Mao Zedong still has resonance with overseas groups

It was a bizarre episode on the face of it: a London couple were arrested last month on charges of keeping three women as slaves for 30 years.

The accused, police said, turned out to be disciples of Mao Zedong, reviving memories of a time when the leader's revolutionary ideas attracted many followers worldwide.

Police say that the couple, Aravinda and Chanda Balakrishnan, reportedly led a tiny sect that was inspired by Mao's ideas. With at most 25 members at its peak, the Workers' Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong had reportedly believed that Mao's army would take over the world by the end of 1977.

And yet a few of them hung on. Theirs was one of the many revolutionary groups created in Britain and other parts of the world in the 1960s and 1970s, when events such as the Vietnam war roused a desire in some for radical change and made Mao's ideas, and his call for the power of youth, so heady.

Mao's foreign followers - often part of far-left political movements - have taken great liberty to interpret, and sometimes reinvent, the Chinese leader's ideas.

Depending on their interpretations of Mao's doctrines, they have fostered intellectual movements, planned guerilla attacks, or - as was the case in London - kept alive a radical cult. Since Mao's death in 1976, the leader's cultural legacy maintains a powerful hold over followers in India and Nepal, where he serves as inspiration to fight for better conditions for peasants.