Maoism: A Global History.By Julia Lovell.Bodley Head; 624 pages; £30. To be published in America by Knopf in September; $37.50.

T HE NAMES of the 20th century’s bloodiest dictators are synonymous with evil. Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin: even to joke about them is in poor taste. Yet one tyrant’s name has a milder impact. Indeed, many still revere him. His face is on almost every banknote in circulation in the world’s second-largest economy. Thousands of people queue up daily to see his embalmed body lying in state in a glass sarcophagus. When Barack Obama was president, a designer in China produced an image blending the despot’s garb with the American’s face and put it on T -shirts. Many people—including Western tourists—bought them for their kitsch appeal. It probably did not occur to them that they were, in effect, equating America’s leader with a figure who caused tens of millions of deaths.

Mao Zedong was always thus: a despot whose global image was moulded and adapted without regard to the man he really was. It floated free of the horrors he set off—the killings of landlords, the persecutions of intellectuals and the mass starvation that swept the country in the early 1960s. His Little Red Book was as eagerly read by rebellious students on Western campuses as it was by insurgents in the developing world. There was no fashion shame in wearing a Mao suit. No child has been reproached for asking who is the most powerful cat in China. (Chairman Miaow.)

As Julia Lovell of Birkbeck, University of London, describes in “Maoism: A Global History”, the abstract chairman inspired revolutionaries around the world, from the highlands of Peru to the jungles of Cambodia, from the cafés of Paris to inner-city America. Mao’s ideology, distilled into a few pithy epigrams (“to rebel is justified”, “serve the people” and “bombard the headquarters” is all you need to know), helped foster suffering and mayhem not only in his own country, but around the world. His was the thinking behind Pol Pot and his Cambodian killing fields. It was his personality cult that encouraged an envious Kim Il Sung to push his own to similar heights of absurdity; North Koreans remain in its terrifying thrall today.

The cult of Mao did not end with the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. It has enjoyed a tenacious afterlife that has not received the attention it deserves. As Ms Lovell argues, the paucity of study of Maoism’s global impact is not only the result of inattention. “It is also a consequence of post-Mao China’s success in communicating a particular narrative of its past,” she writes. Mao’s image continues to be manipulated. It still has a powerful allure in China and elsewhere.

The origins of the legend owe a surprising amount to an American. Ms Lovell explores the startling role played by Edgar Snow in creating the Mao myth more than a decade before Mao seized power in 1949. Snow was a journalist who managed to enter the remote north-western area where Mao and his followers ended up after their epic Long March to escape the forces of Chiang Kai-shek. The book he wrote about the guerrilla base and his meetings with Mao, “Red Star Over China”, published in 1937, became an international bestseller.

No other journalist had enjoyed such access. Snow’s description of Mao, then in his early 40s, as an idealist who wanted to save China from Chiang’s corrupt autocracy and build a democratic country mesmerised the world. As Snow put it, Mao’s aim was to awaken the Chinese “to a belief in human rights” and to persuade them “to fight for a life of justice, equality, freedom and human dignity.” What could be objectionable about that?

Snow’s work, says Ms Lovell, “created Mao as a national and global political personality before there was such a thing in the Chinese Communist Party as Maoism.” A Chinese translation attracted young, well-educated urban Chinese to Mao’s cause. Abroad it became a handbook for anti-Nazi partisans in Russia, for Huk guerrillas in the Philippines and for anti-British revolutionaries in India. It was, says Ms Lovell, a “core text” for thousands of Indians who joined a Maoist insurgency there that still simmers.

Ms Lovell’s descriptions of these (and other) global strands of Maoism are well-researched and colourful. She concludes her book by examining Mao’s afterlife in China itself. This is where the creed’s importance is most starkly evident.

Chaos under heaven

After many years during which Mao had become increasingly marginalised in Chinese political culture, China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, is trying to re-establish the late chairman’s authority. He has ordered party members to brush up on Maoist ideology. China’s successes during the recent era of “reform and opening” should not be used to cast aspersions on the preceding one under Mao, he insists. In this way Mr Xi has become a darling of Mao-loving thinkers in China who have long been chafing at the party’s drift towards free-market capitalism. They admire his fondness of a more state-led kind of economy.

This becomes all the more significant when considering Mr Xi’s foreign policy. Ms Lovell’s book offers a valuable reminder that, under Mao, China wanted to be the leader of a global revolution. Subsequent Chinese leaders tried to downplay that aspect of Maoism—fearful, perhaps, of fuelling Western suspicions of Chinese communism. Mr Xi, however, has made it clear that he wants to make China a central player on the world stage. He says Chinese-style socialism has been “blazing a new trail” for other countries. There are echoes of the past in his words.

For all that, the analogy is difficult to sustain. Mr Xi is not on a revolutionary mission. He wants to ensure a global safe space for Chinese communism, not convert the world to it. He is no supporter of insurgencies. He is happy to forge friendly relations with non-communist powers if they do not challenge his right to rule.

At home Mr Xi uses Maoism as a way of enforcing party discipline: mouthing the chairman’s words shows loyalty to the party he helped create. Mr Xi would not wish its members to take Maoist ideology too literally; after all, as Ms Lovell notes, Mao “possessed a genius” for theories that justified inconsistency and contradiction. When “there is great chaos under Heaven, the situation is excellent,” he said.

Mr Xi does not want Red Guard-type anarchy of the kind unleashed by Mao because he fears the party would not survive it. In many ways he is the antithesis of Mao. He wants stability at any cost. Yet as Ms Lovell’s book advises: “Like a dormant virus, Maoism has demonstrated a tenacious, global talent for latency.”