Events

Book Talk: Mao Zedong and China’s Destiny

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Date:

6 Nov 2017

Time:

16:00-18:00

Venue:

Cho Yiu Conference Hall, University Administration Building, the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Speaker(s):

Prof. Alain Roux

Biography of Speaker:

A well-established China expert, Prof. Alain Roux is Emeritus professor at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in France. He has been studying Chinese history and politics for half a century since he first visited Beijing as a foreign student in 1965. His major publications in French include Chiang Kai-shek: Mao’s Great Enemy, China in the 20th Century, Shanghai Workers’ Movement in the 1930s, The Chinese Puzzle, etc.

Admission:

Reservation is on first-come-first-served basis. Please register here: https://goo.gl/forms/2Nx6BVEFD4XqRGvH2

Enquiries:

Please contact us at namhung@cuhk.edu.hk

Event Details:

Topic: Part Tiger, Part Monkey: Mao Zedong and China’s Destiny

How do we understand the behaviors and motivations of Mao Zedong, who was at the same time the founder of PRC China and a totalitarian leader responsible for millions of deaths? In a letter to his wife Jiang Qing on 6 July 1968, Mao characterized himself as “having both some of the spirit of the tiger which is dominant, but also some of the spirit of the monkey which is secondary.”

Using Mao’s famous self-commentary “part tiger, part monkey,” Prof. Alain Roux will tell us how Mao, an ambitious young man, grew from a rebel to a revolutionary, and later a tyrant during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Based on his lifetime research of Mao and 20th-century Chinese history, Prof. Roux will offer a reliable, convincing, and sophisticated biography of Mao, and share with us his perspectives on China today.