A Matter of Trust: India-us Relations from Truman to Trump
By Meenakshi Ahmed Reviewed by Nayan Chanda
history, it SEEMS, is inescapable. This is one of the conclusions that emerges from reading Julia Lovell’s magisterial, prize-winning study of international Maoism. at a time when Xi Jinping is resurrecting Maoist-style rule in China — whether in the form of an explicit leadership personality cult, ever tightening forms of authoritarian control, a reliance on self-criticism as a means of silencing dissent, the bolstering of the Chinese Communist Party’s commanding role, and selective efforts to associate Xi closely with the iconography and prestige of communist China’s founding father, Maoism remains powerfully relevant. This is true not only in making sense of contemporary China, but also in understanding global history and the political dynamics that have shaped revolutionary change and political conflict over more than 70 years, not merely in asia but in africa, South and Southeast asia, Latin america and Western europe.
Lovell’s findings are in themselves revolutionary. By writing the first comprehensive analysis of the global impact of Maoism, she fills a gap in Cold War historiography with its tendency to concentrate on us-soviet tensions. She also challenges the mistaken assumption that the diplomatic impact of Mao’s China was largely confined territorially to asia or chronologically to the conventional historical arc between the 1947 Truman Doctrine and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Lovell also rebuffs some of the simplistic readings of today’s China — particularly the notion that China’s pursuit of a global presence originates in the post-mao era following the great helmsman’s death in 1976, and the emergence of more reformist leaders such as Deng Xiaoping. Mao’s focus on advancing China’s national and international ambitions can be traced back to the 1930s and the deliberate efforts by Mao to present a sanitized version of Chinese communism to credulous Western journalists such as edgar Snow. Snow’s massively influential 1937 Red Star over China — an account of his meeting with Mao in Yan’an — decisively helped to promote a heroic and idealized image of peasant rebellion and anti-colonial, national liberation that proved seductive to a generation of Sinologists, progressive academics, activists and political radicals as diverse as Jean-paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Shirley Maclaine, Chin Peng (leader of the Malayan Communist Party), nelson Mandela and Tanzania’s Julius nyerere.
Lovell’s narrative is, like all good history, compelling and memorable because of the vivid personal portraits she presents — Mao himself, and senior figures in the Chinese political pantheon such as Zhou enlai, Jiang Qing (Mao’s fourth wife), or Kang Sheng, the head of the Chinese Communist Party’s international Liaison Department and a key figure in the formulation of Chinese foreign policy. Yet the story she tells is not seen purely from a Chinese perspective; it is equally an account of the reception of Maoism internationally, and as such is an invaluable global political history spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries.
Mao’s China invited a generation of indian, african, european and Latin american young idealists to China for training and indoctrination, many of whom (although not all) returned home to foment revolution, with varying degrees of success. Such efforts at propagandizing led to a counter-response by successive us administrations fearful of Chinese “brainwashing” efforts, prompting in turn Cia-sponsored and scientifically bogus and abusive forms of psychological warfare against us and foreign citizens — culminating ultimately, in Lovell’s view, in the interrogation excesses of the War on Terror in the early years of this century.
in a series of brilliantly researched and viscerally unsettling accounts, Lowell takes us deep into the traumatic, genocidal histories of coun
tries such as indonesia when in 1965, between 500,000 and a million communist-supporting indonesians were killed by a military seeking to eliminate the pro-beijing Communist Party of indonesia. She similarly traces China’s role in advancing the competing ambitions of ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and Pol Pot in Cambodia while also fomenting internal and national subregional conflict in Southeast asia — alternately encouraging and restricting local communist uprisings (in, for example, Malaysia) to advance China’s own narrowly nationalist ambitions.
notwithstanding the ubiquity of Mao’s Little red Book as the bible of revolutionary doctrine among a diverse community of global sympathizers including politically fashion-conscious european student radicals in the 1960s, or genocidal Khmer rouge fighters, Maoism itself was not a coherent ideology. instead, it thrived on contradiction and reflected Mao’s own political “mutability,”
opportunism and self-interested pragmatism. Mao embraced inconsistency to bolster his authoritarian control while advancing Chinese nationalism, alongside the country’s Cold War universalist ambitions, especially following the Sino-soviet split of the late 1950s and through the traumatic upheaval of the Cultural revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, a period that Lovell describes as the era of “high Maoism.”
at its heart, Mao’s thinking embraced a belief in the legitimacy of political violence — epitomized by the familiar Maoist adage “power comes out of the barrel of a gun” — not merely as a means of effecting revolutionary change, but also as an end in itself. allied to this was a vision of politics grounded in an overconfident, inherently romantic belief that resolve, will and struggle could compensate for material and practical deficiencies. it is this belief in the transformative power of an idea, bordering on religious faith, that helps to explain the appeal of Maoism to marginalized, untouchable communities in india and their naxalite Maoist advocates today, or impoverished indigenous peasant communities in democratic Peru of the 1980s and 1990s, or voters in contemporary nepal — one of the only countries outside China to have elected a government led by selfavowed Marxists. in this regard, Mao’s doctrine was and remains far removed from the scientific verities of Marxist materialism. it evokes some of the emotional appeal associated with contemporary populist politics in Western europe and the united States under Donald Trump.
The inherent contradictions of Maoism were exemplified by Mao’s idealized support for agrarian-led revolt and the reality of the mass starvation he imposed on the Chinese rural poor via the famines of the great Leap Forward; by the self-destructive purges of the Chinese communist movement, first in the 1943 rectification campaign and then in the more sustained upheavals of the Cultural revolution; and by Maoism’s popularity among urban terrorists in post-1968 germany and italy and among middle-class intellectuals and university professors, such as abimael guzmán who, as the leader of Peru’s Shining Path Maoists, was responsible for the obscene brutalization of his rural supporters and the death of some 70,000 Peruvians.
Lovell’s comprehensive and sophisticated study, blending a wealth of primary and secondary sources in multiple languages, highlights a key paradox: Maoism represents a set of often contradictory beliefs linked to a brutal and hypocritical leader commanding the loyalty and enthusiastic support of individuals who are both the agents and victims of revolutionary change. unpacking this puzzle may be a key to understanding similar revolutionary changes, now and in the future, and the dangerous, seductive appeal of emotional appeals to action at the expense of reason.
reviewed by john Nilsson-wright, senior lecturer, university of Cambridge, korea foundation fellow and senior research fellow for Northeast asia, Chatham house, and a regional editor for Global Asia.