Maoism

This article is intended to rethink a symbiotic but otherwise inadequately attended relationship between postcolonial studies and Chinese academia at a time when the rise of China evokes epistemic, ontological and empirical challenges for critical reflection. Above all, I argue that China is situated in her postcolonial conditions in such a way that these conditions largely define China's multi‐faceted positioning as colonial agent, (semi‐)colonial victim, recipient of colonialist ideology, overthrower of that ideology and its accompanying world‐system, and contender for the “top place” within such a world‐system. Postcolonial theory hence becomes relevant and productive in terms of its potential to problematize various puzzles, contradictions and tensions during China's rise like widespread disregard of basic civic values, political partisanship in scholarship, aggravation of the East‐West divide and rising Chinese exceptionalism. Additionally, however, this article also pinpoints the need to transform and reshape the oftentimes Eurocentric inclination in postcolonial studies through an incorporation of the revolutionary and post‐revolutionary experiences in China and elsewhere. Doing so therefore calls for a post‐revolutionary paradigm as proposed by Wang Hui, among others. I thus advocate cross‐fertilization, rather than mutual exclusion, not only be-tween the postcolonial and post‐revolutionary paradigms but also between postcolonial studies and Chinese scholarship/academia.

The first objective of this article is to provide conceptual clarity regarding the term ‘support’ in the context of insurgent campaigns. While it is commonly claimed that insurgent and counterinsurgent forces compete for the support of the populace, there is often ambiguity as to whether this refers to a voluntary preference for a group of armed actors (attitudinal support), or a set of actions that provide direct benefits to one of these groups (behavioural support or collaboration). Furthermore, while a number of academics and practitioners focus upon the former on the assumption that it translates into the latter with sufficient consistency (Lawrence ‘of Arabia’, Mao, etc.), others maintain a contradictory stance (Kilcullen, Kalyvas, etc.). The findings from research undertaken into the 1996–2006 conflict in Nepal suggest a more complex reality in that certain forms of collaboration (e.g. provisions of information) seemingly necessitate supportive attitudes to a greater extent than others (e.g. supplies of food). The second objective is to evaluate the various approaches used by the Maoist insurgents to generate these distinct forms of support. While their ideology largely failed to resonate with the populace, attitudinal support was obtained through various ‘popular appeals’, including land reform, an opposition to an increasingly repressive monarchy, and campaigns to empower certain marginalised sectors of society. In contrast, the development initiatives of the Maoists, and their nationalist rhetoric in opposition to US and Indian influence were substantially less effective. Each of these initiatives were undertaken to obtain collaboration via attitudinal support, but the former was also generated directly through the use of coercion against specific non-combatants.

The Maoist regime has conventionally been understood as a totalitarian apparatus hostile to the individual. Yet the mass dictatorship also saw the proliferation of guidebooks on how to write a diary. This article is a pioneering exploration of these didactic texts, situating them within a longer Chinese tradition of popular subjectivation. A close reading of the guidebooks in light of their Republican predecessors suggests that the regime simultaneously anticipated the individual's role as revolutionary agent of change and viewed it with trepidation. Prescribing paradigmatic frameworks for constructing socialist subjectivities, the manuals propagated journal-keeping as a political routine by which to shape the writer's life and selfhood. Central in these teachings was the desire to mobilize yet monopolize the individual's conscious agency. At once empowering and constraining, the "how-to" books rendered creative self-reflexivity indispensable-albeit dangerous-to the Maoist agenda, revealing a deep-seated anxiety of the state about socialism's modern legacies.

"""This essay addresses the ‘demand for humanism, with a nod towards Asia’ (Spivak) within current theory and global intellectual political culture. I argue that using humanism as a way to understand China (a habit inside and especially outside the PRC) keeps us within the orientalist tradition. It is also at odds with China's attempted/failed/ongoing revolution and trajectory since 1949, which was a theoretical anti-humanism in then mold of Lenin, Mao, Fanon, and Cesaire.

I offer an interdisciplinary analysis of area studies' and other representations of China, especially in regard to Tiananmen and the Cultural Revolution. I then contrast this with current intellectual debates in China as well as with an older Maoist or revolutionary discourse. The resurgence or ‘demand’ for humanism is rendered as part of an intellectual and political backlash or de-politicization.


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Keywords:

Orientalism; China; humanism; Maoism; theory; de-politicization; post-structuralism; American studies; academe; backlash;

Note:

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Paperback available via Routledge and elsewhere: https://www.routledge.com/China-and-Orientalism-Western-Knowledge-Production-and-the-PRC/Vukovich/p/book/9780415592208

You can see some reviews in section listed on left. https://hku-hk.academia.edu/DanielVukovich/reviews-of-%22China-and-Orientalism%22-(selected)

'It is a pointed and spirited book that incorporates a remarkably transdisciplinary range of approaches and texts.'

Carla Nappi, East Asian Studies, July 2012

'A book of startling honesty and conviction. Writing from Hong Kong but not as a Sinologist, Vukovich presents an erudite case for re-thinking the lessons of Tiananmen, reassessing the legacy of Mao, and questioning the idea that China needs to be saved by becoming like "us." As a revisionist reading of post-war China, the book brims with antinomian vignettes on everything from Chinese cinema to the novels of De Lillo and the philosophy of Arendt.Vukovich blasts the new Orientalism that seeks to free China from its supposedly Borg-like past. A rare voice, and a welcome one.'

Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, USA

'This is a unique critique of orientalism in contemporary Chinese studies. Daniel Vukovich argues that there is a new form of orientalism, which does not project China as an ‘'other'’ as many traditional Sinologists did, but emphasizes ‘'sameness'’ or general equivalence of China to the US-West. From this basic observation, the author highlights the cultural logic of capitalism in the new Orientalistic interpretation of China. A sharp, inspiring and timely book!'

Wang Hui, Tsinghua University, author of The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, China's New Order, and The Politics of Imagining Asia.

‘Vukovich's tenacious critique of the China Studies field is by itself worth the price of admission. But the bonus for readers is his remarkable history of the complexities of post-liberation China. As timely as could be, and guaranteed to spark debate.’

Andrew Ross, New York University, USA, author of Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade; Lessons from Shanghai.

‘An important intervention into the battle for China's past and present . At its heart is a wide ranging, strong critique of the bulk of China studies scholarship on the P.R.C since the 1980s. But it also draws extensively on revisionist, new leftist, and other Chinese scholarship to argue for what is being erased by Sinological-orientalism." Its framing of this knowledge as orientalist and 'post-colonial' should cause a sensation. It may even finally trigger a sorely needed debate in the field.’

Mobo Gao, Chair of Chinese Studies & Director, Confucius Institute, University of Adelaide, Australia.

'This slim, sharply-argued volume should be a mandatory reading for all of us who work on post-1949 China. China and Orientalism is a refreshing and often eye-opening analysis on how knowledge of the object called "China" has been constructed in the West since the end of Maoism…China and Orientalism is an essential contribution to our self-awareness as producers of knowledge and offers a welcome and indispensable criticism of the field.'

Fabio Lanza, The China Beat, Twentieth Century China.


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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Preface and Acknowledgments


Chapter 1: Sinological-Orientalism Now: ‘China’ and the New  Era


Chapter 2: Uncivil Society, or, Orientalism and Tiananmen,  1989


Chapter 3: Maoist Discourse and Its Demonization


Chapter 4: Accounting for the Great Leap Forward: Missing  Millions, Excess Deaths, And A Crisis of  Chinese Proportions

Chapter 5: DeLillo, Warhol, and the Specter of Mao:  The ‘Sinologization’ of Global Thought


Chapter 6: Screening Sinology: On the Western Study of  Chinese Film


Chapter 7: The China-Reference And Orientalism in the  Global Economy


Bibliography & Index

Across the globe, we are seeing a popular shift of appeal from a liberal-humanitarian imagination of the world, or even a communist-socialist ideal, to one that is more conservative and often called 'right-wing populist'. In the ethnographic context analysed here, a utopian movement for revolutionary social change, led by Marx-Lenin and Mao-inspired Naxalite guerrillas, that once had a wide appeal in parts of India, is superseded by a more conservative utopian imagination of Hindutva forces. In exploring the Indian Maoist case, I suggest that dystopia is embedded within utopia. If those engaged in utopian social transformation seek to challenge prevailing ideology to transform people's actions, it is equally possible for their utopian imagination to retreat into ritual that not only bears little relevance to most people but may also be potentially harmful and pave the way for other ideals to become prevalent. In analysing this Indian case, the paper suggests that we develop an anthropological theory of praxis, one that deals not only with how imaginations to change the world become realised in practice, but also accounts for multiple competing imaginations and how and why some become prevalent over others in daily life, in a dialectical process of reflection and action.

This article critically assesses the recent return of “communism” in contemporary political theory. The principal focus is Alain Badiou’s formulation of the “idea of communism” and its “sequences,” which are approached here in relation to the body of work collected in Douzinas and Žižek’s The Idea of Communism. Critical of Badiou, the article argues that communism should be understood as a “real movement” immanent to the mutating limits of capital, and not as a subjective “truth procedure.” In taking the latter route, Badiou not only produces a faulty philosophy of communism but also misdiagnoses its historical record, allowing Lenin and Mao, the spectacle of revolution, to stand as its genuine expressions. In this, Badiou contributes to the contemporary nostalgic image of a “real communism” that in practice was nothing of the sort.

Throughout the “long Sixties” a diverse array of Australian activists traveled beyond what was popularly known as the “bamboo curtain” into the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This paper will argue that they found not the monolithic “red menace” presented by media and government, but an often contradictory set of images mediated by their own political agendas and the changing nature of Chinese politics. More than useful idiots, these radicals took important political lessons from their Chinese counterparts, engaging in a largely unacknowledged process of transnational exchange. Through investigating three key groups of antipodean travelers – Communist Party members in the 1950s, student and worker revolutionaries in the late 1960s, and Indigenous activists in the early 1970s – it is possible to understand how not only their diverse political agendas, but also the changing realities of Chinese domestic and foreign politics, impacted on the lessons they took home. Drawing on memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles as well as archival sources, a light will be shone on this period of political and cultural exchange across seemingly impassable Cold War boundaries, illuminating Australia’s often forgotten involvement in the Sixties experience.

This essay defines Maoism as an experiment in intimate governance and an attempt—albeit a failed one—to dismantle the divide between political leaders and ordinary people. The Communist Party’s claim to intimacy with the people needs to be constantly reenacted in the relationship between party cadres and ordinary citizens––a cadre’s gestures, habits, and attitudes are magnified and scrutinized under the lens of party legitimacy. The special privileges (tequan, 特权) of party leaders are what I call metrics of exceptionality, which separate the party from the people. The promise to govern on the basis of intimacy with the people did not eradicate ruling class entitlements and arrogance but delegitimized them and opened them up to public scrutiny. Although the process of eradicating privileges was always several steps behind their elaboration and intensification, the former was a normative goal that shaped how ordinary citizens perceived and interacted with party cadres. This dual movement in opposing directions still constitutes the fundamental contradiction of China’s political system as seen from within. This essay revisits and examines crucial historical junctures in the People’s Republic of China as framed by popular contestations of special privilege. The fact that in the post-Mao period, party leaders still speak in the language of intimacy, proximity, and distance indicates the aesthetic importance of this relationship in party ideology, despite public complaints regarding its absence. Even when intimacy as a political mode of communication is able to communicate nothing but its own failure, the proximity between the party and the people takes center stage as the aesthetic foundation of party legitimacy.

Adivasis are typically viewed by scholars, activists, and policymakers alike as primitive subjects trapped within modern state imaginaries. Adivasi politics, therefore, is understood vis-a-vis the dramaturgy of postcolonial tragedy. Such an understanding, I argue, denies any meaningful agency to adivasis, and prevents an exploration of the rich, multi-layered performances of resistance through which adivasi subject-formation is successfully negotiated in postcolonial India. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Jharkhand, this paper probes into the myriad tropes and strategies by which the modes, mechanisms, and meanings of modern state power have been reworked and resisted in two apparently opposed moments of resistance: the "peaceful" Koel-Karo anti-dam movement of the 1980s and the ongoing "violent" Maoist movement. In doing so, I show how the aesthetics of power are tied inextricably, albeit ironically, to the ethics of subaltern resistance, each acting and reacting upon the other to define the potentialities of and proscriptions on political expression in the margins of the postcolony.

Capturing people, sometimes by taking relatives hostage, is a common practice for purposes of conscription and law enforcement in the Wa State of Myanmar. Given the unreliability of the local census, as well as the relative weakness of civil government, and registration in a de facto state governed by an insurgent army, the personal politics of capture provides a functional equivalent to state legibility. This personal politics operates based on the reorganization of personal networks between representatives of the military state and ordinary people: first, circles of acquaintances within the military state that provide access to local knowledge, and second, relationships of patronage formed on the basis of those new acquaintanceships, as well as connections of kinship and co-residence. Conscription by capture, however, also requires anonymity; that is, the passive non-recognition of mutuality with strangers and the active refusal of mutuality with acquaintances. This article describes the historical emergence of networks of acquaintances and relationships of patronage as a combination of Maoist state-building and local institutions of war capture and adoption. It demonstrates how conscription by capture relies on relationships of acquaintances and non-recognition, as well as on patronage and the refusal of mutuality. The politics of conscription by capture are contrasted with conscription in imperial states and contemporary nation-states.

What does 'unfree labour' mean in a post-revolutionary context? Based on an ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between 2008 and 2009 in the far-western lowlands of Nepal, this article argues that the brick kiln owners on the Nepal–India border continued their attempts to bind labour by handing out advances and delaying payments, despite the fact that the state had prohibited all forms of bonded labour under the Bonded Labour Abolition Act of 2001. However, the employers and the workers accepted this system of unfree labour only as long as it remained within certain boundaries. I conclude by suggesting that the Maoist Revolution should be judged as a partial revolution: although it addressed some inequalities, it neglected others due to an ideologically narrow framing of the meaning of unfree labour.

This article examines the response of East and West Germany to the ‘Bandung moment’ of the mid-1950s and early 1960s. It focuses on the efforts of students from the so-called ‘Afro-Asian’ world to bring non-aligned politics into the two Germanies. It looks, in par- ticular, at the case of the Algerian war of independence, which forced both republics to reconcile their anti-colonial rhetoric with reality, as well as at the attempts of foreign stu- dents to formulate political geographies that cut across the Cold War mental map of mutually exclusive, binary camps. In tracing the movement of Afro-Asian students into and across the borders of divided Germany, the article concludes that the two republics used remarkably similar strategies to manage the political speech and activism of its foreign residents in spite of their differing political worldviews. In response to demands of actors from the global South, both the liberal-capitalist West Germany and the state- socialist East Germany sought to create spaces of supervised freedom that would contain and, if necessary, suppress political speech that could compromise official interests.

Abstract
Like other “regional” cinemas of southern India, Telugu cinema too has grown on the strength of its
intimate linkages with both language politics and the linguistic state. In the more recent past, the relatively
stable, if contentious, equilibrium between cinema, the linguistic state, and its official language was
disrupted by a political movement demanding the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, which coincided with
the proliferation of post-celluloid forms and modes of engagement with the moving image. This movement
foregrounds the importance of region—understood as territory—as the site for nurturing, but
more importantly producing, “cultural” differences among speakers of a single language. Telugu cinema
came to be imbricated with a political mobilization engaged in, and driven by, the production of cultural
difference, while the Telugu film industry as a whole came under sustained attack by activists and politicians
supporting bifurcation for prejudicial and stereotypical representations of Telangana. The article
focuses on a curious aspect of the movement for a separate Telangana state: the hypervisibility of communist
and radical left propaganda forms, to examine how a minor film genre became a resource for the
production of a territorially bound political community that reinforced the cultural logic of the linguistic
state even as Andhra Pradesh, which was once ruled by a film star-turned-politician, was bifurcated.

"Mao Zedong envisioned a great struggle to “wreak havoc under the heaven” when he launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966. But as radicalized Chinese youth rose up against Party officials, events quickly slipped from the government’s grasp, and rebellion took on a life of its own. Turmoil became a reality in a way the Great Leader had not foreseen. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins recaptures these formative moments from the perspective of the disenfranchised and disobedient rebels Mao unleashed and later betrayed.

The Cultural Revolution began as a “revolution from above,” and Mao had only a tenuous relationship with the Red Guard students and workers who responded to his call. Yet it was these young rebels at the grassroots who advanced the Cultural Revolution’s more radical possibilities, Yiching Wu argues, and who not only acted for themselves but also transgressed Maoism by critically reflecting on broader issues concerning Chinese socialism. As China’s state machinery broke down and the institutional foundations of the PRC were threatened, Mao resolved to suppress the crisis. Leaving out in the cold the very activists who had taken its transformative promise seriously, the Cultural Revolution devoured its children and exhausted its political energy.

The mass demobilizations of 1968–69, Wu shows, were the starting point of a series of crisis-coping maneuvers to contain and neutralize dissent, producing immense changes in Chinese society a decade later."

This article examines the phenomenon of Cambodian intellectual curiosity about China through the social experiences of Phouk Chhay, a prominent leftist activistcritic and Pol Pot's one-time secretary. Amid Phnom Penh's urban radical culture, Phouk transformed from rural student to Communist guerrilla. He associated with Communists, formed pro-China student associations, and through his networks, went on trips that left lasting impressions. This study draws from issues of the Cambodian-Chinese newspaper Mianhua ribao (Sino-Khmer Daily) and several forced confessions to tell a story of becoming that examines community and network in charting the course of 'China-curiosity' as intertwined with Phouk's life trajectory. Bae mit mien chumhar padevoat, mit, thvoe avey ka kaet dae (If you have a revolutionary position, comrade, you can do anything) Communist Party of Kampuchea slogan

This article fills a gap in existing research on the Maoist ‘People’s War’ (1996-2006) in Nepal by considering the implications of the establishment of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) cantonment for those living close by. This article complements the growing literature on the ’People’s War’ and the implications of the war for everyday lives in Nepal (Hutt 2004, Karki 2003, Lawoti and Pahari 2010, Manandhar and Seddon 2010, Pettigrew 2012 and 2013, Pettigrew and Adhikari 2009, Thapa 2003). Furthermore, while there has been limited research undertaken in and on the PLA cantonments (cf. Ogura 2010), none to date has specifically focused on the implications of living next to one.

"Opposing the neoliberal rhetoric of a shining middle-class India, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) has, since 2004, called for a New Democratic Revolution. Indian Maoists dismiss parliamentary democracy as a sham insofar as it fails to address the concerns and aspirations of the majority of its citizens, nearly four-fifths of whom live below two dollars a day. In their party programme, Maoists characterize the postcolonial Indian state as ‘reactionary’ and ‘autocratic’ and seek a ‘worker-peasant alliance’ to overthrow ‘imperialism, feudalism and comprador bureaucratic capitalism’ via an armed revolutionary struggle. The CPI (Maoist) politburo, which constitutes its ideological leadership, is thus supported by an underground People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The party’s long-term objective is to establish a ‘people’s democratic state under the leadership of the proletariat’ that will ‘guarantee real democracy for the vast majority of people while exercising dictatorship over a tiny minority of exploiters’.

The CPI (Maoist) is active mostly in eastern and central India, where human development levels rank among the lowest in the world, forest cover and rugged terrain facilitate guerrilla tactics and protracted low-intensity insurgency, and tribal and lower caste groups are preponderant. According to the Indian prime minister, Maoist rebels pose the greatest internal security threat to India since independence. In reality, however, Maoist cadres are estimated to be anywhere between 10,000 and 40,000 in a country of nearly 1.2 billion people, though this number does not include sympathizers and non-combatants. These thinly-spread cadres are concentrated chiefly in what journalists, policymakers, and scholars call the Red Corridor, running from the Nepalese border through the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, and Andhra Pradesh. In these areas, regular elections are held, state and non-governmental organizations routinely participate in rural development, and state police and forest officials coexist with armed rebels and their rural supporters. Since 2005-06, the state has deployed paramilitaries to supplement state police forces in combating Maoist guerillas, which has intensified state-sponsored violence and led to widespread human rights abuses, yet it has been incapable of establishing anything akin to a monopoly of legitimate violence. Shared sovereignty is thus the norm, not the exception, as in other insurgent zones in India such as Kashmir and the northeastern frontier. This state of affairs also suggests that the everyday realities of Indian Maoism are somewhat different from its ideological self-image as a vanguardist revolutionary movement."

This article examines the challenge of Chinese communism in East Germany in the 1960s. It shows how the Sino–Soviet Split and the Chinese Cultural Revolution endan- gered the public transcripts of East German state socialism by undermining its organiz- ing metaphors and principles. Chinese cadres used their East Berlin embassy as a stage, showcase and megaphone for their dissenting vision of communism throughout the decade, winning some support from elderly communists, young anti-authoritarians and students from the Global South. Studying the East German campaign against what was known as ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ sheds light on the transnational traffic of actors and ideas within the Second World in the turbulent decade of the 1960s. The official and vernacular response to the Maoist challenge suggests that East German ideology was constituted by a double demarcation in the 1960s, against Western social democracy and capitalism to its right and Chinese communism to its left.

For the last twenty years, the Left has appeared to lack any alternative to the existing social and economic order. In recent years, communist movements have only existed as serious forces in a few countries, for example India and Nepal, where once they were worldwide phenomena.

Even the financial crash and world recession of the last two years have done little to revive the fortunes of the Left. There seems to be no coherent force to oppose the existing “free” market world order. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, what remains of the Left is
bogged down in ideological confusion. The collapse of the state-owned economies of the Eastern Bloc appears to have destroyed the practical basis for any alternative to capitalism.

In the immediate post-war era, things looked rather different. To begin with,the socialist nations were apparently successful, at least in economic terms. However, their economies subsequently stagnated and eventually made a transition to economies organised on a “free” market basis.
This article will examine the claim that this reversal happened because of some underlying flaw in the socialist economic system. In this article we will analyse what actually happened, mainly using the example of the Soviet economy. It will be shown that the basis of this economy changed radically after the death of Stalin in 1953. In short, within the span of a few years, a dynamic, socialist system was replaced with a stagnant capitalist system. It was this capitalist system that suffered
slow-down and final dissolution in 1991.

According to a major tendency in Marxism, the leaders who came after Stalin were revisionists. This tendency holds that these leaders wished to revise Marxism by mixing it with capitalist ideology. The economic analysis given below provides evidence to support the anti-revisionist line.

To put it another way, the form of the Soviet system may have remained
socialist, after 1953, in the sense that there was state-ownership and the semblance of central allocation of the means of production. However, changes introduced following Stalin’s death meant that the means of production became commodities.

After 1953, what was being “planned” was in fact capitalist commodity production.

Therefore in essence the system after 1953 was capitalist, not socialist.
We will find that, after 1953, the means of production in the Soviet Union
were sold at their prices of production, like capitalist commodities. This was in opposition to Stalin’s line. Stalin was clear that the means of production should not be regarded as capitalist commodities. Stalin stated that the means of production should be distributed according to decisions made in the course of economic planning and they should be sold at subsidised prices to facilitate this. Consumer goods, unlike
means of production, were sold as commodities in the Soviet Union, prior to 1953, but Stalin understood the importance of this practice being brought to an end as socialism developed. Soviet leaders after Stalin, however, changed this system as they favoured the distribution of the means of production among the various branches of the economy by means of semi-spontaneous market forces. In effect, capitalist profit
criteria rather than central planning decisions were to determine the way in which the Soviet economy developed. Rather than struggling to restrict commodity production, the new leaders of the Soviet Union deliberately expanded it to the entire economy.

These leaders wanted to create a market socialist system where state owned enterprises would behave just like capitalist enterprises.
However, what emerged was a dysfunctional hybrid system, neither effectively planned from the center nor regulated by economic competition. Subsidies for purchasing new means of production had been used to facilitate the planned introduction of innovation up to
1953. Once this system of planning and subsidies was swept away, the incentive to innovate was largely eliminated, as economic competition did not exist to provide an alternative system of incentives. Progressive economic stagnation set in and there was the rapid growth of rent-seeking behaviour (seeking rewards unrelated to effort or
quality of work) by enterprise managers and industrial ministries.

En octubre de 1949 y después de largas décadas de lucha, el pueblo chino liderado por el Partido Comunista Chino consiguió el triunfo que abrió paso a la revolución de Nueva Democracia y al socialismo. Mao Tse Tung era el principal dirigente de aquel Partido en el momento de la toma del poder.
Con el correr de los años la revolución fue ganando la simpatía de otros países del Tercer Mundo. No obstante, el maoísmo sólo emergió como corriente diferenciada dentro del Movimiento Comunista Internacional en la década de 1960 y como consecuencia de varios años de enfrentamiento con el Partido Comunista de la Unión Soviética, que lideraba el bloque socialista en el contexto de la Guerra Fría.
Frente a la rápida asimilación que suele haber entre la Revolución China y el maoísmo, el presente trabajo propone una interpretación que, sin dejar de reconocer que se trata de aspectos íntimamente vinculados, se propone especificar y explicar el momento de la emergencia del maoísmo como corriente política diferenciada dentro del Movimiento Comunista Internacional.
Trabajaremos con los documentos del "debate chino-soviético" y las Conferencias Mundiales de 1957 y 1960, ofreciendo un análisis y periodización como propuesta para su estudio.

At the beginning of the 1980s, the idea of armed jihād against Israel was not only promoted by renegades from the Muslim Brothers in the Gaza strip, but also by former Maoists of Fatah in Lebanon. After the pull-out of most PLO-fighters from Beirut in 1982, a group around its spokesman Munīr Shafīq formed the Brigades of Islamic Jihad which were subsequently responsible for attacks in Israel. In a posthumously published booklet, two activists explained their reasons for their turn from Maoism to Islamism. The following article exposes the activists' trajectory and the stages of their ideological and religious conversion. According to their own narration, the former Maoists at first came to the conviction that Islam was a factor for mass mobilization and then individually adopted Islam to become practising Muslims.

This article traces the path of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist ascent to power from the start of Nepal's 1996-2006 civil war to its end. In the pattern of several other movements inspired by the success of Mao’s 1948 take-over of the Chinese state, the Maoists of Nepal tactically fought their war in stages, consisting of creation, expansion, and consolidation. Re-examining the lifecycle of Nepal’s Civil War in this context allows us to better understand:  the course of events and the timing of significant episodes; the decisions that Maoist leadership made; and what techniques the Maoists used in order to make in-roads during each phase of the conflict.

This paper presents a general model of the emergence and functioning of cults of personality. Drawing on the work of Collins (2004), I understand a cult of personality as a set of interaction rituals, linked in chains, focused on symbols that refer to a political leader, and saturating a significant part of the public space of a polity. I argue that when interaction rituals focused on leader symbols are embedded in patronage relations, processes of “flattery inflation” are likely to emerge. I illustrate this model by looking at three very different cases: the short-lived cult of Caligula in the early Principate in Rome, the cult of Mao in China, and the emerging cult of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

En este artículo, nos proponemos adentrarnos en una de las formas de aproximación a la experiencia revolucionaria en China que tuvieron los argentinos: los viajes como parte de delegaciones. Enmarcadas en la “diplomacia entre pueblos” que signó la política exterior china frente al no reconocimiento de la República Popular por la vasta mayoría de los países en el contexto de la Guerra Fría, las invitaciones a intelectuales, periodistas y militantes fueron una de las formas de romper el cerco impuesto. Consideramos que a través de ellas el maoísmo impregnó los espíritus y tuvo un alcance que fue más allá de la organización de una fuerza propia. Si bien a partir de 1965, discurrieron en forma paralela a las organizaciones maoístas que se conformaron en Argentina, los viajes de delegaciones constituyen un antecedente de los vínculos de dicho país con la República Popular China. A través de testimonios de viaje publicados y de entrevistas, ahondaremos, por un lado, en la organización que se le daba a ese tipo de viajes y, por otro, en los temas, las reflexiones y los intereses que revelaban los viajeros, con el fin de aportar nuevos elementos sobre los tempranos vínculos entre Argentina y la experiencia revolucionaria china.

The book discusses the role of selective identities in shaping China’s position in regional and global affairs. It does so by using the concept of the political transition of power, and argues that by taking on different types of identities—of state, ideology and culture—the Chinese government has adjusted China’s identity to different kinds of audiences. By adopting different kinds of “self”, China has secured its relatively peaceful transition within the existing system and, in the meantime, strengthened its capacity to place its principles within that system. To its immediate neighbors, China presents itself as a state that needs clearcut borders. In relation to the developing world (Global South), the PRC narrates “self” as an ideology with the banner of materialism, equality and justice. To its third “audience”, the developed world (mainly Europe), China presents itself as a peaceful, innocent cultural construct based primarily on Confucius’ passive approach. By bringing these three identities into “one Chinese body” (三位一体, sanwei yiti), China’s policymakers skillfully maneuver and build the country’s position in the arena of global affairs.

In Mao Zedong's 1940 essay " On New Democracy, " he states that the Chinese Communists fought to build a new China with new politics, a new economy, and, most crucially, a new culture. Decades later, Saloth Sar (Pol Pot, nom de guerre) read French translations of Mao's works in Paris, and drew from the Khmer past and Buddhism to call for democratic reform of a Khmer cultural type. While he had read and appreciated Mao Zedong Thought before, it was not until he visited Beijing in 1965–1966 that Sar awoke fully to Mao's ideas, returning to Cambodia a Maoist convert. In Democratic Kampuchea (DK, 1975–1979), Sar, like Mao, sought to create a new culture, but this time through the lens of Maoism (exported Mao Zedong Thought). Party documents and speeches show how he sought to create a " Kampucheanized " Marxism-Leninism along the lines of Mao's " Sinified " Marxism and with a " clean " revolutionary culture. This article argues that by tracking Pol Pot's approaches to rebranding Cambodia, from his earliest political writing to his experiences abroad to the grotesque human experiment of DK, we can uncover the underlying problems of " Kampucheanizing " ideas from Maoist China. As the article shows, despite some similarities, Mao's application of Marxism to the Chinese case—as he outlined in " One New Democracy " —and his vision for a new revolutionary culture were vastly different from Pol Pot's efforts in Kampuchea.