China and the West

Philippe Sollers 1970-1971.
Eric Hayot : The important relation to Chinese writing remained strong throughout Philippe Soller's move toward Maoism at the end of the 1960s. His translation of ten poems by Mao in 1970, for instance, while signaling Tel quel's political interest in China, also adopted a theory of translation.
The advent of China's Cultural Revolution played a vital role in the transformation of Soller's Poundian China into Tel quel's vastly more energetic and political version.
Sollers in 1968 and 1969 began debates among the Tel quel editorial committee designed to move the journal toward a Maoist politics – politics that would only surface fully in 1971, after the final breat with the French Communist Party.
Sollers writes that the Cultural Revolution is 'the battle of a long-repressed thought, of a mass revolutionary practice now consolidated in the light of day'.
Soller's presumption that China is ideal material for an ideological avant-garde suggests that whatever his notion of China was, it remained tied up in some sense of the radical possibilities of the East. In fact the demand that China's worth be recognized, though promted in part by China's growing political and economic power, continues to depend on an 'invented' or imaginary China.