Howard W. French
Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell
China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong by Jude Blanchette
Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell.
Knopf, 610 pp., $37.50
China’s New Red Guards:
The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong by Jude Blanchette.
Oxford University Press,
206 pp., $27.95
On a blistering Saturday last summer, I made my way to Shanghai’s western waterfront, where an extravagant new cultural corridor has been rising in recent years. My first stop was the cavernous Long Museum West Bund, which was opened in 2014 by Liu Yiqian, one of China’s most ambitious billionaire art collectors. Featured on the ground floor of the hulking concrete structure was a lively exhibition of mixed-media work by the African-American artist Mark Bradford, titled “Los Angeles.” But my attention was drawn to another show, in the museum’s underground galleries, whose poster featured an unfamiliar, smiling image of the young Mao Zedong and bore an intriguingly vague, almost meaningless title: “Thinking of the Seven Decades History at My Space.”
What I discovered, nearly hidden away, was room after room of outsized paintings of the Chinese revolutionary leader, most of them dating from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Here was Mao at a desk, tracing his finger across a large map of the Taiwan Strait, as if planning an invasion. There was Mao in a heavy winter coat, writing calligraphy by lantern light. Two tableaux showed him beaming as he walked with overjoyed peasants through their fields. Others showed Mao on horseback or on the deck of a ship, heroically leading troops in battle. The legend inscribed at the bottom of yet another of these images read, “Chairman Mao Zedong is the Red Sun in the Heart of the World People’s Revolution.”
Many people have seen Mao kitsch of various kinds, but even for a longtime and frequent visitor to China, being confronted with such a concentration of it felt unusual. How to explain the effusive glorification of Mao during his lifetime, and why was such an extraordinary collection now stashed away in a cellar? The show’s English-language catalog essay was not of much help. In a passage under the heading “Admiration and Praise,” it said:
The works created by Mao Zedong’s portraits, statues, and Mao Zedong’s themes have developed greatly in the 1960s, not only in the large increase in the number and the expansion of the scope of expression, but also in the way of expression. It shows the creative characteristics of the ten years after the mid-1960s.
For anyone familiar with Chinese history, presumably including Chinese visitors to the show (who that day were few and far between), this can only be described as a grand evasion. The ten years in question were those of the Cultural
Revolution (1966–1976), a traumatic time of widespread political violence and upheaval, as the aging Mao stoked youthful radicalism in a bid to extend his already long hold on power.
Two new books cast fresh light on these questions and on China in that era. China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong by Jude Blanchette, a scholar of Chinese politics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, focuses on the surprising influence that Maoism still has in today’s China, which has been rebuilt on a model of Leninist state capitalism that bears little resemblance to the radical egalitarianism and virtual autarky that prevailed under the founder of the People’s Republic. Early on, Blanchette bluntly addresses the question of why the Chinese state went to such extraordinary lengths to celebrate Mao while he was alive. “Without the cult of personality for Mao Zedong, our Communist Party might have remained a sheet of loose sand and would have remained groping in the darkness,” a present-day proponent of Maoism tells him. Maoism: A Global History by the British historian Julia Lovell provides, by contrast, a richly detailed and wideranging account of the emergence of Maoism and its evolution as a political force, first within China and then, to a remarkable extent, overseas. Her book proceeds from the claim that despite its impact on nearly every continent, Maoism
remains woefully underexamined. “Maoism not only unlocks the contemporary history of China,” she writes in the introduction, “but is also a key influence on global insurgency, insubordination and intolerance across the last eighty years.”
There has been a much-belated recognition that Mao, who assumed the leadership of China in 1949 and ruled until his death in 1976, was one of the bloodiest leaders of the twentieth century, very much in a league with Hitler and Stalin. This reappraisal has come largely on the strength of two recent histories of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s catastrophic program of accelerated collectivization and industrialization between 1958 and 1962: Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (2012) by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng, and Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958– 1962 (2010) by the Dutch historian Frank Dikötter.* The best current estimates of the number of people killed by politically induced famine and terror during this period alone hover in the range of 30 to 40 million. As high as these estimates are, they do not include large numbers of Chinese who were
*See the review of both books in these pages by Ian Johnson, November 22, 2012. killed during a violent land reform movement in the 1950s and the socalled Anti-Rightist Campaign later in that decade, or the million or so killed during the Cultural Revolution’s years of political violence.
Paradoxically, as Lovell makes clear, despite such rampant killing, as well as China’s generally woeful economic performance under Mao, this was also the era of the greatest soft power—its ability to influence others through its political ideals or culture—that the country has enjoyed in modern times. What, then, was Maoism? Despite Lovell’s thorough treatment of the Mao period, the answer proves somewhat elusive. This is the result not of a defect in her analysis but of the difficulty of defining the ideology of a charismatic, totalitarian leader driven by frequently shifting whims. In her best attempt at an answer, Lovell writes:
The term “Maoism” became popular in the 1950s to denote Anglo-American summaries of the system of political thought and practice instituted across the new People’s Republic of China. Since then, it has had a fractious history. Its Chinese translation, Mao zhuyi, has never been endorsed by CCP [Chinese Communist Party] ideologues. It is a dismissive term used by liberals to describe adulation for Mao among contemporary China’s alt-left [the topic of Blanchette’s book], or by government analysts to describe and disavow “Maoist” politics in India or Nepal today.
Historically, she adds, the ideology’s essential core was “veneration of the peasantry as a revolutionary force and [Mao’s] lifelong tenderness for anarchic rebellion against authority,” which was joined with a “veneration of political violence, [a] championing of anti-colonial resistance, and [the] use of thought-control techniques to forge a disciplined, increasingly repressive party and society.” She might have added the abolition of most private property and private markets as well as continual “class warfare,” or struggle against privilege, real or exaggerated.
At home, Mao’s personality cult was so total that, according to one estimate, by 1969 nearly 90 percent of China’s population routinely wore a Chairman Mao badge. Around that time, both his politics and his style of rule were being widely emulated in the third world, a term that Mao himself popularized as a way of differentiating China from the United States and the Soviet Union, which as superpowers he placed in the first world. The putative second world consisted mainly of Japan, Canada, and Europe. Mao placed China in the populous and relatively poor third world, which he aspired to lead. Mao’s China was a resource for would-be revolutionaries, anti-imperialist politicians, and liberation movements across the globe during the era of decolonization from the 1950s to the 1970s. It provided a powerful example of what a disciplined and ruthless Leninist-style