2026 Dacre Lecture - New China, New Asia 1945-49: The debates that shaped postwar China and their relevance today

Chairman of the Kuomintang (KMT) government Chiang Kai-shek met with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chairman Mao Zedong in Chongqing for peace negotiations © Hsu Chung-mao

Professor Rana Mitter, Harvard, will give the Dacre Lecture (held in association with the Faculty of History)

The years just after the end of World War II in 1945 saw China debate many issues that still have immense importance for understanding the China of today. Those years contain the period of the Chinese civil war of 1946-50, but it was period of great political promise as well as turmoil.  It was a time when China moved into a new phase of internationalization as it sought to reshape Asia, and when it became embroiled in some of the biggest global debates about the links between economic and social development. It was also a moment of huge debates about democracy and constitutionalism, as well as what a powerful new political force emerging in the countryside might mean. This lecture explores the thinking of Chinese government ministers, idealistic revolutionaries, and ambitious intellectuals who shaped postwar China – and suggest that those debates have come back to shape – and haunt - their 21st-century successors in today’s Communist Party.

Rana Mitter OBE FBA is S. T. Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. His books include China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (2013), which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (2020).  Before moving to Harvard, he taught at Oxford for more than two decades, and maintains links with the University as an Emeritus Fellow of St Cross College, and affiliations including at the Faculty of History, China Centre and Blavatnik School of Government.