Maoism

The theory and policies identified with the Chinese revolutionary communist leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976). Mao's relationship to Marxism is disputed, since many commentators deny either that he made any novel contributions to social theory, or that his writings were distinctively Marxist. He is principally associated with an heretical theory of socialist revolution (see rebellion, revolution ) which accords primacy to the role of the revolutionary peasantry - hardly surprisingly, given the economically backward circumstances of China in the 1920s, when Mao set out on his political career. Although Marxists continue to dispute vigorously both his relationship to Soviet Marxism, and the practical consequences of his policies on Chinese economic development (especially the effects of the notorious’Cultural Revolution’ of 1966-7), his significance for sociology is limited by the impenetrability of much of his philosophical (as opposed to his political and strategic) writing-a weakness exemplified, for example, in his essays’On Practice’ and ‘On Contradiction’ (1937).

At various times during the Cold War period, neo-Marxist sociologists turned to Maoist China in the hope of finding a socialist state that was less wedded to doctrinaire Marxism than was the Soviet Union, and as a result there are several excellent (though somewhat idealized) ethnographies of life in Maoist China that have achieved almost classic status (including J. Myrdal's Report From a Chinese Village, 1965, and China: The Revolution Continued, 1970; and W. Hinton's Fanshen, 1966). However, students would be well advised to balance these with a reading of a more sceptical account, such as Zhang Xinxin and Sang Ye's oral history of contemporary China (Chinese Lives, 1986).