Timothy Cheek is a Professor with the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and Department of History, Louis Cha Chair in Chinese Research, and C0-Director of the Centre for Chinese Research at the Institute of Asian Research (IAR). He has been a professor at UBC since 2002. His research, teaching and translating focus on the recent history of China, especially the role of Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century and the history of the Chinese Communist Party.

He is a 2023 Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) in the Academy of Arts and Humanities.

In the 2024-25 academic year I will be teaching “HIST 586A Topics in Intellectual History: Mao & Memory in the fall and “The Making of Modern China” HIST 380A in the spring.

Office hours: Wednesdays, 3:00-5:00 PM, Choi 276 (1855 West Mall).

Research Interests

20th century Chinese history
the history of the Chinese Communist Party
the role of intellectuals in public life in China

History of the Chinese Communist Party in the context of China’s Twentieth Century revolutions down to the Party-State today. Running a collaborative translation project, “Revisiting the Revolution”, translating recent PRC scholarship on New Revolutionary History and social history of revolution in China (http://prchistory.org/revisiting-the-revolution-landing-page/ Recent publication: The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives, edited with Klaus Mühlhahn and Hans J. van de Ven (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Working on an ambitious project mapping Chinese statecraft with Bruce Rusk and Shoufu Yin: Between the People and the State: Chinese Statecraft from Early Ming to Xi Jinping.

Contemporary Thought and Society in China. The ideas, debates, writings, and roles of intellectuals in modern and contemporary China with a focus on “certified knowledge” and institutions of intellectual life. Recent publication in this stream: The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and a SSHRC project (2014-19) on “Reading and Writing the Chinese Dream” on public intellectuals in China today (co-directed with Joshua A. Fogel, York University, and David Ownby, University of Montreal). Most recent publication in this stream, Voices from the Chinese Century: Public Intellectual Debate from Contemporary China, co-edited with David Ownb & Joshua Fogel (NY: Columbia University Press, 2020).

Mao Zedong. Translating and editing Mao texts with Stuart Schram for vol. VIII of Mao Zedong’s Road to Power, being the complete works of Mao in English for 1942-1945. Published by Routledge in July 2015.

Books

T. Cheek, The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives, edited with Klaus Mühlhahn and Hans J. van de Ven (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

T. Cheek; D. Ownby, J. A. Fogel, Voices from the Chinese Century: Public Intellectual Debate from Contemporary China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.

T. Cheek. The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

S. Schram; T. Cheek. Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912-1949, Vol. VIII: 1942-August 1945. London: Routledge, 2015.

T. Cheek. A critical introduction to Mao. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

T. Cheek. Living with reform: China since 1989. New York: Zed Books, 2006.

T. Cheek, Mao Zedong and China’s Revolutions: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 2002).

L. Li, translators & editors, H. Jiang; T. Cheek. Small well lane: a contemporary Chinese play and oral history = [Xiao jing hu tong]. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

J. D. Lindau; T. Cheek, Market economics and political change: comparing China and Mexico. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998.

T. Cheek; T. Saich. New perspectives on state socialism of China. Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 1997.

T. Cheek. Propaganda and culture in Mao’s China: Deng Tuo and the intelligentsia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.  Chinese translation: 齊慕實，《鄧拓：毛時代的中國文人》 香港：Oxford University Press, 2016.

Q. Dai; D.E. Apter; T. Cheek; J. Song. Wang Shiwei and “Wild lilies”: rectification and purges in the Chinese Communist Party, 1942-1944. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1994.

R. MacFarquhar; T. Cheek; E. Wu; M. Goldman; B.I. Schwartz. The secret speeches of Chairman Mao: from the hundred flowers to the great leap forward. Cambridge, Mass: Council on East Asian Studies/Harvard University, 1989.

Z.M. Yang; W.A. Wycoff; T. Cheek. Hu Yao Bang: a Chinese biography. Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 1988.

M. Goldman; T. Cheek; C.L. Hamrin. China’s intellectuals and the state: in search of a new relationship. Cambridge, Mass: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987.

C.L. Hamrin; T. Cheek. China’s establishment intellectuals. Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 1986.

Articles/Book Chapters

T. Cheek, “Translating and Assessing Mao’s Yan’an Writings 91942-1945): Reflections on Volume VIII of Mao’s Road to Power,’ in Joan Judge, et al, eds., The Sinosphere And Beyond (Berlin: Degruyter, in press June 2024), 213-225.

T. Cheek, “Waiting for the Dawn: Ci Jiwei’s A Plan for the Prince,” Comparative Political Theory, Vol. 4:1 (in press, May 2024), 14 pp. in page proofs.

T. Cheek, “Intellectuals and Ideological Governance of the Chinese Communist Party,” in Jerome Doyon and Chloé Froissart, eds., The Chinese Communist Party at 100 Years (1921-2021) (Canberra: Australian National University Press, Jan. 2024). doi.org/10.22459/CCP.2024.04 pp. 103-24.

T. Cheek, “Xi Jinping’s Counter-Reformation: The Reassertion of Ideological Governance in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 30, Issue 132 (November 2021), 875-887. [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10670564.2021.1893554?journalCode=cjcc20]

T. Cheek, “China’s Directed Public Sphere: Historical Perspectives on Mao’s Propaganda State,” in James Farley & Matthew Johnson, eds., Redefining Propaganda in Modern China: The Mao era and Its Legacies (London: Routledge, 2021), 36-53.

T. Cheek, “Struggles between Local Powers and Collaboration: Yan Xishan, the CCP and the Western Shanxi Incident,” in Jonathan Henshaw, Craig A. Smith, and Norman Smith, eds., Translating the Japanese Occupation of China: A Documentary Approach (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2020), 374-81.

T. Cheek, “Thought Reform,” in Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini, & Nicholas Loubere, eds., Afterlives of Chinese Communism (London: Verso, 2019), 287-92.

T. Cheek & D. Ownby, “Make China Marxist Again,” with David Ownby, Dissent, 65:4 (Fall 2018), 71-77.

T. Cheek; D. Ownby; J. A. Fogel, “Mapping the intellectual public sphere in China today,” part of a “research dialogue” section of six essays in, China Information, 32:1 (March 2018), 107-120.

T. Cheek, “The Reform Era as History,” in Michael Szoyni, ed., A Companion to Chinese History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2017), pp. 191-203.

T. Cheek, “Making Maoism: Ideology and Organizations in the Yan’an Rectification Movement, 1942-44,”in Knowledge Acts in Modern China: Ideas, Institutions, and Identities, eds. Robert Culp, Eddy U, and Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: University of California Institute of East Asian Studies, 2016), pp. 304-27.

T. Cheek, “Reform and Rebuilding, 1976-1988,” in Jeffrey Wasserstrom, ed., Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 226-49.

T. Cheek, “Attitudes of Action: Maoism as Emotion in Political Theory,” in Chinese Thought as Global Theory: Diversifying Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences and Humanities, ed., Leigh Jenco (Albany: NY: SUNY Press, 2016), pp. 75-100.

T. Cheek, “ “Establishment Intellectuals,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies. Ed. Tim Wright. New York: Oxford University Press, July 2015. ”, in Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, p. online.

T. Cheek, “Mao and Maoism”, in The Oxford Handbook of Communism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 90-115. Chinese translation: 齐慕实，“毛泽东与‘毛主义’” （张明，译）《毛泽东研究》, 2015, No. 4, 112-21.

T. Cheek, “Chinese Socialism as Vernacular Cosmopolitanism”, Frontiers of History in China, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 2-28, 2014.

T. Cheek, “Citizen Intellectuals in Historical Perspective: Reflections on Callahan’s ‘Citizen Ai’”, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 73, no. 4, pp. 921-25, 2014.

T. Cheek, “The Importance of Revolution as an historical topic”, Journal of Modern Chinese History, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 250-53, 2013. Chinese translation: 齐慕实，“革命：作为历史话题的重要性’” （翟亚柳，译）《外国理论动态》, 2014, No. 10.

T. Cheek, “Redefining Propaganda: Debates on the Role of Journalism in Post-Mao China,” [originally published in Issues & Studies, 1989],  anthologized in Chinese Media: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, M. Keane & W. Sun, eds. London: Routledge, 2013, vol. 1, 64-88.

T. Cheek, “The Worlds of China’s Intellectuals”, in China In and Beyond the Headlines, L. Jensen and Weston, T. Lanhan, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.

T. Cheek, “Of Leaders and Governance: How the Chinese Dragon Got Its Scales,” a review essay on Ezra Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Harvard, 2011)”, Cross-Currents: East-Asian History and Culture Review, vol. 2, 2012.

T. Cheek, “The End of Intellectuals: 60 Years of Service, Subversion, and Selling in China”, in The People’s Republic of China at 60: An International Assessment, W. C. Kirby Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011, pp. 339-56.

T. Cheek, “Shengshi, Chinese Values and Han Yu”, China Heritage Quarterly, no. 26, 2011. http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=026_cheek.inc&issue=026

T. Cheek, “The Multiple Mao’s of Contemporary China”, Harvard Asia Quarterly, vol. XI:2-3, no. Spring/Summer 2008, pp. 14-25, 2008.

T. Cheek, “The New Chinese Intellectual: Globalized, Disoriented, Reoriented”, in China’s Transformations: The Stories Beyond the Headlines, L. Jensen and Weston, T. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, pp. 265-284.

T. Cheek, “Xu Jilin and the Thought Work of China’s Public Intellectuals”, The China Quarterly, pp. 401-420, 2006.

T. Cheek, “Historians as Public Intellectuals in Contemporary China”, in Chinese Intellectuals Between the State and Market, E. Gu and Goldman, M. London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 204-222.

T. Cheek, “Beyond Exceptionalism: China’s Intellectuals and America from Heroes to Allies”, in China Beyond the Headlines, T. Weston and Jensen, L. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, pp. 121-145.

T. Cheek, “Introduction: A Cross-Cultural Conversation on Li Zehou’s Ideas on Subjectivity and Aesthetics in Modern Chinese Thought”, Philosophy East and West, vol. 49, pp. 113-119, 1999.

T. Cheek, “From Market to Democracy in China: Gaps in the Civil Society Model”, in Market Economics & Political Change: Comparing China and Mexico, T. Cheek and Lindau, J. D. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998, pp. 219-245.

T. Cheek, “From Priests to Professionals: Intellectuals and the State under the CCP”, in Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China: Lessons from 1989, J. Wasserstrom and Perry, E. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992, pp. 124-45.

T. Cheek, “The Fading of Wild Lilies: Wang Shiwei and Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talks  In The First CPC Rectification Movement,”  The Australian Journal of  Chinese Affairs, No. 11 (January 1984), 25-58.

Reference Entries

T. Cheek, “Political Dissent,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies. Ed. Tim Wright. New York: Oxford University Press, April 2017.    DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199920082-0141

T. Cheek, “Establishment Intellectual”, Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies. Oxford University Press, New York, 2015.  DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199920082-0118

MA & PhD in modern Chinese history (co-supervising with Dr. Jeremy Brown, Simon Fraser University).

Teaching