In their latest book, David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith explore the enduring legacy of China’s Cultural Revolution. They argue that a western intellectual elite gave birth to a distinct interpretation of Maoism which lives on in the strategies employed by today’s woke activists. Joanna Williams welcomes this alarming but insightful critique.

According to the influential charity Stonewall, children as young as two recognise their trans identity. ‘LGBTQ-inclusive and affirming education is crucial for the wellbeing of all young people!’ a spokesperson tweeted. School children are taught that they are ‘privileged by virtue of being white’. Before new students at St Andrews University attend lectures, they must sit a test – not of their subject knowledge, but of their attitudes and values. Students must confirm they agree with statements such as, ‘Acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful starting point in overcoming unconscious bias.’ Disagreement is incorrect: it scores zero. The test must be taken again until students demonstrate the correct way of thinking.

From nursery through to university, education is becoming re-education or indoctrination. Its purpose is to socialise children away from the values of their home environment and into a supposedly better, expert-approved way of thinking. When lessons fail to achieve ideological alignment then peer pressure and social shaming are called upon, with coercive state powers employed as a final means of redress. As David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith explore in their latest book, The Strategy of Maoism in the West, such practices would be recognisable to all who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Jones and Smith trace the ‘neglected genealogy of the Cultural Revolution’ that today, they argue, ‘propels the radical social justice movement, fuels the eagerness of state funded universities to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum, and animates transnational non-governmental organisations to promote deindustrialisation to save the planet’. They briefly take us through what happened in China from the 1950s through to the mid-1970s and show how the Maoist inspired student Red Guards targeted the ‘Four Olds’ – old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits – that were thought to have corrupted and undermined the Chinese revolutionary project.

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But the value of this book lies not in its account of China’s past but in its tracing of the myriad ways in which the ideas and practices associated with the Cultural Revolution continue to shape western society today. The question driving Jones and Smith is why a twentieth-century Chinese revolutionary ideology became so ‘spectacularly successful in the West’. In answer, they explore ‘the channels of ideological influence by which the Maoist ‘long march through the institutions’ spread through the West’s cultural apparatus, manifesting itself today in critical race theory, cancel culture, iconoclasm and curriculum decolonisation.’

The fashion for Mao

In 1972, Hollywood film star Shirley MacLaine visited China to marvel at the triumph of the cultural revolution. She spoke of her admiration for Mao’s reforms and his determination to re-educate the human character. MacLaine was not unusual: Mao was fashionable among the intellectual and cultural elite. France had been celebrating all things Chinese since 1967. Maoism became the ideology of liberation most associated with the student protest movements and emerging youth culture of the late 1960s. To understand why, Jones and Smith remind us we need to look far more closely at what was happening in the west than in China itself.

The counter-cultural fascination with Mao took off at a time when discontent with the success of capitalism was beginning to take hold within the capitalist class itself. The younger generation picked up on this sense of frustration and while they may have had only a limited impact on domestic politics at the time, protesters found western liberal journalists to be ‘ready conduits for their revolutionary and emacipatory message’. In other words, outside of China the message of Mao’s Cultural Revolution was met by a receptive cultural elite already disillusioned with the west and increasingly open to seemingly radical alternatives.

Mao’s Cultural Revolution inspired left-wing intellectuals and activists around the world. Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, then leading lights in the French Communist Party, undertook sponsored trips to China. ‘Che Guevara, as well as a variety of African, South East Asian and South American revolutionaries, went to China in the 1950s and 1960s. Shining Path, the Black Panthers, the Baader Meinhof gang, and more recently Islamic State, all drew upon Maoist understandings in their conduct of guerilla insurgency, believing that clarifying acts of violence were central to the management of their long war strategies.’

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The Strategy of Maoism in the West