Maoism

Maoism Plot Summary

Introduction

In the autumn of 1936, a bearded American journalist named Edgar Snow sat in a cave in northwestern China, interviewing a tall, slightly gaunt Chinese man with a mop of black hair. This was Mao Zedong, then just beginning his rise to power within the Chinese Communist Party. Their conversations, which Snow would publish as "Red Star Over China," became the foundation stone of global Maoism - a political creed that would go on to inspire revolutions across continents. What began in the remote caves of Yan'an would eventually influence guerrilla fighters in the jungles of Peru, student radicals on the streets of Paris, and revolutionary governments from Cambodia to Tanzania. The story of Maoism's global journey reveals one of history's most remarkable ideological transmissions. How did the revolutionary theories of a Chinese peasant's son spread to five continents and inspire movements decades after his death? Why did Maoism appeal to such diverse groups - from educated Western intellectuals to impoverished Nepali villagers? And what explains the devastating violence that often accompanied Maoist movements, from the killing fields of Cambodia to the Shining Path's reign of terror in Peru? By exploring these questions, we gain crucial insights into the power of revolutionary ideas to transcend borders and cultures, the complex relationship between liberation and oppression, and the enduring appeal of radical solutions in societies marked by inequality and injustice.

Chapter 1: Origins: The Red Star and Revolution by Book (1936-1949)

In the autumn of 1936, a bearded American journalist named Edgar Snow sat in a cave in northwestern China, interviewing a tall, slightly gaunt Chinese man with a mop of black hair. This was Mao Zedong, then just beginning his rise to power within the Chinese Communist Party. Their conversations, which Snow would publish as "Red Star Over China," became the foundation stone of global Maoism - a political creed that would go on to inspire revolutions across continents. Snow's book transformed Mao from an obscure guerrilla leader into an international political celebrity. It portrayed the Chinese Communists as idealistic patriots and egalitarian democrats with a sense of humor - an image carefully cultivated by Mao and his comrades, who recognized the value of having a non-Communist foreigner tell their story to the world. The book became a global bestseller, inspiring young intellectuals in China to trek to Mao's revolutionary base, and providing tactical inspiration to anti-colonial fighters from Malaya to India to Soviet Russia. Without understanding Snow's role in crafting Mao's international image, we cannot comprehend how Maoism became a global force. The success of "Red Star Over China" highlights the international character of Maoism from its very beginning. Snow was introduced to Communist networks by Song Qingling, the sophisticated widow of Sun Yat-sen and one of the Chinese Communists' greatest assets. As a fellow traveler rather than party member, she presented herself as a humane, objective democrat, leading charmed audiences to assume the political cause she supported must espouse the same goals. Through her, Snow gained unprecedented access to the Communist leadership in their remote base area. What Snow found - or was allowed to see - was a disciplined, egalitarian community devoted to education and self-improvement. He was bowled over by the apparent informality and accessibility of the leadership, particularly Mao himself, whom Snow described as having "the simplicity and naturalness of the Chinese peasant" combined with scholarly depth. The book carefully excised or obscured instances of Communist brutality, such as Mao's bloody "Anti-Bolshevik" purge in southeastern China in 1930 and the maltreatment of captured foreigners. Snow's account would prove formative to favorable international perceptions of Chinese Communism for decades. It merged into longer-range assumptions about Mao's revolution and state, influencing even academic scholarship into the 1970s. The book's impact was particularly profound within China itself, where its Chinese translation convinced crowds of educated urban youth to abandon their bourgeois existences and join Mao's revolution. One devoted reader observed: "I've read the works of Chairman Mao and other leaders, but I've never read a book that described the Chinese revolution as vividly and systematically." After 1949, when the Communists took power in China, Mao tried to impose his idealized vision - as expressed in "Red Star" - across the whole country. The polycentric, pragmatically adapted Communism of the revolutionary period became dangerously dogmatic, leading to many of the tragedies that followed: the Great Leap Forward, its subsequent famine, and the Cultural Revolution. In designing his international PR through Snow, Mao had also defined himself and his politics - creating a revolutionary mythology that would inspire admirers and insurgents across the globe for decades to come.

Chapter 2: Brainwashing: Cold War Fears and Psychological Warfare (1950s)

In 1951, Edward Hunter, a foreign correspondent and sometime CIA stringer, published "Brain-washing in Red China," claiming to expose an entirely new form of thought control unleashed by the Chinese Communist Party. Hunter alleged that the Chinese had achieved "psychological warfare on a scale incalculably more immense than any militarist of the past has ever envisaged." Despite having neither psychiatric credentials nor knowledge of Chinese, Hunter's ideas about brainwashing became orthodoxy in 1950s America, helping shape perceptions of Chinese Communism as an irresistibly expansionist doctrine. The Korean War provided fertile ground for these fears. When China intervened in late 1950, sending waves of soldiers that pushed back American forces, some 7,000 GIs were captured. After an armistice was signed in 1953, stories emerged of American prisoners who had been "remoulded" in captivity. Most shocking to American public opinion, twenty-three Americans opted to go to Communist China rather than return home. The specter of brainwashing cast a long shadow over US society, suggesting that Mao's China possessed something more menacing than military weapons: the ability to bend the human mind to its will. Hunter's allegations of brainwashing became ever more outlandish, likening Chinese mind control to "witchcraft, with its incantations, trances, poisons and potions, with a strange flair of science about it all, like a devil dancer in a tuxedo, carrying his magic brew in a test tube." His ideas provided justification for MK-Ultra, the CIA's massive program of psychological warfare through the 1950s and 60s. In search of ways to understand and counter Communist interrogation, MK-Ultra experimented with truth drugs (mostly LSD), hypnosis, brain concussion, and remote-controlled animals. The fear of Chinese brainwashing thus empowered one of the more anti-democratic institutions of post-war American government: counter-intelligence. The Anglo-American obsession with brainwashing was part of a broader narrative about Mao's global ambitions. The Malayan Emergency - an insurgency launched in 1948 by the Malayan Communist Party against British rule - was portrayed not as an anti-colonial struggle but as part of a Chinese Communist plot. British and American officials jumped to conclusions about mainland Chinese interference, viewing the Overseas Chinese population as a security liability. This assumption became a key ingredient of the domino theory, which dictated US political and military intervention in Southeast Asia. In reality, the relationship between Mao's China and Communist movements in Southeast Asia was more complex. The Malayan Communist Party leader, Chin Peng, was indeed influenced by Mao's theories of guerrilla warfare, carrying with him from jungle hideout to jungle hideout his "travelling library" of Mao's works. But China's support was inconsistent, driven by its own national interests rather than revolutionary solidarity. When it suited China's geopolitical ambitions, Mao and Zhou Enlai urged the Malayan Communists to negotiate with the British; when it didn't, they promised generous backing for armed struggle. Similarly, while North Korean Communists had deep historical ties to the Chinese Communist Party, Mao was reluctant to support Kim Il-sung's invasion of South Korea in 1950. It was Stalin who first backed Kim's war plans, seeing a Korean conflict as a low-risk way of distracting Americans from Europe. Mao was bounced into the Korean War through Stalin's self-interested impulses and his own status-conscious desire to claim leadership of the Asian revolution. Far from representing a tight-knit alliance between Mao, Stalin and Kim, the Korean War highlighted the fault lines in their relationships.

Chapter 3: World Revolution: High Maoism and Soviet Split (1957-1966)

On November 18, 1957, at an unprecedented gathering of leaders from sixty-four Communist parties in Moscow, Mao Zedong delivered a provocative speech that signaled a new era in his global ambitions. Speaking extempore - the only leader granted this privilege - Mao bragged that China would overtake Great Britain industrially within fifteen years. More shockingly, he aired his views on the inevitability of nuclear war: "If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist." This performance was designed to antagonize the Soviets. Throughout his visit, Mao displayed contempt for his hosts' hospitality, refusing to use the bathroom in his luxurious quarters in favor of a chamber pot brought from China, and leaving ballet performances early with complaints about the dancing. The visit marked the beginning of a new epoch in Mao's projection of his own revolution and status: he was telling the world that he, not Khrushchev, was the sovereign of the world revolution. The rift between China and the Soviet Union had many causes, from petty personal slights to profound ideological differences. Trouble began in February 1956, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin's tyranny and launched a new foreign policy of "peaceful coexistence" with capitalist countries. Despite his own history of snubs at Stalin's hands, Mao set his face against de-Stalinization. He wanted to defend the personality cult and remained attached to "revolutionary Stalinism" - the belief that the population could be hectored and terrorized into generating agrarian surpluses to fund rapid industrial and military development. Throughout 1958, Mao deliberately manufactured global quarrels to challenge "peaceful coexistence" and style himself as the world supremo of revolutionary troublemaking. He stoked tensions with both the USSR and the US, ordering an intense bombardment of Nationalist-controlled islands between the mainland and Taiwan. This confrontation - potentially as serious as the Cuban Missile Crisis - was for Mao just power games, a way of pressuring the Americans while creating a sense of international crisis to justify his domestic Great Leap Forward campaign. The Great Leap Forward was driven by Mao's desire to surpass the Soviet Union and the West - to assert China's global supremacy. "In the future," he prophesied in 1957, "we'll establish a global committee and make plans on global unification." Even as the Great Leap resulted in a catastrophic famine that killed tens of millions, Mao remained open-handed with international aid, determined to buy prestige and influence. In 1960, when China received a letter from a rank-and-file CCP member declaring that "the centre of world revolution has shifted to China, and Mao Zedong is the greatest contemporary Marxist," Mao appointed a committee to present a manifesto arguing for China's candidacy for leadership of the world revolution. The dispute with the Soviets descended into petty name-calling. Denouncing the Soviets as "revisionists" anxious to appease the Americans, Mao and his lieutenants seized every opportunity to sledge the USSR in public. Chinese officials who picked fights with their Soviet counterparts were treated like heroes. Khrushchev likened Mao to "torn galoshes"; Mao returned the compliment by calling Soviet policy programs "long and stinky." Whenever Sino-Soviet relations had the faintest hope of improving, Mao was careful to re-sabotage them. By 1962, after the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward, Mao faced an unprecedented domestic crisis of legitimacy. He maneuvered his way out of it by preaching about the necessity for class struggle and about his and China's leadership of the world revolution against imperialism and revisionism. China, in Mao's new slogan, had a sacred responsibility to fanxiu fangxiu - to oppose Soviet revisionism abroad, and defend against it in China. The ensuing propaganda campaign told the Chinese people to wage revolution as both a Chinese and a global responsibility. A crime against the Chinese revolution became a crime against the world revolution.

Chapter 4: Global Insurgency: Indonesia, Africa and Southeast Asia (1960s-1970s)

In 1965, Indonesia became the stage for one of the most horrific episodes in Cold War history. After an abortive coup on September 30, the Indonesian Army, led by General Suharto, launched a purge of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) - then the third largest Communist party in the world. At least half a million people were killed in the following year, through a combination of army and militia violence. The PKI was destroyed, its leaders executed, and Indonesia's political landscape transformed. This catastrophe had its roots in the complex power triangle of Indonesian politics: President Sukarno, the charismatic leader who had guided Indonesia since independence; the army, which had grown powerful through martial law; and the PKI, which had expanded dramatically under the leadership of D.N. Aidit. Sukarno needed both the army and the PKI - one to govern, the other to mobilize - and each to keep the other in check. But the army loathed the PKI, seeing it as a competitor for power and influence. Mao's China played a significant role in this tragedy. Through the 1950s and early 1960s, China cultivated close ties with Indonesia. Sukarno was impressed by China's disciplined political leadership and mass displays of enthusiasm, and respectfully asked for Chinese guidance on key aspects of state-building. The PKI, meanwhile, was increasingly drawn to Mao's militant rhetoric. Aidit, the PKI leader, visited China multiple times and became an admirer of Mao's revolutionary strategies. In 1963, returning from a three-week visit to China, Aidit proposed a profoundly Maoist view of the world situation: "Once daring has been aroused and has become the possession of the people, it will certainly sweep aside all barriers and obstacles." The high Maoism of the early 1960s encouraged the PKI to confront the Indonesian military. In September 1963, Aidit was invited on a special training course for future leaders of the Southeast Asian revolution, where Zhou Enlai instructed him to "go deep into the countryside, prepare for armed struggle, and establish base camps." The PKI began planning a "Fifth Force" - a trained, armed popular militia that would challenge the army's monopoly on violence. The CCP was strongly in favor of this idea, seeing it as a replication of Mao's own guerrilla tactics. But the PKI lacked the military capacity to challenge the army directly. When Aidit and a small group of conspirators launched the September 30th Movement in 1965, it was poorly planned and quickly crushed by Suharto's forces. The movement's failure gave the army the pretext it needed to destroy the PKI. In the aftermath, Mao's China was blamed by the Indonesian Army and the US State Department for masterminding the coup. While direct Chinese involvement remains unproven, the influence of Maoist ideas on the PKI's strategy is clear. Without Maoism, Indonesia's catastrophe in 1965 is hard to imagine. In Africa, too, Mao's China sought influence through revolutionary rhetoric and material aid. Zhou Enlai toured ten African countries in less than two months in 1963-64, competing with Khrushchev for influence. China provided training for African revolutionaries, including Josiah Tongogara, a key figure in Zimbabwe's liberation struggle. After training in China, Tongogara remade the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army along patient, protracted Maoist lines, translating Mao's guerrilla principles into Shona: the guerrilla troops must depend on the people as simba rehove riri mumvura - as a fish has its strength in water. In Southeast Asia, China's support for Communist insurgencies was more direct and sustained. The Vietnam War became the hottest conflict of the global Cold War, fueled by Chinese-Soviet rivalry. While it was Chinese support that first encouraged North Vietnam to confront the US, the Soviets were then trapped within their rhetoric of anti-imperialism and committed themselves to supporting the Vietnamese Communists. China supplied North Vietnam with roads, bullets, uniforms, and even ping-pong balls and scented soap. It also schooled Pol Pot and gave him over $1 billion in aid, free military assistance and medical check-ups. On the brink of committing genocide, Pol lounged by Mao's swimming pool as the moribund chairman lauded the Cambodian's emptying of the country's cities into forced labor projects and killing fields.

Chapter 5: Enduring Influence: From Peru to Nepal (1980s-Present)

In 1979, as Mao's Cultural Revolution was fading into history in China itself, a philosophy professor named Abimael Guzmán launched a Maoist insurgency in Peru. As leader of the Communist Party of Peru - Shining Path, Guzmán embarked on a brutal campaign that over the next two decades would claim some 70,000 lives and cost Peru billions in economic damage. The timing was no coincidence: after twelve years of protracted guerrilla war, Guzmán set the date for his ultimate, power-seizing offensive as December 26, 1992 - the ninety-ninth anniversary of Mao's birthday. Guzmán's path to Maoism began in 1965, when he attended a military training school in Nanjing, China. "We picked up a pen," he later recalled of an explosives training class, "and it blew up, and when we took a seat it blew up, too. It was a kind of general fireworks display... perfectly calculated to show us that anything could be blown up if you figure out how to do it." Like Mao, Guzmán combined scholarly intellectualism with a taste for violence. He created compelling, comprehensible narratives of Peruvian history, both ancient and modern, that justified his use of violence against both "imperialists" and their alleged Peruvian allies. The Shining Path's insurgency was particularly brutal. Its cadres forced peasants under their rule to exclaim "Ay, Gonzalo" (Guzmán's nom de guerre) instead of "Ay, Jesús" when in pain. They murdered villagers who resisted their authority, sometimes by stoning, sometimes by slitting throats. The revolution, Guzmán forecast, would cost "a million deaths." Some predicted that if the Shining Path succeeded - a realistic prospect in early 1990s Peru - its aftermath would generate bloodshed dwarfing that perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. In India, meanwhile, the Naxalite movement - named after the village of Naxalbari where it began in 1967 - continued to wage a Maoist insurgency against the Indian state. By the early 2000s, Indian rulers considered this Maoist insurgency "the biggest internal security threat to the Indian state." Deep in central India's jungles, Naxalite guerrillas in olive fatigues and bright saris danced in lines before photographs of Chairman Mao and declared war on the government's "uniformed goons" who had confiscated local land for its precious bauxite reserves. Unlike the Maoist rebels in Nepal, who in 2006 abandoned their insurgency to participate in parliamentary democracy, the Indian comrades remained stalwarts of purist Maoist doctrine and refused to take part in elections. The writer Arundhati Roy, after being given exclusive access to Naxalite camps, published articles praising their "simple, vibrant and comradely culture." Critics questioned whether she had romanticized a ferocious revolutionary movement that would destroy her "as naturally as rabbits are by ferrets and farmers" if it were to win control of India. In Nepal, Maoism achieved its greatest post-Mao success. In 1996, Nepalese Maoists - trained by the resurgent Indian Naxalites - declared a "People's War" on the government's long-term, systematic neglect of the country's rural majority. By the close of the conflict in 2006, some 17,000 Nepalis had died. The Nepalese Maoists, led by intellectuals like Baburam Bhattarai, adapted Mao's strategies to local conditions while maintaining core Maoist principles. Unlike their Indian counterparts, they eventually chose to enter parliamentary politics, helping to end Nepal's monarchy and establish a republic. The enduring appeal of Maoism in these diverse settings raises fundamental questions about development, social justice, and international exploitation. Maoism offers not only rhetorical defiance but also practical strategies for empowering impoverished states marginalized or dominated by global powers; for training low-tech peasant insurgencies against state-funded militaries. Its message of anti-imperialist confrontation appeals to peoples who have been repressed economically, politically, and culturally. Although the Cold War has ended, problems of poverty and inequality persist, and the past and present of global Maoism remain important reminders of the radicalism that can spring from material and political desperation.

Chapter 6: Neo-Maoism: China's Contradictory Relationship with Its Past

In Chongqing, a metropolis on the banks of the Yangtze River officially known as "China's happiest city," thousands of identically scarlet-shirted civilians gathered in a public square to sing and dance Maoist hymns: "Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China," "Heaven and Earth Are Small Compared with the Party's Benevolence," "The Communist Party is Wonderful." Stories abounded about the miraculously therapeutic properties of these anthems: a woman recovering from crippling depression through listening; psychiatric patients whose symptoms "suddenly disappeared" after joining revolutionary choirs; prisoners cured of their criminality by singing "red songs." This was not 1966 - the year in which Mao started his Cultural Revolution - but 2011. The architect of this neo-Maoist revival was Bo Xilai, a charismatic politician who combined populist Maoist rhetoric with ruthless ambition. Bo was purged in spring 2012 for corruption and for his wife's poisoning of a British businessman. Yet Xi Jinping, who became party secretary in November 2012, inherited and implemented Bo's neo-Maoism on a national stage. For the first time since the death of Mao in 1976, Xi reintroduced Maoist strategies into China's national, public culture. The persistence of Maoist imagery and rhetoric in contemporary China reflects the complex legacy of Maoism in its country of origin. Although the Chinese Communist Party has long abandoned the utopian turmoil of Maoism in favor of an authoritarian capitalism that prizes prosperity and stability, the Great Helmsman has left a heavy mark on politics and society. His portrait - six by four and a half meters - still hangs in Tiananmen Square, the heartland of Chinese political power. In the middle of the square, his waxen, embalmed body still lies in state. "Mao's invisible hand" remains omnipresent in China's polity: in the deep politicization of its judiciary; the supremacy of the one-party state over all other interests; the fundamental intolerance of dissident voices. Even as the government strives to suppress memory of Mao's chaotic Cultural Revolution, it revives Mao-era songs, films, and language in an attempt to generate nostalgic affection for a regime that has long become more capitalist than Communist. Angry young men denounce the profiteering compradors of the current Communist Party and call for a return to Mao's radical egalitarianism. Laid-off workers, waving Little Red Books, demonstrate against their fat-cat bosses. The contradictions of neo-Maoism were vividly illustrated in January 2016, when a vast golden statue of Mao was unveiled in the middle of the Henan countryside. Over thirty-six meters high, it cost £312,000 to build and was paid for by local people and businessmen. "Eternal life to Mao Zedong!", "He is our legend, our god - we should worship him!" exclaimed some commentators. "Crazy", "Pull it down", "It doesn't look like him" responded others. Two days later, the statue was destroyed by Public Security officials, leaving behind only rubble and rumors that it had violated planning regulations. This episode evokes the elusive quality of Mao and Maoism in contemporary China. The term "Maoism" itself has had a fractious history. Its Chinese translation, Mao zhuyi, has never been endorsed by CCP ideologues. It is a dismissive term used by liberals to describe adulation for Mao among contemporary China's alt-left, or by government analysts to describe and disavow "Maoist" politics in India or Nepal. When the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) used the tag, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs protested: "This group has nothing to do with China, and we feel indignant that they usurped the name of Mao Zedong, the great leader of the Chinese people." Yet for all its imperfections, "Maoism" has become the most commonly used term for a successful Chinese Communist program from the 1930s to the present day. It has validity only on the understanding that the Maoist program - despite possessing a solid symbolic core, in the shape of Mao himself - has taken various (and often contradictory) forms over decades and continents, according to context. It is perhaps this perplexing, inconsistent mutability, in combination with memory of the political and military success of Mao, that has given the political line which carries his name its potency, persuasiveness, and mobility.

Summary

Maoism represents one of the most significant and complicated political forces of the modern world. A potent mix of party-building discipline, anti-colonial rebellion, and "continuous revolution," grafted onto the secular religion of Soviet Marxism, it has not only shaped contemporary China but also influenced global insurgency, insubordination, and intolerance across the last eighty years. From Edgar Snow's transformative portrayal of Mao in the 1930s to the neo-Maoist revival under Xi Jinping, Maoism has demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt and endure, both within China and far beyond its borders. The global journey of Maoism reveals its contradictory nature. It is simultaneously the creed of winners and insiders, of losers and outsiders, of leaders and underdogs, of absolute rulers, vast bureaucracies, and oppressed masses. It has lionized peasant revolution while winning many of its followers from educated elites. It has championed mass democracy while creating an omnipotent party state. These contradictions have not weakened Maoism but rather enhanced its appeal to diverse audiences across time and space. Its message of anti-imperialist confrontation has resonated with peoples who have been repressed economically, politically, and culturally, while its practical strategies for guerrilla warfare have inspired insurgencies from Malaya to Peru, from India to Zimbabwe.

About Author

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Julia Lovell

Julia Lovell is a British scholar, author, and translator whose non-fiction books focus on China.She is professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, where her research has been focused principally on the relationship between culture (specifically, literature, architecture, historiography and sport) and modern Chinese nation-building.Lovell's books include The Politics of Cultural Capital: China's Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature (University of Hawaii Press, 2006); The Great Wall: China Against the World 1000 BC – AD 2000 (Atlantic Books, 2006); and The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Picador, 2011).She is also a literary translator; her translations include works by Lu Xun, Han Shaogong, Eileen Chang and Zhu Wen. Zhu Wen's book I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China, which Lovell translated, was a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize in 2008. Her book The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China won the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature. It was the first non-fiction book to win the prize.Lovell was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2010 in the category of Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern History. These prizes are given to young scholars who have made a significant contribution to their field.She has written articles about China for The Guardian, The Times, The Economist and The Times Literary Supplement.She is married to author Robert Macfarlane.

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