Rebecca E. Karl teaches history at NYU. She is the author of China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretative History and The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in 20th-Century China.
In July 1978, Hu Qiaomu, a sociologist who was working in Deng Xiaoping’s Political Research Office, issued a dire report on the Chinese peasantry. Hu wasn’t known as a supporter of radical reform, but he nevertheless called for something to be done to mitigate the effects of the socialist industrialisation programme. Over the previous three decades China’s agricultural...
In late 1936, two workers from the Renault car factory in the Paris suburb of Billancourt, Tchang Jaui Sau and Liou Kin Tien, travelled to Albacete to join the International Brigades. Already in their mid-forties, they were rejected for active battlefield service and sent instead to act as stretcher-bearers behind the front lines. Their 14-hour days of back-breaking, often emotionally...
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