The Rise of Global Maoism: Global Communist Networks, Local Schisms, and Multiplex Diffusion

Zheng Zhang, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Maoism emerged as a global revolutionary ideology in the 1960s and continued to shape the international order during and after the Cold War. How could we understand the rapid diffusion of Maoism during the Cold War? Structural and cultural accounts provide ad hoc explanations to a cluster of cases. Using network data from Yearbook on International Communist Affairs and other supplementary archives, I argue that the rise of global Maoism was attributed to its diffusion in a multilevel and multiplex network: at the local level, a moderate level of schism within communists in a given country provided the constituents of Maoism. At the global level, local communists' intellectual proximity to radical intellectual circles and organizational distance to International Communist Movement led by the Soviet Union facilitated a favorable external environment. The case of Maoism shows how multiple networks translate structural factors in the process of global social movements, and how the anti-colonial fashion in Maoist ideology was emerged, not rooted in the ideology a priori, from its diffusion. In other words, the attribute of Maoism was the consequence, not cause, of its global diffusion.

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 Presented in Session 122. Ideas, Networks, and Alliances in Revolutionary Transformation