Scripting Revolution by Keith Michael Baker

Author:Keith Michael Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2015-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mao’s Little Red Book

The Spiritual Atom Bomb and Its Global Fallout

ALEXANDER C. COOK

Half a century ago, in the midst of the Cold War, there emerged from China an alternative script for revolution with surprisingly broad influence. Quotations from Chairman Mao (Mao Zhuxi yulu), commonly known outside China as the Little Red Book, was for a time the most printed book in the world. Official editions numbered well over a billion copies in three dozen languages, not to mention untold numbers of unofficial local reprints and unofficial translations into more than fifty languages.1 The book was a novel hybrid of two very different genres: the ancient Chinese genre of collected sayings dating back to the Analects of Confucius, and the modern genre of ideological primers embraced especially (but by no means exclusively) by Marxist-Leninists around the world. In addition, the book’s characteristic physical form—pocket-sized, bright red, clad in sturdy vinyl—reflected its origins as an ideological field manual for soldiers of the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).2 The book’s contents, composed of 427 extracts from Mao Zedong’s writings and speeches from 1929 to 1964 and arranged into thirty-three thematic chapters, covered an eclectic range of subjects from philosophy to warfare to art.3

A notable feature of this script for revolution was its versatility. Mao’s Little Red Book did not present a linear, coherent argument in the style of a polemic like Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Instead, it provided a basic grammar and vocabulary that could be adapted to diverse circumstances. After Mao’s death, the Little Red Book’s unsystematic presentation of fragments torn from their historical and textual contexts was dismissed in China as a vulgarization of Maoism—not to mention Marxism. During Mao’s lifetime, however, his quotations were taken quite seriously. In China and elsewhere, the quotations were adapted into many forms—from rhetoric, art, and song to talisman, badge, and weapon—and put to use for many purposes. This variety of forms and uses is explored in a volume I have edited called Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History. This essay will focus on just one aspect of the Little Red Book as script for revolution—namely, how its sudden and unlikely global influence reflected the circumstances of a particular historical era.

The explanation I offer here arises from a curious interpretation of the quotations’ power that appeared in the foreword to the authoritative second edition of Quotations from Chairman Mao. The effusive foreword was credited to Lin Biao, Mao’s top military man and tireless promoter of the Little Red Book. It describes how the the written script could become a material force for revolution—a weapon of mass instruction, the intercontinental delivery system for a potentially world-shattering ideological payload: “Once Mao Tse-tung’s thought is grasped by the broad masses, it becomes a source of strength and a spiritual atom bomb of infinite power.”4

Lin Biao’s metaphor was an adulatory exaggeration, of course, but it should not be dismissed as only that. Through an extended exegesis, I will argue that the “spiritual atom bomb” was a coherent concept within its own Maoist intellectual context.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.