Pete Millwood is Lecturer in East Asian history at the University of Melbourne. His first book, Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2022), was recently released in paperback. He received his PhD from Oxford and has since taught or held research fellowships at Tsinghua, LSE, and in Hong Kong University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities. His research has also been published in Diplomatic History, the Journal of Contemporary History, and Cold War History.

Uncertain Boundaries of Transnational Democratic Centralism in the Death of Mao and Life of Maoism

Democratic centralism holds that, once a political decision is made in a communist party, that decision is binding on all members. But does this apply to adherents to that state’s ideology beyond the borders of the state from which it originated? Does democratic centralism bind on a transnational basis?

This paper explores these questions in the case of Maoism. While Mao lived, his political ideology attracted swathes of global adherents, from Cambodia to California. But after Mao’s death, the inheritors of his mantle in China distanced themselves from the chairman’s most radical ideas — many of which were those that had most attracted adherents abroad. This posed a serious challenge to global Maoists. Many had placed the ideology at the heart of their political parties and developed deep transnational relationships with Communist China. How did they react when Deng Xiaoping broke with Mao’s policies and even criticised Mao himself so soon after the chairman’s death?

This paper will offer answers to this question with reference to Maoists in the United States. The leading US Maoist organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), split in response to China’s turn away from radicalism. Some in the party believed the RCP should remain loyal to China’s new leadership and even replicate their narratives about how Mao’s more radical colleagues had erred during his lifetime. Others, however, proclaimed themselves more Maoist than Mao’s successors, reaffirming their commitment to the chairman’s ideas and even proclaiming “Death to Teng Hsiao-ping!” when China's new leader visited the United States in 1979. The RCP split helped splinter the American radical left and ensured that it would never again attain the level of popular support it had commanded in the 1960s and 1970s, thus revealing the consequences of the ambiguity of transnational democratic centralism.