What did the Cultural Revolution mean for China’s future? In the decades after Mao’s death, this question haunted political debates across China. This book tells the story of how Chinese intellectuals, activists, and policymakers grappled with that question from the early 1980s to the present. Through this contestation over memories of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese political actors not only articulate future-oriented visions but also construct a self-image of their responsibility, identity, and agency.
Throughout the 1980s, a contested consensus gradually emerged that the Cultural Revolution had been a profound political mistake, marking a departure from Maoist emphases on populist participation, voluntarism, and the accelerated transformation of society. Yet this shared diagnosis did not produce a single political vision. Instead, it gave rise to competing proposals about democratization and civilization, each pointing toward different possibilities for gradual and stable political development. When the social movements of the decade culminated in the massacre at Tiananmen in 1989, this fragile consensus itself came under renewed scrutiny. In the years that followed, new interpretations of the Cultural Revolution emerged—many of them drawing unexpected inspiration from aspects of the Mao era. These plural and often conflicting reinterpretations turned toward the pressing questions of the reform period: how China’s ongoing economic transformations should be governed, and what political project might be built upon them. In the Xi era, as many prospects for political reform have narrowed and as generational loss increasingly shadows those who lived through the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s last revolution has once again returned to public debate—now entangled with powerful feelings of loss, uncertainty, and anxiety in contemporary China.
Drawing on archival materials, policy writings, and intellectual debates, the book reconstructs how Chinese actors themselves used the memory of the Cultural Revolution to interpret their present and imagine their future. It advances a broader argument: political democratization and what I call mnemonic democratization—the pluralization of interpretations of the past—do not necessarily move together. By recovering these debates, the book reveals how struggles over revolutionary memory have shaped China’s political self-understanding from the reform era to the present.
“Theorizing Democratization with Jiwei Ci: Notes on Method." Comparative Political Theory 4(1), 152-170. https://doi.org/10.1163/26669773-bja10061
Reawakening a Revolutionary Party: The Ancient and Modern Princes in Wang Hui’s Political Theory, American Political Science Review, First View, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424000029.
“The Liberalism of Fear in China: Hu Ping and the Uses of Fear and Memory in Contemporary Chinese Liberalism.” Global Intellectual History 8, no. 3 (2023): 335–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2021.1977674.
“Historical Memory, Democratic Citizenship, and Political Theory: Reconstructing a Historical Method in Judith Shklar’s Writings.” European Journal of Political Theory 22, no. 2 (2023): 324–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885120987762.
[With Elena Ziliotti, Sungmoon Kim, Rogers Smith, Yong Li, and Richard Bellamy] “Confucian Democratic Constitutionalism.” Contemporary Political Theory, Online First. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-024-00721-0.
[With Shoufu Yin and Wenqing Zhao] “Agency, Democracy, and China: The Political Philosophy of Jiwei Ci.” Comparative Political Theory 4(1), 85-206.
A paper on mourning (review and resubmit)
A paper on China’s role in political theory (completed)
An invited chapter on scientific thinking (accepted)
A paper on mobilization (under review)
A paper on revolutionary ethics (in progress)
Review of Everyday Democracy: Civil Society, Youth, and the Struggle Against Authoritarian Culture in China, by Anthony J. Spires, Journal of Asian Studies 85(2), 487-488, https://doi.org/10.1215/00219118-12258517.
Review of Teaching Political Theory: A Pluralistic Approach, by Nicholas Tampio, Contemporary Political Theory 23(4), 674-677. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-023-00623-7.
Review of The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, by Daniel A. Bell, Asian Journal of Political Science 25(1), 151-154. https://doi.org/10.1080/02185377.2016.1256225.