How to Tell a Sensitive History:
Interviews with Chinese International Communist Volunteers in Burma
12 November 2025 (Wednesday), 18:15–19:45
Room VG 1.102
Speaker:
Dr. Ning Zhang (University of Oxford)
Research Associate, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies
Abstract:
Dr. Zhang is working on a book project that offers a pioneering exploration of the experiences of Chinese volunteers in Burma between 1968 and 1989. These volunteers were primarily former sent-down youths who supported the Burmese Communist Party’s insurgency against the Burmese government. After China withdrew its official military presence in 1973, many volunteers returned home and faced the difficult process of reintegrating into a society largely unaware of their contributions and sacrifices. Although Chinese involvement in the Burmese Civil War has long been an open secret, it remains officially unacknowledged by the Chinese government. The volunteers’ hopes of being recognised as soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army were met with silence, while their experiences of political repression under the BCP continue to be a sensitive and contested subject in contemporary China.
Drawing on sixty in-depth interviews and a substantial collection of personal archives, Dr. Zhang’s project sheds light on the human dimensions of “international communism” and its reverberations in Southeast Asia. This lecture explores not only how these historical actors remember and recount their contentious pasts, but also the ethical and methodological challenges of researching and narrating politically sensitive histories in China. It highlights how the act of telling these stories—by both the witnesses and the historian—reveals the emotional, political, and moral limits of historical inquiry under conditions of state silence and collective forgetting.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Ning Zhang received her PhD from Fudan University in China and is currently a Research Associate at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. Her research examines the social and political history of modern China, with a particular focus on the Sent-Down Youth Movement and Maoism in Southeast Asia. From 2022 to 2024, she held a Newton International Fellowship at the University of Oxford, funded by the British Academy, for her project entitled “Chinese Sent-Down Youth and the Communist Movement in Burma (1968–1989).” During this fellowship, she conducted extensive fieldwork and oral history interviews. The findings from this research form the basis of her current book project and this lecture.
Organizer:
Prof. Dominic Sachsenmaier, University of Göttingen
Poster image generated with the assistance of ChatGPT.