University Press

Red Handed Book: A Brief History of the Chinese Communist Party: From Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping University Press

University Press returns with another short and captivating book - a brief history of The Chinese Communist Party.

In July of 1921, Mao Zedong and a small band of revolutionaries met in secret aboard a small boat in Shanghai and founded the Chinese Communist Party. On July 1, 2021, Xi Jinping and 70,000 of his most enthusiastic supporters met in Beijing to celebrate the Chinese Communist Party's 100th birthday with a dazzling public spectacle.

In his fiery speech at the event, Mr. Xi recounted a long history of the party's accomplishments, praised the party for China's impressive rise, and predicted that anyone who tried to separate the people from the party would be "bashed against the Great Wall of Steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people."

But Mr. Xi's propaganda history lesson conveniently omitted a few things. For example, he never mentioned Mao's grievously cynical Great Leap Forward campaign in 1958 that culminated in the ghastly starvation of an estimated 45 million Chinese peasants - the largest mass murder in human history. He never mentioned Mao's Cultural Revolution in 1966 that unleashed brainwashed civilian armies of Red Guards to roam the streets and arbitrarily kill millions of citizens - and their cats - in a campaign of terror designed to purge the nation of any "bourgeois" influences. And he never mentioned the effects of a ruthless enforcement of the party's one-child policy - or its iron-fisted crackdowns in Beijing, Tibet, Hong Kong, or Xinjiang.

In more recent decades, the party has managed to help China lift 850 million people out of extreme poverty and take its place as one of the world's most powerful and influential nations. Only time will tell whether Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party will use their new power to simply consolidate more power for themselves or to tackle serious challenges on behalf of the people of China and the world.

This short book peels back the veil and provides a clear-eyed glimpse into the explosive history of The Chinese Communist Party - a glimpse that you can read in about an hour.