This book is a comprehensive historical study of the Bolshevik system of ideological and political indoctrination of a substantial number of Chinese revolutionaries, who studied in Comintern international institutions in Soviet Russia from the October Revolution of 1917 to the Great Terror of the late 1930s.
Including analysis of previously unknown documentary materials from the Bolshevik Party and Comintern archives, as well as memoirs of former Chinese students and prisoners of Stalin’s camps, the book determines how effective the training of Chinese students in the main educational centers in Moscow was, how well it compared to the existing level of Marxist education in the USSR, and how the Stalinist regime defined the lives and fates of the Chinese revolutionaries in Soviet Russia. In raising questions about the transferability of revolutionary ideology, experience, and practice from the revolutionaries of one country to would-be revolutionaries in other countries the authors ask: can revolution be exported?
Shedding light on an under-explored aspect of the early history of the CCP and the Soviet Bolshevik Party this book will be a valuable resource to both students and scholars of Chinese and Russian history and politics.
The 1918 passport of French diplomat Alexis Leger (aka the poet Saint-John Perse) who was, from 1916 to 1921, he was secretary to the French embassy in Peking and wrote his epic poem Anabase. Here’s his passport from the time – detailing his moustache, hair and even wearing a straw boater!
We arrive at book #34 on The China Project’s Ultimate China Bookshelf – an amazing evocation of 1930s Peking by an aesthete, scholar & writer who devoted his life to the study of Eastern religions – click here…
Dalena Wright’s Diplomacy Ends at Midnight: The Long Return of Hong Kong to China (Allen Lane) – fascinated to see what there is new to say, be said, or for anyone involved to say on the handover? Cradock’s long gone; Patten must have sprewed everything by now surely.
British Hong Kong ended in the last minutes of 30 June 1997. Diplomacy Ends at Midnight traces the extraordinary twists and turns of Hong Kong’s long drawn out, but unavoidable, reunion with China, when its 99-year leasehold on much of the colony’s territory expired. 25 years ago, Britain did not want to return Hong Kong to its once and future owner, and most Hong Kongers didn’t want them to either, but the choice was not theirs to make.
Through exceptional archival research and interviews with many of the participants, Dalena Wright traces the intricate diplomacy by which the British sought to resist and then ultimately had to accept the inevitable reversion. The book tells the story of governors, prime ministers, presidents and Chinese leaders who believed for a century that ownership of the tiny entrepot was worth diplomatic standoffs. And when there were no more quarrels to be had, it explains how in the final years British diplomats and their political masters managed the reversion they had not wanted. For 99 years, while they waited for midnight, China and Britain – often as adversaries but occasionally as collaborators – watched Hong Kong grow into a glittering, world-class city. In the end it became a trophy that neither wanted the other to own. How Britain won and lost Hong Kong is the subject of this compelling new history.
“The past decade has time and again underlined the prescience of Leta Hong Fincher’s Leftover Women. This groundbreaking book made a powerful case for how state propaganda and cultural norms combined to exclude Chinese women from the wealth creation springing from the country’s rapid economic development. In this new version, Hong Fincher illustrates how women are beginning to fight back, and the obstacles lined up against them. This book is more relevant than ever to anyone who wants to understand China – read it and rage.” ―Lousia Lim, Author of Indelible City, and The People’s Republic of Amnesia
Just a quick post to say that all my books, plus the China Revisited series are on sale at Livraria Portuguesa in Macao….so, if you’re in Macao, pay a visit….
Having had a sneak peak at an early draft of Scott Seligman’s Murder in Manchuria – now available for pre-order….out October (here on Amazon UK and Amazon US) from Potomac Books (available direct from them here)…
In Murder in Manchuria, Scott D. Seligman explores an unsolved murder set amid the chaos that reigned in China in the run-up to World War II. The story unfolds against the backdrop of a three-country struggle for control of Manchuria—an area some called China’s “Wild East”—and an explosive mixture of nationalities, religions, and ideologies. Semyon Kaspé, a young Jewish musician, is kidnapped, tortured, and ultimately murdered by disaffected, antisemitic White Russians, secretly acting on the orders of Japanese military overlords who covet his father’s wealth. When local authorities deliberately slow-walk the search for the kidnappers, a young French diplomat takes over and launches his own investigation.
Part cold-case thriller and part social history, the true, tragic saga of Kaspé is told in the context of the larger, improbable story of the lives of the twenty thousand Jews who called Harbin home at the beginning of the twentieth century. Scott D. Seligman recounts the events that led to their arrival and their hasty exodus—and solves a crime that has puzzled historians for decades.
