ubcarts.ca portfolio
Maoist practice and Trotskyist critique of exclusion and suppression of urban working-class initiative in the overthrow of the Kuomintang and struggle against its landlord and capitalist supporters.
Book Review of Harold Isaacs. The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009 [1938]. Full review at SFU Chinese History (see link in description)
Western Historiography of the Chinese Revolution: Research Questions from the 1960s and 1970s;
Continuity and Discontinuity in the Chinese Revolution: Western Historiography of China in the 21st Century
I worked with Professor Timothy Cheek and other colleagues to interrogate the intellectual world of scholarly and public debate about the history of China’s twentieth-century revolutions and what they mean for China today and tomorrow. The project involves co-production of knowledge in mapping an intellectual field, collaborative translation, co-authoring analyses and translations and preparing these annotated translations for publication.
With Professor Gregor Benton and other colleagues, I contributed to a collection of English translations of the writings of Chinese Trotskyist Zheng Chaolin (1901-1998), who spent the years between 1952-1979 in prison in the PRC. The collection, Zheng Chaolin, Selected Writings, 1942-1998, will be published by Brill as part of its Historical Materialism Series.
Liberation and Historical Materialism: Trotskyists Explain the 1949 Chinese Revolution: Research Proposal
Permanent Revolution Interrupted? Trotskyist Responses to the 1949 Chinese Revolution
Mao Zedong’s changing theories of social class and class conflict cannot be understood simply as theoretical innovations or departures, but as expressions of fundamental changes in conditions and motives. Mao’s analysis of classes reflects the transformation of the Chinese Communist Party’s composition and purpose from a proletarian socialist political party to a peasant-based, nationalist military organization.