How Western Anarchists Misread Mao’s Cultural Revolution as Libertarian Uprising

Sixty years ago today, Mao Zedong issued the May 16 Notification, a document widely regarded as the catalyst for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. During this tumultuous period, Mao targeted rivals within China’s power structure by labeling them counterrevolutionaries and inciting the nation to rebel against them.

Young radicals known as Red Guards answered his call, sparking chaotic clashes among a patchwork of groups. The decade that followed was marked by violent rebellion, brutal repression, and aggressive assaults on perceived reactionary cultural elements. The human toll was catastrophic: hundreds of thousands—likely well over a million—lost their lives.

At a time when Westerners had minimal direct exposure to China, most outsiders viewed the Cultural Revolution through a haze of misunderstanding. Some observers, particularly left-leaning intellectuals, projected their own political aspirations onto the unfolding chaos. While it was common for leftists to romanticize socialist revolutions, a subset of Western anarchists and radicals saw Mao’s movement as an anti-authoritarian uprising against bureaucracy.

The Three Tendencies of the New Left

Writer Paul Berman once identified three dominant ideological currents within the New Left: traditional Marxists, neo-Marxists, and what he termed the “inconsistent libertarians.” These were not advocates of free-market libertarianism—though overlaps existed—but individuals who were “anarchist at heart, allergic to bureaucracies, allergic to anything like a Marxist-Leninist centralized organization.” Yet they repeatedly fell for the Third Worldist fantasies peddled by modern Marxists, idealizing figures like Ho Chi Minh or other tropical Communists as champions of libertarian causes.

The delusion was especially pronounced regarding China, fueled by the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s rhetoric on local self-sufficiency—a concept that distant observers could misinterpret as a form of decentralized governance. The notion that China was undergoing a semi-anarchist transformation gained more traction than many realize:

• David Dellinger, an antiwar activist with anarcho-pacifist roots, traveled to China in 1967 and reported that “strongly libertarian attitudes” were evident among the Red Guards and, “contrary to the assumptions of most Westerners,” within Chinese society as a whole.
• The avant-garde composer John Cage admired the Spooner-Tucker circle of individualist anarchists, frequently distributing copies of a book about them. His politics blended their brand of anarchy with the futurism of Buckminster Fuller. For a time, he even incorporated Mao into this mix, citing the dictator’s early interest in anarchism and his exhortation to the Red Guards that “it is right to rebel.”
• The counterculture manifesto Whole Earth Catalog, edited by Stewart Brand, carried a strong libertarian ethos. Yet one edition featured a special section praising Mao’s China as “one of the great social and political experiments of all time.” Brand himself later admitted that reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed had “changed his mind politically,” steering him toward the ideas of Peter Kropotkin—and, by association, Mao.
• Colin Ward, a British anarchist, echoed this paradoxical admiration. In 1974, he wrote of the