Labour Affairs Magazine

Newly available on-line:

Problems 22 – China’s Blue Republic, 1912-49 . Also Stalin: Paradoxes of Power.

• China’s ‘Blue Republic’ lasted from 1912 to 1949, and achieved nothing.  It achieved nothing because it was trying to erect a copy of the complex political structures of the USA or Western Europe on top of a society that had very different value. And doing it with a false understanding of the intricate political processes that had occurred there.
• Also available as a PDF, Problems 22_China’s Blue Republic

Also newly published, available for now as print-only:

Problems 26 – Smedley: an American Woman Who Loved China’s Red Army (sample)

• How Agnes Smedley found a life’s purpose in China
• Her connection with super-spy Richard Sorge
• Her account of the little-known Red Areas in South China
• The surprising neglect of her work by later writers
• How she told a genuinely unknown and potentially damaging story about Mao
• The cowboy scholarship of ‘Wild Swan’ Chang and ‘Doc’ Halliday.
• Her account of the ‘A.B. Group’, an early split within the Red Army
• The Chinese Social Democrats’ efforts to created a functional Third Force