London: Penguin Books, 2019. 624 pp. US$37.50, cloth. ISBN 9781847922496.
Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China was the filtered story of revolution that captured the imagination of three generations worldwide. Maoism: A Global History tries to account for how this was possible. Professor Lovell’s attempt is not the first, but it might turn out to be the most compelling. One of the main themes of the study is to point out that, contrary to common perception, the project of the revolutionary regime was to vigorously promote its political program worldwide. Thus, the popularity of Red Star actually coincided, materially, with the internationalization of the Chinese Revolution. Different from the Soviet model, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was able to build the structures of its authoritarian regime many years prior to its conquest of power. The CCP’s international revolutionary vision was also different.
Chapters 3 and 4 are about “the delirium,” and how it came to be sustained for so long. How could a fanatical hecatomb of Great Leap Forward dimensions come to be linked to the mission of continuous and permanent revolution, carried through the years of the Cultural Revolution (CR) into the 1970s, domestically, to be then linked to the same mission internationally? The reason the CCP didn’t collapse was a perfect coincidence: the call to liberate the world coincided with the failure of the world’s democracies (at the time mainly “Western”), blinded by the headlights of the Cold War, to recognize the heirs of their own revolutionary inheritance. Historically, it was in fact a shared inheritance. The vision of a “people’s war” and the denunciation of peaceful coexistence as revisionist betrayal resounded with anti-imperialist activists in Latin America, Africa, and Asia because, objectively, the Western democracies had become their adversaries. Starting with the chapters on Indonesia and Africa, we see how committed pro-independence militants gravitated toward the current of the communist movement that presented itself as the most daring and uncompromising.
Vietnam and Cambodia (chapter 7) revealed most clearly the failure of the United States to see the obvious, and for all of us to see the ultimate logic of Maoism, at the time still unimaginable. While it may be argued that, looking back, the Vietnamese recoiled at their application of the methods of CR-repression learned from the Chinese (233), the Khmer Rouge systematically extended and perfected them, by all indications under Mao’s mentorship. One account (242) suggests that Mao’s death came soon enough for the CCP to be able to purge the Gang of Four faction in time and prevent a similar descent, for the second time, into continuous revolution. The section on the CCP’s international dimension, chapters 5–11, complements the in-depth study by Chen Jian of Mao’s China and the Cold War for readers interested in another aspect of post-World War II history in Asia.
The chapter on Maoist activism in Europe and North America may seem like a footnote; but getting a glimpse of its participation in the broader ferment of the Vietnam War years helps us trace the common features shared by all Maoist political movements. While the surviving groups are largely moribund today—along with the competing formations that trace their ideological lineage to Leninism and Communism—they distinguished themselves from their rivals by the application of methods learned from the Cultural Revolution: exalted display of ideological fervor, political voluntarism, and the public vilification and humiliation of individuals identified as “reactionary.” The chorus of chanting denunciation directed against an Evergreen State College biology professor in 2017, among similar incidents across American campuses in recent years, is vaguely reminiscent of the 1967-style struggle session. While the method of criticism/self-criticism leading to condemnation/conviction can be traced to the Russian communist movement, Maoism consolidated it in Yan’an (1942–1944) based on the Soviets’ own extension of the 1920s show trial to the 1930s. Chapter 4 reminds us that it was precisely Khrushchev’s timid de-Stalinization that provoked Mao to reject Soviet revisionism, coinciding, as it did, not coincidentally, with increased ideological control in China. The two most notorious exports of the CCP model of people’s justice came to light in Latin America (Sendero Luminoso) and Southeast Asia (Khmer Rouge). Over the years, as revelations continued to emerge, there has been on the left a progressive distancing from the figure of Stalin. In China under Mao, in North Korea, and among their international followers, we saw precisely the opposite trend. The display of his portrait was not only out of nostalgia, as might be the case today among some philosophers of postmodernism.
The two concluding chapters bring us to the current regime of Xi Jinping that has selectively revived the authoritarian order patterned after the Maoist period, which is the part of the book most important for understanding today’s challenges. There is the outward appearance: the appointment of “helmsman,” with Xi Jinping-thought inscribed into the constitution. In substance, the evidence is widely recognized today: removal of term limits for the “core leader” and the strong turn away from political opening and toward total ideological control across all institutions, the media, and minority communities. At the same time (an aspect of selective revival), both Xi and his predecessor have kept the growing neo-Maoist mass movement among university-educated young people in check, along with the purging of populist radical Bo Xilai. Readers inclined to feel sympathy for the young CR-inspired “anti-rightist” rebels should pay attention to the assessment of this movement in chapter 12. Having in common with Xi a commitment to totalitarian “Great China” nationalism, there is every reason to believe that the party leadership will keep the new Red Guards in reserve, a version of this movement that would be managed better than before.
Students of effective social and economic change where persistent poverty and injustice continue to spawn hopeless and impossible insurgencies inspired by Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought (see the chapters on South and Southeast Asia) will find new material for reflection in this book.
Norbert Francis
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, USA