Peasant Philosophers and Barefoot Doctors: Local Lessons in Global Maoism

In the early 1970s, people all over the world looked to China as a model for revolution. Would be change-makers saw in the Chinese socialist experiment lessons for transforming, not just the political sphere but the social, cultural, intellectual, and scientific realms as well. Studies of this “global Maoism” long suggested that foreign observers knew very little about Mao Zedong’s ideas or the concrete situation within the People’s Republic. More recently, scholars have begun to reveal closer links between Chinese radicals and their counterparts in other places. Yet the scholarly tendency is still to see Maoism outside of China as only superficially connected to Chinese ideas and experiences, often the product of incomplete or incorrect understanding, shaped purposefully by Chinese propaganda and further obscured by ignorance about China. In fact, however, international students of Maoism often thought and acted in ways that suggested a deeper attention to local Chinese cases and a clearer understanding of Maoist theory and practice.

This paper explores the global conversations about specific examples of revolutionary movements in China, including the work of “barefoot doctors” in the Shanghai countryside and “peasant philosophers” in Zhejiang Province. Through these cases, I explore the relationship between local efforts to remake Chinese society under Mao and currents in radical thought and action worldwide. I argue that global Maoism is a useful term for a set of ideas and activities that was directly connected to its Chinese context, but not always in the ways we might expect. Furthermore, while the international enthusiasm about Maoism declined rapidly by the late 1970s, lessons from Chinese socialism continue to shape global thinking about social change in the 21st century.