Sinobabble

Mao Zedong Thought was one of the most influential ideologies of the 20th Century, and is arguably still having a huge effect on China and the rest of the world today. In this episode, Edi and Emily discuss the Long March and how it has been mythologised and used as a powerful message in propaganda since the 1940s. We also look at the first few years of the CCP at their Yan'an base, which explains...

Mao Zedong Thought was one of the most influential ideologies of the 20th Century, and is arguably still having a huge effect on China and the rest of the world today. In this episode, Edi and Emily discuss the origins of Mao Zedong Thought by tracing Mao's life from his origins as a country boy fascinated with Chinese traditional culture and monarchist heroes, to his rise as leader of the CCP, an...

This is the last episode on the Nanjing decade, so far we’ve covered culture, economics, feminism, and academia, and I wanted to leave this episode till last because I feel it ties all the other threads together really nicely. We’ve gotten a few glimpses of the Nationalist Party’s governance and policy formulation in a few areas, and how they tried to exert control over different areas of Chinese...

Continuing with the Nanjing Decade, in this episode we look at the successes and failures of the Nationalist government with regards to the Chinese economy.  While the Nationalists became increasingly interventionist and looked to ramp up their stake in the financial system, their policies hindered private businesses and failed to save the rural peasant economy. But was this period a complete fail...

The discourse on feminism in the Nanjing decade isn’t just a simple narrative, it actually takes the form of a debate between two camps. There are those who believe that women were champions of the feminist movement, through their various publications, groups, and activist movements, and those who believe that the women’s movement was essentially co-opted simultaneously by the commercial industry...

In March 2018, at a meeting of the 2,980 delegates of the National People’s Congress, a vote was passed to abolish the two-term limit on the Presidency and Vice-Presidency of the People’s Republic of China. The ten year limit, which has been in place for almost 30 years, was initially put in place by Deng Xiaoping ostensibly to prevent the building up of a cult of personality that heavily contribu...

In this week’s episode we’re returning to the Nanjing decade, the period of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist rule from 1927-1937, to discuss the development of the creative sphere at the time. In this episode we’ll talk about how art, literature, and film evolved and try to understand what the major themes and trends of the period were, as well as trying to determine the extent of political influence...

In this episode, we try and understand the formula used by the CCP to manage and quell the roughly 180,000 local protests that spring up across the territory every year. What does the resolution of the demonstrations in Wukan village in 2011 tell us about the Chinese Communist Party's methods of control and appeasement? Can this model be applied to the situation currently unfolding in Hong Kong? T...

In this week's episode I speak to a local Hong Kong protester and a friend from mainland China to gain a wider perspective on the meaning behind the protests and the future of Hong Kong. This conversation was recorded two weeks ago, so it focuses mainly on the July 1st stroming of the legislative council and the impact that it has had on the movement as a whole. Hopefully in the next episode I can...

The protests in Hong Kong escalated on the 1st of July when a small group of protesters broke away from the larger, main protest, and chose to storm the legislative council building on Hong Kong Island. For me, this change in the nature of opposition to the extradition bill brought to mind the following question: do the people who are denouncing the protests have a point? In the previous episode o...

On Sunday 9th June 2019 at 2:30pm starting at Victoria Park between the neighbourhoods of Tin Hau and Wan Chai, around 1 million Hong Kong residents took to the streets in possibly the biggest protest the territory had ever seen. They were protesting the implementation of an amendment to the preexisting Fugitive Offenders Ordinance and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Ordinance, known a...

A new series in which I introduce some of the themes of modern China scholarship, research, and journalism, and explain these broader themes using a couple of example articles each episode. In this episode, we look at Chinese government regulation and control of entertainment and leisure using the examples of celebrity culture and prostitution. The two articles I’ve chosen to look at are from comp...

The Nanjing Decade is the period from 1928 to 1937 that saw Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist rule over a semi-unified China, allowing for the blossoming of new trends in science, literature, art, and culture that were brought to an abrupt halt with the invasion of Japan in 1937. This episode is the first in a series of episodes on the Nanjing decade, and discusses developments in academia, including...

This episode picks up exactly where we left off in the previous episode, with Chiang Kai-shek battling with the Nationalist left and the communists for control over the revolution to overthrow the warlords and establish a unified Chinese government. This episode covers the period 1927 to 1934, we sees the KMT reunite after splitting with the Communists once and for all, and Chiang Kai-shek develop...

In this episode we will be looking at the alliance made between Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in an effort to defeat the warlords and reunite China under the Republican banner. Despite the tension between the left within the KMT, which allied with the CCP minority, and the conservative faction, the party was able to hold together to win major victories...

On May 4th 1919 around 3,000 students from Beijing University and some 12 other universities in the capital gathered in Tiananmen square to voice their opposition to the events taking place at the Paris Peace Conference. What started as a peaceful march erupted into a violent protest, and then into a nationwide cultural and intellectual movement that was to last for three years. This movement is n...

In today's episode we're going to pick up where we left off, at the very beginning of the new Republic of China. We'll look at the rise of Yuan Shikai and the descent of China into a period of warlordism. We will explore the changing nature of China's politics and culture, right up until the next big event to hit the Chinese stage, the May 4th movement. This is a public episode. If you'd like to d...

The second episode of the '20th Century China' series. On October 9th 1911 an accidental explosion in a revolutionary base in Hubei province in central China triggered a revolution that would mark the end of China’s imperial past and usher in its modern future. While the series of events that followed seem to indicate a straightforward revolution on the surface, recent scholarship on the topic sho...

The second episode of the '20th Century China' series. In the last episode we explored the events that led to the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912. In this episode, we look at the individuals who played an important role in these events, and who tried to shape China's future by preventing or facilitating dynastic failure. We will be covering the same events, but this time from the perspective...

The First Episode of the '20th Century China' series, exploring the evolution of China from empire, to warlord Republic, to Communist state, to modern nation. In this first episode, we look at the events that took place from 1830 to the first decade of the 20th century to understand why and how China's last imperial house, the Qing dynasty, had been weakened enough to eventually fall in 1911. ____...