US and China are in a cold war. (Short thread)
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Chinese Foreign Ministry has applied discourse of "quality"/suzhi to India. Suzhi discourse has long been used by urban Chinese to denigrate rural compatriots and treat as second class citizens. Now suzhi discourse is being applied abroad to foreigners not in CCP's good graces
China insults the Indian people.
MFA spox: “When assessing a country’s demographic dividend, we need to look at not just the size but also the quality of its population. Size matters, but what matters more is talent resource.”
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Pleased to announce that the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies has awarded me the Doreen and Jim McElvany award for my article on Chinese views of North Korea's nuclear weapons. Taylor & Francis has kindly made the article free to download.
And finally, the $5,000 Grand Prize is awarded to
@cfmeyskens
for his article, “Chinese views of the nuclear endgame in North Korea," which constitutes a novel contribution on one of the most important unresolved problems in nonproliferation.
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Issue is that CCP knows dictator is a negative term. It has not referred to itself as a dictatorship (专政) since the 70s when it claimed to lead the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nor does the CCP refer to its leader as a dictator (独裁者). That word is reserved for foreigners
I honestly don’t understand what the big deal is. In political science, a “dictator” is simply a leader selected through undemocratic means who can dictate policy outcomes to a large extent in a country. Many leaders fit this definition and it’s by no means negative
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As a China scholar, I've got to say the most notable aspect of this reading list is that there are almost no China scholars on the list.
Discussing the ideological dimensions of great power competition in class today. What would you have added to the reading list?
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The CCP clearly knows that domestic anger about its bungled response to the virus undermined the regime's legitimacy, and so it is now going all in on directing domestic discontent towards the United States.
Central China TV
“Expert” : “The US pushed out the vaccine so quickly, that only means they have been working on it way before the pandemic.”
Host: “So we can conclude that the US had this virus in their possession long ago”
CCP nonstop smear campaign
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I realize that as a historian, it will probably seem a bit ironic that I am going to say this, but the century of humiliation is not the cause of everything China does. The century of humiliation has become a catchall to explain everything about China & thereby explicate nothing.
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Wow. Just wow. My book is
#1
on Amazon in Asian history. Even ahead of history textbooks. Much thanks to
@DSORennie
and
@aliceysu
for shouting out my book in
@TheEconomist
!
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This book, like many before it, uses history to make profoundly ahistorical arguments, recycling many old arguments about why Qing China failed to modernize and reworking them to explain China's problems in the present.
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Despite criticism of his authoritarian leadership, President Xi Jinping has experienced widespread support among the Chinese people as Xi has successfully integrated his personal narrative of integrity through ordeal into the broader Chinese metanarratives
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This study explores Chinese cultural nationalism since Xi Jinping became the President. This article shows that Xi downplays national humiliation and the ‘sick man’ metaphor while emphasising the ‘great power’ narrative and national rejuvenation.
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Happy to share my new piece in Foreign Policy, "China's Disengagement with the United States and the New Cold War"
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Excited to announce the launch of the "Mao Era in Objects" website headed up by Jennifer Altehenger. The website provides a panorama of material culture in Mao's China. A great teaching resource! My contribution is about radios.
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China's top 1% roughly equals bottom 50%. Failures in redistributive policies have primarily caused growing income and wealth gaps. Piketty’s patrimonial capitalism not only applies to capitalist countries but also extends to China’s economy.
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Henry Kissinger has unsurprisingly not read the New Qing history which has convincingly shown that conquest of western China was a major driver of state-formation and identity formation during the Qing dyansty.
Favorite quote from noted China expert Henry Kissinger, on his birthday: "China’s imperial expansion has historically been achieved by osmosis rather than conquest, or by the conversion to Chinese culture of conquerors who then added their own territories to the Chinese domain."
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Looking forward to talking at McGill this Friday about "The Militarization of Everyday Life during China's Cultural Revolution"
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"Kissinger is a university professor who does not know anything about diplomacy." - Mao Zedong
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Common prosperity: China's top 1% income share roughly equals the bottom 50%. Personal wealth share going to the top 1% exceeds by 5 times wealth going to bottom 50%. Failures in redistributive policies primarily caused growing income and wealth gaps.
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Article accepted on the Three Gorges Dam in Republican China. Hooray!
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Chinese have internalized Western/white superiority with the century of humiliation. Chinese also adopted a social Darwinist world view, using the West as the yardstick to rank different peoples and societies in a racial hierarchy.
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So, I guess my first book is Amazon official. Thanks to all who have offered advice and read it whole or in part. Mao's Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China by Covell F. Meyskens via
@amazon
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"Where Mao Meets the Mundane: Everyday Life in a Bygone China" interview with the New York Times
@iandenisjohnson
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Discussions of Xi Jinping's parents nearly always focus on his father - Xi Zhongxun. I can't recall any substantive discussion of his mother Qi Xin and her influence on Xi. This seems very odd especially given that Xi Jinping's mother is still alive while Xi Zhongxun died in 2002
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Since Xi Jinping became the president in 2012, this article shows that Xi downplays national humiliation and the ‘sick man’ metaphor while emphasising the ‘great power’ narrative and national rejuvenation.
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“China really helped by reducing the cost of solar energy. A lot of what happened in solar panels is because of what China did...We can see the same...in electric vehicles. So we need globalisation & collaboration...to achieve our energy targets by 2050.”
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Excited for our
@AASAsianStudies
panel next Thursday on China in the World across the 1978 Divide with papers by
@taomo_zhou
,
@hirako13
,
@WentingHe1103
/
@amysarahking
, and myself along with comments by Gail Hershatter
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China's college-educated workers are highly concentrated in state sector...Factors linked to receiving state sector jobs: male, urban, CCP member, perform well on standardized tests, attend elite college & higher household income or high-status parents
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Thread: This is a common American characterization of China today that just isn't true. Looking back at the history of the PRC since 1978, so much of policy has been adhoc and improvisational. This is the basic thesis of Barry Naughton's book "Growing out of the Plan" and.. 1
"The CCP thinks in terms of decades and centuries, while we tend to focus on the next quarterly earnings report." Try as I might, in all my research on time horizons, I never found any evidence to support this cliche about Chinese time horizons.
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China should never call the United States - 美国. They should only call it the United States. 😉
Chinese never call it 'Tibet'; it's called Xizang.
And we call Hong Kong as Xiang gang, Macau as Ao men.
The West has no right to give their desired names to any inch of Chinese land.
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My thoughts on recent talk of a new Sino-American Cold War
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Honored to be invited to give Duke's annual military history lecture on April 2. Looking forward to seeing folks in the area and talking about my work on Maoist China's Third Front campaign!
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A must read for folks interested in China & Korea. This book argues that "Korea was not the compliant vassal that Chinese imagined it to be, but a canny role-player manipulating China’s imperial myth so as to constrain its capacity to dominate." - Timothy Brook
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Article accepted - "After Empire?: Cold War scholarship on Mao's China"
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Many people argue now that US-China relations are entering into a new cold war. This narrative overlooks that there never was a Cold War China the first time around. For more, read my article below
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@FairbankCenter
I work on capitalist and anti-capitalist development in modern China, especially as it relates to building big infrastructure projects. My first book is about Maoist China's huge military industrial campaign - the Third Front. Second book is about the Three Gorges Dam. Thanks!
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Looking forward to giving a talk on my book "Mao's Third Front:The Militarization of Cold War China" at Taiwan's Academica Sinica next Thursday December 15 at 2pm.
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As a historian of the PRC, I can't agree. Anglophone writing about the PRC has focused on when/how/why it's going to collapse from 1949 and even before. On this topic, highly recommend Fabio Lanza's article
The real world inspiration was the collapse of USSR and resilience of CCP. But what started out as a valid research Q leading to important findings like adaptivity, inevitably as how it always goes in social science, morphed into a hegemonic paradigm, then a plate of word salad…
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Excited to share expanded special issue on Teaching PRC History co-edited w/
@BrianDeMare
w/ new essays by
@BennoWeiner
- Tibet, Joyce Mao - US-China relations,
@ShellenX
- Science,
@jwassers
-Hong Kong, Dominic Yang - Taiwan, & Eric Schluessel - Xinjiang.
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If the bar is they both died in plane crashes, then yes. If the bar is historical significance, then no. Lin Biao was a brillant military strategist who was key to the CCP's victory over the KMT in the Chinese Civil War. Priogzhin had nowhere near Lin Biao's bonafides.
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A large collection: Feng Zikai new year images from the 1950s and 1960s
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US-China history realization of the day. US engagement with China is basically the story of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker where the US thought that engaging with China was producing a great partner and beacon of freedom like itself when it was actually creating Darth Vader.
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In this eye-opening account, Sheila Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and by great-power rivalry, set the course for the future of East Asia and the larger global order.
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Looking forward to talking at Academica Sinica about my new book project on the Three Gorges Dam on June 18
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Happy to have 52,000 visitors to the Everyday Life in Mao's China website last year. Thanks folks for their continued interest and support
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It lives! Thanks so much to Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Ho for shepherding this volume through to this day, and thanks to all the contributors for making the whole process so rewarding and fun! Can't wait to read it!
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I always wondered where the practice of Mao-era CCP elites hugging came from. This wasn't common before them and certainly isn't nowadays. This video of Ho Chi Minh and Mao "font la bise" suggests it perhaps came from France.
1955: Hồ Chí Minh and Mao Zedong meet again. Mao seems rather uncomfortable with Hồ's enthusiastic 'bisou' [kiss] French-style greeting.
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Happy to share the first piece from my second book project. "Dreaming of a Three Gorges dam amid the troubles of Republican China." First fifty downloads are free. In this article, I examine... /1
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For domestic news, Chinese prefer articles that take the opposite position of the gov; for foreign news, they prefer articles aligned with gov position. However, nationalistic individuals tend to select domestic news similar to the gov's issue framing.
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Bo Yibo and Ye Jianying discuss the overthrow of the Gang of Four
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Thread: This article makes a big omission that is common to lots of articles about the history of US-China relations. It presents Nixon's engagement w/ China as being about the US effort to change China and says that it was a failure. 1
Big essay by
@orvilleschell
on the history of US-China relations. It tackles the question everyone is asking now: Did engagement go in the right direction? The publication is
@thewirechina
, a new site founded by
@nytimes
China colleague
@DavidBarboza2
.
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Very excited to be speaking
@Harvard
this Tuesday at 4 pm EST about my research on Mao's Third Front. Information for Zooming in is below.
Join us for the final
@FairbankCenter
Modern China Lecture of the semester:
MAO’S MASSIVE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL CAMPAIGN TO DEFEND COLD WAR CHINA
by
@cfmeyskens
NOVEMBER 10 @ 4:00 PM
Register here:
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Just got this in the mail. Looking forward to reading it soon.
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Excited to join the editorial board of the Chinese Historical Review. Look forward to working with Yuanchong Wang,
@ShoufuYin
,
@utopiamatcha
, Ping Yao,
@hirako13
, Xiaofei Kang, and Shuang Wen. 王主席万岁！
Announcements: Dr. Xiaobing Li will retire from his position as the Editor-in-Chief of the Chinese Historical Review. A new team led by Dr. Yuanchong Wang will continue to grow this academic journal. We greatly appreciate their service and support!
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If
@POTUS
is serious about improving cultural exchanges with China, the Biden Administration should reinstate the Fulbright Program in Hong Kong and China. Without the Fulbright Program, a large quantity of American scholarship on China would simply not exist, mine included.
If the US is actually serious in improving exchange and promoting knowledge about China, it needs to do it on its own. Reinstating the Fulbright Program in Hong Kong and China, for example. Improving the experiences of Chinese students in the US is another need. 5/6
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My piece on China's strategic space in the Mao era
"It is my view that there never was a
#ColdWar
#China
, and this condition deeply shaped the
#CCP
’s strategic space from the 1940s to the 1970s," writes
@cfmeyskens
(
@NPS_Monterey
)
#Mao
#Chineserevolution
#CulturalRevolution
#DengXiaoping
#ZhouEnlai
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Few comments on Xinhua obituary for Jiang Zemin. 1. Only one mention of Xi at end unlike usual extensive mentions. 2. Is praise for "collective leadership," unlike Xi's autocracy 3. Like much recent party history, conflicts of Mao era are erased, and his whole life is...1
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Thread: The idea here seems to be that China's 5,000 years of history somehow is going to help it get a vaccine quicker than the US, because it has a shorter history. This is total nonsense. 1
Interesting to hear some US official talking about the story of vaccine. Is this the normal logic that if anyone has something better than mine, then it must be stolen from me? Remember, China has 5000 years of history while the US has less than 250.
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Happy to contribute to this
@NBRnews
project about how China conceives of its strategic space. My piece argues that there never was a Cold War China as the most important concepts undergirding Maoist China's strategic mental map were war and revolution.
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Um, no Condelezza Rice is wrong here. Just to give a few examples from recently published books from young historians of China.
@guo_xuguang
's "Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early PRC" examines the relationship betwen statistics in state-building in the PRC. 1
“Let's start by really bringing the best young historians of China and India. History is being practiced in the academy in a way that's not really very inspiring. History departments ask much narrower questions than in years past.” -Rice
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Chinese nationalism significantly increased from 2012/13 to 2018, ranked second with a growth rate of 13.7% among 27 selected countries and regions. The intensification of Chinese nationalism will continue as long as heavy state nationalism is maintained.
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Happy to share my new article "Experiencing the Cold War at Shanghai’s secret military industrial complex" in
@coldwarhistoryj
. First 50 downloads are free. 1
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Chinese education is stratified such that top university grads have significant advantages in government recruitment. Merit-based political recruitment as a channel of upward mobility for non-elites is largely an illusion
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Special issue on decolonizing Chinese history
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My book got a review of sorts in the
@TheEconomist
. Yippie!
As China's rulers weigh security & economic prosperity, it's a good time to revisit the Third Front: a vast, Mao-era push for self-reliance. My Chaguan from the once-secret city of Panzhihua, with thanks to
@cfmeyskens
's excellent book "Mao's Third Front"
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The University of Pittsburgh's "China's Cultural Revolution in Memories" project has a treasure trove of oral histories
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Once accepted into college, Chinese rural students perform equally as well, if not better, than their urban counterparts. Rural students also earn a 6.2 per cent wage premium compared to their urban counterparts in their first job after graduation.
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Robert L. Suettinger, "The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer"
The definitive story of a top Chinese politician’s ill-fated quest to reform the Communist Party.
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So started another side project - a website of images and oral histories of the Third Front. This one is of something I often dreamed of finding in an archive but never did - a map of factory locations.
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Over the past four years, 79,237 people have visited the website "Everyday Life in in Maoist China." I'm not sure how much longer I'll keep it up, but it has been a fun side project.
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Xi Jinping and Li Qiang in 2006
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This is a really great book on development as an idea and practice in world history. Highly recommend!
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Finally read
@jeremyyellen
's wondeful book "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War." Highly recommend for folks interested in WWII, Asian history, empire, anticolonialism, and great power competition
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