The Road Is Tortuous: The Chinese Revolution and the End of the Global Sixties

Abstract

This article argues that the rightward turn of Chinese politics in the 1970s was a key contributing factor in ending the revolutionary era of the long and global 1960s and ushering in the neoliberal age of reaction which followed. This process of counterrevolution in China began with the Sino-American rapprochement, which Mao initiated in response to the hostile encirclement of China by Soviet, American and Indian forces in the late 1960s, and ended with the arrest the Gang of Four soon after Mao’s death in