China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong

It wasn’t only foreign observers who thought Mao Zedong’s radicalism ended with his death in 1976; throughout the Deng, Jiang, and Hu eras, most Chinese intellectuals and Party members believed that Mao, while far from reviled, belonged to a stage of China’s development that would not be revisited. In his new book, Jude Blanchette traces the reemergence of radical leftism among educated Chinese. What does the embrace of nationalism, authoritarianism, and Maoist nostalgia by young intellectuals portend as Ch