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Maoism: A Global History Julia Lovell London: Bodley Head, 2019 606 pp. £30.00 ISBN 978-1-847-92249-6
With Maoism: A Global History, Julia Lovell offers the first scholarly exploration of Mao Zedong's impact on the world at large. She implicitly defines Maoism as a body of texts published under his name between the 1930s and 1960s and as the practice of Chinese Communist foreign policy from 1949 to 1976. This dual definition allows her to cover a wide range of developments in Asia, Africa, West Europe and the Americas from the 1930s to current times. Throughout his political career from the 1930s to the 1970s, Mao exploited a varied tool set – his theoretical advocacy of physical violence for revolutionary ends, his ability to coin catchy slogans, his constructed personality cult, and his talent at charming, manipulating and deceiving friend and foe alike – to project his revolutionary appeal far beyond the People's Republic of China. The book starts with the period of internal exile of the Chinese Communist Party in Yan'an (1935–45). This was not only the place where Mao rose from revolutionary practitioner to Marxist philosopher king, but also the mythical revolutionary outpost that Edgar Snow visited in need of a journalistic scoop. The American journalist allowed himself to be manipulated into writing Red Star Over China, a glowing portrait of a supposedly utopian and happy Communist society. His quickly written volume turned out to be the political windfall hoped for by Mao's Communists in China and abroad. In the remaining...