Each year, Holocaust Memorial Week dedicates at least one evening to the examination of campaigns of mass murder or genocide other than the Holocaust. In 2022, our event on comparative genocide will deal with two campaigns that between them may well have cost more than twenty million lives, the preponderant majority of the victims being civilians. These are The Great Purge or The Terror, which convulsed the USSR in 1936-39, and The Cultural Revolution in China, 1966-76. Although in both countries large numbers participated in the killing, the impetus came from the regimes in power and particularly the two men who dominated them – Joseph Stalin in the USSR and Mao Zedong in China.

Professor Hua-yu Li teaches at OSU, in the Political Science Program (School of Public Policy, College of Liberal Arts). Among her research interests are Stalinism and Maoism, a focus that is reflected in her book, Mao and the Economic Stalinization of China: 1948-1953; she is currently completing a second book, titled, Stalinism and the Chinese Communist Party under Mao. When she speaks during HMW, she will discuss the role that Stalin's brand of socialism played in Mao’s thinking and why, in the Terror and the Cultural Revolution, both leaders promoted catastrophe.

Free, open to all. Livestream available via YouTube.

Presented by the College of Liberal Arts and the School of History, Philosophy and Religious Studies.

Hua-yu Li
Public Talk: Hua-Yu Li
Location: 
ON CAMPUS (Horizon Room 49, OSU Memorial Union) and STREAMED.
Event Date: 
Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 19:00