The west has assumed that Maoism, like Soviet communism, has been left in the dust: no European rebels these days carry a Little Red Book. But the ideology is resurgent in China and remains hugely influential elsewhere

In the first week of January 2016, a vast golden statue of Mao, rising up out of frozen brown fields, was unveiled in the middle of the Henan countryside in central China. More than 36 metres high, it cost £312,000 and was paid for by local people and businessmen. Tourists gathered to take selfies, but a few days later, the monument was demolished, apparently for violating planning regulations. Several locals wept as it came down, among them probably descendants of the multitudes – one analyst puts the figure at 7.8 million – who died in Henan during the famine in the 1960s caused by Mao’s policies.

The golden colossus of Henan evokes the strange, looming presence of Mao in contemporary China. The People’s Republic (PRC) today is still held together by the legacies of Maoism. Although the Chinese Communist party (CCP) has long abandoned the utopian turmoil of the Cultural Revolution in favour of an authoritarian capitalism that prizes prosperity and stability, Mao has left a heavy mark on politics and society. His portrait – six by four and a half metres – hangs in Tiananmen Square, the heartland of Chinese political power, and in the middle of the square, his waxen, embalmed body lies in state. “Mao’s invisible hand” (as one recent book puts it) remains omnipresent in China’s polity: in the deep politicisation of its judiciary; the supremacy of the one-party state; the intolerance of dissident voices. And in 2012, the CCP under Xi Jinping began – for the first time since Mao’s death in 1976 – to publicly renormalise aspects of Maoist political culture: the personality cult; catchphrases such as the “mass line” (supposedly encouraging criticism of officials from the grassroots) and “rectification” (disciplining of wayward party members). At the end of February 2018, Xi and his Central Committee abolished the 1982 constitutional restriction that limited the president to only two consecutive terms; like Mao, he could be ruler for life.

The western commentariat has been wrong-footed by Mao’s resurgence. Many perhaps assumed that, as China turned commercial and capitalist since the death of Mao, the country would become “more like us”; that Mao and Chinese communism were history. The opposite has happened. Maoism is the key to understanding one of the most surprisingly enduring organisations of the 20th and (so far) 21st centuries – the CCP. If the party is still in charge in 2024, the Chinese communist revolution will have exceeded the 74-year lifespan of its Soviet older brother. And if the Chinese communist state survives much beyond this point, historians may come to see October 1949, rather than October 1917, as the game-changing revolution of the last century.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The golden statue in Henan. Photograph: AP

There is also a pressing need to evaluate the power and allure of Maoism beyond China; it has had a long afterlife in revolutions and insurrections (that have transformed states and left millions dead) in Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Peru, India and Nepal, based on Mao’s theories of class struggle and guerrilla warfare. The story of Maoism’s travels takes in the tea plantations of north India, the sierras of the Andes, Paris’s 5th arrondissement, the fields of Tanzania, rice paddies in Cambodia and terraces in Brixton. A potent mix of party-building discipline, anti-colonial rebellion and “continuous revolution” grafted on to the secular religion of Soviet Marxism, Maoism not only unlocks the contemporary history of China, but is also a pivotal influence on global insubordination and intolerance across the last 80 years.

But beyond China, and especially in the west, the spread and disruptive importance of Mao and his ideas are only dimly sensed, if at all. They have been effaced by the end of the cold war, the apparent global victory of neoliberal capitalism, and the resurgence of religious extremism. Especially since the communist collapse in Europe and the USSR, western governments have imagined that Maoism was a historical and political phenomenon long past its sell-by date; that there was no need to engage seriously with it, because it had been left in the dust by the supposed death of ideology in 1989. A fresh look at the cold war and global politics today tells a very different story: of Maoism as one of the most significant and complicated forces of contemporary history.

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Maoism is a set of contradictory ideas that has distinguished itself from Soviet guises of Marxism in several important ways. Giving centre stage to a non‑western, anti-colonial agenda, Mao declared to radicals in developing countries that Russian-style communism should be adapted to local, national conditions. Diverging from Stalin, he told revolutionaries to take their struggle out of the cities and to fight guerrilla wars deep in the countryside. He preached the doctrine of voluntarism: that by sheer audacity of belief the Chinese – and any other people with the necessary strength of will – could transform their country. Revolutionary zeal, not weaponry, was the decisive factor. Although, like Lenin and Stalin, Mao was determined to build a militarised one-party state worshipful of its supreme leader, he also (especially in his last decade) championed an anarchic insubordination, telling the Chinese people that “it is right to rebel”. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), he deployed his own cult to mobilise millions of Chinese people – especially star-struck, indoctrinated youth – to smash party rivals whom he deemed counterrevolutionary.

Millions entered into marriages of political convenience and abandoned their children to devote themselves to a utopian experiment

Born in an era in which China was held in contempt by the international system, Mao, through the 1940s, assembled a practical and theoretical toolkit for turning a fractious, failing empire into a defiant global power. He created a language that intellectuals and peasants, men and women could understand; a disciplined army; a system of propaganda and thought control that has been described as “one of the most ambitious attempts at human manipulation in history”. He gathered around him a company of ruthless, unusually talented comrades, and his ideas elicited extraordinary levels of fervour. Millions entered into marriages of political convenience and abandoned their children to devote themselves to a utopian experiment. Many of these children in turn denounced, humiliated and – in extreme cases – killed their parents in the 1960s and 70s, in his name.

Maoism’s global impact began in the 1940s in Asia: in states on China’s borders breaking with European and Japanese empires, and in the first conflicts of the cold war – Malaya, Korea, Vietnam. Here, Mao’s anti-imperial chutzpah, veneration of asymmetric warfare and above all his obsession with airtight party-building inspired and supported ambitious rebels. The Malayan Communist party – instigators of the insurrection that the rattled British empire called the “Malayan emergency” – was led by ethnic Chinese Malays who listened to the crackling tones of Radio Peking in the jungle and wore Mao’s image on brooches. Between the 1940s and 1970s, they made medical and study pilgrimages to mainland China, where they were housed in Beijing’s top-secret International Liaison Department and enjoyed Saturday-night dances with the Politburo.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Scots Guards on patrol in Malaya, 1950. Photograph: Haywood Magee/Getty Images

Mao saw himself as leader of the world revolution – even before the founding of the People’s Republic, he had opened for business in Beijing a Comintern-style training academy for Asian revolutionaries. When Kim Il-sung’s attempt to reunify Korea under his communist regime foundered in 1950, Mao propped up the North Koreans by sending 3 million Chinese personnel (of whom at least 360,000 were killed or injured) to Kim’s rescue. After North and South Korea, and their Chinese and American backers, had fought each other to a standstill in 1953, Kim rebuilt his country substantially with China’s aid and along Maoist lines: worship of the “dear leader”, breakneck mobilisation of the North Korean population into political development campaigns, and regular waves of purges. Maoist history and ideas – the memory of Chinese sacrifice in the Korean War and the two states’ shared ideological origins – have helped preserve the PRC’s support for North Korea; without that assistance, we would not be confronted by the current threat of potential nuclear destabilisation and by harrowing human rights abuses in North Korea.

The Vietnamese communists – adversaries of the US in the hottest conflict of the cold war – were, in the words of one insider, “disciples of Mao”. As Ho Chi Minh planned and fought his rebellions against French and then US control, he relied heavily on material aid and strategic blueprints from Mao. The Maoist hymn, “The East Is Red”, became a Vietnamese anthem; Mao Zedong Thought was sworn in as “the basic theory” of Vietnamese communism. Between 1950 and 1975, China donated some $20bn in aid to North Vietnam, trained thousands of its students and cadres in China, and supplied myriad useful items: roads, bullets and uniforms, soy sauce and lard, ping-pong balls and mouth organs. Without Maoist-Chinese intervention, the North Vietnamese communists would not have been able to fight the French and then the US to exhaustion between 1945 and 1973.

But the Maoist intervention left heavy scars on Vietnam. Mao and his lieutenants made material support contingent on Ho Chi Minh importing China’s violent model of land reform in the 1950s; a conservative estimate in 2002 judged that 80% of the political punishments meted out – including as many as 30,000 executions of “bullying landowners” – were mistaken.

Cambodia suffered worse. From the 1950s, Mao and his toughest, most charming lieutenants wove a careful network of influence around the country. The CCP sponsored Pol Pot’s insurgency against the Cambodian state and were the Khmer Rouge’s main backers after they took power in 1975. When Pol Pot visited his benefactor that summer, Mao – although physically ailing from a form of motor neurone disease – was buoyed by the encounter: “We approve of you! Many of your experiences are better than ours.” Although the Khmer Rouge proved to be unruly allies, they translated into Cambodian key ingredients of Mao’s political model: radical collectivisation, a pathological suspicion of the educated, the paranoia and constant purges of the Cultural Revolution. By early 1979, around 2 million – some 20% of the population – had died unnatural deaths. The country’s current leader Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander with an appalling record of political violence, is one of the world’s longest-serving prime ministers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ieng Sary, co-founder of the Khmer Rouge, was on trial for genocide and war crimes when he died in 2013. Photograph: Documentation Centre of Cambodia/AFP/Getty Images

While the Khmer Rouge committed genocide, western Europe and North America ran their own Maoist fevers. The noisy protest culture of the late 60s passionately identified with Mao’s message to his youthful Red Guards that it was “right to rebel”. Mao badges were pinned on student lapels, Mao quotations were daubed on the walls of lecture halls. Maoist-anarchists scrambled to the top of a church in West Berlin and bombarded passersby with hundreds of Little Red Books. A 1967 issue of Lui magazine (a French version of Playboy) included a special China supplement, titled The Little Pink Book, illustrated by Mao soundbites and snaps of young women dressed – if at all – in Mao jackets and playfully assuming faux-militant Cultural Revolution poses. One young woman, naked except for a rifle, leapt out of a vast white cake, to the Maoist dictum “revolution is not a dinner party”. At least one professional militant in the Bronx read the Little Red Book to his marijuana plant to help it to grow.

Amid widespread disgust at US intervention in Vietnam, western radicals’ fellowship with Mao’s China – tireless in its rhetorical attacks on America – followed the logic of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. After the quashing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and with the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet Union no longer represented a rebellious bulwark against capitalism. The People’s Republic of China – bigger than Vietnam, more remote than Cuba, more extreme than them both – looked the best alternative. Sympathy with Mao’s China merged with outrage over the mistreatment of American “internal colonies” – black, Latin and Asian American. Impressed by Mao’s denunciations of US foreign policy and expressions of solidarity with black rights, the militant wing of the African American liberation movement channelled Mao’s ideas to challenge the white American ruling establishment. The Black Panthers sold Little Red Books to generate funds to buy their first guns.

After the European protest movement of the late 60s petered out, Cultural Revolution-inspired radicalism bled into urban terrorism in West Germany – the Red Army Faction (AKA the Baader-Meinhof group) caused 34 deaths in the 70s alone – and in Italy, where the Red Brigades committed some 14,000 acts of violence, resulting in 75 deaths, between 1970 and 2003. Both the RAF and the Red Brigades larded their declarations with Mao quotations: “imperialism and all reactionaries [are] paper tigers”; “whoever is not afraid of being drawn and quartered, can dare to pull the emperor from his horse”.

Following Mao’s death in 1976, and the PRC’s own denunciation of the Cultural Revolution as “10 years of chaos”, western enthusiasm for Mao faded. But in the developing world – above all in India and Nepal – his ideas remained powerfully appealing. There, Mao’s revolution represented a blueprint for political success apparently suited to poor, agrarian states that had suffered at the hands of colonialism. High-caste rebels seduced by China’s technicolour propaganda dream of an egalitarian utopia led Maoist insurgencies years, even decades after the chairman’s death. These leaders, paradoxically, have come from the educated classes of which Mao himself was so mistrustful. One – the privately educated brother of a Mumbai ice-cream entrepreneur – trained in London as a chartered accountant before declaring war on the Indian state.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Members of Naxalites, officially the Communist Party of India (Maoist), exercise at a temporary base in the Abujh Marh forests, Chhattisgarh, 2007. Photograph: Mustafa Quraishi/AP

India’s Maoist insurrection began with the Naxalite rebellion of 1967, one of the major regional explosions of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. While that earlier conflagration was for the most part extinguished in the early 1970s by a harsh state response, splinters of the original movement fought on. The Indian government currently claims that 20 of the country’s 28 states are affected by the Maoist insurgency, which it has called “the biggest internal security challenge facing our country”. This war owes its survival to Maoist groups’ readiness to attack some of India’s socioeconomic enormities, such as the hierarchical violence of the caste system and the racist exploitation suffered by the poorest tribal peoples. In the new millennium, the Maoists have gained further traction by linking their cause to environmental protests. After 2003, the Indian state – ambitious to increase revenues – began granting lucrative mining contracts to multinational corporations, especially in mineral-rich Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. Maoist insurgents organised locals into resisting state and corporate efforts to empty land ready for industrial development.

Maoist civil war in Nepal started at 10pm on 12 February 1996, when 36 members of the Communist party of Nepal (Maoist) rushed a police station in Rolpa, in the north-west. (Apart from a motley assortment of home-made firearms, they possessed only one rusty rifle, dating from the late 1980s.) A decade later, the Nepali Maoists had fought their way to a position of decisive political influence. Pushing back against the firepower of the Nepali police and army, their People’s Liberation Army was 10,000 strong and had wrested 80% of Nepal’s territory from state control. Their armed rebellion was the principal reason for the collapse of the monarchy and the establishment of a federal republic in Nepal after 2006. Between 2006 and 2016, two leaders of the Maoists (both, like their Indian counterparts, high-caste) served between them three terms as prime minister of Nepal and many other senior party figures held government positions. Although they did not realise their original ambition – state capture resulting in unchallenged control of the country, as achieved by the Chinese Communist party – Nepal is now the only country in the world where you can encounter self-avowed Maoists in power.

There are major aspects of the Maoist heritage that strongman Xi Jinping is determined to suppress

Both these conflicts took place through and beyond the supposed end of the cold war. The Maoist insurgencies in Nepal and India blazed years after Francis Fukuyama declared that humans had reached “the end of history” with capitalism’s definitive victory over communism. Once you write Maoism back into the global history of the 20th century, then, you start to get a very different narrative from the standard one in which communism loses the cold war in 1989. Nowhere is this storyline clearer than in China. More than a quarter of a century since communism disintegrated in Europe and then in the USSR, China’s Communist party continues – seemingly – to flourish. Under its direction, China has become a world economic and political force. The CCP – its practice and legitimacy still dominated by Mao – has with quite extraordinary success recast itself as a champion of the market economy, while remaining a secretive, Marxist-Leninist organisation. Although Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, mothballed the keynote policies of the Cultural Revolution – communes and mass-spectacle purges – Mao is still fundamental to the PRC’s political and institutional framework.

But Mao enjoys an uncomfortable legacy in contemporary China. The leaders of the CCP try to exploit Mao’s fuzzy father-of-the-nation symbolism, in order to shore up Communist party rule. Yet there are major aspects of the Maoist heritage that strongman Xi Jinping is determined to suppress: above all the bottom-up mobilisations of the Cultural Revolution that almost destroyed the party-state in the late 1960s. Xi’s China is in any case different (almost beyond recognition) from Mao’s: tied into global finance, its political equilibrium and legitimacy bound to economic performance rather than ideological purity, its media too diversified for a single official message to convince its increasingly well-travelled, ambitious (and tax-paying) citizens. Xi’s selective revival of the Maoist political repertoire sits awkwardly within a China that is so transformed from the Mao era.

And large, unstable parts of the Mao cult continue to flourish beyond party control. After the CCP dismantled urban welfare and job security in the late 1990s, laid-off workers marched in protest, brandishing portraits of Mao, whom they acclaimed as the patron saint of workers’ rights. Neo-Maoists in China angry at the inequalities generated by the market and globalisation quote Mao’s Cultural Revolution incitement to rebel against the state. The CCP has done its best to co-opt, silence and suppress such dissenting tendencies. The latest eruption to trouble the government has been student “Marxist societies” founded in China’s top universities. In 2018 – to the chant of “Long Live Chairman Mao” – their members helped organise workers’ protests against corporate exploitation; plain-clothes police quickly “disappeared” them.

Idealistic young students and hard-headed party apparatchiks in China; power-hungry dreamers and dispossessed insurgents in the developing world; anti-establishment rebels in Paris, Berkeley, Pisa, Delhi – all have felt the unsettling, border-crossing impact of Maoism. We need to bring Mao and his ideas out of the shadows, and recast Maoism as one of the major stories of the 20th and 21st centuries.

• Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell is published by Bodley Head (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.