The May Fourth Movement and the Origins of Chinese Marxism

THE UPHEAVAL that occupied the People's Republic of China from 1966 onwards -an upheaval without parallel anywhere else in the contemporary world because it was an upheaval encouraged and later directed by its own recognized leader, Mao Tse-tung, and by a party in power -was in its early stages depicted in the West as something su utterly out of the ordinary in the context of Chinese events as to be the prelude to the disintegration of the regime which, having come to power on October 1, 1949, had proceeded to embark on the twentieth century's most remarkable experiment in social engineering. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as it has come to be officially known, was generally presented in the West as if Chinese history, particularly during the twentieth century, had not been marked with even greater disturbances than the controlled phenomenon that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was.