IN-DEPTH: ‘Woke’ Activism Based on Maoist Ideas, Strategic Theory Experts Say

A small group of Chinese youths walk past several wall posters in February 1967 in downtown Beijing, during the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution." Jean Vincent/AFP via Getty Images

Much of the activism currently tearing Western civilization asunder is driven by ideas that can be traced back to Maoism—a Western interpretation of the writings of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong—according to several experts on radical movements and strategic theory.

Not only have Mao’s ideas influenced some of the grandfathers of the current activist currents, but also, the tangible results resemble aspects of Chinese communism, inducing his most nightmarish project, the Cultural Revolution, according to David Martin Jones, visiting professor at the War Studies Department, King’s College, London, and M.L.R. Smith, professor of Strategic Theory at the Australian War College, Canberra.

“There is a whole intellectual structure, architecture, and, ultimately, strategy bound up with the idea of how to disrupt society, disrupt the West, overthrow the traditional order,” Mr. Smith told The Epoch Times.

The authors have summed up their findings in their 2022 book, “The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left.”

The book’s premise came to them during the 2020 protests and riots that swept the United States and even other Western countries in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd.

They saw monuments toppled and defaced, they saw conservative and even some liberal speakers getting shouted down and “canceled,” and they saw people at all levels of society contort themselves in “white guilt” genuflection, and they realized such scenes bear uncanny resemblance to the communist Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, which began with students denouncing their teachers, the obliteration of cultural relics, and party members engaging in “self-criticism” to confess their supposed crimes against the revolution.

The decade-long Cultural Revolution went much further than that. Students sometimes beat their teachers to death. Millions were executed or tortured to death, commonly after forced confessions to fabricated crimes. Children, even infants, were sometimes brutally murdered. Victims were sometimes cannibalized in frenzied bloodlust. The West has been spared such atrocities, but the parallels required examination, the authors concluded.

Was this just a historical happenstance, or was there an actual connection?

“It needed further elucidation, really, how, in fact, Maoist ideas had been transmitted to the West, because the general tendency in political thinking, in a liberal discourse, generally, is to assume that it’s the West that has an influence upon the other,” Mr. Jones told The Epoch Times.

“Very little attention is given to the way the other shapes us, has impacted Western self-understandings. And what became quite evident as we conducted some research is that Mao’s ideas deeply penetrated European thought on the left from the ’60s onwards.”

‘Hothoused in Paris’

Maoism obviously influenced various communist terrorist groups in Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, such as Lotta Continua in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, and, to some extent, the Angry Brigade in the United Kingdom. U.S. communists in the Weather Underground terrorist group called their 1974 manifesto “Prairie Fire”—a Maoist slogan.

But it was in the intellectual and cultural milieu of the European socialists, particularly in France, where Maoism seeded its lasting influence.

“The problem in the West in the ’60s was that America was always spelled with a ‘K’ as some evil empire because of the Vietnam War,” Mr. Jones said.

“But at the same time, Moscow had lost any attraction because of the activities of the Soviet regime in places like Hungary and Czechoslovakia. So China took on a new, stylish meaning in the Western left, in the Western New Left.”

Wearing a Mao jacket and browsing through Mao’s “Little Red Book” became signs of “cool” in the socialist crowd, he said.

“There was something hugely appealing to an anarcho-nihilist Western mentality about tearing down the old, about destroying your teachers, calling them ‘cow demons’ or ‘black influences.’ There was something very exciting about striking down monuments, destroying Confucian texts that have been around for two millennia. So, that aspect of Maoism always took on a redolence with an anarchically minded younger generation.”

Mao’s image as a “doer” and “breaker of things” appealed to the “jaded palates” of French socialists, huddled at institutions such as the Sorbonne University and École normale supérieure, Mr. Smith said.

“It penetrated deeply the academic atmosphere, the actual academic environment of the French left bank, so thinkers as various as Sartre, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Tel Quel group, all embraced aspects of Maoism,” Mr. Jones said.

This Western interpretation of Maoism provided a new way of “deconstructing Western thought” that was then advanced by authors such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak in their “post-colonial discourse theory,” he said.

“Through their efforts, we end up with, over time, the idea of ‘decolonizing the curriculum,’ the whole Maoist assault within our culture.”

As the West started to gain a broader understanding of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in China, Maoism lost much of its prima-facie appeal. By that time, however, its ideas had already been absorbed by the left.

“As people like Foucault, Derrida, the Tel Quel group, became aware by the ’70s, somewhat, after the fact, that actually Mao’s Cultural Revolution was very destructive, they don’t apologize for their stupidity, they actually instead double down on aspects like human rights, the sexual revolution, liberation thinking, which inexorably, over time, gets taken up in American Ivy League universities where they all enjoy stellar careers from the ’80s onwards,” Mr. Jones said.

“Maoism was bred in China, it was hothoused in Paris, but it achieved its global appeal in the Ivy League schools of the United States, and then has been circulated across the American mode of thinking critically about race and gender that has now been transmitted back to Europe in this interesting spiral of thinking.”

Maoism ‘for Western Consumption’

There’s evidence that Mao, when engaged with Westerners, tried to make his ideas appealing to liberals, whom he in fact despised.

“He was aware that there was a Western sympathy for the Chinese communists,” Mr. Jones said. “There was always a sense in which liberalism found something romantic in the Chinese revolutionary.”

As such, there emerged a distinction between “Mao’s Thought” as taught in China until this day, and what some have called “Global Maoism”—"a doctrine which is pushed largely for Western consumption,” he said.

“In his three essays that he wrote, the three main philosophical essays on combating liberalism and on anti-Confucianism, Mao is profoundly aware of how manipulable liberalism is and how you can promote or use liberalism to defeat it.”

Maoism was much more accessible than the European-style socialism.

Socialists in the West tended to put a premium on theorizing. They needed some knowledge of Hegelian dialectics, Marx’s criticism of Hegel, and the Frankfurt School’s picking apart of Marx.

“Maoism rendered all that largely unnecessary,” Mr. Jones noted.

“It required just the citation of certain slogans like ‘the sugar-coated bullets of the bourgeoisie.’”

It was socialism dumbed down for the pseudo-intellectual college grad, he suggested, calling Mao’s “Little Red Book” a “marketing guide for the revolution.”

“It’s very simplistic messaging, which suits a Twitter sort of audience really. It fits into a two-sentence understanding that you can roll out for whatever occasion,” he said.

“Mao has a set of slogans or aphorisms broken down to suit that immediate purpose. So that’s the appeal.

“It made you look as if you knew something, which is also part of the faux nature of a lot of this. You feel that people are often putting it on because they’re hiding a great vacuum that they’re inhabiting.”

In addition, the “abstract dialectics” and “intellectualizing of all these European Marxist thinkers” was simply “boring” compared with Mao’s “appeal to get on and do revolution,” Mr. Smith said.

“Not to sit around and read about it in a book, not to sit around and have a seminar about Herbert Marcuse or Adorno or Horkheimer, but to get up and tear down a statue or deface it or get up and go in a protest and cancel someone—this is what modern Maoism is about. It’s an appeal to action.”

‘Inner Realm’

Since its early days, Maoism has been particularly focused on thought control.

“One of the fascinating, or sinister, aspects of Maoist strategic thought is the way it tries to capture and control the interior realm, the inner world of the individual,” Mr. Smith said. “This notion that the individual is someone who should be reprogrammed and constantly reprogrammed in order to turn them into whatever appropriate revolutionary tool to execute the revolution.”

In the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) first mass political movement, the Yan’an Rectification, from 1942 to 1945, each Party member was assigned a file in a “personnel archive” that detailed his or her entire life.

“People had to list all of their acquaintances since birth and all important life events, along with the time and place of their occurrence. People were asked to write repeatedly for the archive, and any omissions would be seen as signs of impurity,” reads an excerpt from “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party,” a 2004 book published by The Epoch Times detailing CCP’s history and methods. “They had to describe all social activities they had ever participated in, especially those related to joining the Party, with an emphasis on their personal thought processes during these social activities.”

The files were then used to judge the members, but since there were no objective criteria, “nearly everyone was found to have problems,” according to the book.

“Coercion was used to extract ‘confessions’ from cadres who were being inspected in order to eliminate ’hidden traitors.' Countless frame-ups and false accusations resulted, and a large number of cadres were persecuted.”

The CCP then employed similar strategies in all its subsequent political campaigns, including the Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the campaign to eradicate Falun Gong.

Chinese people who lived through the Cultural Revolution could remember writing “self-criticism” essays and participating in often violent “struggle sessions” meant to root out any thoughts critical or even doubtful of the party.

This aspect of Maoism profoundly influenced the West, according to Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones.

In one of the early interviews that Mao gave to Western press in the 1940s, he noted that the communist cadres were constantly being “re-educated.”

“It’s this idea that you are continually ‘re-interrogating’ yourself and being ‘rectified’ so that you have the correct Maoist line ... and he calls this constant re-interrogation of self that’s part of the Maoist program ‘consciousness raising,’” Mr. Jones said.

The concept of “consciousness raising” then became “the key thinking of the Western new left in the ’70s,” he said.

This was no small thing, as it directly undermined one of the pillars of Western enlightenment thinking—respect for the individual’s cognitive autonomy.

“At every stage, even when you’re an effective cadre member following the party rule, you must be regularly rectified to show you’re following the right rules,“ Mr. Jones said. ”And this style of thinking, which we would have dismissed in the ’50s and ’60s—this is brainwashing—becomes ‘consciousness raising’ by the ’70s.”

The authors see a direct line from the Maoist “struggle session” to the contemporary expressions of “woke” self-criticism. Today’s “unconscious bias training” simply falls within “modern manifestations of Maoism in the West,” according to Mr. Smith.

Countless examples have emerged, particularly in academia, politics, and the corporate world.

In 2021, a Virginia Tech University instructor issued an apology in her Human Development syllabus:

“I am a Caucasian cisgender female and first-generation college student from Appalachia who is of Scottish, British, and Norwegian heritage. I am married to a cisgender male, and we are middle class. While I did not ‘ask’ for the many privileges in my life: I have benefitted from them and will continue to benefit from them whether I like it or not. This is injustice. I am and will continue to work on a daily basis to be antiracist and confront the innate racism within myself that is the reality and history of white people. I want to be better: Every day. I will transform: Every day. This work terrifies me: Every day. I invite my white students to join me on this journey. And to my students of color: I apologize for the inexcusable horrors within our shared history.”

That same year, a University of California medical professor reportedly made the following apology to his students:

“I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it ... Again, I’m very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive ... I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.”

The underlying mode of thinking beneath such expressions of shame creates individuals who are “not happy with being free,” Mr. Jones said.

“We live in a permanent presentism, which is based on our guilt as being white-privileged, our anxiety, our self-loathing, and no longer do we have the sense of being individuals—free—which was the Renaissance dream of a liberated individual. We are replaced by a collectivist mentality, which is endlessly examining itself and has no respect for the culture that created the conditions of wealth that we seem to be living in, although for not much longer the way things are going.”

Maoist Rage

Another aspect of Maoism that has greatly affected the West is its emphasis on “rage” as a linchpin of a revolutionary mindset. This makes it distinct from the “critical theory” of German socialists.

“People like [Jürgen] Habermas or the Frankfurt School generally, [Herbert] Marcuse, they try to engage in argument, they wanted rational discourse to create the conditions for transformation,” Mr. Jones noted.

“Mao was much more interested in rage, if you could get people enraged. Rage was the particular strategy ... that enables the left to double down, if you like, on their program.”

Mr. Smith stressed that “rage” isn’t something he and Mr. Jones ascribed to the modern left; it’s lifted directly from literature.

“Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle,” Myisha Cherry, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California–Riverside, declared in the subtitle of her 2021 book, “The Case for Rage.”

“The protests that swept the nation following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the summer of 2020 are examples of effective, morally appropriate Lordean rage,” she told the university’s media representative in an interview.

“Lordean” refers to the black feminist author Audre Lorde, specifically her 1981 speech titled “Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.”

This use of rage often leaves conservatives and liberals alike at a loss as to how to debate woke talking points—rage doesn’t necessarily bother with logic.

“It doesn’t want an argument; it doesn’t want persuasion. It wants, it knows, it is the truth and needs it instrumentalized as quickly as possible,” Mr. Jones said.

After the death of George Floyd, many tried to reason with the activists, pointing out that minorities are actually treated with tolerance in the United States. But the arguments seemed to fall on deaf ears.

“They weren’t even engaged with that. It’s like, if you don’t see the correct position, then you need denunciation, you need re-education, you need consciousness-raising,” Mr. Jones said.

“So it’s that strategic aspect of Maoism that makes it far more powerful or potent than general left critical thinking that still engages in dialectical kind of exchanges.”

Rage can be effective in attaining political goals, especially when dealing with liberals and especially within the framework of Maoism, Mr. Smith noted.

“Maoist rage is all about permanent division,” he said.

“This is where they completely just get one over on the liberals.

“Liberal understandings don’t know how to deal with permanent rage, because they’re constantly trying to accommodate.”

Mao’s concept of “permanent revolution” somewhat eludes liberal political philosophy, he suggested.

“If we think about Western understandings of strategy, it’s about pursuing a particular goal to a particular end. Well, if the end is ... just permanent struggle, there is no end beyond permanent struggle. That is itself something which I don’t think Western political thought has really contended with. But that is what we’re beginning to see manifest in Western politics today.”

Weather the Storm

In the final chapters of their book, Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones turn their gaze toward the future.

“If we are in the throes of a quasi-Cultural Revolution, we don’t quite know how it eventually ends,” Mr. Smith said.

He noted that in China’s Cultural Revolution, the People’s Liberation Army was eventually deployed to “restore order,” laying out the stability-obsessed regime we see in China today.

“This is the Orwellian face of where a cultural revolution ends,” he said.

If China’s “woke moment” half a century ago could provide an analogy, the activists bringing the upheaval could easily find themselves disfavored, he predicted.

“Once they have served their purpose as disruptors and agents of change and rule breakers, etc., one reading of the future may be they themselves would be dispensed with in favor of an entrenched elite,” he said.

Yet the new regime could be quite distinct from autocracies of the past, in Mr. Jones’s view.

“It is despotic, but it’s a managerial technocracy,” he said.

“So you’re permanently being surveilled through AI and other mechanisms to conform to a Maoist legalist understanding where you are all atomized, almost insects being surveyed constantly and monitored, because we have the technology to do it, endlessly filling in forms to show that we meet the current requirements.”

The authors hold up the hope that the West will withstand the storm, though they acknowledge that its fate hangs in the balance.

“Our speculation is whether liberal society has within itself the capacity to defend itself against the more extreme aspects of Maoism, whether it can re-contain Maoism within a structure of liberal governance, or whether we ourselves are embarked on the road to instability and ultimately a period of Great Wokeist-Western-Equivalent-of-Red-Guard-Cultural Revolution which is ultimately going to lead to a search for a form of stability and ultimately an authoritarian order, which, of course, entrenches the power of a particularly cynical and all-surveilling elite,” Mr. Smith concluded.

“We are already living the dystopia in some ways,” Mr. Jones said.