Links to two papers that were written in relation to the June 2006 Hong Kong conference on the 40th Anniversary of the Cultural Revolution: “Evaluating the Cultural Revolution in China and its Legacy for the Future” and “Chinese Foreign Policy during the Maoist Era and its Lessons for Today.”

As China embraces capitalism, the Mao era is being surgically denigrated by the Chinese political and intellectual elite. This book tackles the extremely negative depiction of China under Mao in recent publications and argues most people in China, including the rural poor and the urban working class, actually benefited from Mao’s policy of a comprehensive welfare system for the urban and basic health and education provision for the rural, which is being reversed in the current rush towards capitalism.

Introduction: This issue represent the first collection devoted specifically to the Asian Sixties. In the U.S. and Europe, of course, what we might properly term the “Western Sixties” are known simply as “the Sixties.” Despite the worldwide salience of the war in Vietnam and of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in any consideration of the sixties as a global phenomenon, in much of the world the Sixties are still imagined as a western event- many would nominate Paris or Berkeley as the Capital of the World Sixties. Part of the impetus behind this collection was to remedy that perception, to suggest the centrality of Asia in any general consideration of the sixties, and to put the Asian sixties on the imaginative map.

I take it that this occasion on the 40th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution is not a commemoration-which would distance it too far into the past to have any relevance to the present, or a celebration-which would bring it too close to the present as if it might be directly relevant, but an opportunity to reflect on an event of great historical significance, which raised questions which may be as relevant as ever, and perhaps more so than they ever have been. I would like to take this opportunity to reflect briefly on two aspects of the Cultural Revolution that I think were parts of a single revolutionary project: the part played in social transformation by culture(as it is integral to social consciousness), and, a vision of development that was both the condition and the anticipated result of such social transformation.

今年是文化大革命发动40周年，仇视和歌颂文化大革命的双方都在纪念。文革结束以来，似乎一切以经济建设为中心了，似乎大家都不谈文革了。但是，文革仍然是中国各级政治舞台上各色人物的最刻骨铭心的经历，仍然是政治事件和决策背后最深层的动因