The Cultural Revolution at 60: The Case for More Context

Ian Johnson

Copyright: Sim Chi Yin

Dec 16, 2025, 17:30-19:00

10-322, 3F, building 10, Sophia University

In person and on ZOOM

Please register from here: https://forms.office.com/r/HDsqJ8AEYJ

This coming May marks the Cultural Revolution's 60th anniversary, which will result in a barrage of media reports of what is often portrayed as modern China's greatest tragedy--an event on par with Pol Pot's atrocities and even the Holocaust. The Cultural Revolution was hugely important: millions died, tens of millions of other lives were ruined, and the resulting trauma helped to launch China's reform-and-opening era. But because the Cultural Revolution involved urban elites, its centrality to modern Chinese history has been magnified out of proportion, crowding out arguably more important events that largely affected subalterns, such as farmers and the urban working-class. In this talk, Ian Johnson argues for putting the Cultural Revolution in context, not in order to underplay it but to give more space for events that better explain China's 21st century trajectory.

Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and researcher based in Berlin. He is also the founder and director of the China Unofficial Archives, a repository for hundreds of books, samizdat magazines, and underground films banned in China. His latest book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, was named "best of 2023" by the Financial Times, the Economist, and the Guardian. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Leipzig on Chinese religious associations and continues to write for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications.

This talk is organized by James Farrer (Professor, Sophia University).