Maoism: A Global History
JULIA LOVELL
(Bodley Head, 624 PP, £30)
Tablet bookshop price £27 • Tel 01420 592974
Julia Lovell has written another terrific book to follow her earlier works on The Great Wall and The Opium War. Surprisingly, no one before has written a comprehensive history of Chairman Mao’s global influence. So Professor Lovell breaks new ground and does so in a wonderfully well-written account packed with horrors, extraordinary characters and occasionally macabre humour.
Lovell correctly asks whether there ever was a definable philosophy called Maoism. The “ism” in this case covers a mass of contradictions, since most of what Mao’s thought is taken to represent is pickled in paradoxes – paradoxes that encompassed a life of almost unequalled brutality. Here, perhaps, is the first and mightiest of the contradictions. Mao was a mass murderer in the Hitler or Stalin league, from the early years after the Communist take-over of China and the slaughter of landlords (well documented in Frank Dikötter’s book The Tragedy of Liberation) to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
