Mao’s Global Legacy of Revolution and Bloodshed

The founder of Chinese communism is resurgent in Xi Jinping’s China, but in places like India and Peru, Maoism never went away

By Julia Lovell. Excerpts:

"Mao’s ideology has had a long, bloody global afterlife in revolutions and insurrections that have transformed states, upended regions and left tens of millions dead.

Maoism’s global impact took off in the late 1940s in Malaya, Korea and Vietnam, states on China’s borders that were breaking away from European and Japanese rule in the first hot conflicts of the Cold War. There, Mao’s anti-imperial rhetoric, veneration of guerrilla warfare and blueprint for tightly controlled party-building galvanized ambitious communist rebels. In Vietnam, Maoism helped to build an army that faced down first France and then the U.S.

A Cambodian boy stands in front of a platform covered with human skulls at a newly discovered killing field in a village 15 miles south of Phnom Penh, July 10, 1995. The mass grave contains the remains of about 2,000 victims of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, who claimed the lives of some two million people during their bloody 1975-79 reign.

In Cambodia, the Chinese Communist Party was the main source of inspiration and support for the Khmer Rouge before and after they took power in the spring of 1975. The Khmer Rouge were unruly diplomatic allies, but they adopted many ingredients of Mao’s political model: radical collectivization, a pathological suspicion of the educated, and the paranoia and constant purges of the Cultural Revolution. By the time Khmer Rouge rule ended in 1979, around two million people had died unnatural deaths.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao declared that it was ‘right to rebel.’

During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Mao’s last great campaign for ideological supremacy in China, he told the Chinese people (and anyone else in the world who was listening) that it was “right to rebel.” Tens of millions of Chinese, indoctrinated by the cult of the chairman, mobilized to smash their own political and cultural authorities.

Through the late 1960s, noisy protest cultures in Western Europe and the U.S. passionately identified with this anarchic message of insubordination. Students pinned Mao badges onto their lapels and daubed quotations from his “Little Red Book” on the walls of their lecture halls. Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver called Mao “the baddest [expletive] on planet earth.”

In Western Europe, far-left students and intellectuals misread and embraced Maoism as playful disobedience, even as the ideology helped to trigger murderous terrorism among its more extreme disciples. In West Germany, the Red Army Faction caused 34 deaths in the 1970s and ’80s; across the same period in Italy, the Red Brigades committed some 14,000 acts of violence, resulting in an estimated 75 deaths.

After Mao’s death in 1976, his heirs in Beijing denounced the Cultural Revolution as “10 years of chaos,” and Western infatuation with him waned. But in the developing world—above all in South Asia—his ideas continued to fuel insurgencies. There, many saw Mao’s revolution as a political success story, a model for poor, agrarian states that had suffered under colonialism. South Asian elites seduced by the dream of an egalitarian utopia led Maoist wars for decades after the chairman’s death."

"In Peru, Mao’s ideas inspired a tiny band of underequipped, far-left ideologues—the Shining Path—to come close to toppling the state. By the early 1990s, with inflation running at more than 12,000%, the country found itself in the grip of a millenarian cult of Mao. A provincial philosophy professor named Abimael Guzmán was deified as Peru’s “Chairman Gonzalo” and the “greatest living Marxist-Leninist”—until he was captured by police in 1992. The civil war he caused killed some 69,000 people and swelled the country’s cities with at least 600,000 refugees from Maoist and state violence."