Chinese New Left

History Repeats Itself With Proposed Ban On Marxist Book Club At Peking University

The proposed banning of a Marxist book club at Peking University, one of China’s most prestigious and elite universities, is ironic. Namely, as part of its drive towards centralizing authority and advancing its version of Chinese nationalism, the current Chinese government under Xi Jinping purports to return to Marxist fundamentals rather than destabilizing western influences...

Detention Of Maoist Intellectual Reveals Hypocrisy Of Chinese State, But Ultimately Not Surprising

The arrest of 24-year-old Maoist intellectual Zhang Yunfan, a graduate student at Peking University in philosophy, is nothing really surprising. Despite Maoists advocating for strengthened state powers to regulate the economy and perhaps seen themselves as a loyal opposition to the state, the flip side of this is that the state could still turn on them when it sees them as threats...

McKenzie Wark’s Take On Wang Hui And Leftist Orientalism

A recent essay by McKenzie Wark on Chinese New Left intellectual Wang Hui published on Verso Books’ blog proves an exercise in western academic leftists’ lack of knowledge of Asia and their inadvertent support of individuals with politics that they would likely find repulsive, if not for lack of sufficient knowledge about Asia and wishful desire to find analogues to themselves in non-western countries. It is instructive to examine this essay more closely in order to understand what we might term a form of leftist orientalism...