The Chinese Revolution, broadly defined, was the first national liberation in Asia which experienced cooperation between nationalists and committed communists. That the coalition ended in disarray highlighted the contradictions between forms of nationalism and revolutionary socialism. This talk, based on the speaker’s recently published monograph, explores the ways in which the Chinese Nationalist Party, founded by Sun Yat-sen and subsequently shaped by the ideologies of Dai Jitao and Chiang Kai-shek, succeeded and failed to build a new society governed by what can be called “capitalism without capitalism.”

Brian Tsui is an assistant professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. A historian by training, he is interested in the intersection between revolutionary politics and mobilization of cultures on both the left and the right in China’s twentieth century. His first book, China’s Conservative Revolution: The Quest for a New Order, 1927-1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) studies mass politics under the Guomindang, the dilemmas confronting Chinese liberal intellectuals caught between an authoritarian state and a supposedly untamable populace, and the Nationalist Party’s appeal to Pan-Asianism as a strategy to garner international support. His current research focuses on the advent of “New China” as an Asia-wide event, zeroing in on how the People’s Republic was interpreted by Indian nationalists and Asian Christians in the early 1950s.

Introduction and moderation of the Q&A by Tansen Sen, Director of the Center for Global Asia and Professor of History, NYU Shanghai.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Global Asia and the Global China Studies Program, NYU Shanghai.