A utopian nightmare

What must Mao have thought when in 1968 he heard that towering intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre were enthusiastically distributing newspapers on the prosperous boulevards of Paris bearing his portrait and eulogising his ideas? By then Mao, along with most Chinese, knew that just six years earlier his attempt to create a Marxist utopia in the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1962 had catastrophically failed. The Chinese revolution was effectively over.

His People’s Communes had destroyed the lives of at least 36 million, and possibly many more. Millions of others were tortured, imprisoned or fled their homes to escape an orgy of violence and terror. The economy collapsed after the Chinese Communists seized all private property in the countryside and sought to abolish all money and trade. Yet around the world, and China too, students chanted Mao’s slogans and drew inspiration from his supposed achievements in destroying capitalism and creating a better world.