Modern Erasures: Revolution, the Civilizing Mission, and the Shaping of China’s Past by Pierre Fuller Unavailable

How should we account for the violence and destruction unleashed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong in the 1960s? Most observers viewed the Cultural Revolution as an extreme manifestation of the Chinese Communist Party’s quest to free the country from imperialism and to build a new society. They usually explained its violence as a result of Maoist China’s rejection of everything old and Western, Mao’s own power struggle, his revolutionary romanticism, the simmering tensions within the country’s social fabrics, or some variations or combinations thereof. Fuller, however, takes a different tack. From his vantage point, the entire Chinese revolutionary project, spanning the years from around 1920 to the 1960s and culminating in the Cultural Revolution, was the by-product of a specific form of “revolutionary memory.” Indeed, the project “was in practice less a defense of the local from imperialism than an outgrowth of colonial modernity” (292). In his...