Political Science Graduate Student Research

This paper clarifies the mysteries surrounding the alleged Chinese New Left as an intellectual movement since the 1990s and explains why the term Chinese New Left mismatches with what it seemingly refers to. In fact, as an intellectual movement, the alleged Chinese New Left is an artificial construction of distorted and incoherent referentiality, which has no commonality with the New Left in its original sense. Notwithstanding, as possible and marginal space in the political spectrum and public sphere, a New Left could exist in China, though illegally by far.

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Identifying China’s Long 1980s

(Cambridge University Press, 2025) Lei, Letian

This paper provides a historiographical periodization of China’s Long 1980s (1978–1992) by conceptualizing its political and intellectual contexts and illustrating the reformism–conservatism dichotomy across key events throughout this period. The identification of China’s Long 1980s not only illuminates China’s policy trajectories and ideological landscape back then and ever since but also enriches the global scholarship of modernity, Marxism and 20th-century communist experiences.

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