Did the Communists win or the Nationalists lose the Chinese civil war? This talk will reexamine this classic question with new evidence from diaries and memoirs of the period that examine how economic crisis and political disillusionment in the existing regime interacted with a new type of revolutionary identity. It will discuss the immensely complex and ambiguous political atmosphere in the period leading up to 1949 and suggest that while the forces behind revolution were powerful, they contained the seeds of their own contradictions too.

Register Now, to Join Remotely: https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/overview/K041024/

Speaker Bio: Professor Rana Mitter

Rana Mitter is ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the author of several books, including Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II (2013) which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His writing on contemporary China has appeared recently in Foreign Affairs, the Harvard Business Review, The Spectator, The Critic, and The Guardian. He has commented regularly on China in media and forums around the world, including at the World Economic Forum at Davos. His recent documentary on contemporary Chinese politics "Meanwhile in Beijing" is available on BBC Sounds. He is co-author, with Sophia Gaston, of the report “Conceptualizing a UK-China Engagement Strategy” (British Foreign Policy Group, 2020). He won the 2020 Medlicott Medal for Service to History, awarded by the UK Historical Association. He previously taught at Oxford, and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

This lecture series is kindly sponsored by the Einaudi Center, East Asia Program, Department of History, Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Society for Humanities, Cornell External Education, eCornell, Cornell IT, Department of Government, and Department of Asian Studies.