Professor Julia Lovell (Birkbeck College, University of London)

Since 2012, China has experienced an official revival of Maoist culture and politics, as part of a generalized invigoration of ideology under Xi Jinping. Despite the huge human cost of Mao’s rule, on 1 October 2019 (the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China) the Chinese Communist Party celebrated Mao as august builder of the party and nation. This ideological, authoritarian retrenchment, alongside the PRC’s newly assertive foreign policy, has alarmed Western governments. Fears of a new Cold War, now centred on China, have seized imaginations across the Anglophone world.

This lecture will explore how Mao’s ideas have shaped the world, as well as China, since World War II. It will conclude by assessing China’s current partial Maoist revival and its significance for China’s self-positioning in the world.