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In the center of Beijing, overlooking the vast expanse of Tiananmen Square, hangs a portrait of Mao ZedongMao Zedong mao-zedong The founder and supreme leader of the People’s Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. A revolutionary strategist, Marxist theorist, and political poet, he led the Communist Party to victory in the civil war, transformed China through collectivisation and industrialisation, and unleashed the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution with catastrophic consequences. Mao Zedong rose to leadership of the Chinese Communist Party through the Long March and Yan’an years, developing a distinctive theory of…
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As a tumultuous 2025 draws to a close, a quiet but seismic shift in the global order has become undeniable: the United States, after a years-long struggle, is losing the technology war with China. This is not the result of a single policy failure or presidential misstep, but the culmination of a half-century divergence in economic philosophy. While the West pursued a neoliberal doctrine that hollowed out its industrial base, China cultivated a potent form of state-directed capitalism designed for long-term strategic competition. The consequences of these divergent paths are now coming to a head, marking a pivotal moment that…
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How a political struggle became a project to remake the self — and why remembering it matters. Why the Cultural RevolutionCultural Revolution Mao Zedong’s decade-long campaign of radical political and social transformation launched in China in 1966, in which Red Guards attacked ‘capitalist roaders’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’, destroying cultural heritage, paralysing the education system, and killing an estimated half million to two million people. The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s response to his political marginalisation following the catastrophic Great Leap Forward. In 1966, bypassing the party apparatus that had constrained him, Mao appealed directly to youth — mobilising millions of students as…
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A New Defense Strategy Signals the End of ContainmentContainment The US foreign policy doctrine articulated by diplomat George Kennan in 1946–47, holding that Soviet expansion should be blocked at every point rather than directly confronted. It defined American grand strategy throughout the Cold War. The doctrine of containment emerged from Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ of February 1946 and his anonymous ‘X Article’ in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, which argued that Soviet expansion was not driven by genuine security needs but by ideological imperatives — that the Soviet state required external enemies to justify its domestic repression, and that it would…