A model of meticulous and partisan scholarship.
Introductory talk to the book launch hosted by organised by Friends of Socialist China, Manifesto Press, Morning Star and the International Manifesto Group for the book Storming the Heavens by Jenny Clegg.
Marx Memorial Library, London.
14 February 2026.
Comrades and Friends
On behalf of Friends of Socialist China, I’d like to welcome everyone to this meeting. Whether here in person or online, thank you for giving up some of your Valentine’s Day to join us.
Thank you to our co-organisers and sponsors, the International Manifesto Group, Manifesto Press and the Morning Star for helping us to put this together. And thank you to the Marx Memorial Library for welcoming us again to this historic centre of the class struggle.
A warm welcome to our friends from the Chinese Embassy and the Chinese media. And a Happy New Year of the Horse, which falls this coming Tuesday, to everyone.
I think it’s hard to overestimate the importance of the work that Jenny Clegg has produced. It’s a model of meticulous and partisan scholarship, illustrating how those two aspects can and must be combined.
And it deals with not simply one of the most important issues of the twentieth century, but I would argue of human history in general.
How could a Marxist-Leninist party, a proletarian party, make a revolution in a country that had but a small and young proletariat and a vast mass of peasantry. But where, as Mao Zedong famously observed, only socialism could save China.
This was the untrodden path that was hewed out by the Chinese communists, with Mao Zedong as their foremost representative.
And it became an essential template and inspiration for revolutions from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to Yugoslavia and Albania, to Eritrea and Guinea Bissau, to Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, to Cuba and Nicaragua.
It thus becomes not unreasonable to posit, as for example Andrew Murray has done, that the Chinese revolution may yet be recorded as a more profound historical turning point than even the 1917 October Revolution.
I think there’s probably no one better qualified than Jenny to bring this history to light. She has devoted her life to studying, understanding and explaining China and the Chinese revolution. From her first visit to China in 1971, through her working life as an academic, her groundbreaking book on ‘China’s Global Strategy – Towards a Multipolar World’, to her current work on the BRICS, situating them within the context of the struggle for an international new democracy.
But Jenny has not just studied and learned and taught. She has put her knowledge to work in social practice and at the service of others. In fighting against racism, in supporting struggles against imperialism in all parts of the world, in building broad-based friendship with China, and today especially and vitally, in the work of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Stop the War Coalition.
The respect she has rightfully earned is reflected in the endorsements and reviews that this book has already received and in the calibre of the speakers we will hear from today.
I’m now pleased to hand over to my friend Professor Radhika Desai who will chair and moderate our meeting.
