Rising from the Red Shadow

Mao still resonates in China. In 2024, the Chinese communist revolution exceeded the 74-year lifespan (1917-1991) of its Soviet brother. Now historians perceive October 1949, rather than October 1917, as the game-changing revolution of the last century.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is still held together by the legacies of Maoism. Although the Chinese Communist party (CCP) has long abandoned the utopian turmoil of the Cultural Revolution in favour of an authoritarian capitalism that prizes prosperity and stability, Mao has left a heavy mark on politics and society. “Mao’s invisible hand” remains omnipresent in China’s polity. In 2012, the CCP under Xi Jinping began – for the first time since Mao’s death in 1976 – to publicly renormalise aspects of Maoist political culture: the personality cult; catchphrases such as the “mass line” (supposedly encouraging criticism of officials from the grassroots) and “rectification” (disciplining of wayward party members), writes The Guardian. According to political analysts, Xi is following three key Maoist ideals in governing China: (i) the CCP at the center; (ii) control of history and avoiding the Soviet path; (iii) rejuvenation of China.

Maoism has distinguished itself from Soviet guises of Marxism in several important ways. Giving top priority to a non Western, anti-colonial agenda, Mao declared to radicals in the developing countries that Russian-style communism should be adapted to local, national conditions. Diverging from Stalin, he told revolutionaries to take their struggle out of the cities and to fight guerrilla wars deep in the countryside. He preached the doctrine of voluntarism: that by sheer courage of belief, the Chinese – and any other people with the necessary strength of will – could transform their country. Revolutionary zeal, not weaponry, was the decisive factor. Although, like Lenin and Stalin, Mao was determined to build a militarised one-party state, he also (especially in his last decade) championed an anarchic insubordination, telling the Chinese people that “it is right to rebel”. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), he deployed his own cult to mobilise millions of Chinese people – especially star-struck, indoctrinated youth – to smash party rivals whom he deemed counterrevolutionary.

China Leverages History: from New Silk Road to New Long March

“For Chinese people, history is our religion. We don’t have a supernatural standard of right and wrong, good and bad, so we view History as the ultimate judge”, Hu Ping, an exiled Chinese intellectual, argued. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sees history not as a record, still less a debate, but a tool. For the CCP, engaging with history is not necessarily about the past, but a purposeful political endeavor to shape future direction. Former diplomat Shyam Saran argues that this instrumental approach to history has been a hallmark of Chinese political life.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, born of the revolution, has embraced his party’s heritage. His first public act on assuming power was to escort the Politburo Standing Committee to the National Museum’s landmark exhibition: The Road to Rejuvenation, conceived a few years earlier. At the heart of the narrative was China’s Hundred Years of Humiliation at the hands of foreign bullies and its liberation by the Party. It was the story of the country’s suffering through the Opium Wars and subsequent imperialist aggressions; of how China had been brought to its knees; and how, through the sacrifices of heroic Party members, it had thrown off its shackles and returned to glory. It set the theme of Xi’s leadership and the Chinese dream of wealth and power.

In 2013, President Xi Jinping launched China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also referred to as the ‘New Silk Road’. It is one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived. Since PRC launched its BRI, it has drawn widespread apprehensions, including for challenging the traditional model of multilateral infrastructure financing. Western-led bilateral and plurilateral infrastructure and connectivity initiatives designed as alternatives have remained fragmented and have been dwarfed in scope and scale by a geographically and thematically rapidly expanding BRI, which has thrived on an attractive brand and a streamlined authoritarian one-stop shop project management system, observes the European Parliament.

In 2015 and 2021, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, visited Guizhou. Xi said that of all the places the Red Army reached, it spent the longest time and had the most extensive presence in Guizhou, leaving later generations an enduring spiritual legacy. On May 20, 2019, the Chinese President Xi Jinping paid a visit to Jiangxi Province, the starting point of the 1934 -1936 Long March, that Mao Zedong had started, to lay a floral basket at the monument. Laying a floral basket, Xi said China was on a "new Long March" to overcome "major challenges at home and abroad." The new Long March was Xi's strategy to deal with the US President Donald Trump who started the trade war during his first term (2017-21) of Presidency. The Communists founded a "new China," the People's Republic of China (PRC), in 1949, fifteen years after the Long March began out of desperation to avoid a head-on confrontation with a more powerful enemy.

The Long March is enlisted among “100 Events that Changed the World” in the fall 1997 issue of Life Magazine. From October 1934 to October 1936, the Chinese Workers and Peasants Red Army soldiers left their bases and marched through raging rivers, snowy mountains and arid grasslands to break the siege of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party of China) forces and continue the fight against Japanese aggressors. Some of them marched as far as 12,500 kilometres, almost the same distance from Abuja to Beijing. The surviving military force was less than 7000, down from 86,000 at the start of the Long March.

Applying the Long March metaphor to a current US-China relation, one can see that President Xi was anticipating an equally troubling situation. Quoting a Chinese policy researcher, Nikkei Asia commented, Xi’s real goal was “to ultimately win a '15-year war' with the US that would continue until 2035."

In November 2021, the Communist Party of China (CCP) adopted a landmark resolution on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century. Prior to this, the CCP had approved only two resolutions on history. The first, approved in 1945, established Mao Zedong’s unchallenged authority over the party; the second, under Deng Xiaoping, condemned Mao’s ‘Leftist’ errors and permitted a pivot towards Reform and Opening Up. In a note published alongside the third resolution adopted in 2021, General Secretary Xi Jinping was clear that the CCP’s approach to history was not an academic exercise. Xi argued that the resolution was important both in “a practical and historical sense.” The goal was to “build a broader consensus and stronger unity in will and action” among Party members and society. To do so, it was important to adopt a “rational outlook” for “setting things straight, taking a clear-cut stance against historical nihilism, strengthening ideological guidance and theoretical analysis, and clearing up confusion and misunderstandings over certain major questions in the Party’s history.”

Maoism As an Alternative to Western capitalism

In 2019, Xi said China was on a "new Long March" to overcome "major challenges at home and abroad.". If fifteen years are added to that year, then one can assume that in the next one decade, China would like to emerge as the most powerful country in the world defeating its arch rival USA which claims to represent the Western form of free market capitalism.

Chinese President Xi Jinping used a speech in 2023, on the occasion marking 130 years of Mao’s birth, to push a framework to counter the West’s capitalist model. The “central task” of the nation and its ruling Communist Party is “to build China into a stronger country and rejuvenate the Chinese nation on all fronts by pursuing Chinese modernisation,” he said in Beijing. Xi asserted that “Chinese modernisation” he has been promoting since 2021 — as “a cause passed down from veteran revolutionaries including Mao Zedong” — is the solemn historical responsibility of Chinese Communists. The Chinese leader has promoted that idea at events, describing it as an alternative to systems used by the US and its allies. The Chinese media has described Chinese modernisation as containing unique features, including benefiting a large population and achieving “common prosperity”.

When the free market economy is in deep crisis, the Chinese President Xi has taken resort to Maoism to re-establish an alternative political economic philosophy which once appealed to millions of youths of the Global South, including India"

Views expressed are personal