Orientalist Origins of Cambodia’s Maoist Catastrophe

Ho-Fung Hung, Johns Hopkins University

For a long time, communist revolutions in Asia, such as those in China and Cambodia, have been interpreted through the lens of peasant revolutions. This paper critiques that delusional perspective by examining Cambodia’s communist revolution, which culminated in the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79). The communist guerrilla movement grew with peasant recruits in the 1970s not because of peasant support for socialism or a “moral economy” ethos, but due to the communists’ Machiavellian strategy of concealing their identity and posing as monarchists seeking to restore King Sihanouk’s rule. After seizing power, they pursued a program aimed at reviving the glory of the thirteenth-century Khmer Empire through top-down mobilization of collective labor for large-scale hydraulic projects—resulting in unproductive infrastructure and mass deaths. This program was rooted in the myth of Cambodia’s precolonial “Asiatic Mode of Production,” a myth promoted by both Maoist economic writings and Orientalist scholarship in 1950s France. The origins of this myth can be traced further back to nineteenth-century Romanticist fantasies about the Oriental countryside that influenced late Marx’s writings via the Russian Narodniks.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 31. New Perspectives on Revolutions Old and New