Review | Maoism: A Global History – how China exported revolution around the world
- From the Khmer Rouge to the Red Brigades, the Malayan Emergency, Shining Path, and Nepal, Mao-era China inspired insurgencies across the globe
- In an engaging, heavily researched and well crafted book, full of intriguing anecdotes, China scholar Julia Lovell gauges Maoism’s influence
Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell, pub. Bodley Head
In the 1960s, Beijing’s Friendship Hotel, in the leafy western suburbs between the city and its universities, became a hub for drifting revolutionaries as China sought to position itself as the global headquarters of rebellion and insurgency.
Rooms were filled with left-wing zealots, or those simply enjoying an all-expenses-paid trip to China. “There were melancholic Chilean bolero singers, Colombian actors, Venezuelan armchair guerrilleros, and the doctrinaire British Maoist Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley, who allegedly danced in jubilation around the burning ruins of the British legation when it was torched by Red Guards in 1967,” writes Julia Lovell in Maoism: A Global History, which focuses on the global reach of Maoist thought and action.
Other visitors to Beijing during those years included Pol Pot, the leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge; Dipa Nusantara Aidit, the leader of Indonesia’s Communist Party; and Abimael Guzmán, the leader of Peru’s Shining Path. This trio would have a far more pronounced impact.
Maoism not only unlocks the contemporary history of China, but is also a key influence on global insurgency, insubordination and intolerance across the last 80 years
Maoism may have its roots in China, but Mao Zedong’s theories of class struggle and guerilla warfare spread around the globe in the second half of the 20th century, igniting revolutions and armed uprisings in places as diverse as India, Peru, Malaysia and western Europe. And China actively exported Maoism, throwing considerable resources, in terms of money, training and manpower, into other countries’ armed struggles.
