Recent Books
198 foreign affairs
Each version of the Maoist creed was
principally articulated by middle-class
intellectuals who wanted to lead and speak
for the suffering masses. Lovell traces
this wide-ranging history with a sharp
eye for social setting and personality. But
it is unlikely that the Mao mystique gave
China as much influence over world
events as Lovell claims. Mao often
served as a symbol for activists who did
things their own way, including the Black
Panthers in the United States and the
Shining Path in Peru. But this sparkling
account demonstrates the skill of Chinese
propagandists and the pliability and
reach of Mao’s image and ideas, even in
the years when China was most isolated.Speaking Out in Vietnam: Public Political
Criticism in a Communist Party–Ruled
Nation
BY BENEDICT J. TRIA KERKVLIET.
Cornell University Press, 2019, 246 pp.Vietnam’s authoritarian party-state is
modeled on China’s regime, but Kerkvliet
finds that the Vietnamese government is
less repressive than its neighbor’s. Since
the mid-1990s, the Vietnamese Commu-
nist Party has often tolerated and even
made concessions to dissenting citizens.
The book describes labor protests against
working conditions in factories, rural
resistance to land seizures, nationalist
demonstrations against what some citizens
feel has been a weak Vietnamese response
to Chinese aggression in the South China
Sea, and a small pro-democracy move-
ment that expresses itself mainly on the
Internet. The police are likely to
intervene if protests go on for too long
or grow too large, or if dissenters di-
rectly attack the ruling party. But often,
the authorities seem to regard protests asalso traces a parallel tradition of secular-
ism in Lebanon to well before European
imperialism, delving back as far as the
rule of Fakhr ad-Din II (1585–1635), a
Druze leader whom Farha sees as a proto-
Lebanese nationalist, having integrated
Christians and Muslims into his power
structure. Despite this history, confes-
sional quotas remain a major part of
Lebanese political life, sustained by
Lebanon’s great political families and,
more recently, by petro-zaims (loosely, “oil
barons”) who made fortunes in the Gulf.
Although both studies are rich with
ideas and detail, they are guilty of
overreach. In the Turkish case, after the
advent of multiparty politics in 1950, it is
not clear that many Turks subscribed to
the narrative that set a secular state against
an essentially pious society. In Lebanon,
forces from outside the country have
always stoked confessional tensions to the
detriment of the country’s secularization.
Asia and Pacific
Andrew J. Nathan
Maoism: A Global History
BY JULIA LOVELL. Knopf, 2019, 624 pp.
M
ao Zedong and Maoism—the
ideology of peasant revolu-
tion guided by an all-knowing
sage—inspired insurgent movements in
Cambodia, India, Malaysia, Nepal,
Peru, the Philippines, Vietnam, Zim-
babwe, and elsewhere. Mao’s thought
enjoyed periodic popularity among
intellectuals in Western cities, such as
Berkeley, Cambridge, Paris, and Rome.