Two Maoisms

Guobin Yang dives into two new books on Mao-era China.

By Guobin YangJune 7, 2025

• History

• Cultural Studies

THERE WAS A Mao cult in the 1960s. There is a Teacher fever now. “Teacher” is Mao Zedong’s new moniker on Chinese social media. “If you feel low, read Teacher’s Selected Works.” “When times are tough, listen to what Teacher has to say.” “When in doubt, consult Teacher.” Mao’s youthful dream was to become a schoolteacher. Against all odds, he led the Chinese revolution to triumph and founded the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. In recent years, as Chinese youth have become embittered about jobs and their future, many are turning to Mao’s writing for comfort and strength. On livestreaming platforms like Xiaohongshu (RedNote), internet influencers chant their favorite Mao quotes. They find Mao’s personal struggles as a poor young man inspiring. Some read Mao’s works on political and military strategies for lessons about office politics and career advancement. Not mentioned is Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

In the context of this nostalgia for Mao and the persistent amnesia of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Linda Jaivin’s new book Bombard the Headquarters! The Cultural Revolution in China sounds an alarm. Wait, she seems to say, forget not the violence!

Bombard the Headquarters! recounts the history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution from the founding of the People’s Republic to the present. She characterizes Cultural Revolution politics as “devilishly confusing,” yet renders it with clarity and verve. In just over 100 pages, the book is a bare-bones rundown of key events and characters.

Red Guards were Mao’s monkey kings out to destroy the old world. They burst on the scene in the summer of 1966. The earliest Red Guards were middle school students from elite families in Beijing. “Born red” and raised as heirs to the revolution, these students tried to block others from joining Red Guard organizations. Aggrieved others in Beijing and later all over the country formed their own groups. On campuses and soon in factories, villages, and government agencies, conflicts erupted between rival factions.

Factional warfare was so violent in some cities that it brought the nation to the verge of civil war. The most dangerous moment was the Wuhan incident of July 1967, when the faction backed by the local military beat up Mao’s envoys who had been sent from Beijing to restore peace and order. Mao himself was on a secret visit to meet with Wuhan’s military leaders. Mao hated flying, but for his personal safety, he reluctantly agreed to be flown out of the city at night.

Nationally, Red Guard battles alone caused 237,000 deaths. Yet after Mao called off the Red Guard movement in July 1968, mass killing continued in ensuing political campaigns, causing even more deaths than Red Guard warfare. After Mao’s death in September 1976, the reformer Deng Xiaoping—himself purged during the Cultural Revolution—oversaw the process of settling accounts. The Cultural Revolution was condemned as a national catastrophe to be rejected and forgotten. It has rarely been discussed publicly ever since.

Relying heavily on secondary sources and limited by its brevity, Bombard the Headquarters! occasionally lacks sufficient referencing. It should not be read for new information or analysis. Its point—and power—however, lies in the sheer force of its brevity. Author of several fiction and nonfiction books about Chinese culture and society, including the best-selling The Shortest History of China (2021), Jaivin writes with effortless familiarity of Chinese politics. While telling a sweeping story of horrendous events, she still has an eye for vivid details and character sketches. She mentions Mao’s experience of being humiliated for his “thick provincial accent and earthy, peasant manners” as a library assistant in Peking University—also a favorite story in the current Teacher fever on social media. Jaivin describes Mao’s wife Jiang Qing as a “tough and ambitious character,” who had grown up in poverty and violence. And one reason the famed Chinese filmmaker Chen Kaige’s films keep returning to themes of trauma and betrayal is because of his painful experiences of denouncing his own father when he was a young Red Guard.

If Bombard the Headquarters! is about destruction, another new book, How Maoism Was Made: Reconstructing China, 1949–1965, is about making—the making of things and infrastructures, institutions and people, and ideas and scientific expertise in the years before the Cultural Revolution. Edited by Jennifer Altehenger and Aaron William Moore, the 16 chapters and coda in the volume cover a broad range of topics not often seen in studies of the Mao era, such as furniture-making, sex hygiene guides, and religious revival. Emphasizing historical experiences at the grassroots and institutional levels, the chapters highlight continuities with the pre-Mao era more than ruptures. The early PRC appears relatively open and receptive to different views and practices. The future still held multiple possibilities. This is a refreshing and eye-opening book in highly readable prose; every chapter is a gem.

Toby Lincoln’s opening chapter shows, for example, that the postwar rebuilding of the city of Changsha started in 1946 in Republican China. Those earlier reconstruction efforts laid the groundwork for the “new Changsha” after 1949. In another chapter, Covell F. Meyskens argues that all Chinese leaders in the 20th century viewed infrastructure as essential to modern state-making. The idea of building the Three Gorges Dam was first proposed by Sun Yat-sen in 1919. Geological surveys were conducted in the 1930s and ’40s under the Republican regime and led by American hydraulic engineer John L. Savage. From the 1950s to his death, even Mao the revolutionary romantic valued the role of engineers and global scientific knowledge in the planning of the Three Gorges project.

Unfortunately, Mao’s enthusiasm for scientific knowledge did not translate to protection for scientists during the Cultural Revolution. Shellen X. Wu’s chapter shows that geography as a scientific discipline served state-making from the late Qing and Republican eras all the way to the PRC. Geographical and geological research and surveys were essential to the defense and development of China’s vast borderlands and frontiers across all modern Chinese political regimes. The founding of the PRC even lured back ethnic Chinese geologists and geographers from Europe and North America. Yet, as Wu writes, “the new regime absorbed the knowledge they created and used their expertise but deemed geographers dispensable.”

Political ideals did not easily translate into everyday reality. Altehenger’s chapter on furniture offers a unique lens into complex policy processes. In the early PRC, design standardization was introduced into many areas of industrial production such as electronics and sewing machines. In the city of Tianjin, which had a sizable furniture industry, the municipal government decided to standardize furniture designs and production. Although their goal was to establish a more equitable system of wages and pricing, their efforts created resentment among skilled workers, who would earn the same wages as unskilled laborers in the new system. Consumers also complained about the lack of variety and quality in furniture products. As a result, the city government switched back to some of the practices before standardization.

The building of infrastructures happened together with the making of people and institutions. There are fascinating chapters on cooperative-like urban communes, peasant resistance, dancing pedagogies, bacteriological expertise, book publishing, and brainwashing as a practice of consciousness-raising in times of world revolution.

One of the challenges for the new regime concerned the governance of the many ethnic groups. Benno Weiner’s chapter on the early Maoist state’s role in the resolution of historical feuds between two Tibetan groups in Qinghai and Gansu reveals the state’s ethnopolitical anxieties and efforts to create ethnic minority categories. Moore studies the diaries of six educated individuals from former Kuomintang strongholds to understand how citizens used diary-writing to remake themselves for the new revolutionary order. He finds that diaries were an effective technology of self-making in the 1950s as much as in Republican China. Meanwhile, Sarah Mellors Rodriguez studies sexual hygiene guides published in the 1950s to understand the making of the ideal socialist sexual subject. She finds that these guides drew on both global discourses and traditional Chinese medicine to shape a model of sexual normativity.

Xiaoxuan Wang’s chapter analyzes religious revival in the early 1960s. Before 1960, the Buddhist and Daoist sites on Mount Fang in coastal Zhejiang province had become desolate. However, the heavy human loss caused by the famine after the Great Leap Forward led to the revival of ritual practices, especially rituals for appeasing souls of the dead. Local cadres supported and even participated in the rituals themselves. Thus a ritual economy thrived at a time when religious practices were highly restricted.

How Maoism Was Made does not have a chapter on the making of the younger generation that would become Red Guards, or about the new revolutionary culture in which the younger generation came of age. This is somewhat surprising for a volume that focuses so much on making, including people-making. For sure, there are excellent books already on the Red Guard movement and early PRC political culture, such as those by sociologists Anita Chan and Andrew Walder, political scientist Stanley Rosen, and historian Chang-tai Hung. There are also numerous memoirs about growing up in the Cultural Revolution, such as Rae Yang’s Spider Eaters (1997) and Liang Xiaosheng’s Confessions of a Red Guard (2018).

Such absence makes the Maoism of the 1950s in How Maoism Was Made look radically different from the Maoism of the Cultural Revolution. That is probably the editors’ point, and its importance cannot be overemphasized. When a stellar team of historians and China scholars directs serious attention to the understudied creative rather than destructive aspects of Maoism, everyone should heed. Yet the question lingers: what happened in the 17 years between 1949 and 1966 that led to the Cultural Revolution?

It is hard to see early signs of the Cultural Revolution in How Maoism Was Made. One exception is perhaps Christine I. Ho’s chapter on mass muralism. By showing how peasant artists were mobilized to put up mass murals during the Great Leap Forward, the chapter gestures toward the revolutionary zeal to put up big-character wall posters during the Cultural Revolution. Yet even the Great Leap Forward did not necessarily foreordain the Cultural Revolution. Robert Culp’s chapter on book publishing in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward even catches glimpses of the return of a mode of global cosmopolitanism oriented toward Western cultures.

Ultimately, How Maoism Was Made raises the intriguing question of exactly when the politics of “making” in the early PRC began to shift to the destructive politics of the Cultural Revolution. If, as Roderick MacFarquhar argues, the early 1960s were a crucial turning point on China’s path to the Cultural Revolution, it would mean that it took just four or five short years for political violence at the scale of the Cultural Revolution to break out. Anyone who wishes to prevent such violence from happening again must ponder how and why the buildup to violence could be so fast.