Rebecca E. Karl

on February 12, 2015

Rebecca E. Karl teaches History at New York University. She is the author, most recently, of China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief History (Verso, 2020), and The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also the author of Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (Duke University Press, 2010). Karl is co-editor and co-translator (with Lydia Liu and Dorothy Ko) of The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (Columbia University Press, 2013). She is a Founding Editor of Positions Politics, and of the Critical China Scholars collective.

Is Mao Still Dead?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Rebecca E. Karl, Michael Schoenhals & more on February 12, 2015

It has long been standard operating procedure for China’s leaders to pay tribute to Mao. Even as the People’s Republic he wrought has embraced capitalist behavior with ever more heated ardor, the party he founded has remained firmly in power and his portrait has stared out over Tiananmen Square toward the squat building where his body reposes peacefully at the heart of a country he would scarcely recognize. But since Xi Jinping’s arrival at the helm, Mao’s words have seemed to reverberate more loudly. From the rejection of liberalism that colors the internal Party directive known as Document 9, to Education Minister Yuan Guiren’s recent speech demanding an “ideological campaign,” to Xi’s own speeches which seem to reference Mao and Marx far more often than his predecessors', Chinese politics under Xi seem to have taken a hard ideological turn. How significant is this phenomenon and what does it mean? Is Mao still dead?

China’s New Environment Minister Has Work Cut Out For Him

A Political Outsider, Respected Academic’s Rise May Signal Efforts to Defuse Public Anger

on February 11, 2015

The elevation of the president of China's most prestigious university to the job of government minister was unexpected. It is rare to bring in an academic without a goverment background. But given the tarnished reputation of a ministry that is widely viewed as having failed, the move makes sense.

Unusually, the announcement of Tsinghua University President Chen Jining’s appointment as Minister of Environmental Protection (MEP) barely mentioned his 65-year-old predecessor, Zhou Shengxian, who had held the post for a decade.

Andrew Stokols

on February 11, 2015

Andrew Stokols is a researcher and writer whose work has focused largely on the environmental and social consequences of urbanization. As a Fulbright Scholar based in Xi’an, Stokols investigated the forced relocation of villagers to new urban housing across western China. His reporting on the relocation of nomadic herders in Qinghai and farmers in southern Sha’anxi was featured in chinadialogue. He has also been a contributing writer for The Atlantic, where he wrote about the true size of China’s cities and the geographic distribution of China’s surnames. Before moving to Xi’an, Stokols worked at the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center on a project to document and share the history of Beijing’s hutong, as a Princeton-in-Asia Fellow. He recently spoke at the New York Times Cities for Tomorrow conference on China’s urbanization.

In 2014, Stokols was based in Seoul at the Joong-Ang Daily/International New York Times, where he wrote about eco-cities in Korea and China-Korea relations.

Stokols graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with degrees in History and Urban Planning.