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.

One of the most influential individuals of modern history is Mao Zedong – or Chairman Mao. He lived an extraordinary life. Influenced by the Marxist-Leninist ideology of communism while a student at Peking University, Mao was a founding member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1927. He immediately led an insurrection – the Autumn Harvest Uprising – that initiated a civil war with the Kuomintang (KMT), the nationalist party that then ruled China. It was a war that would last until 1949 (although interrupted by the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945). When Mao’s CPC finally defeated the nationalists, the KMT and its followers retreated to Taiwan. This is the reason that China still does not recognise Taiwan as an independent country today.

Chapter 3 illustrates the importance of retributive justice from the perspective of the state. Using the case of China, the chapter shows how leaders behave as if addressing the public’s concerns about retributive justice are important for their ability to maintain power. In fact, rulers may even foster such concerns in order to experience the bump in public support that comes from subsequently taking action to alleviate those concerns. In tracing the historical evolution of state strategies for retributive justice, we can see how state building involves not just resource extraction and the accumulation of coercive power but also the production of moral order. In China, government authorities and the public throughout the imperial and communist periods have consistently highlighted that retributive justice is and should be a core function of the state. Indeed, government authorities have at times taken active steps to encourage public outrage at the corruption and malfeasance of local state agents in order to then benefit from the implementation of retributive justice.

Chapter eight summarizes key empirical findings of the study, draws theoretical conclusions about the potential for charismatic movements to bypass routinization and live on in personalistic form, and reflects on the challenges these movements pose for democracy. It also extends the analysis to cases beyond Argentina and Venezuela where charismatic movements persisted or reemerged after the disappearance of their founders, including Fujimorismo in Peru, Forza Italia in Italy, the Pheu Thai Party in Thailand, and Maoism in China. The chapter also explores the broader implications that my theory of personalistic revival holds for the potential staying power and consequences of charismatic populist leaders, who are on the rise in countries across the world.

Chapter 3 provides an account of some of the other factions and individuals which created Tawhid in 1982. One of them, the Movement of Arab Lebanon, was like the Popular Resistance an originally leftist militia which embraced Islamism instrumentally, but its leader and members later turned more sincerely committed. Other factions and individuals, like Soldiers of God and scattered groups of Islamist individuals, had for their part always been sincerely committed Islamists. In addition to detailing their respective origins and trajectories, this chapter also traces the root of the merger of all these Tripolitan Islamist factions and individuals back to two regional events which threatened to spill over onto Tripoli – Syria’s February 1982 Hama massacre and Israel’s June 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Tawhid posed as a militant Islamist movement which claimed it would protect the city from foreign invaders, take the struggle to Syria and Israel and create an Islamic Republic in Lebanon. As a result, it rapidly attracted the constituency of Tripoli’s committed Islamists.