Julia Lovell’s “Maoism: A Global History” is an attempt to recenter the role of Maoist China in the Cold War, and to trace Mao Zedong’s awkward ascent from deft military man to implausible philosopher king. Mao himself cut his teeth and earned his early credibility during the civil war, soon rising to political power by purging his rivals one by one. However, as a Marxist theorist he was an unlikely candidate for the next major intellectual:
“Until the late 1930s in Yan’an, Mao was famed as a military man: his doctrinal skills in Marxism-Leninism lagged far behind those of his rivals for power . . . He had almost no time for Marx’s more careful historical and economic analyses, condensing the message of the Communist Manifesto down to: “Class struggle! Class struggle! Class struggle!” Some of Mao’s closest colleagues listening to his lectures were embarrassed by his bêtises and blatant plagiarisms from the Chinese translation of Marxist texts”
Mao’s own genius, however, lay in writing about complex topics of inequality and oppression in an accessible style that could be read widely even by semi-literate people. Again and again ex-revolutionaries in interviews attest to Mao’s ability to reach beyond narrow intellectual circles, in contrast to the dense, academic prose of Lenin or Stalin.
Mao also had a talent for memorable slogans and rallying cries, such as “a single spark can start a prairie fire,” “imperialism is a paper tiger,” and, of course, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." He played up his bumbling peasant origins and built a brand that was as much about his cult of personality as the doctrine of communism. He would use his newfound audience to speak directly to the legitimate concerns of people suffering under colonialism and oppression; indeed, Mao recognized and endorsed the African American Civil Rights Movement before the United States itself did.
This transition from Mao the man to Mao the revolutionary world leader was buoyed on by a team of ghost writers and a propaganda outlet which served simultaneously to obscure internal failures and to lionize Mao as an anti-imperialist. The central state and a compliant media machine trumped up Mao's successes, required his philosophy to be taught in schools and disseminated millions of his portraits and Little Red Books across the world. Not content to grow locally, the People’s Republic of China would soon join the Cold War and the ideology of Maoism would creep to every continent
Spreading the Ideology
After the Soviet Union announced its policy of “peaceful reconciliation with the United States,” Mao lambasted Khrushchev as a revisionist and declared himself the true leader of global anti-imperialism. The PRC began its international expansion by inviting countless guests from across the developing world for educational stays in China. Many future socialist leaders received their formal training within China during this time, including Pol Pot, Abimael Guzmán and Julius Nyerere, but thousands of ordinary people came as well. These visits were a blend of extensive military and ideological training, alongside heavily choreographed displays of the successes of communism.
Many of these conventions actually happened during the devastation of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. However, visiting foreigners were carefully never exposed to this; the party would roll out a diplomatic machine that lavished guests with fancy bedrooms, meals and splendid entertainment, and never let them stray far from the training bases to see the countryside. At times this reached extreme heights, with Lovell recording one incident where:
“On the occasion of a ceremonial visit by a key ally, Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, public security emptied the streets of an entire city and repopulated them with plain-clothes police disguised as ordinary urbanites.”
For visitors who chose to settle down in China, the “hospitality machine” couldn’t really sustain at length, but it was ideal for the purposes of propaganda and recruitment, and sent countless revolutionaries back to their home countries singing Mao’s praises. And they were followed by a stream of financial aid and military support that flowed outward into dozens of colonies.
Just as the PRC lavished foreign visitors while carefully shielding them from local poverty, the height of PRC international aid came during the Great Famine, and hundreds of millions of dollars left the nation while millions of people starved in China. At this point Mao and Khrushchev were locked in a competition to be perceived as the leader of the global revolution, and the PRC prioritized this ideological contest over repairing the crisis at home.
Much of the aid went into conventional development work in Africa. However, Lovell estimates that about 20% of the aid budget went to military training and equipment, flowing to a dizzying alphabet soup of revolutionary groups, including the SWAPO in Namibia, the ALNK in Cameroon, ZANU in Zimbabwe, and others in Zambia, Rwanda, Guinea and Angola, and even inspiring and shaping (though not directly funding) the military strategies of Nelson Mandela's ANC in South Africa.
In practice this did not necessarily generate the kind of Maoist revolution that the PRC might have hoped for. In all of Africa, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania was the only true Maoist to ascend to power, and he did so through peaceful negotiation. Likewise, the only successful revolution driven by a Maoist insurgency happened in Zimbabwe, and rather than create a Maoist state it led to the rise of Robert Mugabe, a nominal socialist who governed more as a generic autocrat.
In many other instances, Lovell points out that budding statesman were perfectly willing to accept China’s aid and pay lip service to Mao without actually having any particular interest in communism. And the reverse was true as well; while the Maoists were deeply dedicated to spreading their philosophy, and often to fighting imperialism, their idealism was also grounded with a heavy dose of practical politics. This balance between ideological promotion and nationalist concerns was best exemplified by the ongoing project to gain China the international legitimacy of a seat in the UN:
“Every year a debate took place in the UN as to which of the ‘two Chinas’ should take the seat at the UN: the mainland PRC or the ROC on Taiwan. Eventually, it was the small but numerous African nations that tipped the balance in the mainland’s favor. In 1971, after six African states dropped their opposition to the PRC, Beijing won the UN seat from the ROC. More than a third of the supporting votes came from African delegates who ‘arms swooping above their heads, jumping up and down in their seats as wild applause engulfed the circular chamber’. Mao personally reserved aid packages for those African nations that recognized the PRC, and his passion for guerrilla struggle was always tempered by nationalist concerns. If a regime did not recognize the communist government diplomatically, the latter would support guerrilla rebels on its fringes. If diplomatic recognition was in the offing, as happened in Cameroon in 1965, support for anti-government guerrillas might fade away. African leaders played the same game, threatening to switch sides to either the PRC or the ROC; the imminent loser would have to produce enough aid to gain recognition.”
Likewise, the on-the-ground reality of aid was also less idealistic than it was often portrayed in Chinese propaganda outlets; many Chinese aid workers felt simultaneously homesick and confused by the inevitable culture clash they encountered.
Nor was all the Maoist proselytizing eagerly swallowed by the entirety of the continent. Mao was indeed quite popular across Africa, but many grew tired of the aid worker's constant blatant attempts at indoctrination, their paternalistic insistence that they were the clear leaders, and the sneaking perception that China had more than a little to gain from their investments. One of the more biting condemnations of China’s foreign policy in Africa came from the former president of the Ivory Coast, Houphouet-Boigny:
“At Nanjing, in China, Africans are being taught to assassinate those whose eyes are open to the Chinese danger, in order to replace them with servile men who will open the gates of Africa to China . . . we should be blind if we failed to realize that China, which is overpopulated and would soon have a thousand million mouths to feed, looks enviously at our huge continent populated by only 300 million. If we are not careful we shall be served as Chinese soup.”
Offshoots and Copycats
Lovell asserts several times that the success of Maoism has been bizarrely unpredictable. The People’s Republic of China sank incredible sums into Africa with little to show for it. However, Peru, India and Nepal all developed strident Maost movements with comparatively little investment. In fact, while China generally focused on developing nations, Maoism took hold and inspired youth movements among privileged, upper class college students in many developed western nations.
One of the most obvious exports from Chinese Maoism into its offshoots is the cult of personality. Nyerre, for example, essentially lifted the entire Maoist symbology and shtick, just replacing the color with green instead of red. He disseminated collections of his own sayings in Little Green Books, called his youth supporters “Green Guards,” and held Tanzanian reenactments of the Long March and the Cultural Revolution. Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the Shining Path, demanded a religious level of obediance and worship from his follower; even in prison his supporters would march and sing songs under his deified posters.
Many of the Maoist insurgencies drew heavily from Mao’s writings on prolonged guerrilla warfare, or “surrounding the cities from the country-side.” This allowed rebels to thrive from geographic fringes where many nations lacked an established security apparatus. Copycats used Maoist concepts such as the “mass line” to justify top down, unquestioned leadership and, sometimes bizarrely, insisted that their countries mirrored Mao’s diagnosis of early twentieth century China as “semi-feudal, semi-colonial.”
Lovell points out that while many of these new movements emphasized racial equality, in practice they often re-established and calcified old racial hierarchies. The Shining Path built its credibility on empowering rural indigenous peoples against an oppressive government. However, the movement’s leadership was entirely educated, Spanish descended urbanites, and the vast majority of their political violence was inflicted upon poor indigenous communities. Likewise, in India, the Naxalites courted the brutally oppressed Adivasis by promising them empowerment, only to treat them as primitive foot soldiers:
“Shah has observed high caste and male domination of Maoist hierarchies; despite its attempts to dissolve caste and ethnic divides, the movement replicates the inequality baked into Indian society. It is dismissive of the positive attributes of Adivasi society - its relative gender egalitarianism, its biodegradable way of life - assuming that these patterns must and will be erased by modernization . . . ‘The Adivasis cannot represent themselves; . . . they must be represented either by agents of the states or by the revolutionaries [and] the voice of the revolution is almost always that of a Brahmin / upper class . . . So we have a Maoist intelligentsia playing out their revolutionary fantasies through the lives of the Adivasis, while the people actually dying in battle are almost all Adivasis’.”
Given that Mao’s popularity in the developing world was directly linked to his straightforward language and ability to be understood by semi-literate people, it’s interesting that many of the largest and most influential Maoist groups were run by some of the most educated and privileged members of their respective societies.
Alternatively, because many South East Asian countries had close proximity to China, they were afforded a realistic look into the actual ongoings of the PRC that those in the Americas, Europe and Africa were not privileged to see. Even Ho Chi Minh expressed his incomprehension at the Cultural Revolution, a stance shared by most groups Lovell calls “mature communist parties.” This stands in stark contrast to the western college students who saw the Cultural Revolution and other major milestones of CCP policy with rose colored glasses provided by thousands of miles of distance and a steady stream of propaganda.
The extent of violence unleashed by Maoism in the last century really cannot be exaggerated. Many Maoist insurgencies committed extreme political violence in the name of their long term cause and, in turn, were met by shocking and indiscriminate repression from the governments they resisted. In Peru, at least, this was the explicit goal of Guzmán’s “killing quotas:” to provoke state brutality and thus inspire more to join his revolutionary cause. It worked, and if the Peruvian government wasn’t tyrannical before the Shining Path it certainly soon became so. Likewise, in India, Maoist terrorism led the government to commision anti-communist teams called Salwa Judum, which were dispatched to kill, with impunity, anyone associated with the Naxalites and destroy villages which may have harbored them. With commendable even handedness, Lovell covers atrocities committed by all sides, from the nightmarish communist genocide in Cambodia to the state sponsored anti-communist genocide in Indonesia (both of which are estimated to have claimed between 2 to 2.5 million lives).
Maoists in Power
As Maoists groups blossomed in Malaysia and Indonesia and communism spread one by one to the nations of French-Indochina, it looked to the western powers like this wave of revolutionary thought might roll across all of Asia. However, the western “Domino Theory” failed dramatically in understanding the role of regional nationalism and historical grievances, which could only be somewhat papered over by a shared ideology.
And what remains of the successful Maoist regimes in Asia? Where did the dominoes fall?
In Cambodia, unchecked authoritarian communism went so far that the ideology has been forever tarred as genocidal. Astoundingly, the backlash was so severe that Cambodia restored its previous monarchy, an almost unheard of reversion in the twentieth century. They ostensibly maintain a parliament nowadays, though most of the power has been consolidated to one party.
In Vietnam, the victorious communists did indeed initially draw from Mao’s playbook and oversaw the executions of thousands of landowners and the collectivization of land and industry. After decades of chronic poverty and food insecurity, eventually Vietnam went the path of modern China and significantly liberalized its economy, retaining communism only in name.
In Nepal we see the unique scenario of the only country in the world where Maoists came to power through legitimate political election. However, the Nepalese Maoists have found it difficult to actually exact any large scale leftist reforms in the democratic process. Their willingness to participate in a fair multi-party system has simultaneously earned them international credibility while neutering their ability to actually implement Maoism.
The fragmented legacy of these Maoist East Asian countries may offer lessons about the limitations of Maoism as a unifying ideology, and about the system’s potential to be replicated or sustained long term.
Today, in 2020, there is not a single legitimately Maoist country on earth.
Overall, Lovell’s “Maoism: A Global History” is excellent, both comprehensive and easily accessible. Lovell approaches with fair and academic charity the deeply conflicting legacy of Mao, a leader who stood as a symbol for hope and liberation for countless people worldwide, while at the same time ruling as a dictator at home and overseeing some of the worst mass death in human history. This book is a must read for all students of socialism and the Cold War.
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