China's New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong

by Jude Blanchette

Ever since Deng Xiaoping effectively de-radicalized China in the 1980s, there have been many debates about which path China would follow. Would it democratize? Would it embrace capitalism? Would the Communist Party's rule be able to withstand the adoption and spread of the Internet? One debate that did not occur in any serious way, however, was whether Mao Zedong would make a political comeback. As Jude Blanchette details in China's New Red Guards, contemporary China is undergoing a revival of an unapologetic embrace of extreme authoritarianism that draws direct inspiration from the Mao era. Under current Chinese leader Xi Jinping, state control over the economy is increasing, civil society is under sustained attack, and the CCP is expanding its reach in unprecedented new ways. As Xi declared in late 2017, "Government, military, society and schools, north, south, east and west-the party is the leader of all." But this trend is reinforced by a bottom-up revolt against Western ideas of modernity, including political pluralism, the rule of law, and the free market economy. Centered around a cast of nationalist intellectuals and activists who have helped unleash a wave of populist enthusiasm for the Great Helmsman's policies, China's New Red Guards not only will reshape our understanding of the political forces driving contemporary China, it will also demonstrate how ideologies can survive and prosper despite pervasive rumors of their demise.

Genres: China, History, Politics, Nonfiction, Asia, Military Fiction

218 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 2, 2019

Reviews

[Bonnie G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a strong interest in the ebb and flow of Maoism in China. I was first in the country in late 1984, and I traveled around talking to people in cities, towns and unmapped countryside. At significant personal risk, they generously shared their experiences during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. They trusted me, and I have done what I can to raise awareness. I ended up working in China for a time, and what I knew impacted my approach to the work, always with good intentions, though some of those intentions led to bad things. I am writing a book right now, a thriller. It comes as a surprise to few who know me that Chinese students with right-leaning political views are central to the narrative. (In China, right means pro-Mao, pro-strong central party control.) I read this book to structure a part of my story, and it was very informative. This is scholarly work. The endnotes go on as long as any chapter. If you are looking for a better understanding of the nostalgia for the Mao years, this is a great place to start. That is especially true if you want to know about the "nostalgia" of 20-40 year olds who were not alive during the Cutlural Revolution, and who deny the 30 millionish (it is hard to get an accurate count) people who died of starvation and tourture during those years, as many right wing people in Europe and the US deny the Holocaust. I will need to thank Mr. Blanchette in my acknowledgments.

[Carlos Martinez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't share many of the author's political opinions, but this book has a ton of fascinating information about neo-Maoism and other elements of the Chinese far left.

[Mladen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book presents a great analysis of the position of neo-Maoist movements in Chinese politics and society. Beginning from the death of Mao Zedong the book gives the reader an overview of how the Chinese government's political agenda changed through time all the way until 2019 when it is led by Xi Jinping. The author gives you a thorough insight into how neo-Maoist movements influenced Chinese politics through time and what their perspectives are of specific social issues. Every chapter provides numerous examples of crucial characters and events with which the author also provides sufficient literature to back up his whole story. On top of all this, the book is very well written and is easily readable.
All in all, a great book for anyone interested in Chinese politics, social movements, and similar topics.

[Adrian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few books have been written on the Neo Maoist undercurrent in China, and many articles touch on this phenomena. However, Jude Blanchette’s study really captures the feeling and Zeitgeist of the movement, and helps answer the question any reader would want to know; what is Neo Maoism really about?
Well, Neo Maoism builds on the personality cult of Mao Zedong, a cult the Chinese government put at a cautious distance, however, the real motivator is the increasing inequality and plight of China’s workers who are not feeling the benefits of China’s economic growth. As such, Neo Maoism is a movement striving for a more egalitarian age in China, which they associate with the Mao Era.
The book is far from an examination of such a movement, rather, it also gives significant coverage to the government’s cautionary approach toward the movement, epitomized by Deng Xiaoping’s dictum “the party must maintain vigilance against the right, but primarily against the left.”
This is illustrated in the case of the persecution of both workers who have protested against harsh treatment, and the student activists who have supported their cause. The most famous and iconic case is the downfall of Bo Xilai, and the enduring popularity of his Chongqing model, however, many other currents of Neo Maoism remain in China.
Neo Maoism is not a centralized or coherent movement, but rather, a kind of ethos that is present throughout the disgruntled and nostalgic throughout China. It cannot be simplified, and simply needs to be felt and absorbed to be understood, and Blanchette’s book provides an excellent introduction.

[William Derasmo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very dense but if you want to get a better understanding of China’s totalitarian regime, this is a good place to start. You do get a better sense of why we are where are with China. The whole book comes together in the last few pages and can be summed up with the song lyrics The Who once sang, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” I just feel for the Chinese people in that I don’t think they’ll ever know freedom.

[Andrew Carr · Rating 4 out of 5]

History is not just written by the winners, it is largely written about the winners. But they are not the only ones with an interesting or important story to tell. And as Blanchette makes clear, in Xi's China, the new Maoists feel they are losers no more.

By studying those who objected to China’s great reforms and opening up, China's New Red Guards offers an unconventional reading of the country's history. This book therefore moves at a different pace, and looks with fresh eyes on what often feel like tired, well-told events.

The neo-Maoists are somewhat like the US Tea Party - an analogy Blanchette himself draws. Both groups are both intensely nationalistic and proud, yet also uncomfortable with the transitions and changes they have seen in their nations. In Xi and Trump both groups have found leaders who seem to speak for them, yet many still worry that neither man is sufficiently radical to ensure their country becomes great again. Realising that those who may be loudest in promoting their nation may also have the most angst about its choices is an important reminder about the complexity of political life.

Though hawks in both the US and China cooperate to project a view of the CCP as master strategists with 100 year plans, Blanchett's book shows an elite unsure about the right way, a 'wave like' pattern of reform and retreat over recent decades and serious infighting and political obligations driving domestic and foreign policy decisions. Paradoxically, I would suggest this can encourage a sense of empathy.

Not that we in the West should welcome the Neo-Maoists (it's hard to respect those who dismiss the starvation of tens of millions of their compatriots in the Great Leap Forward). But this more realistic picture helps us get a sense of a China which is grappling with genuine uncertainty and domestic constraints every bit as challenging as our own. That may not change any of the fundamental issues driving the US and China into conflict, but it may help us think our way towards strategies that can achieve our interests while allowing them to at least save face.

The final blessing of this book is its relatively short length. A tight 161 pages is sufficient to detail the rise and influence of the Neo-Maoist movement, and discuss its implications without bogging down in endless anecdotes or sideline figures whose names may slip from the readers heads soon after closing the cover.

[Frank McGirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book about the effect of the far left on China's politics.

If America has a problem with 2 parties not being able to really give a concise mandate of what their members believe, imagine the difficulty of the Communist Party in China, especially as they've "modernized" over the past 30 years.

Blanchette stays focussed on China, but for me, I was continually drawing parallells between the neo-Maoist and Trumpists (though occassionally our far left) with its nationalism and hero worship and willingness (or often its outright demands) to ignore any of the short comings or outright disasters (35 million starved to death during the Great Leap Forward) of the "good ol' days."

One of the most notable take-aways being that these passionate people can have a huge impact on the course of politics even if they and the politicians that purport to represent them don't have a coherent policy.

It's a relatively slim volume with almost a third of its 200 pages being devoted to documentation, so it's not trying to be the definitive history of China, and I can't really fault Blanchette on not filling me in on all my ignorance of how China has evolved (or devolved if you happen to be a ne0-Maoist), but I really wanted to know more about how working conditions, polution (it was sever when I traveled China for a month in 2000), human rights, and corruption changed during its economic progress.

It's being able to put those things into some kind of perspective that really lets one evaluate what's going on. In that regard, Blanchette spends the most time on the question of the mass starvation that occured towards the end of Mao's reign, showing how the power of the internet has enabled the unfounded claim of 3 million dead to be a legitmate "theory" just because of its spread on the internet (Blanchette shows that most agree it is somewere between 15-55 million), as well as how the passing of time distances people even people who were alive, and of course those who weren't, from the actual reality.

The short end chapter starts off (it seemed to me) showing Xi Jinping skillfully steering China back towards communism and Mao's ideals, but it never abandons it's complexity and their are still groups who condemn him for half-measures. And very tellingly, Blanchette ends with a story of factory workers trying to unionize getting arrested for "stirring up trouble" and a young student activist critical of the CCP being hauled off in a car by three un-identified men. The CCP is for preserving the CCP foremost, using Mao's intolerance for dissent more than his belief in equality.

With the increasing polarization in the US, I have been often thinking of what I had learned when I was in China, that Mao was officially considered 70% right, 30% wrong, and wishing that a majority of Americans were capable of speaking about shades of grey. (Blanchette, incidentally, points out that that's a falacy, there has never been an official reckoning of Mao's "correctness.") But it appears that China is in-step with the rest of the world in digging into radical positions.

This book predates the increased abuses the Uighar minority has been enduring for at least a few years now, and I hope to read some more recent work from Blanchette.

On a different note, this was an amazing thrift find for me: a modern, low-print book that I had actually marked as "want-to-read" after reading a piece on it in the New Yorker!

[Matthijs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jude Blanchette's China's New Red Guards boils down to an extremely well-researched case study of the neomaoist grassroots organization Utopia. Its extreme density of names, dates and writings is a double-edged sword. There are nuggets of gold awaiting the reader thanks to Blanchette's clear eruditeness in Chinese writings, but you will have to stay on high alert during the mining process to spot them.

The concluding chapter of the book left me wanting more. Blanchette stays understandably clear of making the kind of erroneous flashy predictions made by many other foreign observers, but it would have been insightful to know what possible scenarios he envisions on how neomaoism might continue to steer the policy and party debate in the near future.

[strategian]

A well cited and informative overview of contemporary public politics both in and out of the Chinese Communist Party. It charts primarily the development of the Chinese left-wing website Utopia and the figures in its orbit but also puts the new-Maoists into the context of being a group putting some pressure on actual 'party politics' in a one party state. It strives for breadth rather than depth which may be the best manner of writing on trends, but the book doesn't so much end as stop. As an account of contemporary politics if it runs out of contemporary politics to write on this makes sense, but there isn't much in the way of a conclusion or argument drawn by the author.

[Gabor Seprenyi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book about the revival of Maoism an how the CCP an Xi Jinping channelled this force into the party. This book also helped me understand the Bo Xilai phenomenon and his spectacular downfall and its background and puts the present party dynamics in China into historic perspective. I was not surprise to read how false hopes blindsided the West and Western China "experts" about Xi Jinping. Downside of the book: it is an academic book, way too many details for my level of interest. Who wrote what article when etc. is too much for me and it was impossible to keep track of the names of the key characters in the book.

[Bioskope · Rating 5 out of 5]

Information dense, but it was well woven together for the most part.

[Alexander Von kaldenberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

A heavy but relatively brief view into Chinese politics. Not recommend for those no REALLY interested in China and already somewhat informed.

The biggest takeaway for me was that the CCP is not the unified and monolithic institution that it presents itself as. There are just as many factions, divisions and personalities as in any other government. The only difference is that they don’t use twitter to air their dirty laundry and the party keeps a tight lid on all media, reporting and communication...so you rarely hear about rivalries and tension until something really explosive happens.

[Kaiser · Rating 3 out of 5]

此乃持平之论也，十年前出版也许还恰合时宜，如今若想满足中国大陆读者的期许，不讲讲北大南大马会那帮人和知乎上那帮口必称“毛伟人”的Maomie和Nazi是说不过去的。

[rqoeyzcf rqwezcv · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book revealed to me a group of people that I know their existence but never confronted them face to face. They are the extreme left wing people who love Mao Zedong and think that Mao Zedong's management and development method could give China a brighter future.

Chinese people have different feelings when Mao Zedong died. It is true that the inequality has always existed in China since Mao's era. So that people of different social status and economic status have different feelings about Mao.

There is no Marxist quotation for what is happening now. Same statement could be that there is no Maoist quotation for what we are doing now. The world is developing fast and we could only learn from the current facts.

In China, a socialist country lead by a communist party, student commonly laugh at Marxist in their political examination.

Xi Jinping said that our red nation will never change color. What does red mean?

[Ronald · Rating 4 out of 5]

very interesting background on a powerful dissident NeoMaoist movement in China. could have used some speculation as to how this movement will evolve as the party enters its endgame as predicted by Michael Auslin in The End of the Asian Century. It is anticapitalist and seems like the wrong way for China to go.

see the online 2016 article in the Financial Times for and excellent overview and potential impact of this movement. search for "NeoMaoist movement in China"

[Jeff Bragg · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting look into how the political situation in China has changed over time. I haven't read a lot of other books about the political landscape in China to get a good feel for how accurate this book is, but the thesis of the book seems reasonable based on what I have observed from the outside. Definitely recommend to anyone trying to understand what is going on in China.

[Louis Lue · Rating 1 out of 5]

The same kind of liberal cliché that treated rightwing populism as some kind of foreign, external invasion rather than a symptom of some immanent limit that marks the field of the liberal state itself -- the kind of liberal lie that insists populist capitalism (such as fascism) is the same kind of "totalitarian" horror as the real experience of what Marx, and we in the last century, used to call communism. The new Maoists in China today are not only a problem for liberal civilization (in the precise sense that it is China's full subsumption into neo-liberal globalization that has produced the problematic "new red guards"), but much more so for China's ruling Party-State. Ever since a prominent workers' protest organized by "neo-Maoist" activists in 2018, China's state organs have been cracking down on workers, radical left activists and their online presence, ushering in a new phase of state brutality and censorship. Young Marxian leftists are at the frontline of a subterranean revolt against the kind of authoritarian capitalism that Deng introduced to China in the name of reform and liberalization. For anyone who's still interested in a politics of universal emancipation, the re-introduction of language of class struggle in contemporary China points to nothing less than an impossible new beginning of politics. The task of re-inventing emancipatory politics is a question of subject agency, one that does not surrender to the State.

[Alfonso Parada]

fake socialism Sadge

[Killer Bee · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.62 overall rating

[Shrike58 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back in the day I had a friend with an expat wife from the PRC who would make regular trips to see her family in China. To him, the most notable thing that concerned the people he met was the prevalence of open corruption, or at least what they considered to be corruption.

Flash forward 10-15 years and we have this book, which might be better entitled “China’s Grumpy Old Red Guards.” What tends to aggravate these folks is how the traditions of the pre-1981 years have been cast aside, leaving working-class folks in the lurch.

While examining the beliefs of these people in some detail, Blanchette goes to some lengths to demonstrate that the current leader of the PRC, Xi Jinping, is perfectly willing to exploit these feelings to chastise his opposition on the “right.” This is at least until organizations of a Neo-Maoist persuasion get too obstreperous and the hammer is dropped.

The basically insolvable issue, as most of the people who read this book will be aware of, is the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to retain the person of Mao Tsetung as the symbol of their legitimacy to wield power in Beijing, while repudiating the inheritance of the Great Cultural Revolution. It is to be hoped that the inability to transcend domestic contradiction in domestic conflict does not lead to foreign military adventurism.

Actual rating: 3.5.

Originally written: March 11, 2020.