This talk will focus on the policy, ideology and politics of Xi Jinping, State President and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and China’s 'ruler for life'. Through comparisons with former CCP leaders, including Deng Xiaoping, Dr Lam will assess whether, having abandoned many of the key precepts of the Era of Reform and the Open Door, the conservative supreme leader’s restitution of Maoist standards might enable China to sustain economic growth and project hard and soft power worldwide.

*Dr Emma MacKinnon* is a researcher of contemporary political theory and the history of political thought, with broader research interests in histories of human rights and humanitarianism, anticolonialism, international political thought, and the relationship between history and politics. Her current book project concerns the history of human rights in the twentieth century through a focus on political contests over the meaning of human rights as a foundational promise of political community.

To read the abstract for the talk and sign-up to attend in-person, please click here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/imperial-collections-and-commemorations-as-justifications-for-empire-tickets-732814667397?aff=oddtdtcreator.

This project responds to industrial economies’ ever-frequent invocation of economic security to indefinitely justify activities that impair other states’ trade within the post-war global economic order. It makes two crucial contributions to the discourse. The first contribution is to disprove