Which East is Red?” is a study of the little-known “anti-revisionist” currents within the Soviet Bloc in the wake of the Sino-Soviet Split, particularly those which described themselves as Maoists. This study primarily concentrates on the Maoist wind that blew through the USSR and Eastern Europe during the 1960s, when the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China generated anti-revisionist storms around the globe. It also discusses the effects of the Cultural Revolution on diplomacy in the socialist Second World. Finally, this thesis challenges mainstream academic studies of Marxism and dissent in the Soviet Bloc, which presents a false dichotomy of dissidence within the region: a false dichotomy, that is, between those who embraced liberal democracy of the West versus the Kremlin’s official version of MarxismLeninism. In short, a new historiography of dissident movements in the USSR and Eastern Europe during the Cold War must include the Maoist, communist opposition. INDEX WOR...

This article analyses the political life of two important European communist activists who, in the aftermath of the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, decided to support China and Albania against the Soviet Union: Kazimierz Mijal, a Polish communist who, in the mid-1960s, decided to exile himself to Albania, from where he promoted the 'China way' of communism; and Jacque Grippa, a Belgian communist who struggled to find space between the Western European left, Beijing, and Moscow. The article analyses how apparently marginal protagonists of the Cold War gained a prominent position and played an important role in the dynamics created within the communist world following the Sino-Soviet split.

A paper that investigates the influence of Imported ideology from chairman man's cultural Revolution, specifically on student activism in East and West Germany.

On the 120th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s birth in December 2013, the whole of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee, led by new installed leader Xi Jinping, attended commemorations held in Beijing. Commentators inside and outside China were calling Xi a new kind of Mao, noting his eagerness to use some of Mao’s political techniques to mobilise people, and often referring to the supreme leader of the People’s Republic from 1949 to 1976 in highly complementary ways. As I try to show in this paper, Mao Zedong’s legacy today remains profound, but complex. That so many were critical of Xi’s willingness to refer to the former leader is one indication of this. Mao was perhaps the modern leader of China who forged the deepest emotional link with people in the country. But he was also someone associated with campaigns from the 1950s onwards that carried huge social costs. The most epic of these, the Cultural Revolution, was one that Xi himself suffered in, becoming a send down youth in 1969 and moving from Beijing down to the Shaanxi countryside. Many, many others have similar experiences. Those that appeal to the Chairman these days tend to do so not because, like Xi, they want to make a clear link between pre and post-1978 history, when the reform and opening up process is meant to have started, but because the feel that modern China has lost its path. It has forsaken the Utopian, idealistic goals that Mao set it, allowing elites to re-emerge, and the Party to end up as the sort of self-serving, bureaucratic entity that he strove so much to avoid it turning into. The language contained in documents like the statement put out after the Third Plenum in Beijing in October 2013 of `perfecting the market’ in China and saying that a free market is necessary for implementation of socialism with Chinese characteristics alienates and antagonises them. They want public ownership of assets restored, and a welfare system that covers everyone and drives for equality imposed again. They feel that while some have gained form the post 1978 deal, there are many more Chinese who have suffered, been pushed into poverty and injustice, and betrayed. Some of these voices find their way onto the internet, and have social influence. I look at these in this paper, and try to answer just how influential and representative they are. For the question of Mao and his continuing impact, the answer is partly that he continues to escape the boundaries that people claiming his name try to put on him. For this reason, understanding him and those that try to speak in his name even to this day, is important. I hope this study helps a little in understand just why the red sun of Mao Zedong is still very much alive in some Chinese people’s hearts, and why people as senior as Xi chose to appeal to Mao when they conduct politics in the era when China has become the sort of economic and political powerhouse that Mao could only ever dream about.

This article explores the transnational connection between China and the GDR in 1989 and views the student protests on Tiananmen Square in spring 1989 as a consequential precursor to German reunification. The SED’s endorsement of the Chinese government’s suppression and the East Germans’ fear of a “Chinese solution” to looming domestic unrest aggravated the mass exodus in the summer and fall of 1989. Contrary to expectations, Leipzig, the center of protests in East Germany, did not become another Tiananmen on October 9. The military crackdown in Beijing ultimately served as a counterexample that helped to facilitate a peaceful revolution in East Germany.

This chapter explores the grassroots response to the Tiananmen Square massacre as expressions of alternative internationalism in East Germany (GDR). While international solidarity was a core governing principle in the GDR, the object of solidarity was inflexible and strictly prescribed. At different points in the republic’s forty-year history, small numbers of East Germans bucked this internationalism from above and departed from the party line by forging bonds of identification and empathy with distant populations. Alternative internationalism presented a challenge to the regime’s monopoly on the language of solidarity and conjured a political geography that overlapped with and opposed that of the state.