The introduction outlines the main issues tackled in the volume and presents urban collectivization during the Great Leap Forward as a case study for the search of a socialist everyday, different from and alternative to the capitalist one. It highlights how this search embodied a specific understanding of the political economy, and how it highlighted contradictions within the Maoist project of revolution. Finally, it describes the sources and methodology adopted in the book.

Chapter 5 examines the demise of urban collectivization after 1961. While the production side of urban communes had its problems, it remained economically profitable; it was communal welfare services (canteens, childcare, etc.) that were deemed to be wasteful and dysfunctional and were eventually disbanded, and this could not but have disastrous consequences for female labor and the project of female liberation. Many workers, newly subjected to the double disciplining of industrial labor and family chores, protested these closures, and archival sources convey their dismay and their vocal criticism, which highlighted the continued devaluation of female workers and of their labor, both in the home and in the factory.

This chapter describes the initial phase of the urban commune campaign, in the second half of 1958, and it investigates both Party official rhetoric and archival sources from the early communes in Beijing to show how early models of collectivization were presented as “prescriptive descriptions” to be followed, but also how contradictions between the different goals of this mass movement surfaced almost immediately and framed the praxis of activists and workers at the street level.

Marx’s concept of the Asiatic Mode of Production, characterized by Oriental despotism and isolated Asiatic peasant communes, appears throughout his sporadic writings on Asia. While Marx initially regarded these Asiatic features as barriers to modernity and revolution, in his final decade, he began to see them as possible shortcuts to socialism. His depiction of Asiatic society was informed by British colonial reports on India, as well as German and Russian Romantics’ portrayals of the countryside as communal societies untouched by capitalist industry. These Romanticist views later influenced a variant of twentieth-century dependency theory that idealized premodern Asian rural society and sought to recreate a hyper-modern version of Oriental despotism through rural collective farms. Such theories contributed to large-scale catastrophes and atrocities in Asian communism. Although recent research has largely debunked this romanticized view of the Asian countryside, it persists within some dominant academic theories on Asian peasants.

This chapter tracks the importance and resilience of CPC ideology by examining the development of Mao Zedong Thought from his early Communist writings (1927–1940) through to Yan’an Rectification (1942–1945) and then during his reign as Supreme Leader (1949–1976). It then explores Mao Zedong Thought’s importance for the CPC today. CPC leaders since Mao’s death have invoked, and continue to invoke, Mao Zedong Thought for legitimation and to exhibit continuity despite shifts away from the ideology and practice of the Mao era. Mao Zedong Thought thus fulfills a legitimative need rather than a social one; CPC leaders must acknowledge, and often reference, Mao Zedong Thought to project continuity even if the ruptures since Mao’s death have resulted in an un-Maoist Party-state.

In the People’s Republic of China, according to Mao Zedong himself, literature was to serve politics. But where did the ideas of politics come from, and how did they circulate throughout the state? This book is an exploration of the literary aspects of a political campaign and how literary practice shaped Maoism and the Chinese state. The spring of 1957 found China in the midst of a great bloom. Floral themes and imagery permeated texts across genres of poetry, journalism, political speeches, and fiction. They decorated covers of literary journals, fabric for dresses, and even architecture. Where did these flowers come from? What happened to them in the second half of the year during the Anti-Rightist campaign? This chapter introduces the major questions of the book through the story of the young Shanghainese poet Xu Chengmiao. Through Xu’s poetry and life we explore the flowering of China and the broader question of how individuals participated in Maoism.

This chapter examines how Emmanuel Dongala employs the symbol of China in his fiction to criticize one-party rule in the People’s Republic of the Congo. The symbol is part of a larger invocation of Third Worldism as a key geopolitical and intellectual backdrop for African literature during the twentieth century. The chapter explores the contradictions between postcolonialism and “scientific socialism” via the figure of the “African Mao.” As a symbol, Maoism functions as a paradox in Dongala’s work, inspiring idealism and catalyzing disillusionment; it manifests in characterization (dress, speech, and action) as well as in rhetorical figures (stream of consciousness, intertextuality, and malapropism). The chapter shows how the trope of China crystallizes the perils of Congolese postcolonialism when vernacular convention contests the dogma of revolutionary tautology.

This chapter turns to the Indian context to demonstrate how insurgent activity is shaped, if not enacted, by forms of solidarity extended to the victims of violence. The first part focuses on three novels, Diti Sen’s Red Skies & Falling Stars, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, and Diptendra Raychaudhuri’s Seeing through the Stones, which demonstrate the pitfalls of cultivating bonds of violence across caste, class, and gender divisions. Whereas Diti Sen’s and Jhumpa Lahiri’s novels build on an enchanted solidarity which fails to foresee the ideological pitfalls of the Maoist movement, Diptendra Raychaudhury’s novel extends a disenchanted solidarity for the militants, one that is geared toward exposing the fractures, fault lines, and inherent disunity of the insurgency. In the second section, two works of literary journalism, namely, Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades and Sudeep Chakravarti’s Red Sun, steer the discussion on “deep” and “liberal” solidarities that fortify such fractured cultures of insurgency. While Roy’s narrative, given its penchant for fictional devices, is orientated toward a deep, affective solidarity, Chakravarti’s work, which is more attuned to factualization of narrative, is a champion of liberal solidarity.

The first chapter, Kofi Awoonor Imagines China: The Longue Durée of Ghana–PRC Relations, maps a cultural history. I begin with the Afro-Asian solidarity of the Cold War and end with the beginning of the period governed by the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC); its first summit occurred at the turn of the millennium. I examine the life-writings and poetry of the Ghanaian poet and diplomat Kofi Awoonor and how he imagines the history of modern China through a series of key geopolitical events in three poems: the Red Army’s Long March in 1935, which Awoonor interpolates into pan-Africanist imaginings of decolonization in “The Black Eagle Awakes” (1965); the Cultural Revolution, which sows the seeds of a disillusionment with Chinese socialism (culminating in the government crackdown on democracy protests in 1989) marked in “The Red Bright Book of History” (1989); and “Xiansi, Pou Tou Dalla,” about an official trip to a rapidly industrializing China during the 1990s. In ironic contrast to the previous poem’s disillusionment with China, the speaker admires the Chinese development miracle even as widespread suspicion emerges about the PRC’s investment in the continent.

Chapter 4, Racialization and Afro-Chinese Identity: Henri Lopes’s Le lys et le flamboyant, argues that race needs to be understood as a complex series of shifting racializations brought about through interactions between Africans and Chinese rather than as only an engagement with its ahistoricity as disseminated out of Western classifications rooted in histories of colonialism and imperialism. I examine how multiracial identity is represented in Henri Lopès’s francophone Le lys et le flamboyant (The Lily and the Flame Tree) (1997). I show how the novel—on the level of both form and content—subverts the rhetoric surrounding Africa–China relations as either a total “win-win” or unavoidably a “new colonialism.” I capture how each respective discourse is a mystification and so exceedingly dangerous for individuals when instrumentalized by the jingoistic discourse surrounding Africa and China.

The chapter provides an overview of the burgeoning historiography of the People’s Republic of China, especially of the early period between 1949 and 1978, and suggests how we might integrate this new work into narratives of the Chinese past and present. In working through the research of the past thirty years the findings not only help us identify new areas of research, bur also rephrase some of the initial questions. The chapter highlights areas in which reconsidering PRC history seems especially necessary: transnational flows, violence and social transformation.

Chapter 7 explores the ways statistics were used to govern public health in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC), showcasing another way the language of statistics was spoken. The PRC was disconnected from the WHO’s statistical network during this time, and instead became part of an international health network made up of socialist countries. The chapter details the rise and fall of socialist statistics within the PRC and the methodological continuity maintained by public health researchers, despite the government’s enforced implementation of socialist statistics in the 1950s. The PRC during the period under study illustrates how statistical thinking continued to develop even as experts’ authority was called into question due to a series of anti-intellectual campaigns.

The 1964 Peking Science Symposium and 1966 Summer Physics Colloquium were the two largest-scale international science congresses hosted by Mao’s China. Chapter 4 delves into the inner workings of these events, which brought hundreds of visitors to the People's Republic of China from throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. From planning through to post-conference tours organised for participants, it examines the network of organisations and individuals at national and local levels that collectively shaped these major initiatives to bring foreign scientists to China on the cusp of the Cultural Revolution. In doing so, it shows the extent of integration and coordination between science and foreign relations systems during the Mao era.