18 The New York Review
*See the review of both books in these
pages by Ian Johnson, November 22,
2012.Mao’s Shadow
Howard W. French
Maoism: A Global History
by Julia Lovell.
Knopf, 610 pp., $37.
China’s New Red Guards :
The Return of Radicalism and the
Rebirth of Mao Zedong
by Jude Blanchette.
Oxford University Press,
206 pp., $27.
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 re-
cent years. My first stop was the cavern-
ous 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 un-
familiar, smiling image of the young
Mao Zedong and bore an intrigu-
ingly vague, almost meaningless title:
“Thinking of the Seven Decades His-
tory at My Space.”
What I discovered, nearly hidden
away, was room after room of out-
sized paintings of the Chinese revo-
lutionary 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 Tai-
wan 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.”
Ma ny people have seen Mao k itsch 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 extraor-
dinary 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 “Admira-
tion and Praise,” it said:
The works created by Mao Ze-
dong’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 his-
tory, presumably including Chinese visi-
tors to the show (who that day were few
and far between), this can only be de-
scribed 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 surpris-
ing 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 rad-
ical 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 extraor-
dinary lengths to celebrate Mao while
he was alive. “Without the cult of per-
sonality for Mao Zedong, our Commu-
nist 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 wide-
ranging 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, Mao-ism remains woefully underexamined.
“Maoism not only unlocks the contem-
porary history of China,” she writes in
the introduction, “but is also a key in-
fluence on global insurgency, insubor-
dination and intolerance across the last
eighty years.”There has been a much-belated rec-
ognition 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 cen-
tury, 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 ac-
celerated collectivization and indus-
trialization between 1958 and 1962:
Tombstone: The Great Chinese Fam-
ine, 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 es-
timates of the number of people killed
by politically induced famine and ter-
ror 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 werekilled during a violent land reform
movement in the 1950s and the so-
called 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 his-
tory. 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 adu-
lation for Mao among contempo-
rary China’s alt-left [the topic of
Blanchette’s book], or by govern-
ment analysts to describe and dis-
avow “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 re-
pressive party and society.” She might
have added the abolition of most pri-
vate 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 politi-
cians, and liberation movements across
the globe during the era of decoloni-
zation from the 1950s to the 1970s. It
provided a powerful example of what a
disciplined and ruthless Leninist-styleA propaganda photo showing Mao with people from African, Arab,
and South American countries, 1959HouBo/Mark^Henley/PanosPictures/Redux