Among the comets that crossed the skies of 1968 the most brilliant and ambiguous came from China. The name of Mao Tse Tung is waved in the student marches in all the capital cities: associated with Marx and Marcuse, or in the slogan Mao, Marx, Ho Chi Minh. Why China, and what China? As a great Communist country that in 1960 had broken with the USSR, China suggested a Communism "not turned middle class", the emblem of a rural and revolutionary Third World that had risen against the "paper tiger" of imperialism. It offered the young Europeans an anti-consumerist model as opposed the West of waste.  China had made its first and radical criticism of the model of industrial production. Above all, from China arrived the echoes of the Cultural Revolution started a couple of years before, with passwords that found immediate echo in the movements of 1968 in Europe: an anti-hierarchical revolt, based on the creativity and spontaneity of the masses and summarized in the slogans "Shoot at the headquarters" or "to rebel is right". Not one but many Chinas were reflected in Europe in a multitude of different groups, and even more in ideas, symbols, suggestions. The first Maoism in Europe dates to the 1960s and is that of the "M-L" (Marxist-Leninist) parties and groups born after the break between China and the Soviet Union. This originated in the controversy on the "model of development": since the middle of the 1950s Mao Tse Tung had criticized the order of priority of the Soviet model, founded on heavy industrialization. When Kruscev begins de-Stalinization in 1956, Mao indicates the errors of the USSR not to be repeated: excess of centralization, repression, unilateral industrialization at the expense of agricultural development. The Chinese criticism reflected the effort to construct Socialism in a large rural and underdeveloped country, and precisely the necessity to experiment a different model drives Mao, in 1958, to launch the Great Step Forward: a gigantic effort to mobilize the peasant masses, modernize the rural areas and build a small decentralized industry. The popular Communes are born then: productive but also political-administrative units, an experiment of construction of Communism. Peking finally goes so far as to upset the order of priority: to the Soviet "construction of the material bases of Socialism", understood as heavy industry and centralized planning, it will contrast a great investment in agricultural and decentralized development. To the centrality of the technicians, it will contrast "politics in the place of command". But the first European Maoism above all reflects the ideological controversy between the two great Communist parties. The Chinese attack against the "modern revisionism" of Kruscev in 1960 was the sign. The USSR replied by recalling its technicians to their country: the fracture had occurred. In Western Europe the Communist Parties took the side of the orthodoxy of Moscow against the Chinese "deviation". The "M-L" fractions born then, the majority of them from franges of the Communist Parties, see in China an "anti-Kruscev" and anti-revisionist bulwark.  The year 1968 passes like a tide over the M-L parties, involved in dividing themselves into fractions that mimic the political process taking place in Peking. More than the groups, it is some ideas and suggestions of Maoism that leave their trace. There was the echo of the Hundred Flowers, a movement of criticism of power. But the most explosive novelty comes from the Cultural Revolution, or, better still, from how it is perceived in Europe: a movement "from the base" of radical criticism of the capitalist way of production and of the state, the hierarchies, the knowledge "of class". These are the ideas that are reflected in slogans such as "In Italy as in China, the students in the workshop", or the French "Osons lutter, oasons vaincre" (we dare to fight, we dare to win). Ironically, the image of China that arrived just then in Europe had little to do with real events. In Europe, Japan or in Mexico, 1968 was the year of the revolt of the students. In China it marked their exit from the stage. The Cultural Revolution had by now run its course: from the beginnings of 1966 with the movement of the Tatzebao in the universities and the Resolution in 16 points of the Central Committee endorses the revolution, to the experiments of self-organization of the workers and the Commune of Shanghai, until the violent clash between factions of the Red Guards. Of all this in Europe only echoes arrive together with many slogans, some documents (spread by magazines such as Vento dell’est [Wind of the east] in Italy or by the intellectual circles close to the Gauche proletarienne in France). Some episodes become symbolic: the first Tatzebao hung in the university of Peking by a group of young teachers, which denounced the academic authorities and the reactionary nature of the teaching, were so appreciated by Mao that he had the text spread by radio throughout the country. Or the Tatzebao written by Mao himself and hung on the door of the Central Committee, with the title "Fire on the headquarters!": an open invitation to revolt against every hierarchical principle. The "revolutionary students" criticize the mechanism of selection and the sciolistic teaching, they refuse and overturn the claimed neutrality of knowledge, they criticize the separation between school and work They want to abolish the "three differences": between city and countryside, manual and intellectual work, governors and governed. The movement spreads from the universities to the factories and to the farming communes, where many young Red Guards have gone to work to "join the working class". The workers are invited to establish "proletarian power", under the form of mass bodies of the Cultural Revolution. In the winter of 1966-67, the workers "counter-power" will result in the Commune of Shanghai, inspired by the Commune of Paris described by Marx, that "foreshadows the dictatorship of the proletariat". The movement of criticism against the return of old privileges, the "revisionism" and the "new bourgeoisie" within the party, has thus arrived to question the hierarchies of power in production (between workers and technicians, for example) and in society. Finally it has attacked the actual principle of the authority of the state. It is a critical point: the army is sent to mediate between the factions of the Red Guards, by now armed; the cult of the personality of Mao knows no limits, his Little Red Book is waved like a bible, "popular trials" and violence are widespread.  It is the hot summer of 1967. It is then that the central group of the Cultural Revolution and the leaders of the party reach the "consolidation" of the revolution, or the attempt to regain control, reopen the schools, re-organize production. In China, therefore, 1968 was the year of normalization of the Cultural Revolution. The last violent clashes between factions take place again in the universities, in Canton and in Peking. At the end of August Mao warns the "little generals" of the Red Guard: the next morning workers teams go to occupy the universities and the revolutionary students are sent to the countryside, to "work in the base". In September the Workers daily announces that the battle for the creation of revolutionary committees at provincial level has been victoriously concluded. A huge rally in Peking celebrates the event: it is the formal closure of the Cultural Revolution. What begins rather is an impressive exodus of leaders of the party and former Red Guards, sent to "be re-educated" in the farming communes. Within a year, directors of the Cultural Revolution and loyalists of Mao such as Chen Pota and Marshall Lin Piao, who had introduced the study of Mao’s thinking in the army and had made it a pole of the political struggle, will be put aside. The news of the real events of those years only partly reached Europe. Even after a long time it is still difficult to analyze the ideological divergences and the struggles for power that lay behind that great agitation, at the time explained summarily with the clash between "line of the masses" or of the left and "line of the right" or bourgeoise-revisionist. The great violence with which the Chinese "uninterrupted revolution" was peppered was left untold. Paradoxically, while the line "of the masses" was exalted, the Chinese society was the great absentee in the writings and documents of the time. And yet that China that was partly mythical and partly misunderstood, the great egalitarian revolution based on the spontaneity of the masses, the bulwark of the Third World against the imperialist "paper tiger", that China was close to the whole of 1968.