How do we explain the surprising trajectory of the Chinese Communist revolution? Why has it taken such a different route from its Russian prototype? An answer, Elizabeth Perry suggests, lies in the Chinese Communists’ creative development and deployment of cultural resources – during their revolutionary rise to power and afterwards. Skillful «cultural positioning» and «cultural patronage,» on the part of Mao Zedong, his comrades and successors, helped to construct a polity in which a once alien...
