Once the totalitarian regime is established, various disasters are bound to recur. A totalitarian state is diagonally opposite to liberal democracy, which is characterized by prevalence of horizontal connections, the sum total of which constitute a social contract. An ideal totalitarian structure, to the contrary, is like a zero-impedance conductor: orders flow from the top to the lowest level all without any obstacle. It was this totalitarian system that enabled Mao, the charismatic leader, to use his overwhelming social support to overthrow his political rivals within the system when his authority was weakened. Like a courtly struggle, the Cultural Revolution was for the sake of Mao’s personal power, but the cost of social destruction was incomparably greater.

This chapter makes the point that there is no need to go as far back as pre-modern Cambodian and pre-modern Vietnamese and Chinese histories to describe the well-documented hostile feelings between the Cambodians and Vietnamese, and that of Vietnam and China. The narrative thus begins during the period in which many of the main protagonists in the Third Indochina War were already active in the arena of the conflict.

By the early 1960s, Vietnam was firmly lodged in China's embrace. Khrushchev's commitment to Vietnam was limited, as he focused instead on relations with the United States. However, after his ouster in October 1964, Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, began to see Vietnam as an opportunity to demonstrate Moscow's revolutionary leadership. The Soviet Union's support for Vietnam served two purposes: establishing credibility in the revolutionary world and asserting its position as America's equal. As the war escalated, both Moscow and Beijing's commitment to Vietnam grew. Despite disagreements over military tactics, the Soviets won Hanoi's loyalty, largely because they supplied Vietnam with badly needed military aid. Yet the end of the war became a Pyrrhic victory for the Soviets. Moscow ended up investing heavily in Vietnam's reconstruction and industrialization, which contributed to the Soviet Union's later insolvency. This chapter highlights the importance of understanding the Vietnam War not only as an East–West struggle but also as an East–East struggle, with the Soviet Union and China competing for power and influence across the region.

De-Stalinization in the Soviet Union deepened the crisis within the international Communist movement. The exposure of Stalin's crimes led to widespread disillusionment in Communist parties in the West, while the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 highlighted the moral bankruptcy of the Communist project. This chapter offers a broad overview of this difficult year, discussing why Khrushchev refrained from invading Poland and why he ordered the invasion of Hungary. It also provides new details on the joint Sino-Soviet effort to pressure North Korea's Kim Il Sung to ease brutal repressions. Lastly, the chapter argues that Mao Zedong's efforts to define Stalin's legacy contributed to his emergence as the self-proclaimed strategist for the socialist camp, bolstering China's influence.

This chapter explores Stalin's approach to China, in particular his difficult relationship with Mao Zedong. It shows Stalin at pains to redefine his strategy as the Chinese Civil War produced an unexpected set of victories for the Communists. By delving into the details of Anastas Mikoyan's negotiations with Mao in Xibaipo, and later Mao's talks with Stalin in Moscow, the chapter brings out hidden tensions between would-be allies while explaining how and why, despite these tensions, Beijing and Moscow managed to conclude a treaty of alliance. The chapter also explores the road to the Korean War, highlighting Stalin's reasons for permitting North Korea's Kim Il Sung to invade South Korea in June 1950. The war allowed Stalin to both strengthen the Sino-Soviet alliance and keep the Americans occupied, postponing the possibility of a conflict in Europe.

During the past 2,000 years, Christianity has evolved from a small group of fishermen recruited on the Sea of Galilee to become the world’s oldest continuously operated religious institution and largest Abrahamic religion. Of all the Christian denominations, including Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholicism remains the largest denomination.1 In 2018, the population of practicing Catholics was equivalent to the population of the People’s Republic of China, or 1.33 billion adherents. Traditionally Europeans dominated the church (21.5 percent). However, the majority of global Catholics are now composed of North and South Americans (48.3 percent), while the fastest growing communities are in Africa, at more than 17 percent.

The Communist revolution from the 1950s to the 1970s unleashed an excess of olfactory anomalies. In the lexicon of Mao-era politics, class enemies are ‘dog shit’ and labour camps are ‘cowsheds’. A method to castigate landowners and capitalists is to ‘stinken’ (douchou) them, and the bourgeois ‘fragrant breeze’ has to be perceived as stinking air. Chapter 6 measures the mighty symbolic power commanded by the olfactory in the moral–political regime of Maoist China, and ponders its jarring relationship with the teleology of Western olfactory modernity. Adopting the keywords approach initiated by Raymond Williams, I analyse a number of smell-related keywords that pervade Mao Zedong’s writings, party documents, and official media. Bridging the biological and the social, this olfactory glossary maps the emotional states of paranoia, rudeness, ruthlessness, and love–hate, all necessary ingredients of the Communist revolution. Overall, Mao’s olfactory revolution was yet another round of retuning the neurons, and yet smell never fails in laughing at the absurdity of human acts evidenced by the contradictions embedded in the propaganda discourse.

European Marxism diffused widely to other parts of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attracting support from many thinkers whose contributions to Marxist thought about the international dimensions of political economy deserve to be better known. This chapter focuses on some innovative and important Marxist thinkers from Trinidad (C.L.R. James, George Padmore), China (Mao Zedong), India (Manabendra Nath Roy), Indonesia (Tan Malaka), Japan (Kōtoku Shūsui, Takahashi Kamekichi, Sano Manabu), and Peru (José Carlos Mariátegui). These thinkers were important not just because they became well known in their local contexts and, in some cases, in wider international Marxist networks. They also sometimes developed ideas that predated better-known European ones and they often called attention to issues that received less attention in European Marxist debates, such as racial discrimination, Eurocentrism, the relationship between Marxism and Islam, the nature and impact of imperialism outside of Europe, and revolutionary politics in places subject to imperialism.

This section focuses on a set of occupied countries whose internal conflicts during and/or immediately after occupation rose to a level of violence that can be described as civil war. Although each of these clashes featured particular characteristics arising from local conditions, participants were usually acutely aware of their connection to the continental and global theaters of warfare as well as to analogous internal conflicts in other occupied countries. One can therefore speak of a sort of archipelago of loosely analogous, temporally overlapping (though not necessarily synchronous), and at least indirectly interconnected civil wars fought across a wide array of lands amidst the overarching global conflict. Indeed, this archipelago extended well beyond Europe, as will be seen in the discussion of the Chinese case.

The transformation of the film industry was tightly bound up with the plan of the Chinese Communist Party for creating the new nation and its socialist culture and the “revolutionization” of film stars was an essential part of it. This chapter focuses on the story of one individual, the actress Li Ming, who started out as a military arts soldier in the New Fourth Army, to illustrate the everyday politics at the Shanghai Film Studio in the 1950s. Li Ming suffered an identity crisis as both actress and party cadre, witnessed the complicated relationship between the new nation and film stars, and experienced the impact of the “organization” on her new individual career. From a perspective of “the party’s own,” her story provides us with an intriguing way to understand the revolutionary cultural agenda, examine the degree to which the power of the Party permeated the grassroots, and comprehend the everyday politics in the socialist transformation of the urban culture.

This chapter reveals the popular origins of the Nixon-Mao summit. It argues that people-to-people diplomacy and nonstate actors made a fundamental contribution to the beginning of Sino-American rapprochement in 1971. Private US organizations – chief among them the National Committee on US-China Relations – helped change American minds about the need for engagement with the People’s Republic of China. Thereafter, people-to-people interactions were the first means by which direct contact between China and the United States resumed—through ping-pong diplomacy but also a raft of other 1971 visits by American scientists, students, and ideologically-motivated travelers. This chapter also analyzes the impression formed of China by some of the first American visitors to the country since the Cultural Revolution. It concludes with the negotiations over the structure of the exchange program that took place between the Chinese government and US state and nonstate actors in 1971 and 1972, including during the Nixon–Mao summit of February 1972.

Samuel Griffith went to New College, Oxford University, after retiring on March 1, 1956. He had made contact with Basil Liddell Hart by the middle of 1957, and Liddell Hart soon agreed to read and comment on Griffith’s dissertation. Liddell Hart made extensive comments on the dissertation as it was being read, and Griffith mentions reading Liddell Hart’s Strategy: The Indirect Approach. Griffith also believed that Chinese strategy was fundamentally different than Western strategy, with the possible exception of Liddell Hart’s strategy. Griffith also assumed, and consequently asserted without evidence, that Mao Zedong’s strategy was consistent with Sunzi. This was also due to Griffith’s connection between guerrilla warfare, Mao, and Sunzi, a connection that was particularly strong because he had translated Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare when he was in China. Griffith also asserted that Communist strategy, even before Mao, was based on Sunzi. It was also important for the dissertation to try to determine whether Sunzi had been influential in Western military thought before the twentieth century. Griffith’s biases, in addition to those of Liddell Hart, affected his choice of translation terms as much the introductory explanation of Sunzi.

The Art of War and Sunzi’s modern image outside China must be placed within their original Chinese context. The mythical author and “his” text served a specific function in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian that, given the seminal nature of the Records of the Grand Historian in creating many of the categories and interpretations of pre-imperial and very early imperial history, have persisted until the present. Samuel Griffith connected Sunzi to Mao Zedong, the great Chinese military genius of the twentieth century, in order to make Sunzi relevant to Western readers. He also connected Sunzi back to ancient Chinese history to establish that, if Mao was the most recent manifestation of strategic acumen, the foundation of that thought was basic to Chinese culture. Sunzi was an ancient classic that was not only an enduring piece of strategic truth, but also a description of warfare in premodern China.

Since 1949, the Chinese party-state’s approach to health policy has fluctuated with the vicissitudes of politics, oscillating between neglect and an instrumental use of healthcare to promote state legitimacy. This chapter examines health policy in China from 1949 until the 2000s, with a focus on rural areas. During the Maoist period, two factors hindered the erstwhile Ministry of Health in improving health services: budget constraints and political oscillations that prioritized ideology over expertise. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping initiated market reforms and subordinated healthcare and social policy to economic growth. In the early 2000s, due to pressure from society, shifts in governance style, and encouragement from at home and abroad, the Chinese government initiated a dialogue on healthcare reform that culminated in the 2009 plan to overhaul the health system. But because local government was still primarily responsible for funding health policy and faced budget constraints, legacies of health policy in the second half of the twentieth century continued to impact healthcare in the 2000s.

Chapter 20 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet continues the book’s exploration of the early Cold War years and the threshold of the Urban Planet’s Greatest Acceleration. It visits imperial capitals like London and Paris as certain types of spaces there became “proto-Third worlds” where young nationalist leaders formed their early ideas of liberation and development, then brought them back to colonial cities to launch struggles for national independence. Mohandas Gandhi’s Satyagraha or non-violent resistance transformed the practice of mass urban protest even as Gandhi fought global urban industrialism, rising sectarian violence, and the British Raj en route to Indian independence. Mao Zedong took a contrasting route to power that also started with villages, in this case as effective military bases to expel far better-armed imperial and bourgeois nationalist forces and then seize China’s great cities. Dozens of other independence movements adopted mixtures of these two strategies, which coalesced above all around development – starting with state or capitalist investment in advanced industrial facilities as well as the housing, educational, health, transport, and planning infrastructure aimed to erase the sheer inequalities of the imperial-era Urban Planet.

As reports of mass famine turned from a trickle to a flood in 1960, the leadership slowly realized that the party had made a mistake of historical proportion. According to Ministry of Public Security data, 675 counties and cities had death rates exceeding 2 percent of population in the early 1960s, compared to the normal 1 percent or so. In forty counties, mainly in Anhui, Sichuan, Henan, Guizhou, and Qinghai, the death rates exceeded 10 percent of the population (Yang et al. 2012: 395). Economists and demographers estimate that the Great Leap Forward caused sixteen to thirty million unnatural deaths in the early 1960s (Kung and Lin 2003). The policy of using confiscated grain to finance a rapid buildup of industrial capacity championed by Mao and his colleagues had led to one of the greatest man-made disasters in the twentieth century.

During his ascent to power in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Mao had “packed” the CCP upper echelon with people who had sided with him in the many internal power struggles in the party, especially those who had served with him in the First Front Army. Yet even this strategy was insufficient to maintain Mao’s absolute power in the party. When the unexpected shock of the Great Leap Forward led to a precipitous fall of Mao’s prestige within the party, a rival coalition composed of Mao’s former allies emerged to sideline him. Even a formerly loyal protégé such as Deng Xiaoping began to display streaks of independence.

Even at an abstract theoretical level, the power configuration in China after the 1969 9th Party Congress was highly unstable. On the one hand, Mao continued to be an active and powerful chairman of the party. On the other hand, Lin Biao, the anointed successor, had a great deal of control over the military. Without the possibility of other powerful factions in the party to check a potential fight between Mao and Lin, both sides had much temptation to eliminate the other if they believed they had sufficient power to do so (Acemoglu et al. 2008: 162). Fortunately for Mao, he had cultivated two disparate groups to help him govern China in the event of a purge of Lin Biao: the Fourth Front Army (FFA) and the surviving scribblers. Mao’s strategy of cultivating the tainted FFA paid off handsomely. Instead of having to concede to Lin Biao’s reluctance to carry out self-criticism or being forced to rely on Lin’s followers, Mao forced Lin’s hand, knowing that he could credibly threaten Lin with replacing the Lin Biao faction with FFA veterans. After Lin Biao fled, Mao carried out his threat and eradicated close associates of Lin Biao wholesale from the military, replacing them with veterans of the FFA. The Lin Biao incident on September 13, 1971, finally led to the full installation of the coalition of the weak.

Zhang Chunqiao helped Mao launch the Cultural Revolution and became a core member of the Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG). At the 10th Party Congress in 1973, Mao promoted him into the most powerful institution in the Chinese Communist Party, the Politburo Standing Committee, a rarely seen leap for a pre–Cultural Revolution vice-provincial-level official in the space of seven years. When his daughter asked him right after the congress whether he felt a sense of triumph, Zhang responded, “I don’t feel much. Which revolutionary base area did I build? Which army did I lead? Which battle did I win?” (Zheng 2017: ix) Despite his formal power, Zhang knew that since he was a writer and an ideologue instead of someone with faction followers throughout the party and the military, he had very little informal power. Given their limited political experience and narrow political networks in the party, why did Mao elevate Zhang and others in the scribblers mafia (笔杆子) into senior offices during the Cultural Revolution?