During their Yan'an commune days after the Long March, Mao and his confrères first identified the appeal a revolution with Chinese characteristics might exercise over the progressive western mind. Little did they know how successfully socialism with Chinese characteristics and its strategy of consciousness raising and rectification would later translate into a modern western context. This chapter explores the manner in which this process occurred, examining how a number of strains of European thought from Frankfurt School Marxism, existentialism and post-modernism, to structuralism and situationism blended with Maoism in the course of the later twentieth century to offer new romantic revolutionary possibilities to an affluent, if bored, generation inspired by the prospect of a new, exciting, emancipated utopia with non-western characteristics.
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
