Gao Zhen, a prominent Chinese artist known for provocative sculptures of the former leader Mao Zedong, has been sentenced to three years in prison after being found guilty of slandering China’s “heroes and martyrs”. The sentencing came two years after he was detained while visiting the country with his family, according to his wife and human rights groups. The case has attracted international condemnation, largely because the artworks at the centre of the case were created more than 10 years before China created the law under which Gao was charged.…
Tag: Mao Zedong
In a Faltering Chinese Economy, Working-Class Stories Strike a Chord
A Chinese food delivery driver rushes from gig to gig, measuring time by the number of jobs he completes instead of by the passing of the seasons. He toils in cities across China to send money back to his family, but has been away for so long that his son calls him “that man” instead of “Dad.” These are scenes from the poems of Wang Jibing, a food delivery driver, one of several Chinese poets and authors who have turned their experiences of repetitive factory labor and insecure gig work…
Zhu Rongji obituary
Zhu Rongji, who has died aged 97, was the fifth premier of the People’s Republic of China and one of its most effective administrators and economic reformers following its foundation in 1949. In 1991, Zhu was summoned to Beijing, in the footsteps of the then president and party secretary Jiang Zemin, and in the aftermath of the 1989 uprisings in Beijing and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As vice premier in the state council, and governor of the People’s Bank of China (1993-95), Zhu was put in charge of…
The Guardian view on Chinese workers picking up the pen: poetry in motion | Editorial
The hundreds of millions who have built modern China from the ground up – sweeping its streets, labouring in its factories and ferrying its goods – are often overlooked. But they refuse to go unheard. Last week, a food delivery rider won China’s top literary award. Wang Jibing, 56, first caught attention when a poem about his experiences went viral in 2022. The following year, Hu Anyan’s memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, became a bestseller. In the early 20th century, Chinese intellectuals sought to capture the harsh realities of working-class…
A Quiet Pacific Village Becomes China’s Security Testing Ground
The first sign that something unusual was unfolding in the Solomon Islands was when the Chinese police showed up at Fighter One, a quiet village ringed with banana trees. The Chinese officers gathered villagers on a grassy patch and proposed a system they said would help keep them safe. They suggested that the residents fill out cards providing the names, addresses and dates of birth for each household member. They recommended collecting fingerprints and palm prints — both highly unusual and legally dubious in a country lacking laws governing personal…
US-based dissident artist put on trial in China over satirical Mao sculptures, says rights group
The Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen, known for making satirical sculptures of China’s former leader Mao Zedong, has been tried over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs”, his wife and a rights group have said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit to China from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, his wife, Zhao Yaliang, and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese human rights defenders group, said. The closed-door, one-day trial took place on Monday at Sanhe city people’s court in Hebei province…
The ‘Third Front’: China resurrects Mao’s military capabilities
Dotted across the mountainous roads of Sichuan and just a few hours’ drive from some of China’s most bustling cities, the crumbling ruins of an abandoned military experiment are eerily quiet. Top secret factories that once housed thousands of workers are now overgrown with vegetation; nearby villages, empty of young people who were once shipped in from across the country to build China’s future, are plastered with advertisements for hearing aids and, in one case, a bundle deal on coffins. The factories in south-west China were once part of its…
‘A cave complex worthy of Batman!’ Mind-boggling buildings that showed the world a new China
In 1954, an issue of Manhua, a state-sponsored satirical magazine in China, declared: “Some architects blindly worship the formalist styles of western bourgeois design. As a result, grotesque and reactionary buildings have appeared.” Beneath the headline Ugly Architecture, humorous cartoons of weird buildings fill the page. There is a modernist cylinder with a neoclassical portico bolted on to the front. Another blobby building is framed by an arc of ice-cream cone-shaped columns. An experimental bus stop features a bench beneath an impractical cuboid canopy, “unable to protect you from wind,…
Chairman Trump: has the US turned its back on free-market capitalism?
When Ronald Reagan became the first US president to address China’s Great Hall of the People in 1984, he did not waste an opportunity to school his audience on the benefits of the American way. He boiled down his central economic ideology, and that of his Republican party – that governments should get out of the way, allow companies, industries and markets the space the thrive, without intervention – into a simple mantra: trust the people. “These three words are not only the heart and soul of American history, but…
Rare copy of Mao’s Little Red Book expected to fetch more than £30,000
The Little Red Book, a talisman of 20th-century Maoism, may have fallen out of favour in China after the Cultural Revolution, but its popularity with collectors shows no sign of abating. The book, officially entitled Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, was given its popular name due to the bright red cover of mass-produced editions. A rare prototype version is about to resurface in a sale by a west London auction house of hundreds of artefacts from the Cultural Revolution, where it is expected to fetch more than £30,000. The early…