The Chinese Cultural Revolution, Deleuze, and Desiring-Machines

The Chinese Cultural Revolution started by Mao Zedong in 1966, apparently a revolution targeting the bourgeoisie, in actuality can be taken as a revolution against individual desires. Attempting to eradicate individual desires, the revolution demanded of individuals a total dedication of the self to the collectivity. Resultantly, desire was removed from Chinese society. Following Gilles Deleuze’s theory of desiring machines, this paper proposes to explore why there was a decline of economic production in China during the Cultural Revolution. Viewed from a Deleuzian perspective, desire is always productive and to suppress desire is necessarily to suppress production. When Deng Xiaoping put an end to the Cultural Revolution and inaugurated the era of reform and opening-up in the late 1970s, what he brought about, it can be argued, was essentially an emancipation of desire, which in turn considerably spurred economic production. This is fundamentally why China’s economy has been growing quickly over the past thirty years or so.