Maoism: A Global History

"It’s a difficult book, I suspect, to sell. It probably is the least commercial book on the list, because it is an intellectual history of a vast and imposing subject. And as an imposing subject, not only because it’s complicated, in that the story isn’t straightforward, but also because it’s a story often simplified and turned into postcards, caricatures and pop art. Everyone cites Mao and knows Mao, knows the image of Mao, not least because of how he’s presented in in pop art. So to say, this is a vast, sprawling, global history of a man’s thoughts, and then to attack those thoughts—what I find so invigorating about this book is it attacks with intelligence. It doesn’t try and get lost in every single detail. It has a plan, it has a scheme, and it goes through each aspect of Maoism and its effect on popular culture. And, indeed, global culture and political culture. Taken together, that strikes me as an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking and I think it’s delivered with real wisdom and intelligence, and with style that you wouldn’t necessarily expect in a political theory history. Yeah, it must be. Otherwise there’s no point. It’s readable without simplifying. Because maybe one of the worst things you can say about a book with such an academic pedigree is that it’s ‘readable’, because people might think that’s code for it skipping over things and oversimplifying—but I don’t think this does that at all, actually. I think this has real intellectual heft. What I find most admirable about it is that it has a plan at the level of the sentence, so it can convey the information it wants to convey. And that’s a real trick because this is, at its broadest, a not particularly familiar story about the global impacts of Maoism. And yet on the other side of the spectrum, it’s a very overfamiliar story, because Mao is someone who has been commodified ironically and simplified and turned into slogans and images. Dealing with those two polarities is what the book does really well."

"Maoism by Julia Lovell is another towering book. It offers a rich and brilliantly researched history of an important world ideology. At least, at the end of this book, you come to realise that Maoism is a truly important world ideology. Lovell re-evaluates Maoism by showing how internationalism lay at the heart of it. The Maoist experiment wasn’t about closure, but about supporting all manner of anti-colonial, anti-imperial, nationalist liberation movements around the world. “The Maoist experiment wasn’t about closure, but about supporting all manner of anti-colonial, anti-imperial, nationalist liberation movements around the world” The book looks at how Maoism was taken up in different countries and the many regions around the world that were influenced by it. The 1968 movement in Europe and America, the political struggles in Peru, Vietnam, Cambodia, Tanzania, South Africa, India and Nepal all turned to Maoism. Very interestingly, she notes that much of this happened at a time when Russia was in the ascendancy. It was beginning to open up a bit more under Khrushchev. But it was not seen—by anti-capitalist and liberation movements around the world—as the appropriate state system or political philosophy to pursue. Instead of Marxism, they turned to Maoism. The book gives us all the details of the individuals, the leaders of those countries, who were enchanted by Mao and Maoism. Lovell writes about their travels to China and veneration of Mao. Many of them were bowled over after they’d met Mao. She also writes about the support that the Chinese gave—financial, engineering, sometimes military—to all these movements. The book is of course honest about the oppression that followed from Maosim both in China and abroad—like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Sendero Luminoso in Peru. But the book is equally true to the passion for Mao and Maoism felt within many anti-colonial struggles around the world. It’s all too easy to caricature it today, but it explains a quest for change in China and abroad. Lovell provides an astounding and close-up portrayal of a protagonist and a political ideology that changed the world and shaped China’s internationalism. If you scan the world after the post-war period and especially after the 1960s, you have to marvel at how influential Maoism was. Yes, and when I was finishing my ‘O’ levels in an East London School in 1971, The Little Red Book was everywhere. It was quite extraordinary. In the book, Lovell does talk about Mugabe and ZANU-PF. The ties were very strong. There was a fervent belief in the values of Maoism, the ideas of continual revolution, of maintaining constant vigilance, of enacting a cultural revolution. It was about not going down the industrial pathway in the way that Russia had done, but introducing a form of rural socialism. It was also very avidly taken up through Ujamaa in Tanzania. These ideas were underpinned by a huge amount of moral and material support from China and that explains quite a lot. The book is 600 pages, but you’re compelled to read all of them. What Lovell argues is that there was never that much closure. During the Maoist period, the Chinese state purported to be relatively closed off, but it wasn’t—that’s what she’s saying. She also argues that after Mao, internationalism continued, but it changed as well. In the book, she traces connections between Maoist internationalism and China’s current internationalism under Xi Jinping in a very subtle and interesting way. He is closer to Mao than his predecessors have been, and there is a revitalisation of Mao and Maoism going on in China. But it’s a new form of internationalism which is much more about helping developing countries build their infrastructure and providing expertise—rather than fomenting Maoist struggle and anti-capitalist revolution. But the line of reasoning is that what we see today is part of an old internationalist story. It does. I was in China last summer and he’s still there on full show."

"This is a book by Julia Lovell, who is a brilliant historian of China and has written a number of excellent books. This is not a history of China as such, it’s a look at Maoism as a phenomenon. Maoism has been picked up all kinds of people around the world—by terror groups in South America, by European students and American students in the 1960s. It’s even there in the films of Jean-Luc Godard. It’s had its moment. But now Maoism is resurgent because it remains the ideological core of the Chinese Communist Party. Although China has abandoned the extreme stuff, like the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and embraced capitalism, it’s very much an authoritarian, command kind of capitalism and Mao remains in the background. Or even in the foreground: there’s a huge portrait of Mao that remains, to this day, in Tiananmen Square, at the very heart of China’s enormous power, and his body still lies in state there. It’s not neglected, it’s not seen as some kind of historical by-product in the way Lenin is in Moscow. Mao remains this great figure and there’s talk of his ‘invisible hand.’ The means to power in China remains Mao’s Communist party, however much it has changed. The judiciary is highly politicized and it’s still a one-party state. China is still viciously authoritarian and we’ve seen—with what’s happening in Hong Kong and with the suppression of the Uyghur people—the full nature of the horrors of modern China. In this, Xi Jinping has been really important. He invokes Mao a lot and uses catchphrases like the ‘the mass line’ or ‘rectification’—which encourage criticisms of officials from the bottom. These awful words are very Maoist ideas and are about keeping key party members in line. Meanwhile Xi and his Central Committee have increased their power. They got rid of the constitutional restrictions of 1982 that limited the president to two terms as in the United States. And Xi Jinping now, just like Mao, can rule for as long as he wants to. “It’s an extraordinary story, one of the greatest stories in all of human history.” I think a lot of people in the West really misread what was happening in China. Julia Lovell plainly was not one of them, because she had intimate knowledge of China. But a lot of commentators got it wrong. They presumed that China was going to become a commercial, capitalist enterprise that would slowly break with its past and westernize (whatever that means). Nothing like that has happened. Maoism remains absolutely central to this incredible organization, the Chinese Communist Party, which soon will overtake the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in terms of years of holding onto power. And there’s no sign it’s losing its grip. One gets the sense that the West needs the cheap goods that China produces and one does wonder if the Soviet Union missed a trick, that had it produced a lot of cheap tat, it might have survived rather longer. This book is a wake-up call as to the true nature of China. Weirdly enough, one of the people who does seem to understand China is Donald Trump. He’s wrong on just about everything else, but he may be right—rather like Churchill in the Second World War was wrong about almost everything but got one political question right—about China and how to oppose it. This is a hugely significant book and a real eye-opener to anyone—and that’s most of us, let’s face it—who has not really grasped the true nature of China in the 21st century. Yes, and that’s without thinking of China’s more recent moves into Africa. It’s a very, very good book and it’s got real authority to it. Julia Lovell really knows her subject, she knows the language, and she’s not afraid to reveal the Chinese state in its true nature. To a certain extent, it is. The mid-17th century has been invoked quite a bit of late, the constitutional aspects of it, because of issues like prorogation in the Brexit debate and the role of the judiciary, the nature of the constituent countries in the UK and the relationship with Europe, as well as our global presence. All these are resonant of the 17th century. But the reason I wrote the book—which is called Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate —is because the period has relatively little purchase with the wider public unlike, say, the Tudors or the Victorians or the Normans. That situation is particularly puzzling because there has been so much great scholarship on this period over the last two decades. There are lots of brilliant scholars, but they’re relatively unknown to the wider population. So I wanted to write a book as a window onto this world and the most neglected of all the periods of the 17th century, which is the Protectorate. The book is about the period from the execution of Charles I to the Restoration of his son, Charles II. I wrote it so that people would be tempted to read the really great historians of the period, because it’s a world that has been neglected for too long. There are a lot of things people don’t know about this period. You see the nascent British Empire, you see the world’s first written constitution, you see a commoner being offered the Crown. You see Britain and Ireland united for the first time. There are all kinds of things that go on in this period that people don’t know, so I’m hoping the book will at least be a corrective in that way. It does have a slightly strange reputation. The people involved in it, the Cromwells, smoked and drank and danced and liked music. They also liked art. As I said earlier, in relation to Roderick Floud’s history of the English garden, they were even keen gardeners. They were aesthetes, but they were a small group of people who were slightly isolated from the wider English public and I think that’s ultimately where they went wrong. The innovations and their attempts to heal and settle the nation ultimately failed because Cromwell’s power rested on the army. It was never transferred to the people and, in the end, the people opted for the ancient constitution and the old ways. But the monarchy could never be the same again and it never was. There was no absolute monarchy again in Britain after Charles I."