Content area
Full Text
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON MAO ZEDONG'S THOUGHT. Edited by Arif Dirlik, Paul Healy and Nick Knight. Atlantic Highlands (New Jersey): Humanities Press International (Available in Canada from Fernwood Books, Halifax). 1997. vi, 399pp. US$60.00. cloth, ISBN 0-391-03993-8; US$19.95, paper ISBN 0-391-03994-6.
EDITORs Arif Dirlik, Paul Healy and Nick Knight have assembled in Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong's Thought a diverse set of dense essays on the weighty significance of the life's work of Mao Zedong. Given Mao's large impact on China and the rest of the world for about a half a century, it is likely that Mao and his ideas will continue to be a matter of serious discussion for quite a while to come. The good work in this heavy tome contributes to that vital dialogue.
The essays are of three types. Some evaluate Mao's impact on Maoists in other nations. Some situate Mao within a Marxist-Stalinist pragmatique, disagreeing over whether Maoism represents continuity or rupture. And some argue that Mao should be interpreted in terms of post-modernist liberation projects. There is much to learn from all three approaches.
Among those discussing Maoism outside of China, William J. Duiker offers a wise and informed overview of Maoism in Vietnam. Duiker shows Vietnamese Communists eager to learn from Mao practical lessons about how to mobilize peasants to struggle for national liberation and ready to go their own way when Mao's prescriptions did not solve Vietnamese ills. Duiker reveals how, in power, Vietnam's Marxist-Leninists, that is, Stalinists rejected Mao's tactics for building socialism because his way "terrorized" people and persecuted them into "suicide" (p. 328). That is, some Vietnamese Communists rejected Maoist practices that led to "a reign of terror" (p. 329) and were more brutal than Stalinism.
But others promoted Mao's notions of "revolution," leading to "an indiscriminate witch-hunt that led to the execution of thousands" (p. 331). After the "mass starvation" caused by Mao's Great Leap, however, Vietnamese Marxist-Leninists "began to lose interest in Chinese economic policies" (p. 334), with Ho Chi Minh finding Mao someone "who unleashed the forces of class war and party factionalism within the revolutionary movement" (p. 337) .
In the Philippines, Emerita Dionisio Distor shows, with much good new data, that Maoist revolutionaries at times seemed "like fundamentalist preachers"...