Elizabeth McGuire, “Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution” (Oxford UP, 2017)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Oct 8, 2018 · 1h 9m

If Sino-Russian relations today sometimes seem bluntly pragmatic, things were not always so, and as imperial dynasties in both countries crumbled one hundred years ago many interactions between these two Eurasian land empires had a decidedly romantic hue. As Elizabeth McGuire relates in the rich, persuasive and utterly engrossing Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2017), more than one generation of young Chinese people was swept up by the romance of the new socialist order taking shape after Russia’s October Revolution. The…