Lecture by Julia Lovell, Oxford, 5 Nov

In recent years, a neo-Maoist revival has gained some purchase in China, driven both by elite politics (Bo Xilai, Xi Jinping) and by grassroots nostalgia. It is easy to point out the inconsistencies and weaknesses in this political project: the hypocrisy of national leaders who mouth Maoist slogans such as the “mass line” while sending their offspring to Oxford and Harvard; the intellectual shallowness of young neo-Maoists who devoutly quote Mao’s words without reference to their historical consequences. This talk will focus on a more intellectually challenging champion of Maoism: Zhang Chengzhi (b, 1948). Poet, novelist, essayist, archaeologist and ethnographer, Zhang is an unusually complicated and controversial figure in contemporary Chinese culture. Allegedly the inventor of the term ‘Red Guard’ in the context of the Cultural Revolution, he has remained an unapologetic defender of Mao and of the ‘Red Guard spirit’ through the post-Mao decades. In 1987, Zhang converted to an impoverished and ascetic sect of Chinese Islam, the Jahriyya （哲赫忍耶）in Gansu, and since the 2000s he has become one of China’s most prominent spokesmen for global Islam. This talk will explore how Zhang reconciles his zeal for the Cultural Revolution and for Mao, on the one hand, with his Pan-Islamism on the other. Although Zhang’s stance suffers from undoubted contradictions and shortcomings, his career and beliefs demand serious consideration: for the way in which they grapple both with the legacy of Maoism and with the contemporary trajectories of global Islam, drawing on decades of engagement with the geographical, political, cultural and religious complexity of China.

Julia Lovell is reader in modern Chinese history and literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of three books on modern China, most recently The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (2011), which won the 2012 Jan Michalski Prize Her several translations of modern Chinese fiction include Han Shaogong’s A Dictionary of Maqiao (winner of 2011 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature) and Lu Xun’s The Real Story of Ah-Q, and Other Tales of China. She is currently working on a global history of Maoism, and on a new, abridged translation of Journey to the West.