Maoism Book Summary - Maoism Book explained in key points

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Maoism summary

Name: Maoism
Rating: 4.3 (84 reviews)
Author: Julia Lovell

Julia Lovell

A Global History

4.3 (84 ratings)

33 mins

Brief summary

"Maoism" by Julia Lovell offers a comprehensive exploration of Maoism, its origins, and its impact on China and the world. The book challenges popular misconceptions and provides insightful analysis regarding Maoism's continued relevance in contemporary politics.

Topics

Political Figures Socialism & Capitalist Critique Political Philosophy Asian History

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Maoism
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What’s in it for me? A whistle-stop tour of the global legacy of Maoist thought.

Maoism is a potent mix of party-building discipline, anti-colonial rebellion, and continuous revolution. Over the past 80 years, it’s been a key influence on global insurgency, insubordination, and intolerance. Put simply, it’s one of the major stories of this century and the last.

Mao evolved earlier forms of Marxism in a number of ways. But the real reason Maoism has been so dynamic through the decades is because of its flexibility: practitioners, whether autocrats or factory workers, can cherry-pick the ideas that work for their contexts.

Maoism offered a real alternative to Soviet-style Communism and US-style capitalism during the Cold War to countries and communities throughout the world. And since the end of the Cold War, Maoism has remained a potent force for revolutionary insurrectionists.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

the role an American journalist had to play in developing the Mao cult;
exactly how complicit Maoist China was in various genocides throughout the world; and
the choice words Eldridge Cleaver had for China’s chairman.

Maoism can be condensed to a few core principles.

Communism in China didn’t start with Mao Zedong. But the government’s brutal crackdown on Communists, starting in 1927 in Shanghai, radicalized the movement. It was obvious to Communist leadership that to survive, they’d need an army. Violence was the only way to assert the primacy of Communist beliefs, Mao believed.

The key message here is: Maoism can be condensed to a few core principles.

Violence isn’t the only principle inherent to Maoism. Mao was also the first in the Marxist-Leninist tradition to put peasants first. For the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), peasants were its main audience. It succeeded in saturating the countryside with its ideas and attracting peasant recruits like no Communists ever had.

In its early years, Maoism also placed a large emphasis on feminism. This feminism was radical and helped spread Mao’s ideas throughout the world. But personally, Mao wasn’t only a serial philanderer – he was actively cruel to his wives and mistresses. When his second wife gave birth on the Long March – the Communists’ desperate flight across China – she was forced to give up the baby, who later died.

It wasn’t only women that Mao ostensibly sought to empower, though. His party also championed anti-imperialism around the world. The rise of the CCP coincided with a massive trend of decolonization across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. For this reason, China was able to position itself as the headquarters of the growing anti-imperial movement.

Although Maoism theoretically seeks to empower the disenfranchised, it also has darker sides. Under Mao’s rule, people who went against the party were periodically purged, hauled in front of huge audiences, and publicly vilified for days at a time. After days of torment, many were executed. This combination of manipulation and brute force became known as thought reform in China and was a backbone for Maoist China.

Such purges are key to Maoist thought. In official Maoist propaganda, the process was coined continuous revolution. The largest of such purges started in 1967 when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. The aim of the revolution was to save Communism in China by purging remaining capitalist and traditional elements of Chinese society. This ten-year social experiment resulted in millions of Chinese people either starving to death or being killed.

The horrors of the Cultural Revolution notwithstanding, rebels and insurgents all over the world have been inspired by Mao’s rhetoric. According to Maoist doctrine, individuals can triumph simply through force of will, rather than preparation or skill.

Red Star Over China was an international smash hit and has played a significant role in how Mao – and Maoism – are perceived.

In 1936, China was in the midst of a civil war pitting Mao’s Communist Party against the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. At the time, Communist forces were mostly holed up in caves in the northwest of the country, trying to rebuild their army after a series of defeats against their nationalist foes.

During this delicate period, Mao received an American visitor. Edgar Snow was an American copywriter who’d washed up in Shanghai and, by luck and pluck, maneuvered himself into the position of respected English-language journalist.

Competition between China and the USSR provided justification for Mao’s increasingly radical policies at home and investment abroad.

In 1966, a publishing house in China issued a new map of the world – with China at the center. This reflected a new prong in the Chinese propaganda machine: beginning in the late 1950s, Mao was portrayed as the savior of world revolution, battling imperialism, capitalism, and Soviet revisionism. In creating a global cult for the chairman, the propaganda would underline an increasingly obvious rift between China and the Soviet Union.

This Sino-Soviet split had wide-ranging implications. It pushed the Soviets toward imperial overreach as the two competed for influence in the developing world, and it fueled aggressive nationalism across the Communist bloc, especially in Vietnam and Cambodia. The author even holds that the Sino-Soviet split was the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

Indonesia’s Communists were inspired by Mao’s rhetoric to confront the Indonesian military, which gave them an excuse to retaliate.

The Indonesia that emerged from Dutch colonialism, and then Japanese occupation during World War II, was one scarred by violence. The country’s post-war leader was Sukarno, a statesman who’d previously been a leading figure in the independence movement against the Dutch. According to the author, by the late 1950s, he was holding onto power by playing Indonesia’s Communist Party, or PKI, and its army off each other.

From 1965 to 1966, Communists in Indonesia were subjected to mass violence at the hands of Indonesian Army death squads. At least half a million were killed, many tortured in front of their families first. The UK and US played a shameful role in providing financial support and equipment for the Indonesian Army.

China’s efforts in Africa failed to spread Maoist-style politics – but it did give China one big win.

During the Great Leap Forward, the CCP began inviting African leaders to China. In the first half of 1960 alone, Mao met 111 African representatives. These relationships soon translated into foreign aid. In 1965, China offered to back the Tan-Zam Railway, running from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to Zambia’s copper mines. The whole construction project was financed by an interest-free loan of $415 million.

It wasn’t just Tanzania and Zambia either: between 1950 and 1978, China gave out more than $24 billion in international aid to African countries. But the aid didn’t accomplish China’s goals. The outcome of Chinese aid for Tanzania and Zambia, for example, didn’t do anything to help create stable governance structures and reliable allies.

China’s investment in Southeast Asia played an important role in horrific regional conflict in the 1960s and ’70s.

In the 1950s, domino theory was all the rage in American political circles. The idea was that if one country in a region turned Communist, it was only a matter of time before all the rest did too. And the biggest risk for Asia was Vietnam. Blinded by this faulty theory, the US ended up committing hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars to waging war in Vietnam.

But contrary to popular belief, the domino theory wasn’t only espoused by the US. The leaders of China also subscribed to the idea that Vietnam and other countries in Southeast Asia were pawns in the world revolution. And some in Cambodia, just west of Vietnam, feared that their neighbors wanted to dominate the region.

In the West, Maoism has influenced a wide range of groups and individuals.

In Western Europe and the US, Mao’s ideas of continuous peasant revolution appealed to left-wing rebels, criminal megalomaniacs, and civil rights campaigners alike. The popularity of Maoism has led to some positive effects, such as concepts like serving the people and consciousness-raising. These have led to the development and strengthening of feminism, gay rights, and radical environmental movements outside China.

The key message here is: In the West, Maoism has influenced a wide range of groups and individuals.

Shining Path was founded as a peasant revolution. But peasants bore the brunt of the movement’s horrific violence.

Throughout the Americas, Peru probably suffered the most as a result of the Maoist thought diaspora. The Shining Path insurgency in the 1980s, helmed by the portly professor Abimael Guzmán, was the country’s most destructive conflict. Rural populations were utterly devastated by revolutionary violence, as well as brutal state retaliation. The conflict led to more than 69,000 deaths, and, according to the author, essentially eliminated the possibility for democracy in Peru.

The Shining Path was incepted in 1969 in the poverty-stricken region of Ayacucho. Guzmán saw the concentration of marginalized ethnic groups, as well as newly educated students, as a huge potential base for revolutionary insurgency. As he predicted, his easy, militant solutions appealed to the disenfranchised ethnic minorities of the region, concentrated around the university where he was professor of philosophy.

Maoism in India underlines that rural populations almost always suffer the most from Maoist insurrection.

Sino-Indian relations have been uneasy for decades, ever since the Dalai Lama fled to India from Tibet in 1959. But Maoism is perhaps the most troubling factor in the ongoing relationship between the superpowers. For nearly 20 years, politicians in India have cited Maoist insurgents as the “biggest internal security threat facing our country.”

The Indian Maoist insurgency was made possible by three elements: an impatient, militant wing of the Communist Party of India, a deep socio-economic crisis in the subcontinent, and the eagerness of the Chinese Communist Party to support a Maoist Indian revolution.

In Xi Jinping, China has its most Maoist leader yet since the chairman.

After Mao’s death in 1976, China’s politicians focused their efforts on de-Maoification. The economy began to be privatized, first slowly, then quickly; by 1982, the communes had been dissolved. The government also mulched up to 90 percent of the warehoused copies of Mao’s Little Red Book. They were replaced on bookshelves with new editions depicting the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward.

But in recent years, Mao’s legacy has experienced a complex resurgence in China. Under Xi Jinping, China has reasserted its global ambitions, renormalized criticism and self-criticism sessions, as well as the personality cult. Plus, under Xi, the Central Committee has abolished the two-term limit, essentially granting Xi lifetime rule.

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What is Maoism about?

Maoism (2019) is a deep dive into Maoist ideology, tracing the origins of the movement in the caves of northwest China to the jungles of India, the high Andean sierra, and the California city parks where The Black Panthers did their military drills. Maoism is a movement that’s hardly limited to China or even Asia.

Who should read Maoism?

Anyone looking to bone up on Chinese history
Followers of leftist politics
Those interested in transnational historical arcs

About the Author

Julia Lovell is a China scholar and is professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. She’s previously published several books about China: The Politics of Cultural Capital, The Great Wall, and The Opium War. She’s also written articles analyzing Chinese current events for the Guardian, the Times, and other publications.

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