March 12, 2020 19
political movement could accomplish
through secretive organization, ideo-
logical indoctrination, mass spectacle,
and political violence, which often took
the form of asymmetrical or guerrilla
tactics, known as People’s War. To il-
lustrate Maoism’s influence, Lovell’s
narrative moves chapter by chapter
from a Communist insurgency in Indo-
nesia to the Shining Path in Peru and
from a contemporary and long-running
Naxalite rebellion in India to Cambo-
dia’s Khmer Rouge.
U n d e r M a o , a s L o ve l l r e p e a t e d l y d o c -
uments, China stood ready to provide
arms, training, and cash to movements
in Asia, Africa, and Latin America
that solicited its patronage. Indonesia
provides one example. Its Communist
party, the PKI, embraced Maoist rheto-
ric and grassroots organizing, with its
leader, Dipa Nusantara Aidit, taking
instruction from Mao’s longtime prime
minister, Zhou Enlai, during a special
training course in China in 1963. Mao
also had great sway with the country’s
authoritarian president, Sukarno, and
two years later promised him 100,
small arms for free, ostensibly to help
Sukarno counterbalance the country’s
powerful army. Indonesia’s Commu-
nists became the target of a crackdown
in October 1965 by General Suharto,
who would later seize power and con-
solidate it with a genocidal purge of
alleged PKI members and their sympa-
thizers throughout the country.
Maoism’s other influential innova-
tion was highly personalized dictator-
ship under an unquestionable leader
whom the masses were forced to fol-
low and revere. In this, it was influen-
tial well beyond aspiring third-world
Marxist dictators or liberation move-
ments. In the 1960s the longtime ruler
of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko—no man
of the left—fancied himself, like Mao,
the national “helmsman” and “guide”
whose words must be memorized by
all and ritually danced and chanted;
he even banned Western-style suits,
replacing them with an African version
of the Mao suit.
Lovell presents Cambodia as the
most extreme example of imitation
along these lines. In June 1975—two
months after the Khmer Rouge took
power, abolished the national currency,
and ordered the evacuation of the
country’s cities (Lovell writes that “an
estimated 20,000 people died of snap
executions, hunger and disease in the
emptying of Phnom Penh alone”)—
Mao received Cambodia’s new leader,
Pol Pot, in Beijing and told him, “What
we wanted to do but did not manage,
you are achieving.” This was likely a
reference to what Mao regarded as his
stalled or incomplete Cultural Revolu-
tion. Understanding the power of flat-
tery, Pol Pot told the Chinese leader,
whose health was fading fast, “In fu-
ture, we will be sure to act according
to your words.... The works of Chair-
man Mao have led our entire party.”
Under the Khmer Rouge’s four-year
rule, as many as two million people—
a quarter of the population—perished.
That year, Mao gave Cambodia per-
haps the largest amount of aid in Chi-
na’s history: $20 million as a gift and
$980 million as an interest-free loan. A
few years earlier, Lovell also reports,
“China [had] postponed the building
of its own metro in Beijing to build one
for Pyongyang instead.”
Why did such gigantic sacrifices
seem worth making at a time when
China was roughly as poor per capita
as Bangladesh? Part of the answer lies,
of course, in Mao’s extravagant ego, but
there was more to it than that. Lovell
depicts a modernizing Communist state
that has retained many reflexes from its
long imperial past, especially what she
calls a “Middle Kingdom mentality” of
wanting “to occupy the centre of the
world.” The eminent Harvard historian
of China John King Fairbank wrote
decades ago that having ritual displays
of foreign adulation and tribute had al-
ways been seen as central to the legiti-
macy of China’s leaders and ultimately
to its stability. This reminded me of a
painting in the Shanghai exhibition,
one of the few tableaux that did not fea-
ture Mao. It portrays instead Zhou sur-
rounded by black peasants on a visit to
an unidentified African country. Zhou
bathes in their jubilation but is the only
individual given a face. “The idea of an
approving foreign gaze—that events in
China were inspiring revolutionaries
all over the world—was intensely im-
portant to those propelling the revolu-
tion,” Lovell writes.
China’s present leader, Xi Jinping,
heads an incomparably richer coun-
try, which spends tens of billions in a
methodical drive to win friends and
boost China’s position in the world.
Measured against the widespread im-
pact of Maoism, though, Xi’s efforts
have fallen far short. “Within Europe,”
Lovell writes in one description of the
formidable range of influences that Xi’s
forbear came to enjoy,Mao’s Cultural Revolution gal-
vanised Dadaist student protest,
nurtured feminist and gay rights
activism, and legitimised urban
guerrilla terrorism. In the United
States, it bolstered a broad pro-
gramme of anti-racist civil rights
campaigns, as well as sectarian
Marxist-Leninist party-building.Even this, however, only begins
to describe Maoism’s reach. During
Mao’s lifetime, the Chinese govern-
ment oversaw the distribution domesti-
cally and overseas of roughly a billion
copies of Quotations from Chairman
Mao Tse-Tung—the compilation of his
revolutionary aphorisms, also known
as the Little Red Book. His defense
minister, Lin Biao, called it a “spiritual
atom bomb of infinite power.”Anyone under fifty might be sur-
prised to learn just how deeply Mao-
ism affected Western popular culture.
After a visit to China in 1972, for ex-
ample, the American actress Shirley
MacLaine wrote a paean to the coun-
try—then in the throes of the Cultural
Revolution—in her book You Can Get
There From Here:I was seeing that it was possible
somehow to reform human beings
and here they were being educated
toward a loving communal spirit
through a kind of totalitarian be-
nevolence.... Maybe the individ-
ual was simply not as important as
the group.The year before, the Italian director
of spaghetti westerns Sergio Leone
opened his film A Fistful of Dynamite
by quoting one of Mao’s sayings: “Arevolution is not a dinner party, or writ-
ing an essay, or painting a picture, or
doing embroidery.”
In Europe, Maoism was embraced
by radical groups like the Red Army
Faction, and in the United States by the
Weather Underground, out of the belief
that both capitalism and established
authority were inherently illegitimate
and corrupt and that violent rebellion
was justified. The Black Panther Party
meanwhile quickly became known in
the US for its most famous slogan, the
Maoist-sounding “Power to the People,”
usually shouted with a hoisted fist.
Bobby Seale, a leader of the Panthers,
said the group’s inner circleused the Red Books and spread
them throughout the organiza-
tion.... Where the book said,
“Chinese people of the Commu-
nist Party,” Huey [Newton] would
say, “Change that to the Black
Panther Party. Change the Chi-
nese people to black people.When asked why he kept a poster of
Mao on his apartment wall, Eldridge
Cleaver, another Black Panther leader,
was more blunt: “Because Mao Zedong
is the baddest motherfucker on planet
earth.”
I can attest to the resonance of Mao
Zedong’s ideas for a generation of
Americans who were coming of age
at that time. My parents were active in
the civil rights movement of the early
1960s. They knew its top leadership and
provided medical support during some
of the great marches in the South. An
older sister of mine, however, made a
break with the civil disobedience strat-egy epitomized by Martin Luther King
Jr. and his peers, joining the Black Pan-
thers instead.
A few years later, as a high school
student, I read and was powerfully af-
fected by many of Mao’s writings, in-
cluding both his poetry and his political
works. When he died I was in college
but spending time in Africa, where my
family had moved. Still under the sway
of Mao’s ideas, I initially lamented the
initiation of capitalist-style reforms
under Deng Xiaoping, who succeeded
Mao after a brief transitional period
under Hua Guofeng. It was clear that
this was, by design, the definitive end of
class struggle in China and of the war
against entrenched elites, or “continu-
ous revolution,” that Mao had preached.
What made Mao’s ideas so attrac-
tive not just in the so-called devel-
oping world but also to a bookish,
middle-class, African-American youth
who sported a large Afro, in keep-
ing with the spirit of the times? As
Lovell explains, part of the answer lies
in the surprising truth that some of
his best-known ideas share a passing
kinship with the philosophy of some
of America’s founders. A Mao slogan
I particularly admired was “To rebel is
justified.” To an impressionable young
man, one could hear echoes in this of
T homas Jefferson, who wrote, “I hold it
that a little rebellion now and then is a
good thing, and as necessary in the po-
litical world as storms in the physical.”
Mao and Maoism, Lovell writes, “agi-
tated to give voice to the marginalised,
and to prevent the inevitable flow of
power to technocratic metropolitan
elites.” There was also a resolute hos-
tility to inequality in his writings andWhiting
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