Global Maoism and the Politics of Localization in Peru and Tanzania

In 1853 Karl Marx wrote in reaction to the Taiping Uprising in China "it may safely be augured that the Chinese revolution will throw a spark into the overloaded mine of the present industrial system and cause the explosion of the long-prepared general crisis, which spreading abroad, will be closely followed by political revolution on the continent."1 Marx may not have been aware of the Christian Taipings' hellfire and brimstone millenarian beliefs, but he saw in their rebellion a spark that could start a prairie fire of political progress. This paper holds Mao Zedong's proposal in 1938 for the "Sinification of Marxism," which referred to specific ways in which the foreign theory of Marxism-Leninism could be adapted to the concrete historical realities of modern China, in the same regard.2 The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially recognized the Thought of Mao Zedong (later "Maoism") as the guiding ideology of the Chinese Revolution in 1945 after years during which Chinese Marxist intellectuals includ-ing Mao attempted to reconcile Marxism with China's specific revolutionary situ-ation. But despite a handful of existing scholarship on Maoism outside China, only a few attempts have been made to subject Mao's groundbreaking concept model to an analysis of its impact in the developing world.3