Sixty years ago today, Mao Zedong issued the May 16 Notification, a document frequently seen as the opening shot of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In this period, Mao fought his rivals in China's power structure by declaring them counterrevolutionaries and urging the country to rise up against them. Young radicals known as Red Guards heeded the dictator's call, and soon a mishmash of groups were chaotically clashing. The ensuing years saw violent rebellion, even more violent repression, and intense attacks on allegedly reactionary forms of culture. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed—probably well over a million.

At a time when Americans and Europeans had very little direct contact with China, most Westerners viewed this through a fog. Some of them projected their political ideals onto what was unfolding. This was not merely the familiar pattern where starry-eyed leftists identified with a socialist revolution: This time, some of them thought they were watching an anti-authoritarian leader instigating a revolt against bureaucracy.

Paul Berman once argued that there were three "grand tendencies" in the New Left: the old-school Marxists, the neo-Marxists, and the "inconsistent libertarians." He didn't mean the free market sort of libertarians—though as we'll see, there was some overlap. He meant people who were "anarchist at heart, allergic to bureaucracies, allergic to anything like a Marxist-Leninist centralized organization," yet "kept falling for the Third Worldist fantasies of the modern Marxists, kept wanting to celebrate Ho or some other tropical Communist as a hero of the libertarian cause." The fantasy was particularly intense around China, thanks to the Cultural Revolution (and thanks to Mao's interest in local self-sufficiency, which a distant observer could misconstrue as a more benign sort of decentralization). The idea that something semi-anarchist was happening in China had more adherents at the time than you might expect:

• David Dellinger, an antiwar activist with an anarcho-pacifist background, reported from China in 1967 that "strongly libertarian attitudes" were "noticeable in the Red Guards and (contrary to the assumptions of most Westerners) in Chinese society generally."

• The composer John Cage loved the Spooner-Tucker circle of individualist anarchists—he was constantly giving away copies of a book about them—and his politics mixed their breed of anarchy with the futurism of Buckminster Fuller. For a while he improbably added Mao to the mix, citing the dictator's interest in anarchism as a young man and his admonition to the Red Guards that "it is right to rebel."

• That counterculture bible, the Whole Earth Catalog, had a strong libertarian streak, as did its founder and primary editor, Stewart Brand. Yet one edition included a special section hailing Mao's China as "one of the great social and political experiments of all time"—and Brand himself casually declared, while reviewing Ursula Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed, that the book had "changed his mind politically" by turning him "toward Kropotkin and Mao." The left-anarchist writer Peter Kropotkin, that is.

• The British anarchist Colin Ward offered the same unusual pairing. Writing in 1974 of the decentralized economic development imagined in Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops, Ward cited China as one of three "actual human societies which exemplify the ideas set by Kropotkin in this book"—though he acknowledged that the country was sufficiently centralized that "some great shift in policy might put into reverse the trends which, at a distance, we admire."

• In continental Europe, the German New Left leader (and later vice chancellor) Joschka Fischer sometimes spoke of "anarcho-Mao-spontex," an anti-hierarchical ideological tendency that fused anarchy with, in Berman's words, "an imaginary Mao—a Mao who, unlike the real Mao, was not a totalitarian." This phenomenon took its most bizarre form in Italy, where a partly but not entirely tongue-in-cheek movement styled itself "Mao Dada." (That's Dada the anti-authoritarian art movement, not Dada the benevolent father.) In France, a Mao-spontex party called Gauche Prolétarienne included several prominent intellectuals; Michel Foucault worked with many of its members (including his partner) in forming a militant anti-prison group.

Needless to say, Mao wasn't abolishing prisons back in China. But in France, Gauche Prolétarienne was the most prominent collection of self-proclaimed Maoists around.

• In the free market world, the future gun-rights litigator Stephen Halbrook took to claiming an exotic assortment of leftists for the libertarian cause, describing V.I. Lenin as "one of the great libertarians of our age" and Fidel Castro's network of informants, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, as an anarchistic alternative to "huge central bureaucracy." Halbrook's attempt to fuse libertarianism with Leninism crested with two articles full of praise for Mao, one in Libertarian Analysis and the other in Outlook. The latter appeared under the title "Mao, Economy, and State"—a play on Murray Rothbard's pro-market treatise Man, Economy, and State—alongside a cartoon of the Great Helmsman reading Rothbard.

Some of his articles' assertions were flat-out inaccurate: Halbrook claimed, for example, that "all forms of coercion were taboo" during the Great Leap Forward. Others were cherry-picked: He quoted a 1934 report where Mao wrote, "As regards the private sector of the economy, we shall not hamper it; indeed we shall promote and encourage it," without mentioning the rest of the sentence—"so long as it does not transgress the legal limits set by our government." Halbrook essentially assembled every example he could find of Mao either promoting local self-sufficiency or relaxing economic controls, and he presented them together as a more-or-less consistent ideal of "a free, decentralized economy." Most readers did not find this persuasive.

Still, at least two prominent libertarians felt something compelling in Halbrook's arguments. One was Leonard Liggio, a future president of the Mont Pelerin Society, who had publicly praised Halbrook's take on Lenin and published an article that invoked "Lenin's basic anarchism" and the "anarchistic nature of [China's] cultural revolution." (Liggio would later take a more critical attitude toward that portion of Chinese history.) The other, treading more carefully than Liggio but still dipping his toes into the water, was the Goldwater speechwriter turned anarchist Karl Hess.

Outlook's editors asked Hess to write an introduction to Halbrook's piece, perhaps under the theory that a benediction from a figure widely admired in libertarian circles might help a controversial thesis go down more smoothly. Hess approached the subject from the side: He did not claim that China was free, but he argued that libertarians should pay attention to "the direction of political and social movement within all nation states" and thus should take note if the Chinese were "moving—at least moving—away from command socialism and toward a sort of participatory democracy." Hess mostly left it to Halbrook to offer evidence of that movement, but he listed some changes that he believed were happening in China: turns "toward a militia defense, unarmed police, local direct democracy, cooperative rather than state ownership."

By framing the subject as a shift toward freedom rather than an actual arrival at a free destination, Hess put a degree of distance between himself and the Chinese regime. A few years later, when Reason columnist Edith Efron claimed that Hess "now calls himself a Maoist," he wrote in to call that an "actual libel" and to say that the "only other place beside Miss Efron's article that I have been described as a Maoist, so far as I know, is in the intelligence files of the FBI."

By that time, Hess was not merely distinguishing movement from destination; he was distinguishing the party-state from the hinterlands. Interviewed by Playboy in 1976, he derided Mao as "an elitist, a bureaucrat" and concluded that the country was freest where Mao's power was weakest: It was "far left out in the countryside and still right-wing in Peking." (In the mid-1970s, Hess used left to mean dispersed power and right to mean concentrated authority.) He made a similar claim in his 1975 book Dear America. Each time, he was vague about what precisely was happening in those hinterlands. But in that vagueness, and in that lingering suspicion of the Beijing regime, Hess accomplished something that I don't think any other Mao-curious anti-authoritarians managed to do: He anticipated a transformation that was about to sweep the country.

You see, there really was something anti-authoritarian and decentralist in the Cultural Revolution's effects, though not in the way the anarcho-Mao-spontex crew imagined. The chaos of the period so decimated the party and the state that the authorities were too weak to keep a firm grip on the countryside. By the time Playboy was interviewing Hess, many villages really did enjoy a great deal of de facto autonomy—and used it to divide communal property, evade planners' diktats, expand private landholdings, and trade on a growing black market. Soon millions were engaged in what was essentially a vast, spontaneous civil disobedience campaign. When the post-Mao regime "introduced" market reforms, it was legalizing what people at the grassroots had already started illicitly on their own. In the words of the Chinese-American political scientist Kate Xiao Zhou, "When the government lifted restrictions, it did so only in recognition of the fact that the sea of unorganized farmers had already made them irrelevant."

So when Hess wrote in Dear America that China was "very far to the left out in the countryside while still being much more to the right in the seats of power," he landed on an important truth. He may have landed there accidentally, but he got there all the same.

There was, I should add, one more significant group of people in the late '60s who embraced the anarcho-Mao-spontex notion that true Maoism meant eradicating hierarchies. This was the ultra-left segment of the Red Guards themselves. In the 1968 tract "Whither China?," a teenaged spokesman for the Shengwulian movement argued that the party was a privileged class and that the state should be replaced with a decentralized democracy modeled on the Paris Commune. If you need proof that Maoist orthodoxy and Mao-spontex heresy were very different beasts, you need only note that this essay was officially denounced and its author shipped to a prison camp. (He eventually became a free market economist.) Another contingent of ultra-left ex–Red Guards had to flee to Hong Kong, where they mixed with anarchists and other anti-Mao leftists in a journal called Minus and a group called the 70s Front. No longer anarcho-Mao-spontex, they now were simply anarcho-spontex.

Those leftist critiques of the Maoist state caught an American politician's eye. "The main thrust of the 70s Front is the contention that Red China has become a giant monopolistic corporation," he announced. "The economy is governed by raw political power, rather than by the law of supply and demand. The state corporation has become a religious cult, and criticism of the regime is suppressed." This politician acknowledged that these "new Chinese libertarians" were "not defenders of Western-style private enterprise," but they did, he said, recognize the evils of monopoly and the need for civil liberties.

The politician in question was not one of those New Left veterans who had combed their sideburns, put on suits, and tried to take over the Democratic Party. He was Ronald Reagan, reading a radio script composed by a libertarian Republican who had never seen Mao as anything but a tyrant—a fellow named John McClaughry. If anyone ever wants to start a movement called anarcho-Reagan-spontex, they should check out the moment in that broadcast when the Gipper read directly from a 70s Front manifesto. "We oppose all dictatorships, all governments, all forms of statism, and all authority," he quoted approvingly.

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