Chairman Mao

The thoughts of Chairman Xi – in digestible form

3 February 2024 9:00 am

Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung helpfully cut through the jargon of interminable speeches and publications, and the totalitarian vision they expose is not reassuring

Xi Jinping is acting like Stalin

30 April 2023 3:37 am

The General Secretary of China’s Communist Party is a different kind of leader. Now in his third five-year term, Xi…

The man behind Xi Jinping

27 July 2021 4:05 pm

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, over a billion copies of Mao’s Little Red Book were distributed across the…

One great Chinese puzzle remains its cuisine

13 March 2021 9:00 am

A truth that ought to be universally acknowledged is that Chinese food, while much loved, is underappreciated. China certainly has…

Chilli con carnage: the red hot pepper and communism

20 June 2020 9:00 am

These days it is as hard to imagine Sichuanese food without chillies as it is to imagine Italian food without…

When kissing in public carried a death sentence

9 February 2019 9:00 am

I once threw Tony Parker’s Lighthouse across the fo’c’sle of a ship at sea when I read that his characters…

Rao Pingru and his siblings make a lion lantern with their mother

Enduring life under Chairman Mao

5 May 2018 9:00 am

Rao Pingru is 94, and a born storyteller. His gripping graphic narrative weaves in and out of the violent, disruptive…

Chairman Mao devours his foes

30 April 2016 9:00 am

Frank Dikötter, professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong and winner of the Samuel Johnson prize in 2011,…

White glazed bowl, Shunzhi-Kangxi period, Qing dynasty, 1650–70

The perils of porcelain – and the pleasures of Edmund de Waal

19 September 2015 8:00 am

A.S. Byatt on the dark, deadly secrets lurking beneath a calm, white surface