But that’s not the only analogy between late-1960s China and 2018 America. One of the mainsprings of the Cultural Revolution was a vindictive aged actress out for revenge on the producers and actresses who had cost her roles back in her prime. Mrs. Mao, Jiang Qing, had been a movie starlet in 1930s Shanghai, when she built up a lifetime of grudges that she acted upon when her husband let her take control of Chinese popular culture in the 1960s.
Her squads beat up aging film figures and reedited old movies to conform to new political prejudices. She would have considered the recent American custom of terrified novelists hiring “sensitivity readers” to censor their manuscripts for them a step in the right direction. (…)
Outside of the occasional Evergreen State, American educational institutions are torn between promoting social justice warfare and maximizing revenue. Ironically, the increasing dependence of American colleges on full-tuition-paying Chinese students, who have nothing but contempt for African-American Cultural Revolutionaries (“Hey, hey, hey, this is library!”), inclines them toward prudence.
