The Cultural Revolution in the Global Sixties

This presentation will illustrate how Maoist China, and specifically the China of the Cultural Revolution, came to constitute a foundation for a transnational discourse of intellectual and political change—something usually called “global Maoism.”  This particular discourse did not place at its center ethnic- or culturally-based values, nor did it espouse the myth of a “rise of China/Asia” in terms of geopolitical power.  Rather, “Cultural Revolution” here was the name of a shift in the political and intellectual frame of reference in the 1960s-70s, when what was happening in China acquired a new relevance for people all over the world within their own historical circumstances.  It is this shift that made it legitimate and logical for the Black Panthers to quote the Little Red Book and for Parisian students to call themselves “chinois.”

The Cultural Revolution, (mis)perceived, imagined, or experienced, was not only and not simply the location of a utopia that could be deployed by idealistic youth to define more locally-specific goals.  Rather, “The Cultural Revolution” represented a short-lived radical political alternative, one that forced those people who took it seriously to rethink their relationship to work, social roles, daily practices, and the production of knowledge.  By examining how the Maoist experiments of the Cultural Revolution were reinterpreted in the West, we may be able to clarify the political meanings of a period of Chinese history that remains quite obscure.  Looking at the “global sixties” from the perspective of China might also help us to rethink Maoism in light of its global appropriation.