Chinese history

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. This programme contains distressing details.Our guest is Bárbara Fernández Melleda, Assistant Professor in Latin American Studies at the University of Hong Kong.We start with Ch ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Professor Barbara Keys, a specialist in US history at Durham University.We start with a celebration of the American Freedom Train, as the US prepares to mark 250 ye ...  Show more

By the early 1960s, Chairman Mao Zedong's campaign to modernise Communist China had ended in disaster. Known as the Great Leap Forward, it resulted in turmoil on such a scale that many had begun to question Mao's authority. In response, he set out to claim absolute political supr ...  Show more

In 1960, a poet and journalist named Lin Zhao was arrested by the Communist Party of China and sent to prison for re-education. Years before, she had –at approximately the same time– converted to both Christianity and to Maoism. In prison she lost the second faith but clung to th ...  Show more

In 1968, Jingyu Li and her parents were among hundreds of thousands of Chinese people sent to labour camps during Mao Zedong’s so-called cultural revolution.The aim was to re-educate those not thought to be committed to Chairman’s Mao drive to preserve and purify communism in Chi ...  Show more

The Art of War is one of the most important military strategy texts ever written, and it has become just as influential, perhaps even more so, in the worlds of business, sport, and politics. Bridget Kendall learns what the 2,000-year-old treatise has to say about deception, spyin ...  Show more