Ah, da jia hao tong zhi men. Welcome back once again to the great proletarian cultural revolution podcast with your host Andrew Smith broadcasting once again from the ancient city of Xi’an. Um, we are now coming up to our first week of spring semester 2024 here at our university and uh I’m excited to once again be teaching the same batch of students that I was last semester.

Um, it’s weather’s been kind of interesting. It was kind of warm last week, but right now it is a winter wonderland outside and we’ve got quite an accumulation of snow. It’s uh quite a bit cold and quite a bit slippery. So, I’m staying in today working from home and uh just keeping myself warm with lots of good pu’er tea and things like that.

So, uh you know, hopefully hopefully which will be on its way out here soon. It usually is around March in Northwest China. So, um quick updates. Uh you guys might remember that uh my fiance and I, we ended up going to Lanzhou, which is the capital of Gansu province. And Lanzhou was all right.

Uh Gansu province is definitely one of those provinces where like all the cool stuff, like the ancient temples and ruins and the parts of the Great Wall, um most of that’s going to be in the countryside, several hours drive or high-speed rail away from the provincial capital.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. Don’t get me wrong. Lanzhou was no by no means a bad city, but other than the Gansu Provincial Museum and the stuff around the Zhongshan Bridge waterfront and some of the night markets, uh I don’t know. Give Lanzhou about 10, 20 years and I think it’ll be a cool town.

Um I did like the Hui community there, the Muslim night markets, the mosques, uh the famous Lanzhou Niurou Lamian, which is the Lanzhou beef lamian noodles, uh which are specifically made by the Hui people there. Those were all great, delicious.

Um I also got two new Mao badges from the antique market. I mean, nobody’s surprised. Of course, I’m in a new city in China. Got to see where Mao badges are for sale.

Uh I don’t know. I I I I - give Lanzhou a try. See what you guys think if you’re ever in China.

To my American listeners, if you like Chattanooga, Tennessee, you might like Lanzhou. Let me put it that way. Very similar, very similar, almost like sister cities, you could say, even though not officially.

As for Chinese New Year or Spring Festival itself, nobody calls it Chinese New Year here. We call it Chūnjié or Spring Festival.

Anyways, it was pretty chill. Um Yoú Kūn’s dad and stepmom made a stupendous spread for Spring Festival Eve lunch. And then that night, we made some made-from-scratch dumplings and ate them while watching the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, which I don’t know.

The Gala is usually kind of repetitive and hokey, but this year they featured Xiao Zhan, so that had us all hyped up, man. Uh then the next day on like Spring Festival day, on Chinese New Year’s Day, uh stepmom’s son and his wife, so my fiancé’s stepbrother and his wife came over the next day. And I whipped them up some nice homemade char-grilled cheeseburgers, which they enjoyed immensely.

Um yeah, obviously the Americans of the family, he has to make burgers.

But you know, it was a nice little time and definitely gave me a feeling of really just how much of a blessing it is to a become part of Chinese family.

Anyways, uh that’s what the Guo and Smith families been up to. But today, what I want to do is I’m going to do a thematic episode about a little thing you could call it. It’s It’s a book. Um but it’s more than a book.

For the people of the world, it is the symbol of the Cultural Revolution. And it’s it’s one of the quintessential symbols of the 1960s worldwide.

Uh I mean, honestly, it’s absolutely impossible to talk about the Cultural Revolution without spending a good amount of time talking about it, its contents, and its impact.

So, I think you guys know what we’re going to be talking about when I say a book. A book that is, without exaggeration, one of the most formative books in my life in terms of making me the person I am today and shaping the trajectory of my life. Without it, I probably wouldn’t be broadcasting to you guys from China today.

Of course, what I’m talking about is a little text called Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, aka The Little Red Book. So, if you guys have a copy, grab it from your bookshelf, crack it open, and let’s dive into this tiny little book that shook the world.

Um in fact, May 1st, 2024 will be the 60th anniversary of the first publication of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong. Uh 60 years of one of the most iconoclastic icons. A book that, depending on who you ask, is the ultimate symbol of conformist indoctrination or the ultimate symbol of dynamic youthful rebellion.

It’s made up of 427 quotations divided into 33 thematic chapters. And it presents extracts from Mao writings and speeches from 1929 to 1964 converted into digestible little bites to stir the reader to action.

At the time, the Little Red Book was the most printed book in the world. Printed in the billions and at one point it even out-sold the Bible. I think it was in 1968 and 1969. Those were the two years it out-sold the Bible. Keep in mind though that’s all lot of it is because there were 750 million Chinese people and literally everyone there owned multiple copies.

But, as you guys see here in a moment, it sold like hotcakes in the global south and among young radicals in the west. In fact, it was translated into more than 50 languages and was sold in over 100 countries.

Scholar Alexander C. Cook in his introduction to his compilation Mao’s Little Red Book, A Global History, um, says this, quote,

“The story of the Little Red Book speaks to the coming of age of the post-war generation, the unresolved legacies of fascism and totalitarianism, the disenchantment with liberalism and with state socialism, the descent into the Cold War and the threat of nuclear confrontation, the unfulfilled promises of national liberation in the post-colonial world, the accelerated globalization of capitalism, and the mass production and radical appropriation of popular culture.” I uh have a lot of issues with that, but I think he’s on to something.

And I’ll get a little I’ll I’ll I’ll unpack that a little in that I think that uh the Little Red Book really captures the zeitgeist of the '60s. Um it’s and the global proliferation of Little Red Book, in my opinion, reflected widespread and disenchantment with the post-war status quo.

Liberal capitalism had given away to massive inequality, racism, and imperialism, and misogyny, and {quote} actually existing socialism in the Eastern Bloc was gray, bland, ossified, and corrupt.

And many of the initial Third World national liberation movements in the 1950s and '60s had not solved the problems that colonialism had left behind or had gravitated into basically becoming comprador collaborators with the West in one way or another.

As The Who said around the same time, you know, meet the old boss, same as the you know, meet the new boss, same as the old boss, was how a lot of people in the Third World, in the newly independent countries, especially like in Africa and Asia, felt. Maoist China, however, increasingly was identified with national liberation against neocolonialism, and it actively threw in its lot with the oppressed nations of the global south.

And you know, at that time, Marshall Lin Biao drew up grand visions of a global people’s war with ideas of encircling the global cities within the global countryside in his text Long Live the Victory of the People’s War.

Um so, and what’s interesting is that scholar Ban Wang makes another good point is that the Little Red Book also captures the creativity of the '60s. He said, quote, “The Little Red Book was what people made of it. It is perhaps tempting to think of it as the sacred word of a totalitarian godhead exerting its numerous powers over the mass of enslaved idolaters or as an ironic accessory for the non-believers who knew better, but in fact there is something more to it.”

And we’ll talk about that a little more. I’m very interested in talking about how this ties into Wu Yiching’s ideas that he puts forward in The Cultural Revolution in the Margins, um, which is a book that we have discussed a lot on this place.

But most importantly, I feel that the Little Red Book acts as a metaphorical weapon.

You know, what Lin Biao referred to as a spiritual atom bomb that can obliterate bourgeois thinking within the reader and thus within society.

And, you know, Mao believed that people, not weapons, were decisive within revolutionary warfare. So, he felt that if the people took the Little Red Book into their own hands and used it in correct and creative ways that sugar-coated bullets of the capitalist rulers in the party and the soft power of the USA and USSR would be useless against the heart of the masses.

You know, after all, Mao, with his books On Practice and On Contradiction, he is a firm believer that the superstructure and culture, including literature, can at points be decisive in changing the base and thus keeping China on the socialist road.

For many, the Little Red Book simultaneously acts as a guiding North Star, a compass, and as a ship for the reader to guide themselves to communist consciousness.

So, let’s get a little into the history of the Little Red Book. So, we have to go back to kind of near the end of the Great Leap Forward.

Marshal Peng Dehuai was - he was the man in charge of the People’s Liberation Army at the end of the Great Leap Forward, but of course, with the way things turned out, he fell from grace, and Marshal Lin Biao found himself catapulted to become head of the People’s Liberation Army and second in command of the party. Now, Lin was the kind of guy who, at the time, seemed very timid and unambitious. But, Lin was also a very by-the-book sort of guy. He was a strong proponent of rote memorization when it came to revolutionary theory or military strategy.

Um and in the early '60s, he began to really push for something that could fit the mold of pedagogy for soldiers in the People’s Liberation Army, especially because the socialist education movement was being launched within the armed forces after the Great Leap Forward. Uh

For those who don’t remember what the socialist education movement was, please refer back to episode 1, why the Cultural Revolution happened.

In December 1963, Lin Biao and Liberation Army Daily Newspaper editor Tang Pingzhu convened with the General Political Department of the PLA with the idea of coming up with some kind of small study guide of selected quotes by Mao regarding military issues and theoretical issues.

After several months of brainstorming and several revisions, in May of '64, the official edition of a small book called Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong was distributed to officers and soldiers of the PLA, but specifically for military use only. Civilians were not allowed to have them.

Originally, it was only 355 quotations divided into 30 chapters, but within a year, it was expanded to include more non-military theoretical quotations and was packaged into the now standard 427 quotations and 38 chapters with its trademark red vinyl cover and its pocket-sized shape, the Little Red Book that we know and love today.

According to the forward printed in the reprint of the August '65 edition, and in conformity with comrade Lin Biao’s instructions, the Little Red Book was to be issued to every soldier in the whole army just as we issue weapons. Amidst the nationwide campaign of learn from the People’s Liberation Army, which was part of the socialist education movement, it was a handy piece of standard issue equipment that became a prized trophy among young soldiers.

In late August 1966 with the Cultural Revolution, you know, really got going. Mao approvingly reviewed throngs of young Red Guards waving little red books in Tiananmen Square.

And the book was soon made available to the general public in order to, as Lin Biao’s foreword said, “Arm the minds of the people throughout the country with Mao Zedong Thought. Mastering Mao Zedong Thought could split the atom of the mind, unleash the power of human consciousness, destroy the old world, and create a better world.”

Now, it should be noted that the rise and fall of the spiritual atom bomb that we call the Little Red Book is seen as often tied to the personal fortunes of Lin Biao, with whom the book is often closely associated throughout history. Now, there is a bit of dispute about just how much of an active role Lin took in creating the Little Red Book. You mean, he was often seen as, like I said, very timid, very unambitious, especially at that point.

And um some even doubt that he even wrote the foreword credited to him. Some people think it was ghost-written by someone else.

Uh but he is still seen as the guy who pitched the idea in '63, and he was the one who spearheaded the Little Red Book’s popularization.

So, I think, and the consensus is basically within popular academic discourse, that without Lin, there would have been no Little Red Book.

The Quotations, like I said, was quite received by the soldiers of the PLA. And when they bring it home to share with their families while on leave, they found that their civilian loved ones were eager to get copies as well. While still only officially available as an internal military document, demand for access to copies among civilians grew across late '65 and early '66. Finally, on April 20th, 1966,

a little more than 3 weeks before the Cultural Revolution was officially launched, the People’s Publishing House and the Central Propaganda Department of the China of the Communist Party of China jointly issued an authorization to sell what would become known in English as the Little Red Book or in Chinese, Hong Bao Shu, or the Red Treasure Book.

Uh so, I just want to let you guys know that if you say in China the XiaoHongShu, which the literally the Little Red Book, people will not either not know what you’re talking about or be think you’re talking about um a popular social media app called XiaoHongShu. But if you say Hong Bao Shu, the Red Treasure Book, that’s when people will know, “Oh, you’re talking about the Quotations of Mao Zedong.”

But I digress. On April 20th, 1966, the directive allowed civilian bookstores in every city and every village in China to stock the Little Red Book. And within days, it seemed like bookstores couldn’t keep them on the shelves, with literally millions being sold even before Mao wrote the May 16th circular.

When the Cultural Revolution was launched with the May 16th circular, the people of China were lucky. They had already made manual for revolution that they could carry with them at all times, categorized into subjects with sharp, concise quotations that they could pull out and read if they had a question or wanted some inspiration on how to move forward with a problem, how to organize with their comrades and community, blah blah blah blah blah.

And just to give you an idea of the sheer numbers of book Mao’s Little Red Book of Global History says, quote, “Between 1966 and 1970, the amount of paper used for the official print of Mao’s works amounted to 650,000 tons, slightly more than it had been used between 1949 and 1965 for all published items in the People’s Republic of China.” So, think about that.

By late June of '66, basically the whole Chinese publishing industry was geared towards the production of the Little Red Book, even at the expense of printing of the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.

The target number of the quotations had been raised to 200 million copies, and the party center ordered new printing houses to be set up in every province by the end of the year, each of them exclusively for printing the Little Red Book and the similar red vinyl edition of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong.

By the end of '66, it seemed like there was a copy of the Little Red Book in the hands of almost every literate adult Chinese citizen. And by the end of 1968, statistically every single Chinese citizen owned more than one copy. And that’s not counting the millions in circulation outside of China.

By the end of 1970, the Chinese government called for a temporary cessation of production of Little Red Book because the sheer amount of ink, paper, and vinyl being used to make them was just too much to keep up with. Especially by 1970, there were enough unsold Little Red Books to keep the book on the shelves for decades to come.

And they were pretty serious about distribution. Another quote from the book that I was rereading is materials used for the production of Mao’s work were exempt from all taxes. Transfer of raw materials and paper and finished products of books via railway or air, including packaging and distribution cost, was conducted free of charge. State banks offered interest-free loans to institutions manufacturing or distributing Mao’s works. P

rices were set only slightly above manufacturing costs, thus turning the book hype in his the biggest book hype in history into actually one of the biggest financial losses. But at the end of the day, the party didn’t care. What mattered was not profit, turning a profit, it was making revolution.

Now, what’s interesting is that yes, there was the standard 33-chapter um Little Red Book. And uh I’ll just list off the 33 chapters um for those who don’t have a copy or don’t have their copy by them.

The Communist Party,

Classes and Class Struggle,

Socialism and Communism,

The Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,

War and Peace,

Imperialism and All Reactionaries Are Paper Tigers,

Dare to Struggle and Dare to Win,

People’s War,

People’s Army,

Leadership of Party Committees,

The Mass Line,

Political Work,

Relations Between Officers and Men,

Relations Between Army and People,

Democracy in the Three Main Fields,

Education and the Training of Troops,

Serving the People,

Patriotism and Internationalism,

Revolutionary Heroism,

Building Our Country Through Diligence and Frugality,

Self-Reliance and Arduous Struggle,

Methods and of Thinking,

Methods of Work,

Investigation and Study,

Correcting Mistaken Ideas,

Unity,

Discipline,

Criticism and Self-Criticism,

Communists,

Cadres,

Youth,

Women,

Culture and Art, and finally

Study.

Now, the reason I listed off those 33 chapters was because I want to make an interesting point is yes, there was the standard Quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong, but there were other well, you could call, you know, uh, Hongbaoshu, uh, red treasure books that weren’t the standard quotations of the 427 quotes in 33 chapters.

Um, where in 1970, it ruled that there was also, alongside the official Little Red Book that we all know and love, there was no less than 440 local editions, 53% of which had been compiled by Red Guard organizations, while the remaining 47% had been printed in the name of temporary state institutions such as revolutionary committees.

Um, I actually have some of these uh, little local editions of Red Treasure Books. I have a little Red Book that is just Mao’s poetry. I have one that is a collection of articles and quotations by Mao from um, some Red Guard faction at Xi’an Jiaotong University.

I have one that is a little Red like it’s kind of a little Red Song Book. It’s a little Red Book and it’s just songs. It’s like a different songs of the Cultural Revolution.

I have one that is uh, something about Mao and agriculture. Chairman Mao speaks on agricultural production. So, like I Yeah, there were multiple little Red Books.

Although I don’t think other the selected military writings of Mao, those were translated in a more limited numbers into foreign languages. I have an English edition and a Portuguese edition. But, uh, other than that, yeah, most of the local little Red Books were only produced in Chinese.

And anyways, the years of 1966 and '67 were such a fascinating period when people applied the Little Red Book into all aspects of life. And this is where I I want to circle back around to what I was ranting about earlier about how

And much like scholar Wu Yiching said of Maoism in general, uh what you see is that the masses forced Mao’s quotation out of Mao’s hands and into their own and crafted their own interpretations in very innovative but it also very contradictory way.

So, for example, in the spring and summer of 1966, pro-Liu Shaoqi work teams used the Little Red Book’s first chapter, which says the ‘leading core of the Chinese nation is the Communist Party’, to justify blind obedience to all party cadres,

while high school Red Guards during Red August later that year used the quote about how ‘revolution is not a dinner party’ to wreak havoc and punch in all directions indiscriminately.

Often in ways that were excessive and to unnecessary tragedies.

Some factions tried to use the quotations from the chapter on the correct handling of contradictions among the people to emphasize that the Cultural Revolution should primarily be a revolution based on non-violent line struggle in the realm of culture,

while other factions used the military and strategy and maneuvering quotations chapters to emphasize the necessity to raise the Cultural Revolution into being an armed struggle.

And that’s the strange beauty of the Little Red Book, in my opinion. It’s a book that because it’s what you make of it, in a sense, it’s an extremely democratic text. It’s an anti-authoritarian text in a way, if I may be a bit provocative.

And let me tell you, Chinese people weren’t the only way to feel this same way about the Little Red Book.

And let me tell you about how the Little Red Book took the world by storm.

And uh we’ll get a little more into this near the end of this podcast series and our transnational consequences of the Cultural Revolution, but I want to touch real quick about the translations. Like I said, so there are 50 translations. Uh the Little Red Book was translated into 50 different languages, sold in over 100 countries.

And it was not just, you know, distributed to the pro-Beijing parties or, you know, such groups. It was extremely popular, for example, with the Black Panther Party in the United States, the Students for a Democratic Society in the United States.

Um many national liberation movements in Africa, like, you know, the UNITA in Angola or uh SWAPO in Namibia. Even the non you know, the non-communist uh certain not pro-Beijing African National Congress, I have heard, used the Little Red Book in certain ways.

Uh in Western Europe during May of 1968, French radical students on strike and French workers in the labor unions waved the Little Red Book as a symbol of rebellion.

Uh the Red Army Faction, Red Brigades, and other urban guerrilla movements in Western Europe utilized the Little Red Book. The Little Red Book was even popular among some of these weird like third positionist Italian neo-Nazis. Oh.

It’s The Years of Lead in Italy were really weird and uh so yeah, there was kind of this way where there was like these Nazis that liked the Little Red Book in Italy. You should definitely look up that story if you have to. We don’t have time, but that’s that’s quite a story.

Um even the Provisional Irish Republican Army, uh while the leadership of the IRA disapproved of the Little Red Book being used, it was popular among IRA POWs in Long Kesh prison. It was popular um especially within the South Tyrone Brigade of the IRA and the South Armagh Brigade of IRA.

Um it was popularly used by the Irish National Liberation Army, which was a more Marxist offshoot of the IRA.

So I mean, the Little Red Book had such a global impact. It was taught in universities in Ghana. It was taught in universities in Tanzania. It was taught in universities in Albania. Chinese embassies couldn’t keep up with the amount of requests for copies of the Little Red Book from the East Germans you know, from for their Embassy in East Germany or their Embassy in London.

It was just crazy how everyone it seemed in some way, shape, or form was goo-goo ga-ga for the little redbook. The little redbook was even used by the Viet Cong in during the Vietnami the Vietnam War to a limited extent. I have a Vietnamese translation of the little redbook on my shelf in fact.

So, it is really amazing just how much of an impact that the little redbook had as a symbol of youthful rebellion, as a symbol of, you know, of bringing the Cultural Revolution outside of China’s borders from Berkeley to Tokyo.

However, the summer of 1968 saw a great change in how the little redbook was treated at least in China.

That’s where is when we see as you know, and we will see in the upcoming episodes the disbanding of the Red Guard movement and the Rebel mass organizations and the People’s Liberation Army becomes inordinately dominant in many aspects of political life and Lin Biao’s loyalty campaigns to continue to ramp up, which I’ve talked about in the last couple of episodes.

The little red book at this point in summer of '68 through spring of 1969 slowly becomes less of a book that the masses could interpret freely and apply to their particular conditions and was basically now a piece of scripture that was to be recited, memorized, and codified into a dogma. Now, the PLA’s interpretation, or more specifically, Lin Biao and his clique’s interpretation of Mao’s quotations were the only interpretation that would fly.

Uh remember how I said in a recent episode how during the loyalty campaigns, people were encouraged to memorize the Little Red Book from start to finish, and were told to quote, “Study and memorize Chairman Mao’s teachings, even if you do not understand them.” End quote. Uh many feel that a vulgarization of Maoism had been cast over the Little Red Book by the PLA, and a wind of dogmatism began to blow through the book’s pages.

Some scholars argue, not without merit, I think, unfortunately, that by the 1970s, the Little Red Book had become an empty symbol of obedience rather than one of rebellion.

And when I say a wind of dogmatism, I talk about people treating the Little Red Book as scripture, I really do mean it. Um thanks to the Marxist Internet Archive’s Peking Review archive, and also Carma Hinton and Longbow Group, they have an excellent website called Morning Sun, which is the official website uh for her documentary about the Cultural Revolution called Morning Sun. I did a minisode where I reviewed it.

Anyways, it’s a great website with a lot of interesting resources about the Cultural Revolution. And I found a few articles that really stuck out to me. I found one article that speaks of one exemplary red family’s devotion to the Little Red Book.

‘In March 1967, with the enthusiastic help of the PLA, a Mao Zedong Thought Study Class was set up in in Ting Laiyu’s family village.’

‘This further promoted the family’s ideological revolutionization and aroused an expressively deep class feeling of loyalty to Chairman Mao.’

‘Every member, with the exception of Wang Ping, who is less than three, can recite the good old three articles and over 100 quotations from Chairman Mao. Every bit they learn, they apply, combining study with application.’

'The invincible thought of Mao Zedong is the lifeblood of the revolutionary people. They feel that in addition to studying and applying well Mao Zedong Thought themselves, they should also propagate it among more people. They study and practice every day. So far, they have learned to sing more than 100 revolutionary songs and perform 50 odd minor revolutionary items of literature and art.’

And this family, the Ting family, they actually would go on tour as a musical troop, like the Von Trapp Family Singers, all around China, doing these, you know, revolutionary songs that were quotations of Chairman Mao set to music.

In some places in China, literal miracles were attributed to the Little Red Book.

In 1972, a pamphlet was published in English called Exploring the Secrets of Treating Deaf-mutes that said that in Liaoyuan, Jilin province, barefoot doctors and PLA soldiers help deaf mute children learn to speak via the quotations.

A similar story was running in the March 1969 issue of China Pictorial.

Which said that at one school for the deaf in Liaoning province, 105 students were able to gain the ability to hear and speak through study of Mao’s work and well, with a little help from strategically poked acupuncture needles.

And they joyously shouted, “Long live Chairman Mao.” as their first words.

Another article run by Xinhua News Agency in September of '69 declared that a cancer patient’s determination to study and apply the works of Chairman Mao helped clear his body of the illness and he declared, “Cancer is a paper tiger.”

And like I said in a few other episodes, many national minorities like Tibetans, Mongols, and Hui believe that Mao’s quotations could be used as spells to ward off evil spirits, bring good luck to their households, and would carry the little red book with them as an amulet of protection. Just like during the old society they would carry Buddha sutras, pocket-sized Qurans on their bodies.

I don’t know of any other secular text, honestly, in world history that caused such reverence and awe in people than the little red book.

In 1971, however, the Little Red Book went through yet another unfortunate transformation.

In 1966, it was a weapon of mass line struggle. In '69, it was a scripture of a personality cult. In 1971, it begins to slowly fade into the background of the Cultural Revolution.

Anyone who’s familiar with the general history of the Cultural Revolution knows that in 1971, Lin Biao makes a little bit of a boo-boo and uh he tries to flee to the Soviet Union and then uh ends up crash the plane ends up crashing and he dies in somewhere in Mongolia, allegedly.

But, you know, the Little Red Book was so tied with Lin that the Little Red Book kind of fell from grace itself.

Don’t get me wrong. People still bought it, read it, studied it, carried it with them, but it was not as prominent of a symbol.

It wasn’t a daily thing that you would read uh you know, at study groups obligatorily, like for the most part. I mean, it still happened. Um I didn’t really see people waving Little Red Books at rallies as much anymore, things like that.

And by 1976, like I said, the Little Red Book, it’s still in circulation, but it’s actually no longer in print. They don’t really need to print anymore. They’ve made enough for decades to come. And in fact, mostly Mao’s other works, um his selected works and his collected works become far more popular than the Little Red Book at this point.

Um Of course, Mao’s death in September of 1976 and the coup that toppled the Gang of Four and ushered in the reign of Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping, this was the beginning of the end for the Little Red Book in China.

The reform and opening up had no place for revolutionary rhetoric and rebellious symbolism. Money and foreign goods were to be the new objects of veneration after all. So, Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping, and the entire Central Propaganda Department issued a joint communique on February 12th, 1979 to say that the Little Red Book had to go.

The very next day, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong was officially withdrawn from circulation, and by the end of the year, over 100 million unsold copies had been pulled from bookshelves and those that had yet to reach bookshelves were either sold out to foreign bookstores or melted into pulp.

In the 1980s, the party criticized the Little Red Book as having been a bastardization of Marxism-Leninism and had been orchestrated solely like by Lin Biao to create excessive dogmatic worship of Mao. Nowadays, the only way you can get a copy of the Little Red Book here in China is either by buying them from antique book shops at flea or at flea markets or by buying the 1993 bilingual Mao centenary edition that you’ll often see in souvenir shops around Beijing.

Uh many of my listeners probably have one. It’s the one that has Mouse face on the cover and it has a few color photos of him at the front. Thankfully, like I said a few times this episode, so many of them were made that even with it being out of print and so many unsold copies being destroyed in the late '70s, it’s still very easy to find and will probably be for many years to come. You can also buy a very good edition from China Books in the US that is made to look like the 1960s English edition and that’s the one that I usually keep on my desk at home.

The Little Red Book is just it’s one of those books that has such a staying power. It’s truly a spiritual atom bomb and an invincible weapon.

Well, all righty folks, I guess that’s as good as a point as any to stop. But man, I really enjoyed talking about this book today. I really enjoyed talking about the Little Red Book. Very few books can be said to have the impact that it did. You know, the Bible, the Quran, the Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, uh the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and of course, Quotations from Chairman Mao.

And it’s a book that I think will make continue to make a serious impact on radicals around the world for generations to come if my predictions are correct.

But uh right now, it’s time for me to click off the mic and uh whip up some lunch here in a bit. Uh I got to upload some of last spring’s sister’s PowerPoint lectures to my USB drive for next week’s classes. Um just a letting you know, Uh, I found out that I will have a uh, I have a conference to go to at the end of March.

So, there will be no new episode next month. Maybe I’ll be able to sneak in a minisode in the middle of the month. Uh, if I have some time, but um, our next chronological episode will have to wait until the end of April. Sorry to say it, but you know, work comes first. I don’t make any money off of this podcast yet. I just do it for the hood.

But, uh, stay tuned for April, cuz that’s when we get back to the rest of the story as the drama of the revolution continues yet again and reaches yet another jaw-dropping crescendo. You won’t want to miss it, trust me.

So, like I always say at the end of every episode, from the ancient city of Xi’an, I say, be resolute, fear no sacrifice, surmount every difficulty to win victory.

And always, everyone be safe and take care. Zaijian.

Sources for this month’s episode are

Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History, compiled and edited by Alexander C. Cook.

The Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution by Daniel Leese.

Morning Sun: A Film About Cultural Revolution Official Website by Carma Hinton and the Long Bow Group.

Marxist Internet Archives Peking Review Archives.

And of course, the Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong by Mao Zedong.

All right, you guys have a great March and I will see you guys in April. Bye-bye.

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