For several generations, historians have been writing about the “roots” or “origins” of the communist revolution in China.

China was hermetically closed for decades after the Communist Party came to power in 1949. Even today, access to primary sources, not least party archives, remains haphazard at best. The party ...

Tung's communists took over mainland China after a long civil war in that country. Mao's failure with Taiwan and his order to ...

“In history,” the late historian Paul Johnson memorably observed, “there are no inevitabilities.” Johnson’s adage holds true with the Chinese Civil War. In 1949, communism emerged triumphant, securing ...

The Chinese Communist Party has turned Lu Xun, a Mao-era hero who excoriated the establishment, into a bland, Disney-style ...

Indeed, the majority of Chinese weren’t communists — far from it, in fact. In 1929, in the industrial city of Wuxi, north of Shanghai, the Party had a mere 25 members out of a population of 100,000.