Book Review: Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell

Abstract

In explaining the phenomenon of global interest in Mao Zedong Thought, or Maoism outside China, it is not difficult to explain why the People’s Republic of China (PRC) became a significant point of reference for activists all over the world. The de-Stalinization era of the Soviet Union and Moscow's policy of peaceful coexistence, criticized by Mao as appeasement, led Mao and his acolytes to capitalize on waves of decolonization and subsequent establishment of newly independent autonomous socialist nations. China then occupied the center of world revolution, with Mao Zedong Thought and the Chinese revolutionary experience emerging in progressive thought streams worldwide. More difficult, however, is explaining why it was Maoism specifically that provided a “vocabulary” and “syntax” for political struggle in the global 1960s and beyond.2 Undoubtedly, Maoism has operated as a major influence on many Communist insurgencies against oppressive regimes and the entrenched “cyclical phenomenon” of global capitalist exploitation of developing countries.3 But why did Mao’s thought specifically, rather than the Soviet brand of Marxism-Leninism, resonate with radical intellectuals? How and why did it impel them to engage in activism, and in extreme cases, spearhead violent protracted movements to capture state power against numerically and technologically superior forces?