Chinas greatest export: Maoism, orientalism and post-colonial discourse theory

This chapter traces the evolution of New Left thought from the late 1970s. It illustrates how deconstructionism and critical theory moved out of revolutionary idealism and into politics. From the 1980s the promotion of abstract human rights, radical democracy, social justice and post-national constellations acquired a distinctive Maoist and Frankfurt School infused edge. Somewhat differently, the 1970s also witnessed a new, critical, post-colonial discourse theory, the harbinger of attempts to decolonize western thought and culture. Out of deconstruction, via Mao and Fanon, post-colonialists adapted privileged first world thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault to the needs of the silenced, non-western subaltern identity. This too had implications for an updated version of Maoism in China from the 1990s and for further exposing the contradictions at the core of western liberalism and progressivism. These developments came together in an all-purpose western version of cultural revolution and alter globalization in the second decade of the twenty first century.