Rethinking the Significance of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions: A Dialogue with Wang Hui

This is a transcript of a dialogue between faculty and students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the renowned “new leftist” Chinese intellectual, Wang Hui. The immediate theme of the discussion concerned the two major socialist revolutions of the twentieth century, namely the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Wang Hui’s recent work asks how these revolutions and their associated processes problematize typically Eurocentric assumptions about “modernity.” Relatedly, there has been a recent tendency to subsume the Soviet Union and Mao’s China under the history of capitalism. Such revisionist readings of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions echo earlier Marxist arguments about “actually existing” socialism being a form of state capitalism. The various discussants develop different positions on this issue, but they in general affirm the idea that the socialist revolutions partially succeeded in creating an alternative to capitalism, and this legacy continues to be meaningful to our social imagination.