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The Emergence of Global Maoism: China's Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist Movement, 1949–1979 by Matthew Galway

2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/jcws_r_01132

1531-3298

Craig Etcheson,

Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography

Scholars of modern Cambodia have generated a long shelf of contentious historiography, and Matthew Galway's The Emergence of Global Maoism is the latest addition to the stack. The mainstream view of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) among Cambodia scholars is that the party's animating ideology was an amalgam of various influences, including several strands of Communism, along with anarchism, nationalism, and indigenous sources, most prominently Buddhism. In this impressively researched new book, Galway contends that the CPK was fundamentally Maoist in orientation.Galway develops his argument by drawing on Edward Said's “traveling theory,” which describes the diffusion of ideological ideas through three stages: production, transmission, and reception. Expanding this analytical framework, Galway adds two more stages: adaptation and implementation. In the first chapter, he demonstrates the application of this framework by examining Mao Zedong's intellectual evolution from his youth through the Cultural Revolution he implemented in China in 1966–1976. By the mid-1920s, Mao's reception stage saw him become a devotee of Bolshevism. From there, Mao moved to the adaptation stage as he struggled to discern how to make a European paradigm relevant to China's feudal, agrarian historical situation. His “Sinification of Marxism” sought to forge a Marxist-Leninist vocabulary that would speak to specifically Chinese problems and to discover a path to Communist revolution through a united front of the proletariat and the peasantry. After the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949, the implementation stage evolved through multiple phases, from land reform, rectification, the Hundred Flowers, the Great Leap Forward, and finally the Cultural Revolution.Turning to Cambodia, Galway focuses on three revolutionary figures: Pol Pot, Hou Yuon, and Hu Nim. After graduating from French colonial schools, these three were among numerous Cambodians sent to Paris for advanced education. There they were gradually radicalized, eventually joining the Communist Party of France (CPF). This corresponds with the reception stage of the traveling theory. Pol Pot was more interested in studying Stalinist methods of organization than in his radio-electrical curriculum, and he soon lost his government bursary. He returned to Cambodia and quickly became immersed in the underground Communist movement. Yuon and Nim both went on to earn doctorates, producing theses that Galway argues made them “the theoretical architects of a Maoist vision” (p. 109) underpinning the CPK state of Democratic Kampuchea (DK).Both wrote about problems of the Cambodian peasantry. Galway describes this as the adaptation stage of Maoism to Cambodia's concrete realities. Yuon's thesis, “The Cambodian Peasants and Their Prospects for Modernization” (1955), emphasized the rural/urban divide and advocated voluntary, state-supported agricultural cooperatives to raise living standards and ameliorate foreign dependency. Galway maintains that “scholars have largely dismissed Yuon's role in the formation of Cambodian Maoism and for laying the groundwork for DK” (pp. 112–113). (Full disclosure: Galway repeatedly cites my 1984 book The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, which argues that “Hou Yuon's theories would become the intellectual foundation of the Khmer Rouge revolution.”) Hu Nim's dissertation, “Economic Public Services in Cambodia” (1965), expanded on Yuon's ideas, analyzing Cambodia's class structure and land tenancy, concluding that the exploitative nature of the Cambodian economic system should be reformed by empowering peasants and giving “primacy to the national accumulation” (p. 135).Both Yuon and Nim pursued the parliamentary route to reform, entering politics and holding ministerial portfolios in Prince Norodom Sihanouk's government before Sihanouk's increasing repression of the left drove them underground into the maquis by 1967. There they quickly found prominent roles with the CPK. Once the Khmer Rouge came to power, Hou Yuon initially continued in his wartime role as minister of interior, cooperatives, and communal reform. However, his disagreement with the party lines on the abolition of money, the evacuation of the cities, and rapid development of cooperatives resulted in his ouster and execution in 1975. Hu Nim was appointed minister of information and propaganda, but after former North Zone Secretary and DK Minister of Commerce Koy Thuon was arrested, and named Nim as a purported co-conspirator, Nim, too, was arrested, tortured, and executed in 1977.Even though Pol Pot, the undisputed leader of the CPK from 1963 on, clearly viewed Mao's China as a key ally and supporter, and, to a certain degree, an inspiration, the extent to which he was a Maoist has been and will be questioned by many specialists. Numerous aspects of Pol Pot's policies—evacuating the cities, eliminating modern medicine, and abandoning money, to name just a few—did not seem to reflect a Maoist inclination. As Galway himself notes: “In several instances, Pol Pot's regime rejected Maoism in implementation not unlike Mao's own rejection of key points in Stalinism” (p. 161). Somewhat counterintuitively, Galway argues that this is evidence that DK was in fact Maoist. Elsewhere, he argues that the CPK's “large-scale persecution and purges” were “strong evidence of a Kampucheanization of Maoism” (p. 173), as if this did not also occur in the Soviet Union. One might rather argue that it is actually strong evidence of Stalinism.Galway exaggerates the influence of some and underplays that of others. He says Yuon and Nim helped develop the party's strategy of “combined political and armed struggle” and initiated the party's secret defense units (p. 145). He offers no evidence for this. Neither man was ever a member of the party's Central Committee. Khieu Samphan wrote a doctoral dissertation on “Cambodia's Economy and Its Problems with Industrialization “(1959), drawing on Samir Amin's center-periphery theory. Like Yuon and Nim, he, too, was Paris-educated, joined the CPF, initially took the parliamentary route to reform as part of Sihanouk's government, and then was driven into the maquis in 1967. But unlike Yuon and Nim, Samphan went on to become head of state in DK and a leading defender of the regime. He is now in his 90s, the only surviving senior leader of the CPK. The autarkic development model advocated by Samphan in his thesis is precisely what the CPK implemented. It is striking that Galway mentions Samphan repeatedly but does not credit him as one of the regime's intellectual leading lights.Despite these issues, Galway's volume exhibits immense scholarship and is likely to ignite considerable debate among Cambodia scholars. It is a fascinating contribution to the historiography of modern Cambodia.