About Global China Humanities Series
The Center launches its inaugural Global China Humanities Lecture Series in February 2021. We invite internationally renowned scholars and young, first-book authors to discuss their latest works on topics ranging from Cold War history, diaspora studies, global medicine to literature.
Global China Humanities Series: Maoism: A Global History
Prof. Julia Lovell 藍詩玲教授 (Professor of Modern China, Birkbeck, University of London)
10th February 2021 (Wed) 19:00 (HK), 11:00 (London)
Format: Zoom Webinar
Language: English
Please REGISTER HERE to secure your place
Abstract:
Since 2012 – and for the first time since the death of Mao in 1976 – China has experienced an official revival of Maoist culture and politics. Despite the huge human cost of Mao’s rule, on 1 October 2019 (the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China) the Chinese Communist Party staged a festival of patriotism invoking Mao as august builder of the party and nation. But this definition of Mao as respectable paterfamilias obscures other, more destabilising legacies of Maoism – a volatile mix of militarised autocracy, anti-colonial rebellion and ‘continuous revolution’. Although Mao remains central to China’s increasingly authoritarian government, his ideas have also been a key influence on global insurgency and subversion across the last eighty years, in revolutions and insurrections that have transformed states and left millions dead. In Vietnam, Maoism helped build a party and army able to face down the French and then US empires. In Western Europe, it stood for playful disobedience (as well as inspiring murderous terrorism). In Peru, it inspired a tiny band of under-equipped ideologues – the Shining Path – to challenge the government, almost to the point of toppling the state. This lecture will explore how Mao’s ideas have shaped the world, as well as China, since World War II.
About the Speaker:
Julia Lovell is Professor of Modern China at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Maoism: A Global History, which won the 2019 Cundill History Prize, and The Opium War, which won the 2012 Jan Michalski Prize. Her many translations of modern Chinese fiction into English include The Real Story of Ah Q and Other Tales of China. In 2021, Penguin Classics will publish her new translation of Journey to the West. She writes about China for several newspapers, including The Guardian, Financial Times, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.