Book talk: Tsang, Steve and Cheung, Olivia. The Political Thought of Xi Jinping. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2024).

This presentation draws on an eight-month ethnographic study in a rural community in Southeastern China to examine the socio-economic transformations brought about by the digital age. With limited entrepreneurial opportunities following the decline of the family workshop model of earlier industrialisation eras, younger generations face a stark dissonance between the opulent lifestyles portrayed on social media and their own constrained realities.

Sri Lanka’s conflict landscape was dominated by its three-decade long civil war, which absorbed scholarly and popular attention from the 1980s onwards. The island’s longer history of ethno-religious violence has received less attention, allowing historical narratives such as those on the ‘1915 Sinhala-Muslim Riots’ to be captured and distorted by nationalist and statist interpretations. How, then, do you write back into history an event in which the victims have been forgotten, the aggressors remembered as ‘victims’, and the state a key purveyor of a distorted narrative?

Where will US-China relations go when Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office? Join Oxford University International Relations Society, King’s Politics Society at the University of Cambridge, and Cambridge Journal of Political Affairs for an online discussion with Dr Maria Adele Carrai, Assistant Professor of Global China Studies at NYU Shanghai. Dr Carrai's research explores the history of international law in East Asia and investigates how China’s rise as a global power shapes norms and redefines the international distribution of power.