The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, launched in the People’s Republic of China in the summer of 1966, evolved into a global movement. The shockwave of Mao Zedong Thought—the “spiritual atom bomb of infinite power” in the words of General Lin Biao, one of the main protagonists of the campaign—echoed the world over, shaping and reshaping leftist movements from Asia to Africa, Europe to the Americas.Footnote 1 Never clearly defined, Maoism, as Julia Lovell and others have shown, was an amorphous body of ideas, experiences, and lessons, encapsulated in Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-tung—or “Mao’s Little Red Book”—and interpreted by myriad actors worldwide to fit their own agendas.Footnote 2 At the most basic level, Maoism was a revolutionary ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism and Leninism, which emphasized revolutionary praxis over theoretical orthodoxy, promoted a united front of progressive forces to form a vanguard party, and championed armed liberation struggle on a global scale. In the United States, different constituencies of the New Left, disillusioned with Soviet-influenced socialism espoused by the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), embraced Maoism as a theoretical and practical tool to organize themselves and grapple with pivotal issues like race, gender, class, and imperialism. Although overshadowed by other outsized personalities such as Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Martin Luther King Jr., Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was a leitmotif not only on U.S. college campuses, but also in popular media. The August 31, 1970, issue of Time magazine, which featured the feminist theorist and icon Kate Millett on the front cover, called her “the Mao Tse-Tung of Women’s Liberation,” for example.Footnote 3
Scholars have extensively studied the impact of Maoism—and Mao’s China—on the United States. Radical African American activists, from W. E. B. Du Bois to Robert F. Williams to members of the Black Panther Party (BPP), beheld China as the leader of the global crusade against racism and imperialism, particularly after Mao’s 1963 statement of support for the civil rights movement.Footnote 4 Chinese American political organizations active in Chinatowns from the East Coast to the West Coast, including the Red Guard Party, I Wor Kuen (IWK), and Wei Min She, cherished Maoism as a guide for their domestic struggle against racism and capitalism.Footnote 5 For leftist academics, particularly those in the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS), who revolted against the relatively apolitical establishment within Asian studies and opposed U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, Mao’s China offered a unique socioeconomic model based on collectivism and egalitarianism, a potential alternative to U.S. capitalism.Footnote 6 Maoism, in essence, was a weapon of the weak at a time of global revolution.
Maoism in the United States reached its apex around 1970. At the turn of the 1970s, over three dozen Maoist organizations were operating in the United States, run by some ten thousand activists, and The Guardian, a radical weekly newspaper and the largest Maoist periodical in the country, boasted circulation of over twenty thousand.Footnote 7 By the early 1980s, however, Maoism was no longer a viable force in American politics, with only a few sects worshiping its variations. At a cursory glance, this downfall seemed to have resulted from two developments in the early 1970s. First, disillusionment with the Cultural Revolution turned many leftists away from Mao’s China. By 1970, the violence had settled down, and a flock of American expatriates, who mostly taught English or edited English-language periodicals—from Vicky Garvin to Robert Williams to Nancy and David Milton—had returned to the United States, many of them engaging in friendship work with China, but disenchanted with the excesses of the mass rebellion, which wreaked havoc on the community of Westerners in that country.Footnote 8 Second, Beijing’s foreign policy adjustments in 1971–1972, particularly Sino-American “rapprochement,” epitomized by U.S. President Richard Nixon’s trip to Beijing and Shanghai in February 1972, cost Mao’s China what National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger called “revolutionary virginity,” something that had endeared it to countless leftists.Footnote 9 Eldridge Cleaver, one of the leading Panthers, recalled: “Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger went to China and stole Mao Tse-Tung away from us.”Footnote 10 Inspired by China’s 1971 accession to the United Nations, Huey Newton and other Panthers shelved the gun and turned to electoral politics.
Maoism in the United States survived these setbacks, however, and the dwindling light of Mao’s China continued to be the lodestar for many. “In the long run,” historian Anne-Marie Brady writes, “CCP decision makers cared little about the left-wing movement in the United States.”Footnote 11 Yet Beijing’s efforts to form a united front of Maoists sustained their hope for a socialist revolution in the heartland of capitalism—a fleeting hope that was dashed by the end of the decade. Scholars have attributed the ebbing of Maoism in the United States to three factors: factional strife among Maoist groups, sabotage efforts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and shifts in U.S. politics from the left to the right.Footnote 12 Affirming the key roles played by these factors, this article argues, based on U.S. and Chinese sources that have rarely been used, that the fundamental cause of the decline of U.S. Maoism lay in the tension inherent in its core tenet—unity and struggle. This tension (the chairman used the term “contradiction” in his writings) between building a broad united front and staying vigilant against revisionism underpinned Mao’s continuous revolution for decades, but the same tension among U.S. Maoists, aggravated by Beijing’s pivot from revolution to modernization, frustrated their aspirations and precipitated their fragmentation.
This article consists of four sections. The first section examines Chinese propaganda toward sundry leftist groups in the early and mid-1970s, aimed at nudging them into forming a united front party. The second section focuses on the politics of the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association (USCPFA), a grassroots organization that the CCP tried to groom as its front organization in North America. The third section analyzes the factional strife among U.S. Maoists following the death of Mao in 1976, which rocked the USCPFA and repulsed his successors in Beijing. The fourth section discusses the demise of Maoism in the United States at the turn of the 1980s, caused by normalization of U.S.-China relations and Deng Xiaoping’s disavowal of revolution. The conclusion briefly traces the afterlife of U.S. Maoism in the 1980s.
In Search of a United Front
The CCP had always hoped to cultivate a front organization in the United States, particularly after the feud with the Communist Party USA surfaced following the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The Progressive Labor Party (PLP), a 1961 breakaway from the CPUSA, became the prime candidate. Beijing hosted members of the Students for Democratic Society (SDS), in which the PLP boasted the largest faction, including Leibel Bergman, founding member of the PLP, who stayed in China between 1965 and 1967. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) did not fail to take notice. According to its report, Bergman’s mission was to “form a national union of pro-Maoist radicals” in the United States.Footnote 13 When he founded the Bay Area Revolutionary Union in 1968, which would change its name to the Revolutionary Union (RU) in 1971, the FBI called it “a national organization… synonymous with the Chinese Communist Party in the United States.”Footnote 14 The FBI profiling seemed exaggerated for a group anchored in Palo Alto, Oakland, and San Francisco; but the RU would indeed become an important conduit for Chinese influence on U.S. Maoism.
Beijing’s united front efforts picked up steam in 1971 when Sino-American rapprochement began to unfold. Just as a group of U.S. table tennis players toured China that spring as part of Nixon’s “Ping-pong diplomacy,” the Chinese began to welcome other recently-founded leftist groups—not only the CCAS and the BPP, but also the antiwar National Peace Action Coalition, the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party, and the Black Workers Congress, which first convened in Gary, Indiana, in September 1971. The goal was to reinvigorate their revolutionary spirit by sharing Chinese experiences. Carmelita Hinton, mother of William Hinton, author of Fanshen and one of the most prominent pro-China figures in the United States, for example, led a delegation of radical American youth in the fall of 1971, which stayed at Dazhai Commune (a model agricultural collective in Shanxi), the Jinggangshan Mountains (former Red Army base in Jiangxi), and a factory in Beijing, each for a month (Figure 1). Having worked at William Hinton’s Cuban-style farm in Pennsylvania, the poor American students in Mao suits, who could barely afford the trip with donations, obsessed over the Chinese peasant experience; at Dazhai, they refused to give up farm work for sightseeing and spent hours every day discussing Mao’s writings.Footnote 15
Figure 1. Carmelita Hinton’s radical youth delegation in Yan’an, Shaanxi Province, undated, 196-1-466, Shaanxi Provincial Archive.
Beijing’s hopes for a united front reached a climax on October 5, 1971, when more than seventy left-leaning Americans—short-term visitors and long-term residents, all concurrently staying in Beijing—were summoned to the Great Hall of the People for a meeting with Premier Zhou Enlai (Figure 2).Footnote 16 The invitees included Pablo Guzman (one of the founders of the Young Lords Party), John Service (an old China hand persecuted during McCarthyism), George Hatem (a Chinese citizen practicing medicine in China since 1936), Hosea Williams (an organizer with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference), and Max and Grace Granich (former CPUSA members with working experiences in China). The group also included leaders of the Revolutionary Union: Robert (Bob) Avakian, Leibel Bergman, Mary Lou Greenberg, and Douglas Monica. Avakian, the rising star in the ranks, was even afforded a rare personal meeting with Chairman Mao. Upon their return, FBI agents labeled the RU “the country’s youngest, fastest-growing and potentially most dangerous Communist party,” which was “making impressive gains” inside and outside labor unions. “Avakian worships Mao; Mao appreciates Avakian,” the FBI report concluded. “No question now—Revolutionary Union has replaced Progressive Labor Party as the Peking-sanctioned Communist party in the U.S.”Footnote 17
Figure 2. Zhou Enlai’s meeting with American guests, October 5, 1971, Xinhua News Agency.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) carefully monitored the October 5, 1971 meeting, aided in its efforts by an informant inside the RU. According to the CIA’s detailed intelligence report, Zhou Enlai used the opportunity to justify the Nixon-Mao summit, scheduled the next spring, to the American leftists at the scene, many of whom agonized over it. “He… explained that China had always been willing to negotiate with the Americans,” the report read. “Chou made the point that it was Nixon who was coming to the Chinese and not the Chinese who were coming to Nixon.” Having defended Beijing’s new foreign policy, Zhou turned to Black Maoist Bill Epton, a recent defector from the PLP, which had turned its back on the CCP and denounced Sino-American rapprochement. When Epton commented that the PLP “seemed to be as strong as ever,” the CIA informant sensed “a chill of sorts” descending on the hall. Unable to mask his disappointment, Zhou simply instructed Epton to “work harder” to “accomplish his task,” which meant uniting Maoist forces in the United States. The premier ended the meeting with a positive note nonetheless, stating that more leftists would be allowed into China: “The crack has been made and will widen. The door is open.”Footnote 18
The Americans left the meeting hopeful for a united front. Nuclear scientist Joan Hinton, sister of William, praised Beijing’s efforts to “unite with the majority [the oppressed Americans] and encourage the minority [the Maoists].” Erwin Engst, husband of Joan Hinton and a long-time agricultural advisor in China, also lauded the premier for “promoting the unity of the American people,” although he considered the compatriots at the meeting “unable to cooperate with one another” back home. Some aired doubts about Zhou’s comments, though. One RU member in Carmelita Hinton’s group, who was bitterly critical of Mao’s invitation to Nixon, asked why the premier directed his criticism at the leftist PLP and not at rightist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.Footnote 19 The answer was simple: Only by forming a united front could U.S. Maoists confront rightist groups—or even revisionist groups like the CPUSA, which had thirty thousand members—and the PLP, for the moment, was the most immediate obstacle for such unity.
As Zhou predicted, more leftists soon traveled to China, where they were hosted by the China International Travel Service (CITS), the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), and numerous other organizations affiliated with the state or the party. Maud Russell, former Young Women’s Christian Association activist and an old “friend” of China, for instance, revisited the country in the fall of 1972. Russell insisted she was “not a tourist” and pledged that she would disseminate her findings in the United States during her annual speaking tours and in Far East Reporter, a magazine that she had been editing since 1953.Footnote 20 The Guardian provided one of the few channels of sustained travel in the early 1970s (Figure 3). Since the radical newsweekly did not incorporate ads, subscriptions were the only source of income, which made it more vulnerable to suspension and suppressions of other sort. When Jack Smith, editor of The Guardian, visited China in the spring of 1972, he proposed to make it Beijing’s key travel agent in North America. The newsweekly would organize individuals friendly to China, especially workers and minorities, into tourist groups, through which they would earn a stipend, while also secretly receiving subsidy from the Chinese government.Footnote 21 In the next few years, The Guardian’s biannual tours escorted hundreds of Americans to China—from revolutionary youth to progressive workers to the Hollywood star Candice Bergen, who recounted: “In our traveling collective, day after day the dialectical debates grew more heated; ideologies were argued, cries of ‘counterrevolutionary,’ accusations of ‘revisionist’ could be heard.”Footnote 22
Figure 3. Participants of a Guardian tour in front of Mao Zedong’s former residence in Shaoshan, Hunan Province, undated, reprinted with permission of Gene Guerrero, courtesy of the University of California San Diego Library.
“Develop friendship and promote revolutionary tendency” was Beijing’s propaganda motto for leftist students, workers, and intellectuals.Footnote 23 Many of them were moved by the Chinese fable The Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountains, which indirectly glorified the CCP’s determination and perseverance in revolutionizing China. African American writer John Oliver Killens, member of the July 1973 teachers’ delegation organized by The Guardian, for instance, resolved to “sacrifice for generations yet unborn” to achieve Black revolution in the United States. “If [the Chinese] could, from the very lower depths, come so far so fast then why not African-Americans?” wrote Killens. “Why not us?”Footnote 24 Jean Hinton, daughter of Carmelita, led the second delegation of American youth in May 1975. After twelve days of labor at Shanghai Electric Machinery Factory, one member, who had bemoaned the lack of U.S. revolutionary potential, learned that the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949 did not take place overnight; Mao began his revolutionary work in the “darkness” following the April 12 Incident of 1927, in which the ruling Nationalist Party crushed the then Shanghai-based CCP. “This made me realize that we should not wait for the U.S. revolution—we should do it!” the American traveler exclaimed.Footnote 25 Countless Americans left China with renewed vigor to replicate what they witnessed back home.
Party-building lay at the core of Chinese propaganda. Jack Smith briefed the Chinese about the conundrum facing U.S. leftists: the CPUSA was “Moscow’s mouthpiece,” with financial backing from the Soviets; the PLP and other “Trotskyist” groups opposed China’s new foreign policy; and other pro-China organizations, numbering around ten (the Revolutionary Union being the largest, with some five hundred members on the West Coast) were beset by perennial infighting. Smith longed for a united front party, and so did the Chinese.Footnote 26 To get this message across, Beijing guided American visitors to historical landmarks of the CCP, including a stone warehouse in downtown Shanghai, where the fledgling party held its First National Congress in 1921. When a group of sixteen workers from Lower Manhattan paid a visit in 1972, one former CPUSA member recited Mao’s words: “A single spark can start a huge blaze” (xingxing zhi huo keyi liao yuan). “We urgently need to establish one correct party,” said another group member. “Only when we establish a correct party can we have correct theoretical guidance.”Footnote 27 This site also awed the 1975 women’s delegation organized by the October League (OL), founded in 1969 by former SDSers in Los Angeles, which was struggling to establish a united front party due to factional strife among youth. “You have provided a model for revolutionaries around the world,” the delegation leader commented. “This is also an encouragement for our struggle.”Footnote 28 The Chinese message was clear: if you want a revolution in the United States, you need a broad-based party like ours.
The Chinese were sending mixed signals, however. Just as they highlighted the importance of a united front, they touted “two-line struggle”—struggle between Mao’s revolutionary line and his rivals’ revisionist line that characterized every aspect of political life in China. This was particularly so during the “Criticize Deng Campaign,” which culminated in the April 1976 purge of Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, who had led various socioeconomic reforms in 1975. In June 1976, when members of U.S. revolutionary organizations, including the OL, visited Yan’an, the CCP’s revolutionary capital in Shaanxi, the hosts took them to the Revolution Memorial Hall and lectured them about the Yan’an Rectification Movement in the early 1940s, in which Mao and his allies ousted their rivals from the party. Eagerly taking notes, the Americans claimed that they received “great encouragement.”Footnote 29 Another group of leftist students visited the Revolution Memorial Hall a month later. A member of the OL’s central committee praised the ongoing Criticize Deng Campaign as “very helpful” for their own efforts to establish a new party. “We do not hope that our party also becomes revisionist,” he stated. “We should learn your revolutionary spirit.”Footnote 30
And learn they did. Following Beijing’s emphasis on unity and struggle, U.S. Maoist groups decided to establish separate parties—parties of their own that could pursue the “correct” line as they defined it. In September 1975, the Revolutionary Union, along with Wei Min She, reconstituted itself into the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Its founding convention declared that the RCP assumed “the very solemn responsibility of uniting with the struggles of the millions of workers and other oppressed peoples in this country… to overthrow U.S. imperialism.”Footnote 31
In June 1977, the October League also transfigured into the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)—CPML. Pledging to wage a “fight against modern revisionism as a life-and-death battle,” Chairman Michael Klonsky laid out the CPML’s central tasks ahead, one of them being “continuing the struggle to unite the Marxist-Leninists” to topple U.S. imperialism.Footnote 32 This was a defeat for Beijing, which was secretly pressing the RU and the OL to merge. But due to the RU’s and OL’s distinct organizational lineages and disagreements over issues related to race and gender, as well as to the FBI’s sabotage, Beijing’s designs for this marriage failed.Footnote 33 Both the RCP and the CPML claimed to be the vanguard party for U.S. Maoists, and their rivalry would only escalate with the death of the beloved Chinese chairman.
“Red China’s American Lobby”
The Chinese hardly stewed over this failure, for in place of a united front party, they found a mass organization that could function as a united front of Maoists in the United States: the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association (USCPFA). The first local friendship association was founded in San Francisco, the bastion of Maoist radicals, in June 1971, followed by others in Los Angeles and New York that August. When Koji Ariyoshi, Japanese-American veteran of the Dixies Mission, which established U.S. contact with the CCP in Yan’an in the mid-1940s, revisited China and met Zhou Enlai in January 1972, the premier promised to provide visas to anyone for whom he could vouch. Upon return, Ariyoshi founded the Hawaii-China Friendship Association in Honolulu and embarked on his China tour operation. These early associations were mostly led by former residents in China, including William Hinton and Vicky Garvin; former CPUSA member-turned-Maoists like Frank Pestana and his wife Jean Kidwell; and recent visitors to China, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist Ethan Signer and Black Mississippi activist Unita Blackwell. By the time Hinton established the national organization in Los Angeles in September 1974, some forty local associations were already in operation, and the number would steadily increase in the next several years.Footnote 34
According to its statement of principle, the USCPFA’s goal was “to build active and lasting friendship based on mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of China.” To achieve this, the association called for normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries based on the Shanghai Communiqué, the product of Nixon’s trip to China, and removal of U.S. forces from Taiwan—“a province of China.”Footnote 35 The USCPFA engaged in a range of activities, including production and distribution of literature, films, and photo exhibits, the publication of a monthly magazine New China and other periodicals, and sponsorship of speaking tours of former expats like Erwin Engst, George Hatem, and Sidney Shapiro, a Chinese citizen who, like many others, had worked for the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing. These activities were funded by the USCPFA’s most important money-making operation: China tours. The association’s three regional offices—East Coast, West Coast, and Midwest—were given equal quotas from Beijing, around six tours each year, an arrangement that afforded the USCPFA “visa power” (as China specialist Douglas Murray called it), a privilege to offer a rare opportunity to visit China to individuals of its choosing, including nonmembers with little understanding of the association’s cause.Footnote 36 By “speaking out against distortions and misconceptions” about China, the USCPFA promoted a “benign consensus” understanding of that country, which held that contrary to the common knowledge, Chinese socialism had scored socioeconomic miracles, from price stabilization to full employment, universal healthcare to gender equality.Footnote 37
Beijing spared no effort to sway the USCPFA. In October 1971, Henry Noyes, owner of China Books & Periodicals, a San Francisco-based company that imported Chinese publications and distributed them across the country, sent his son Chris to China for five weeks, where he was hosted by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a Foreign Ministry-affiliated organization designed to facilitate cultural exchanges. The CPAFFC gave Noyes a list of guidelines that it had adopted for friendship associations in other non-socialist countries, including Britain, France, and Japan. The guidelines stipulated that the CPAFFC would not interfere with the internal affairs of other countries; that the association should be led by people “truly friendly” to China and unite all people regardless of their politics; and that it should avoid “closed-door” decision-making. These essentials informed the USCPFA’s statement of principle. USCPFA organizers indeed took a cue from Beijing. Many local friendship associations preferred community organizing to centralized governance, but the Chinese invited their leaders and prodded them to form a national body.Footnote 38 In July 1974, two months before the USCPFA’s launch, three representatives designated by the Provisional National Steering Committee—Frank Pestana (Atlanta), Ralph Rapoport (Chicago), and Esther Gollobin (New York)—traveled to Beijing to discuss the association’s future operations with the CPAFFC and the CITS, and their visit included conversations about photo exhibits, film showings, and future tours.Footnote 39 The CPAFFC sent a congratulatory note to the USCPFA’s founding convention.
The USCPFA seemed like an ideal front organization for the CCP, which was obsessed with how foreigners viewed the People’s Republic. The Chinese were vexed by the raft of criticisms of their foreign policy, socioeconomic system, and tourism propaganda that kept surfacing in the United States, much of it on account of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, which administered cultural exchanges facilitated by the U.S. and Chinese governments. The USCPFA was different. Just before its founding, Janet Goldwasser and Stuart Dowty of the Detroit friendship association called it “not only appropriate,” but also “necessary” to “raise criticisms and questions [about China] in a principled way” “within the framework of building friendship.” Koji Ariyoshi and other leaders took exception, arguing that instead of raising criticisms and questions, the association should focus on “developing understanding.”Footnote 40 New China, as a result, carried glowing articles about Chinese socialism written by USCPFA-affiliated individuals. When a USCPFA delegation visited Beijing in October 1976, CPAFFC and CITS representatives praised the association’s no-public-criticism policy. They would welcome constructive criticisms, but not “public criticisms, which not only harms friendship but violates the [USCPFA’s] Statement of Principles.” “Public criticisms, by our friends, has an even greater effect than can be realized by the attacks of the bourgeoisie,” warned the Chinese.Footnote 41 Georgia Representative and staunch anticommunist Larry McDonald (D-GA) was not far off the mark when he later condemned the USCPFA as “Red China’s American Lobby.”Footnote 42
The Revolutionary Union lurked behind this lobby. The FBI reported in the early 1970s that the RU dominated local friendship associations on the East Coast and the West Coast, and their leaders, including William Hinton and Frank Pestana, were secret RU members.Footnote 43 The connection between the two groups seemed obvious. In April 1975, the press attaché at the Chinese embassy in Ottawa, likely dispatched by the CCP International Liaison Department to establish a united front in North America, was expelled from Canada for security reasons. According to the State Department’s account, the Chinese diplomat was charged with passing secret funds to several “revolutionary” organizations, including the RU, “a semi-covert Marxist-Leninist group with Maoist pretentions,” which used the USCPFA as a “front organization.”Footnote 44 The FBI even profiled the RU and the USCPFA as a “threat to the internal security of the United States of the first magnitude.”Footnote 45 The RU and later the Revolutionary Communist Party plotted to wrest control of the USCPFA. For example, they tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to sabotage the formation of the association’s Southern regional office in addition to the existing three at the USCPFA’s 1975 annual national convention in Chicago. The RCP, which dominated New China in its formative years, also blocked the magazine from issuing an obituary for Koji Ariyoshi, an RCP critic, when he passed away in October 1976.Footnote 46
The RCP’s heyday was short, however. The 1975 Chicago convention established the outreach to minorities and the working class as a national priority, on par with normalization of U.S.-China relations. At the USCPFA’s 1976 annual national convention in Philadelphia, the RCP, as well as some National Steering Committee members, including William Hinton, hampered an outreach resolution proposed by the East Coast office, criticizing it for “pitting certain sections of American people against others” and “creating divisions where none need exist.” RCP members further denounced the resolution(“smacking of tokenism” as they called it) for taking a “Noah’s Ark” approach, as it demanded specific numbers of workers and minorities to be included in all USCPFA activities, including subsidized China tours.Footnote 47 The RCP was vocal, but outnumbered. Nearly all RCP candidates and supporters were defeated at the elections in Philadelphia, and New China was soon ordered to issue Ariyoshi’s obituary. The USCPFA even established the Koji Ariyoshi Award to honor its members who made an exceptional contribution to advancing U.S.-China friendship. The association now embodied the growing tension between unity and struggle among U.S. Maoists.
The death of Mao Zedong on September 9, 1976, foreshadowed the decline of Maoism in the United States. In a pamphlet dedicated to the late chairman’s achievements, the RCP stated: “no one can destroy what Mao Tsetung stood for—the emancipation of the working class and man-kind. It will live in the hearts and minds and will eventually be realized by workers and oppressed people the world over and their children and their children’s children.”Footnote 48 The spring 1977 issue of New China also featured Mao’s obituaries written by USCPFA members. “Our world, in need of leaders, has lost one of the greatest of our century. But the Chinese people and we, too, have gained a heritage,” wrote Lois Wheeler Snow, wife of Edgar Snow, the first Western journalist to visit Yan’an in 1936. “The teacher is no longer with us, but his teachings remain.”Footnote 49 Yet Mao’s China was losing momentum. As myriad accounts profusely lauding Chinese socialism, many of them written by USCPFA-affiliated tourists, appeared in U.S. media, more and more scholars and journalists spoke against their skewed travelogs. Grey Dimond, a renowned physician and frequent visitor to China, told George Hatem in 1976: “I think too many of your USA visitors are avowed leftists and fringe-communists… You do your cause no good by bringing over flocks of people who by their behavior alienate most Americans.”Footnote 50
Wrestling with Post-Mao China
With Mao’s passing, Chinese foreign policy came under harsh criticism. The late chairman’s Three Worlds Theory, which divided the world into the U.S. and Soviet superpowers (First World), their affluent allies (Second World), and all developing countries, including China (Third World), was particularly targeted. In 1978, Enver Hoxha, leader of the Party of Labor of Albania (PLA), one of the few allies of the CCP during the Cultural Revolution, published Imperialism and the Revolution, in which he condemned the Three Worlds Theory for driving a wedge in the socialist camp. Beijing cut aid to Tirana, and the CCP-PLA split replicated itself in the United States.Footnote 51 Critical of the Three Worlds Theory, The Guardian proposed a resolution promoting “friendly criticism” of China at the USCPFA’s 1976 convention.Footnote 52 The resolution was soundly defeated, and Beijing took away The Guardian’s China tour privilege. The RCP carved out a unique position in this altercation. Agonizing over Beijing’s support for pro-U.S. dictatorial regimes in the developing world—those run by the Shah of Iran, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)—the RCP maintained that the Three Worlds Theory was highjacked by Mao’s successors, including the new chairman Hua Guofeng, who distorted the late chairman’s intentions. The RCP slandered the post-Mao leadership as “revisionist usurpers” and its Three Worlds Theory as an “apology for capitulation” to U.S. imperialism.Footnote 53
This attack was led by Bob Avakian, chairman of the RCP since its 1975 founding. A white upper-middle-class veteran of the 1960s Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, Avakian revered Mao as “the greatest revolutionary of our time” and the Cultural Revolution as “a burst of light through the clouds” that signified “not just the greatest advance of the Chinese people’s revolutionary struggle but also the highest pinnacle yet reached by the international proletariat.”Footnote 54 Mao’s death and the subsequent arrest of the Gang of Four, a group of four politicians, led by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, who tried to perpetuate the Cultural Revolution, shook Avakian up. He denounced the latter as a “revisionist coup” by Mao’s successors, who were determined to derail the Chinese revolution.Footnote 55 “China was lost as a socialist country, as a bastion of revolution and socialism and a guiding light and a source of inspiration for oppressed people all over the world,” Avakian later wrote. “This was a terrible and stunning setback, an almost incalculable loss.”Footnote 56 His view came into conflict with other RCP leaders. Leibel Bergman, former mentor of Avakian, and Mickey Jarvis, vice chairman of the RCP, supported the purge of the Gang as “counter-revolutionaries” and preempted Avakian’s attempt to send a telegram of protest to Beijing.Footnote 57 The tension between Avakian, who had a flock of devout followers on the West Coast, and Bergman and Jarvis, who had their stronghold on the East Coast, particularly among trade unionists, reached a climax at the Third Plenary Session of the RCP’s First Central Committee, held in 1977. When the meeting affirmed the Avakian faction’s majority position, the Bergman-Jarvis faction—some 40 percent of the party membership, numbering more than 400—decided to defect and form a separate organization: the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters (RWH).
The RCP mounted a fierce offensive on the USCPFA, which showcased the fundamental contradiction in the Maoist creed of unity and struggle. At the USCPFA’s September 1977 national convention in Atlanta, RCP members and supporters, including Clark Kissinger and Joann Shapiro of the Chicago chapter, tried to stir up an ideological debate about the post-Mao leadership. “The events in China since the death of Mao Tsetung are confronting people everywhere, and demand to be analyzed and understood,” they claimed. “It is our responsibility to make these events the main topic of discussion at this convention.”Footnote 58 Yet RCP sympathizers were a minority in this broad-based association. Despite the RCP’s opposition, the National Steering Committee decided to create a salaried staff position for each region (in place of volunteers) and to institute the monthly pamphlet U.S.-China Review as an alternative to RCP-dominated New China.
To overturn the numeric disadvantage, the RCP resorted to skullduggery targeted at local chapters, starting with Seattle. In August 1977, Avakian and Sue Becker, candidate for the National Steering Committee, signed up forty-five RCP members—who had never worked in the USCPFA—for membership a day before the Seattle chapter’s elections, which resulted in Becker and other pro-RCP candidates’ victory and membership on national and local steering committees. Frustrated and enraged, many old members simply walked away from the Seattle chapter, leaving it all the more vulnerable to RCP’s control. RCP members dominated the chapter’s steering committee after the January 1978 election, which they “stacked” again. At a February 1978 panel on Beijing’s new education policy, which, among other things, restored the national college entrance examination, Becker vilified it for erecting “a new intellectual elite,” while an RCP member on the floor called it “dead wrong!” When a member of the National Steering Committee at the scene underscored the USCPFA’s policy against public criticism of China, the Seattle steering committee reached the following resolution: “Any member of the Association has the right and responsibility to raise questions and/or disagreements with China’s policies within our Association.” The RCP targeted minority members next. In a chapter assembly that March, the Black caucus was surrounded by a majority of white members. One RCP member pointed her finger at a Black woman’s face, shouting, “We don’t need people like you in USCPFA.”Footnote 59 The Seattle chapter was in shambles.
The commotion captured the National Steering Committee’s attention. The committee dispatched an investigative team to Seattle in May 1978, which, upon return, recommended immediate suspension and de-accreditation of the Seattle chapter. Accusing the RCP-dominated leadership of being “fundamentally chauvinist and racist,” the investigators stated that those “bent on criticizing China should withdraw from participation in a friendship building movement.”Footnote 60 Two weeks later, the National Steering Committee met in Miami to decide what to do with the Seattle chapter. Despite some voices of concern over suspending Seattle outright, USCPFA Chairman Frank Pestana was determined to rid the association of the RCP. A series of resolutions passed with a majority; they included that the Western Regional should temporarily suspend the Seattle chapter, that members advocating public criticism of China should be asked to resign or expelled, and that Becker should be censured for “actively pushing criticisms of China… which is not in keeping with the spirit of our Statement of Principles.” Sue Becker, who opposed the measures, grumbled that the Seattle staff, herself included, were being “hung” by these resolutions, but Pestana countered that inaction on the RCP would be “suicidal.”Footnote 61 He later circulated a statement: “Not only has the RCP demonstrated that they are enemies of the Chinese people and their government, but they have demonstrated that they are enemies of the Association as well.”Footnote 62
The RCP launched the final counter-offensive at the USCPFA’s 1978 national convention in San Francisco over the Labor Day weekend. RCP members disrupted the convention, threatening their resignation from the association. Having circulated a position paper, titled “Uphold Mao Tsetung and the Revolutionary Accomplishments of the Chinese People,” the RCP once again demanded that the convention discuss the ideological verdict on the post-Mao leadership. “It’s a life and death struggle between Marxism and revisionism. We will fight to put out our line,” RCP member Mary Lou Greenberg avowed. Many non-RCP USCPFA members fired back, complaining that when Mao was alive, the RCP opposed public criticism of China at the association. In an attempted rebuttal, Clark Kissinger stated: “When China was on the revolutionary road, it was reactionary to use the USCPFA as a forum to criticize China. Now, after the revisionists have come to power, the only meaningful thing to do is to raise struggle.” The logic was far from convincing for Pestana, who swiftly decided to expel all RCP members. “They are enemies of China and enemies of the USCPFA,” he reaffirmed. “The USCPFA should not be used as a platform for criticizing China.”Footnote 63 After the San Francisco convention, the association was dominated by CPML and RWH members. Two CPML candidates, one RWH candidate, and one jointly-supported candidate—Frank Pestana, Mark Selden (also active in the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars), Margaret Whitman of the New York chapter, and Unita Blackwell, now mayor of Mayersville, Mississippi—were elected onto the National Steering Committee, now completely free of RCP influence.
The USCPFA’s decision to side with the post-Mao leadership was understandable. The association had 11,000 members in some 120 local chapters at the end of 1978, but its expenditures for the 1978–1979 year, over $800 thousand, could hardly be covered by the general membership dues of $5, or the “sponsor” and “patron” contributions of $15 and $25, respectively.Footnote 64 The bulk of its income came from China tours. In 1978, the USCPFA introduced the China Study Tours. Unlike the existing China Friendship Tours organized by the association’s regional travel committees, which provided general sightseeing tours, the China Study Tours were arranged by the China Tourism Service to offer “special interest tours” for women leaders, trade unionists, prominent scientists, and administrators of non-governmental organizations, to cite a few examples. These tours, targeted at the “petty bourgeoisie,” came with a $500 mark-up, which elevated the cost close to $3,000, today’s equivalent of $14,000. “LET CHINA SELL ITSELF!” was the direction stipulated in the China Study Tour Leaders Handbook. “Do not try to talk tour members out of their politics or sell them China’s.” Tour leaders were instructed instead to take care of problems that arose occasionally in the China Friendship Tours, such as stealing, racism, and anticommunism—problems that might imperil the cash cow.Footnote 65 The mark-up met some objection. The USCPFA’s Northwest subregional meeting, for instance, wrote that “in view of our priority to reach out to working class and minority peoples,” the extra $500 was “hypocritical and contradictory to what we are trying to accomplish.”Footnote 66 Yet the mark-up was the whole point of the new program. In 1978, the revenues from the China Study Tours and the China Friendship Tours comprised 83 percent and 14 percent respectively of the USCPFA’s annual budget, bringing the total to 97 percent.Footnote 67 By the following year, the association’s tour revenues exceeded a whopping $1 million, more than enough to cover the paid regional staff and U.S.-China Review.Footnote 68
As the USCPFA doubled down on its national campaign for normalization of U.S.-China relations, Avakian and the RCP showed no intention of backing down. In September 1978, Avakian organized the Mao Tsetung Memorial Meetings in New York and San Francisco, attended by 2,500 in total, to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the late chairman’s passing (Figure 4). In a speech titled “The Loss in China and the Revolutionary Legacy of Mao Tsetung,” Avakian intoned that Mao’s death was “a loss impossible to measure to the international proletariat and the people of the world.” Defending the Cultural Revolution as a “pathbreaking achievement,” he lambasted Mao’s successors as “revisionists” and “counter-revolutionaries… who have completely betrayed the cause left behind by Mao Tsetung.” The three-hour speech was followed by a question-and-answer session, in which participants discussed the dreadful state of Chinese socialism.Footnote 69 Ironically, Mao’s revolutionary legacies became the most contentious issue for the unity and struggle among Maoists in America.
Figure 4. Poster of the Mao Tsetung Memorial Meetings.
Unity Fizzles Out
Beijing’s hopes for a united front of U.S. Maoists were growing thin. Hu Hongfan of the CPAFFC made a strong statement of concern in 1977 about the “endless bickering” within the USCPFA, opposing its leftist tendencies and advocating a broad-based organization.Footnote 70 The Chinese observed Avakian’s rebellion with despair. When Chris Gilmartin, director of the USCPFA’s publication committee, visited China in the spring of 1978 amid the national campaign to criticize the Gang of Four, she briefed the CPAFFC about the RCP’s split, calling the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters a “Splittist Headquarters.” She explained that Avakian “hates” the current Chinese leadership, particularly reform-minded Deng Xiaoping, and admired the “Gang of Five,” including Mao. The Chinese had some regrets. When the RCP requested a fact-finding mission after the Gang’s October 1976 arrest, Beijing rejected Bergman as the mission leader (likely because of his tirade against its “right”-turn during his spring 1973 trip to China)making Avakian his substitute.Footnote 71 Upon its return, the entire delegation sided with Avakian’s anti-CCP faction. Gilmartin warned the Chinese of further upheavals in the USCPFA, although she predicted that a majority of members would eventually reject the RCP and accept Beijing’s position about the Gang.Footnote 72 With the storm gathering for the USCPFA’s 1978 national convention, CPAFFC officials decided to break with past practice and sit out the gathering.Footnote 73
Meanwhile, the Chinese rushed to empower the RCP’s rivals. The nascent CPML piqued their interest first. Accordingly, Hua Guofeng met CPML Chairman Michael Klonsky in Beijing in July 1977. The Washington Post wrote that Hua’s warm toast to Klonsky revealed “how eager the Chinese are to prove [they are] the ideological leaders of the Communist world.”Footnote 74 That December, the CPML called for other Maoist organizations to join the multi-racial “Marxist-Leninist Unity Committee” to achieve a “communist unity,” an idea with which I Wor Kuen (Chinese) and the August the Twenty-Ninth Movement (Latino/Chicano; ATM), along with other groups, concurred.Footnote 75 When Jennifer O’Day, member of the central committee, led a CPML delegation to China in October 1978, the Chinese profiled the CPML as “a relatively good leftist party in the United States at the moment,” seeking unity among Maoist groups. One delegate resolved to put aside minor differences and “build a broad united front in the United States,” because, as the hosts informed him, the CCP, too, cooperated with the Nationalist Party and Chinese capitalists during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Unlike the RCP, the CPML also gave unwavering support for “Reform” and “Opening-Up” (gaige kaifang). “The Chinese people are striving to achieve the four modernizations [in agriculture, industry, science and technology, and national defense] under the leadership of Chairman Hua, which makes us more confident in our struggle!” O’Day enthused at the banquet.Footnote 76
Besides the CPML, Beijing also embraced the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS), an October 1978 merger of IWK and the ATM, soon to be joined by other multi-racial communist organizations, including the Revolutionary Communist League, led by the venerable Black activist Amiri Baraka. More steeped in community activism than the RCP and the CPML, the LRS focused on grassroots campaigning for a wide range of domestic and international issues, including racial discrimination. The rise of the LRS symbolized a fracture, not unity, of U.S. Maoism—IWK and the ATM never quite got along with the CPML—but the LRS’s allegiance to Beijing was as firm as the CPML’s. The LRS’s newspaper, Unity, for example, published A Study Guide for Mao Zedong’s Theory of the Three Worlds in 1978, which extolled the late chairman’s battered theory as “one of his great contributions to Marxism-Leninism.”Footnote 77 The LRS also lauded the four modernizations. “Modernization will greatly enhance the material base of socialism,” it explained. “This is an important revolutionary task in fighting against internal and external enemies who want to overturn the dictatorship of the proletariat and restore capitalism.”Footnote 78
The normalization of U.S.-China relations on January 1, 1979, closely followed by Deng Xiaoping’s nine-day tour of the United States, fell upon U.S. Maoists as the final test of faith. The USCPFA, now co-chaired by Pestana and Blackwell, announced that the association “rejoice[s]” at the normalization. “Now with this handicap removed, we are free to develop a full program of cultural, artistic, scientific, technological, trade, student, and other exchanges,” it commented.Footnote 79 The LRS also celebrated normalization and Deng’s U.S. visit as “a victory of China’s socialist foreign policy,” which “helped to strengthen socialism in China.”Footnote 80 So did the CPML, but not without a caveat. It criticized the USCPFA for taking the “Hinton line,” which advocated China’s alliance with U.S. imperialism against Soviet imperialism. “China’s line,” it claimed, was to defeat Soviet imperialism and then U.S. imperialism.Footnote 81 Regardless of the specific “line,” normalization, in the eyes of U.S. Maoists, was beyond criticism; there would be no repeat, in other words, of U.S.-Maoist criticism of Mao’s invitation to Nixon seven years before. Rewi Alley, a New Zealand member of the CCP, wrote in China Reconstructs, one of Beijing’s English-language periodicals: “To understanding minds, the new stage in U.S.-China relations will be well understood as the progressive thing it is.”Footnote 82
The pro-Soviet Communist Party USA spurned such a view. In the wake of the normalization, Gus Hall, general secretary of the CPUSA since 1959, sent a scathing nineteen-page open letter to the CCP. It blared: “Some years ago, the Central Committee of your Party sent us a cablegram in which you criticized our Party for being ‘soft on U.S. imperialism’… We now reverse the same charges. Your Party leadership is collaborating with and ‘prettifying’ imperialism.” “You have veered away from the working class revolutionary path,” the letter continued. “Your actions have become a counterrevolutionary force against the building of socialism throughout the world.” The CPUSA crucified the CCP for working with U.S. imperialism in the developing world, from Chile to Angola to Vietnam: “It is impossible to estimate the amount of suffering and death in human terms that Maoism has contributed to around the world.”Footnote 83 Hall even paid $9,000 to put up an anti-normalization ad in the New York Times on January 28, 1979, a day before Deng Xiaoping’s arrival in Washington. Eager to demonstrate its loyalty to Beijing, the CPML sent an open letter to Hall, highlighted by a point-by-point refutation of his accusations. “Unfortunately,” it read, “neither $9,000 nor nine zillion dollars can stem the tide of history.”Footnote 84
Bob Avakian tried to do just that. On January 29, 1979, the RCP led a mass rally outside the White House, comprised of some five hundred members. They waved Mao’s banners in the face of Deng Xiaoping, a “revisionist traitor” meeting President Jimmy Carter in the Rose Garden, while chanting the slogan: “Mao Tsetung Did Not Fail, Revolution Will Prevail!” Four members of the RCP vandalized the Chinese liaison office (soon to be the embassy) nearby, breaking windows, splashing white paint across the front of the building, and slamming Deng as a “capitalist roader.” Another member, who was later caught near the liaison office, was carrying a .357 magnum.Footnote 85 After scuffles with the police, seventy-eight protestors were arrested, and seventeen “Mao Tsetung Defendants”—later reduced to eleven—were charged (Figure 5). Avakian, who was not identified at the scene, faced twenty-five felony counts and was sentenced to three lifetimes (241 years) in prison for “aiding and abetting” the violence. It was too much even for the diehard Maoist. Avakian flew to France in March 1981 and stayed there in exile for a couple of years, pleading for political refugee status and creating a diplomatic irritant for Washington. Partly thanks to the efforts of the Committee to Free the Mao Tsetung Defendants, all charges were dropped in June 1982. Ten defendants, all wearing red T-shirts emblazoned with the pictures of Mao and Avakian, appeared in the court to enter their pleas of guilty to two misdemeanors, as part of a legal deal for light sentences. “A great victory has been won in the battle to Stop the Railroad of Bob Avakian and Free the Mao Tsetung Defendants,” the RCP triumphantly proclaimed.Footnote 86 Yet Avakian’s political career was irreversibly damaged. France denied his refugee status, and the forty-year-old RCP chairman now had to stay low in his own country under the FBI’s threatening gaze.
Figure 5. Police confront RCP members at Lafayette Park after demonstrators hurled bottles, sticks, and metal weights at officers, January 29, 1979.Photo by John McDonnell/The Washington Post via Getty Images.
With Avakian and the RCP out of the picture, Beijing made one last bid for a united front in the United States. As one CPML participant relayed, a delegation comprising of six Maoist organizations—the CPML, the LRS, the RWH, the Boston-based Proletarian Unity League, the Bay Area Communist Union, and the Portland Red Star Unity Collective, the last two of which would soon merge into the RWH and the CPML respectively, visited China in early 1979 to “strengthen the unity between the U.S. Marxist-Leninists and the Communist Party of China” and to “promote the prospects for unity among the U.S. Marxist-Leninists.”Footnote 87 Upon their return, the CPML, the LRS, and the RWH agreed to “hold a series of meetings to seek greater unity” as “a step forward in the process of forging a single, unified communist party.”Footnote 88 Beijing counted on these faithful parties to endorse its historical verdict against the Cultural Revolution, particularly after the Fifth Plenum of the Eleventh CCP Central Committee in February 1980, which posthumously rehabilitated Liu Shaoqi, the former CCP chairman who died in disgrace in 1969. When RWH and CPML delegations visited China that March and June, they both rubber-stamped Beijing’s position. “What we heard and saw of the situation in China was good,” the RWH group commented. “There is no question but that China is firmly on the socialist road and dealing with its problems in a way to overcome the disastrous consequences of the Cultural Revolution.”Footnote 89 Jennifer O’Day, who led the CPML delegation again, told the Chinese: “Our party also suffered ultra-leftist influence… and dismissed the united front work… We are fixing it now.”Footnote 90
What little unity existed among U.S. Maoists was falling apart, however. Beijing kept inviting Maoist groups, large and small, during the next few years, but these efforts, as well as the CPML-LRS-RWH trilateral talks, bore little fruit. It was no surprise. On February 17, 1979, ten days after Deng Xiaoping returned from the United States, China invaded Vietnam, once its comrade and brother, in what it named a “war of self-defense.” It prompted the RCP and other Maoist organizations to accuse Beijing of joining “the U.S. imperialist war bloc” and posed “excruciating challenges” to the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, which soon disbanded.Footnote 91 The “world-historical importance” of the Sino-Vietnamese War, the first war between two Marxist-Leninist states that was not justified in ideological terms, inspired Benedict Anderson to write his seminal work on nationalism.Footnote 92 Revolutionary unity had unraveled. In an interview with the celebrated playwright Arthur Miller in China, William Hinton called himself “an American nationalist,” with “the sound of a conclusion he has come to after a long time.” Pressed about the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s complicity in it, Hinton faltered: “I don’t know. Nobody knows.” “The Revolution is loved by [the Chinese people]. Don’t ever forget that,” said Hinton, as he walked out into the dimly-lit hallway. “It’s their pride and their dignity and all their hopes rolled up together.” Of Hinton, Miller wrote in conclusion: “He has invested the better part of all his hopes in China, and now he is tired, and there is no end in sight.”Footnote 93
Conclusion
The concept of Mao’s China underwent “devolution” in the 1980s, to borrow Fabio Lanza’s term.Footnote 94 Countless China scholars, many of them once inspired by Mao’s revolution, discovered its terror in China. Vera Schwartz, for example, was appalled by “an uninterrupted stream of horror stories” about the Cultural Revolution, while Merle Goldman compared it to the Holocaust—“We knew but we didn’t want to believe. It was too horrible.”Footnote 95 Even Grace Lee Boggs, a long-time Maoist activist of Chinese descent, pitied foreign residents in China whose lives were disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. “Previously, I had been somewhat envious of the opportunity they had enjoyed to witness firsthand events of such historical magnitude. But I was glad that I was not in their present situation and that I had the struggle in Detroit to go home to,” she wrote.Footnote 96 The myth of the “Chinese model”—socioeconomic development based on Chinese socialism—also dissipated. Jan Prybyla of Pennsylvania State University observed: “Instead of ‘Is the Chinese developmental model transferable to other countries?’ the question now became: ‘What developmental model can the Chinese borrow to get them out of their bind?’”Footnote 97 Mao’s China and Maoism no longer held the same traction in Ronald Reagan’s 1980s has it had in the 1960s.
The USCPFA, as a result, faced an existential crisis. Not only was the association no longer the sole provider of China travels (its tour income plummeted to $400,000 in 1980, creating financial problems), but its friendship-building agenda had, on account of normalization, also become obsolete. “The particular role of USCPFA is going to be greatly diminished, perhaps even non-existent,” warned Ellen Brotsky, president of the San Francisco chapter, who argued that the association should reposition itself “into the mainstream of American society.”Footnote 98 As Beijing stopped touting “New China,” an antithesis to “Old China” prior to 1949, New China magazine folded in 1979. A RWH paper maintained that the RWH and other Maoist groups should stay in the USCPFA, “but we should be modest and realistic about what we can accomplish.”Footnote 99 As the USCPFA slowly fell into obscurity, so too did these organizations. The CPML dissolved in 1982 due to factional strife, and the RWH coalesced with the Proletarian Unity League to form the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) in 1985, which vowed to avoid dogmatism, a defining feature of Maoism in the United States.
The Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4, 1989 dealt a fatal blow to the remnants of U.S. Maoism. Always keen on using foreign “friends” for diplomatic gains, Beijing invited USCPFA leaders—Claire Hirsch, Eleanor Phillips, Bob Kahan, and Frank Carney—to China that August as “old friends of the Chinese people.” Their tour was a propaganda show, full of meetings with students, soldiers, and citizens, who all vilified the protestors as a lawless counter-revolutionary mob desperate to topple the CCP regime. The group was granted a meeting with Jiang Zemin, Deng Xiaoping’s successor, in Beijing. When the American visitors lamented the recent difficulty facing their friendship work, Jiang’s answer in English was “as you can see, our conversation is taking place without the noise of gunpowder.”Footnote 100 Such witticism proved of little use in keeping U.S. Maoists riveted to China. While the FRSO offered a tepid defense of the CCP, the LRS and other Maoist organizations soon disbanded.Footnote 101 Shortly before her death, Maud Russell, who had been active in the USCPFA for many years, denounced the Tiananmen bloodshed in Far Eastern Reporter as the “bitter harvest” of Deng’s economic reform, which caused inflation, unemployment, and inequality.Footnote 102 William Hinton also put the blame on corruption induced by the market economy. “It lit up, like a bolt of cosmic lightning, the reactionary essence of China’s current leading group,” he wrote.Footnote 103 Hinton withdrew into farming, his lifework, leaving his daughter, Carma, making documentary films about the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square Massacre.Footnote 104 As the Cold War drew to a close, Maoism—an impossible combination of unity and struggle aimed at socialist revolution—became all but irrelevant.
Today, Maoism is nowhere to be seen in mainstream American politics. As this article has shown, the uncompromising pursuit of unity and struggle caused fragmentation among U.S. Maoists and frustrated the entire movement. Maoism, however, is not history just yet. Almost half a century after Mao Zedong’s death, Bob Avakian, now eighty-one, stands alone as the poster child of Maoism in the United States, and the RCP as its vanguard party. The RCP’s central committee adopted a resolution in 2016: “The new synthesis of communism brought forward by Bob Avakian… represents a qualitative advance in the scientific approach to making revolution and emancipating humanity. It provides the foundation and point of departure for a new stage of communist revolution that is urgently needed in the world today.” For Avakian and his disciples, revolution is as imminent as it was in the 1970s. With his embalmed body in the mausoleum near the Tiananmen Square, Chairman Mao cannot lead this revolution. But fear not, the RCP resolution continued: “Just as, in 1975, being a communist meant being a follower of Mao and the path that he had forged, so today being a communist means following Bob Avakian and the new path that he has forged.”Footnote 105 Avakian is now the new Mao Zedong, and his teachings new Maoism. Mao’s dream for revolution thus lives on, though in a unity so closed and a struggle so obscure that it no longer sparks the world’s imagination.
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