Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, Under the Red Flag features twelve stories which take place during China's Cultural Revolution--stories which display the earnestness and grand
Why do political elites in authoritarian regimes, even within the same country, engage in different levels of predatory behavior, whereby some foster vibrant capitalism and others suffocate the innovative private sector? This book proposes a theory of localized property-rights protection under authoritarianism. By combining in-depth fieldwork with archival research and quantitative data analysis, Qi Zhang and Mingxing Liu discuss the post-1949 conflicts between dominant and marginalized factions in the Chinese province of Zhejiang. These conflicts resulted in systemic vulnerabilities among the marginalized local cadres, thus motivating them to form alliances with their grassroots constituents. They therefore provided their constituents with quasi-public goods, such as property-rights protection, to increase their odds of political survival. Zhang and Liu argue that this framework can apply both to the Mao era and to the current reform era, and it also can be extended beyond China to a
Communism was one of the most powerful political and intellectual movements of the modern world; at the height of its influence over a third of the world's population lived under Communist rule. This
Under Canadian Pacific's red-and-white-checkered flag, the company's founders, George Stephen and William C. Van Horne, created a rail-sea service from Liverpool to Hong Kong. Boasting sternwheelers,
Cultural production under Mao, and how artists and thinkers found autonomy in a culture of conformityIn the 1950s, a French journalist joked that the Chinese were “blue ants under the red flag,” dress
