Matthew Galway explores the mechanisms by which Mao Zedong's thought, or Maoism, first became a dominant ideology in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and was then adapted and implemented by individuals outside of the PRC for their own transformative political ambitions. At its heart, this book is an intellectual history of “how local ideas become global ideological phenomena with varied forms of indigenization” (2). For Galway, the production, transmission, and reception of Maoism—an expansion of Edward Said's traveling theory model—provides a framework for how ideas travel unevenly across groups and geographies and are then adapted to disparate situations in different localities. The ideological flexibility of Maoism as a lexicon for pragmatic action “born from the Chinese revolutionary experience” (103), in addition to its vocabulary for waging revolution and practical strategies for fighting protracted war, Galway argues, is what imbued Maoism, rather than Marxism-Leninism, with the necessary appeal to be...
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