Bøger af Gregor Benton

In his prizewinning Mountain Fires: The Red Army's Three-Year War in South China, 1934-1938, Gregor Benton traced the fate of the Communist rear guard that stayed behind when the Red Army set off on the Long March. After three bloody years, the survivors regrouped as the New Fourth Army, which later helped to drive the Nationalists from the mainland. In this sequel to Mountain Fires, Benton describes the first three years of this army, and its triangular war with the Nationalists and the Japanese.Like the Three-Year War from which it stemmed, the New Fourth Army was for many years neglected by historians, mainly because of the absence from it of Mao Zedong, around whom the story of the Chinese Revolution was largely written until his death in 1976. With the downgrading of the Mao cult and the return of some power to the regions (where New Fourth Army veterans held power) in the 1980s, new sources on the New Fourth Army became available. This study, which combines a thematic and a narrative approach, makes exhaustive use of these and other sources to explain the original features of this youthful army, which was no outgrowth or faithful copy of Mao's senior and better-known Eighth Route Army but a body with its own origins and history, and which fought its war in a quite different political, military, and social setting.

This book offers a comprehensive account of indentured Chinese labour in the Dutch East Indies between 1880 and 1942, particularly in its twilight years after 1917. The author shows that Chinese indenture started and evolved differently from other forms of bonded labour in Southeast Asia and globally, including its Indian and Javanese variants. This difference is reflected in its lexicon, which was in part special to the Chinese strain. Using fieldwork findings from the tin islands of Bangka and Belitung and the Deli plantations on Sumatra as well as archival materials in Dutch, Chinese, and other languages held in libraries in Java, Nanjing, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Leiden, this book presents cutting-edge research that sets out to contribute to the revising of our historical understanding of indenture.

Zheng Chaolin helped found the Chinese Communist Party’s European branch in Paris in 1922 and its Trotskyist Opposition in Shanghai in 1931. He held the world record in political imprisonment – seven years under Chiang Kai-shek (as a revolutionary) and 27 under Mao (as a ‘counterrevolutionary’), thus beating by a year Auguste Blanqui’s previous record. After joining the revolution in his teens, his commitment never wavered. His life – which spanned from 1901 to 1998 – was coterminous with the century and a dramatic embodiment of its vicissitudes. The writing collected in this book reflects that, and provides an indispensable record of his contribution to revolutionary thought in China.

"Mao: The Unknown Story" portrays Mao as a monster - equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin - and a fool who won power by native cunning and ruled by terror. This book brings together sixteen reviews of "Mao: The Unknown Story" by some of the internationally well-regarded specialists in modern Chinese history.