Review | China’s New Red Guards: rise of the neo-Maoists examined in briskly written book
- Author Jude D. Blanchette explores the stresses within China’s Communist Party
- ‘It may present itself as a united and monolithic organisation but is in fact a sackful of sects struggling for control of the narrative’
China’s New Red Guards – The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong
Jude D. Blanchette
Oxford University Press
4/5 stars
“The mortuary of global politics is piled high with the corpses of socialist countries,” said PLA Air Force Senior Colonel Dai Xu in a 2014 pep talk to a military audience in northeast China.
A hero to the neo-Maoists, whose rise is described in Jude D. Blanchette’s China’s New Red Guards – The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong, Dai saw shadowy forces everywhere conspiring to add Chinese socialism to the list of casualties, whether by encouraging “peaceful evolution” or taking to the streets in the then ongoing Occupy Central protests.
A China specialist at United States risk-advisory firm Crumpton Group, Blanchettehas had face-to-face meetings with many of his subjects – neo-Maoists and opposing economic reformers, grass-roots activists and high-profile figures alike.
He neither takes sides nor comments on the merits of each argument, but sets out to describe the stresses within the Chinese Communist Party.
It may present itself as a united and monolithic organisation, but it is, in fact, a sackful of sects struggling for control of the narrative about the party’s supposed past miracles and the righteousness of its present policies. Blanchette recounts the history of this struggle and its consequences for the economy from the moments after Mao’s death, in 1976, to the present day.
