The Emergence of Global Maoism

The Emergence of Global Maoism examines the spread of Mao Zedong's writings, ideology, and institutions when they traveled outside of China. Matthew Galway links Chinese Communist Party efforts to globalize Maoism to the dialectical engagement of exported Maoism by Cambodian Maoist intellectuals.

How do ideas manifest outside of their place of origin? Galway analyzes how universal ideological systems became localized, both in Mao's indigenization of Marxism-Leninism and in the Communist Party of Kampuchea's indigenization of Maoism into its own revolutionary ideology. By examining the intellectual journeys of CPK leaders who, during their studies in Paris in the 1950s, became progressive activist-intellectuals and full-fledged Communists, he shows that they responded to political and socioeconomic crises by speaking back to Maoism—adapting it through practice, without abandoning its universality. Among Mao's greatest achievements, the Sinification of Marxism enabled the CCP to canonize Mao's thought and export it to a progressive audience of international intellectuals. These intellectuals would come to embrace the ideology as they set a course for social change.

The Emergence of Global Maoism illuminates the process through which China moved its goal from class revolution to a larger anticolonial project that sought to cast out European and American imperialism from Asia.

Matthew Galway is Lecturer in Chinese History at The Australian National University. He has published in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, China Information, and Cross Currents, among others.

[The Emergence of Global Maoism] overcomes some of those challenges to shed new empirical and theoretical light on how revolutionary thought "travelled."

Yinghong Cheng, Delaware State University, author of Discourses of Race and Rising China:

Masterfully setting material from three different languages into conversation, Matthew Galway treats an otherwise easily politicized subject, Maoism in Cambodia, with nuance, remaining clear when moral questions unavoidably arise.

Fabio Lanza, University of Arizona, author of The End of Concern:

The Emergence of Global Maoism is utterly unique in depth and scope, a must-read. Matthew Galway's work is at the forefront of studies of the Cambodian Maoist movement.