Ian Johnson | Rethinking the Cultural Revolution at 60

This coming May marks the Cultural Revolution's 60th anniversary, which will result in a barrage of media reports of what is often portrayed as modern China's greatest tragedy--an event on par with Pol Pot's atrocities and even the Holocaust. The Cultural Revolution was hugely important: millions died, tens of millions of other lives were ruined, and the resulting trauma helped to launch China's reform-and-opening era. But because the Cultural Revolution involved urban elites, its centrality to modern Chinese history has been magnified out of proportion, crowding out arguably more important events that largely affected subalterns, such as farmers and the urban working-class. In this talk, Ian Johnson argues for putting the Cultural Revolution in context, not in order to underplay it but to give more space for events that better explain China's 21st century trajectory.

Center on Contemporary China | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Center on Contemporary China (OWNER)

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