As if parodying the era’s radical chic, a 1967 issue of Lui magazine (France’s Playboy) included a supplement illustrated with quotes from Mao Zedong and scantily clad women assuming militant poses inspired by the Red Guards of China’s Cultural Revolution. One nude woman jumps out of a cake under the caption “revolution is not a dinner party”—one of Mao’s many proverbs.
This is one small example of the strange, far-flung influence of Mao Zedong—part of a much larger story, obscure to most Westerners, but masterfully told by Julia Lovell, professor of modern China at the University of London. Historians, Lovell plausibly argues, may someday see October 1949 rather than October 1917 as the game-changing revolution of the last century.
Lovell covers some familiar ground, such as the human-induced famine of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s that claimed around 30 million lives, and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s that took countless more. She also nicely canvasses Mao’s improbable ascent to power in the Chinese Community Party (CCP) and the Communist Revolution that created the People’s Republic of China (PRC). But the book soars in its concentration on the manufacture and dissemination of “Maoism,” a highly adaptable ideological élan—a political attitude, a frame of mind—that formed and deformed protest and liberationist movements across the globe in the twentieth century.
What is the nature of this élan or “Mao Zedong Thought” as it is known in China? Lovell defines it using the aphorisms of Mao most frequently invoked by his global acolytes. These include: “power comes out of the barrel of gun,” a candid recognition that intimidation and violence have a place in politics; “revolution is not a dinner party,” that the true revolutionary cannot worry about propriety and collateral damage; “practice is the sole criterion of truth,” that theory and intellectuals (especially those beholden to “bourgeois” values) should not be trusted; “women can hold up half the sky,” a radical egalitarianism with respect to the sexes (which nonetheless did not impede Mao’s own misogyny and philandering); “expose errors and criticize shortcomings,” a mandate to challenge anyone who deviates from party orthodoxy; “imperialism is a paper tiger,” that Western colonialism appears strong but cannot withstand a frontal challenge. When combined with understandable grievances with colonial rule and admiration for Mao’s rapid political and military successes in the 1940s and 1950s, these dicta made for a powerful ideological cocktail that gained worldwide “potency, persuasiveness, and mobility,” according to Lovell.
But the global reach of Maoism might not have happened without one useful idiot, the American journalist Edgar Snow and his wildly influential book, Red Star over China, first published in 1937. Eager to make a name for himself, Snow gained unprecedented access to Mao and his lieutenants while the Red Army was a rag-tag guerilla force in western China, hazily known to most Westerners. Adulatory accounts of Mao’s demeanor and ideals, vivid descriptions of the famous Long March, the omission of several known brutalities, and an uncritical acceptance of Mao’s conception of Chinese history, not to mention Mao’s own interventions to shape the project’s outcome, led to a book bordering on hero-worship. Once translated into various languages, including Chinese, the book became the gateway drug into Maoism for many future revolutionaries, inside China and abroad. “Edgar Snow,” Lovell sums up, “is the first main character in this global history of Maoism because without him both a domestic and international cult of Mao would be hard to imagine.”
After treating Snow, Lovell charts the export of Maoism—and sometimes Chinese financial and military aid once Mao came to power—to various global destinations, including Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Malaysia, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Peru, Nepal, India, and, not least, Western Europe and the United States. Mao rescued North Korea in its time of need, making possible the current regime there; supported Vietnamese communists in the hottest fighting of the Cold War; and in Cambodia backed Pol Pot and the murderous Khmer Rouge. Maoists today are in power in Nepal—and India, which survived a Maoist rebellion in 1967, still claims that a simmering Maoist insurrection remains “the biggest internal security challenge facing our country.” A meticulous historian, agile with qualitative and quantitative data, Lovell’s global reach allows her to generalize that “Maoism was one of the most significant and complicated political forces in the modern world. A potent mix of party-building discipline, anti-colonial rebellion … grafted onto the secular religion of Marxism, Maoism not only unlocks the contemporary history of China, but is also a key influence on global insurgency, insubordination, and intolerance across the late eighty years.”
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