One of the #books I'm reading this week is The Wind from the East by Richard Wolin. It looks at the idolization of the Cultural Revolution by certain students at the Ecole normale superieure and their subsequent influence on French society -- mostly by looking at how they influenced more established thinkers like Sartre and Foucault. It also discusses the wider student movement during 1968. Worth a read.

"None spoke Chinese, and reliable information about contemporary China was nearly impossible to come by, since Mao had basically forbidden access to outsiders. Little matter. The less these normaliens knew about contemporary China, the better it suited their purposes, Cultural Revolutionary China became a projection screen, a Rorschach test, for their inner-most radical political hopes and fantasies which in de Gaulle's France had been deprived of a real-world outlet. China became the embodiment of a "radical utopian future," by assuming new identities as French incarnations of China's Red Guards, these dissident Althusserians sought to reinvent themselves wholesale. [...] The "successes" of Chinese communism--or its imagined successes--would magically compensate for the abysmal failures of the Communist experience elsewhere."