20 The New York Review
a recurrent insistence that through or-
ganization, will, audacity, and zeal, the
poor and weak of the world could over-
come their oppressors.
Finally, as Lovell astutely observes,
China under Mao was able to lever-
age racial identity during the cold war,
whose two main opponents, the United
States and the Soviet Union, were both
perceived as dominated by whites.
“You are still white,” she quotes Af-
ricans telling the Soviets. “But [the
Chinese] are yellow, closer to us.” Mao
understood this and played it to the
maximum, whether by celebrating Paul
Robeson and hosting W. E. B. Du Bois
or telling a banquet hall full of guerrilla
trainees from Africa, “You’re more or
less like us.”
In Lovell’s account, which is as much
a portrait of Mao as of the shape-
shifting phenomenon of Maoism, the
Chinese leader emerges as someone
who saw conflict as a path to truth,
and as the ultimate rebel and “outlier.”
“Bombard the headquarters,” he urged
the revolutionary youth known as the
Red Guards during the Cultural Revo-
lution, even though he was himself the
unquestioned leader of the country.
“Don’t be afraid of making trouble.
The bigger the trouble we make, the
better.... There is great chaos under
heaven; the situation is excellent.”
The roots of both Mao’s power and
his appeal appear to have been twofold.
From the very beginning of his ascent,
he revered violence and prized control
of it above all else, initiating a major
bloodletting campaign against his own
party in the early 1930s, just years
before Stalin’s great purges began.
“Only with guns can the whole world
be transformed,” he wrote around that
time. When he was cracking down on
small rural landowners, Mao said,
“The only effective way of suppressing
the reactionaries is to execute at least
one or two in each county...it is nec-
essary to bring about a brief reign of
terror in every rural area... [and to]
exceed the proper limits.”
His other great weapon was his re-
markable command of language, which
Lovell describes as an “ability to cre-
ate compelling, comprehensible nar-
ratives of human history, both ancient
and modern.” Maoism’s political mes-
saging worked through simple, con-
fident explanations, and through its
exploitation of socioeconomic crises.
Imperialism, Mao said in a famous
phrase, was a “paper tiger.” This rejec-
tion of conventional measurements of
national strength convinced many of
his Chinese and international followers
alike that revolutionary zeal and sheer
will could overcome nearly any obsta-
cle. His way with words caused Edgar
Snow, the American journalist and au-
thor of Red Star Over China (1937) —
the adoring book that Lovell credits
with launching Mao’s early reputation,
both within China, where it was distrib-
uted in translation, and globally, where
its readership ranged from Malayan
rebels to Nelson Mandela—to describe
the Chinese leader as “a rebel who can
write verse as well as lead a crusade.”
In the years following Mao’s death, the
Chinese Communist Party underwent a
major crisis of reinvention. First came
the arrest of a radical faction of Mao-
ists known as the Gang of Four, which
included his fourth wife, Jiang Qing,
a leading figure in the Cultural Revo-
lution. An early problem was what to
do with the immense stockpiles of the
printed writings of the departed leader,
from mountains of Little Red Books to
his collected works. Blan chette recounts
the decision to shred most of them and
to discard most of Mao’s ideas while
preserving an exalted place for his
image in Chinese life. Thus today his
portrait sits atop the gate at Tiananmen
Square and on almost every denomina-
tion of China’s paper currency. In fact,
Blanchette argues, the CCP had little
choice. The Soviet Union was able to
de-Stalinize in part because it could
still lean on the prestige of Lenin.
After decades of suffocating one-man
rule, China only had Mao.
Contemporary China treats much of
its history under Mao as an embarrass-
ment; it demands extreme selectivity
and idealization in the offi-
cial versions of his life, and
imposes stringent censor-
ship on scholarly and unof-
ficial publications about it.
There has never been a can-
did accounting to the gen-
eral public, for example, of
the Great Leap Forward, the
Cultural Revolution, or the
fomenting of revolt in coun-
tries near and far. This may
help explain why China cu-
rates gigantic shows of Mao
imagery yet hides them away
in basements. Blanchette
quotes Feng Chen, a Chinese
political scientist:As long as “socialism”
remains symbolically im-
portant for the Party’s political
legitimacy, the CCP has to bear
the burden of justifying its current
practices in socialist terms, which
will therefore involve a protracted
ideological battle with the leftists
over what is authentic socialism
and who represents it.Much of this struggle plays out over
the use of Mao’s name and image.
China’s New Red Guards is the story
of these battles. Blanchette minutely
documents the rise of groups on the
Chinese Internet that have used Mao
to criticize the increasingly capitalist
policies of the party, which have pro-
duced cronyism and corruption on a
vast scale, along with stark inequality.
Invoking Mao is like wrapping one-
self in the flag; it provides a degree of
protection from persecution, although
there are limits. A network of pan-
leftist websites like Utopia and Mao-
flag adopted this approach and grew
increasingly dense and diversified, de-
spite facing periodic crackdowns and
blackouts. Blanchette speculates that
the Maoist voices in venues like these
benefit from protection from center-
left forces that survive in the Chinese
Communist Party and regard Maoists
as a useful “radical flank” to help slow
down the evolution away from socialist
ideals.
Utopia has had a particular impor-
tance in this development. It began in
Beijing in 2003, both as a website that
welcomed left-wing opinion in China
and a salon-like speaking venue for
leftist scholars, intellectuals, and au-
thors, with the humble intention of
becoming “a small platform through
which social progress can be facilitated
by pursuing a fairness-first society and
the formation and expansion of a re-sponsible middle-class.” Success came
quickly, though, measured by its Inter-
net popularity and turnout at its events.
In Blanchette’s telling, beginning
with Deng and continuing through
the rule of Deng’s chosen successor,
Jiang Zemin, China continued to move
strongly to the right. First it opened up
to private investment and globaliza-
tion under Deng, and then it welcomed
capitalists into the Communist Party
under Jiang, who also took the coun-
try into the World Trade Organization.
This made the pan-leftists furious, and
they fulminated online against trends
that they warned would drain Chinese
socialism of all meaning. The most im-
portant of these trends were reforms
aimed at privatizing state-owned in-
dustries. China was falling victim to
something leftists (ironically) called“peaceful evolution,” which variously
meant a plot by the party’s leaders to
abandon Chinese socialism or a cam-
paign by Western forces to constantly
nudge China in that direction. One
leftist figure, a party veteran named Ma
Bin, argued in 2006 that every seven or
eight years China should wage a new
cultural revolution in order to prevent
a “capitalist restoration.”Under Jiang’s successor, Hu Jintao,
seemingly in response to this pres-
sure from the left, the Chinese state
proclaimed a war against inequality,
notably increasing social benefits for
peasants. By 2006, however, the pan-
leftist coalition was fragmenting, with
some of the most successful Internet
voices, like Utopia, turning aggres-
sively nationalistic and openly Maoist
in rhetoric. “From this point on, Utopia
and an increasing cohort of competitors
and copycats would embrace a paranoid
worldview,” Blanchette writes, “that saw
global conspiracies of Western domina-
tion, the infiltration of China and the
party by traitors and ‘hostile forces,’ and
a belief in an inevitable and unavoid-
able conflict with the United States.”
Led by Utopia, the neo-Maoists also
became more overt in their criticisms
of establishment politics under Chi-
na’s Communist Party. In 2012 Hu’s
outgoing premier, Wen Jiabao, gave a
news conference in which he warned
ominously that the country could ex-
perience the convulsion of a second
cultural revolution. The exact meaning
of this comment was left open to inter-
pretation, suggesting to some the need
for greater reform in China aimed at
reducing class disparities and official
corruption, but to others the menace of
an increasingly aggressive left.The most prominent figure of this
resurgent left was Bo Xilai, the char-
ismatic son of a revolutionary com-
rade of Mao’s and the party secretary
of Chongqing. During the transition
between Hu and Xi, Bo attempted to
upend the carefully choreographed
succession and leapfrog his way into the
senior leadership by organizing high-
profile events, including a sweeping
anti-crime crusade, adopting Maoist
rhetoric against inequality and cor-
ruption, and assiduously courting the
media, especially Utopia. By the eve
of the 18th Communist Party Congress
in 2012, many observers speculated
that his efforts would be rewarded
with a seat on the Politburo Standing
Committee. What ensued instead was
a downfall even more abrupt than his
rise, after Bo’s police chief in Chong-
qing, Wang Lijun, unsuc-
cessfully sought asylum in
an American consulate and
then denounced Bo as “the
greatest gangster in China.”
Soon afterward, Bo was
stripped of his party posts
and arrested, along with his
wife, Gu Kailai, who was
found guilty of the murder
of a British business partner.
Bo was tried for corruption,
and both he and his wife
are currently serving life
sentences.
Blanchette observes that
when Xi took office in 2013,
most foreign analysts ex-
pected him to become a
liberal reformer, reducing
state control of the economy
and perhaps allowing for more free-
dom of expression and association.
He was thought to adhere to some-
thing called the Guangdong Model, so
called because the Communist Party
secretary of that prosperous province,
Wang Yang, had been a conspicuous
liberalizer. But once Bo was arrested,
Xi did the opposite, more or less adopt-
ing his impatient rival’s so-called
Chongqing Model, which called for in-
jecting ever more money into China’s
vast state-owned corporate sector to
protect its underperforming companies
from layoffs and failure.
Under Xi, not only has the state be-
come much more deeply involved in
the economy, but power has been more
strongly concentrated in Xi’s hands
than in those of any other post-Mao
leader. A personality cult has grown
up around him that is reminiscent of
Mao’s, and the space for dissent has
shrunk dramatically. Xi, who is some-
times called the chairman of everything
because he personally oversees virtu-
ally all of the most important policy,
planning, and oversight groups of the
Communist Party—with the exception
of the ongoing fight against the coro-
navirus epidemic, whose leadership
he ceded to his ordinarily low- profile
premier, Li Keqiang—has removed
limits on his time in office that were
instituted by Deng to prevent the rise
of another leader like Mao. The les-
son that Xi seems to have drawn from
Bo’s rapid if brief ascent is that Mao-
ism—built on the style and rhetoric of
a paternalistic and all-powerful leader,
whose personality cult keeps his be-
nign visage in view at all times, with
slogans that all citizens should be able
to recite—remains such a potent tactic
and resource that he cannot afford to
dispense with it. QLiu^HeungShingA portrait of Mao being removed from the Museum of Chinese History,
Beijing, 1981; from A Life in a Sea of Red: Photojournalism
by Liu Heung Shing, published recently by Steidl