The altered position of the Chinese leadership was summed up at the 13th Congress of the CCP in 1987.An official account of that meeting noted, “The congress endorsed the Party’s basic line of building socialism with Chinese characteristics in the primary stages of socialism. … The party pledged to lead the people of all our nationalities in a united, self-reliant, intensive and pioneering effort to turn China into a prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and modern socialist country by making economic development our central task while adhering to Four Cardinal Principles.” The document explained that those “principles” were “keeping to the socialist road, and upholding the people’s democratic dictatorship, the leadership of the Communist Party, and Marxism-Leninism and Mao Tse-tung Thought.”[78] However, Mao Tse-tung Thought had less and less relevance to what was actually taking place in China and in its relations with the rest of the world.
Decline of “Popular Wars”
Communist parties of Maoist inspiration attempted in at least nine countries to put into effect the Maoist doctrine of “popular wars.” Most of the countries involved were geographically close to China, and in all but one of these the Chinese party and government gave greater or less degrees of support to these insurrectionary efforts so long as Mao Tse-tung was alive. However, by the mid-1990s these conflicts had largely collapsed, due in large part to the fact that Mao’s successors had little interest in them, being more concerned with maintaining friendly relations with the governments against which Maoist parties were revolting than in the fate of those parties.
The countries in which “popular wars” were launched by Communist parties in the 1960s or earlier were Thailand, Malaysia, Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and India. The only case in which such an insurrection was successful was Vietnam, where Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues certainly followed the Maoist model in their struggle, first against the French and later against the government of South Vietnam and the United States. However, the Vietnamese Communists remained “neutral” in the Sino-Soviet dispute as it unfolded in the 1960s and 1970s.Once the Vietnamese Communists were successful, their attitude toward the Chinese Communist regime was determined by Vietnamese-Chinese national interests rather than by any Communist doctrine, and these interests even brought the countries into a short-lived military conflict.
The Cambodian “popular war” was closely related to the conflict in Vietnam. With the collapse of the South Vietnamese regime in 1975, the Maoist Khmer Rouge swept to power in Cambodia. It governed the country for four years with catastrophic results, including the deaths (due to assassinations, starvation, and overwork) of at least a million Cambodians. The Khmer Rouge regime also came into conflict with that of Vietnam, as a result of which the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, ousting the Khmer Rouge government in 1979.
On its way to power, and while in power, the Khmer Rouge regime had the strong support of the government of Mao Tse-tung. For some time after the ouster of the Khmer Rouge regime, the Chinese continued to support the guerrilla war efforts that the Khmer Rouge carried on against the government that succeeded them. Here, too, the Chinese may have been more inspired by their view of their country’s national interests (vis-à-vis Vietnam) than by Maoist theory. In any case, the Khmer Rouge “popular war” had all but totally collapsed by 1997.
For many years, the Chinese party and government supported—financially, militarily, and in terms of propaganda—the “popular wars” of Maoists in Thailand, Malaysia, Burma, and the Philippines. Their backing of the attempts of Indian Maoists to launch a “popular war” was less clear. However, by the middle 1990s, due in large part to the withdrawal of Chinese support as the post-Mao government sought to improve its relations with neighboring regimes, the insurrections in Thailand, Malaysia, and Burma had almost totally collapsed. Also, by then, the “popular war” in the Philippines had received severe setbacks. The efforts of the Indian Maoists to launch a major “popular war” had failed, being reduced to little more than a nuisance, insofar as the Indian government was concerned.
In 1996, it was announced that the Maoist party in Nepal had launched a “popular war.” However, the impact of this effort appears to have been marginal at best.
The only instance outside of Asia where a Maoist party sought to launch a “popular war” was Peru. The Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) Communist Party there began such an effort in 1980.For a dozen years, its guerrilla effort constituted an important challenge to the Peruvian regime. However, with the arrest in 1992 of the Sendero Luminoso’s principal leader and theoretician, Abimail Guzmán (Presidente Gonzalo), and growing resistance from both peasants and urban workers, the Sendero subsequently suffered severe reverses, and came to be plagued by internal dissension. In any case, there is no evidence that the Peruvian guerrilla effort—although launched in the name of loyalty to Maoism—received any help or encouragement from China.
Thus, by the late 1990s, the Maoist doctrine that “popular war” was the only way to power for a Communist party had little to demonstrate its validity outside of Vietnam and China itself.
The Revolutionary Internationalist Movement
As we have noted, Mao Tse-tung and other Chinese Communist Party leaders gave their “franchise” to parties in other countries that they considered to be adhering to genuine MarxismLeninism, as reflected in “Mao Tse-tung Thought.” They did so by giving more or less lavish receptions to representatives of such parties who visited China, as well as by reporting on the activities of these parties in their own press, and sometimes publishing documents of one or another of those parties. Undoubtedly, they also subsidized (to a greater or less degree) some of these parties, and in the case of at least some of those in neighboring countries that were carrying on “popular war,” they provided the means of conducting such activities.
However, Mao Tse-tung, for whatever reasons, did not seek to bring these various Maoist parties and groups together to establish his own version of the Communist International. His successors had no interest at all in launching such an organization.
It was left up to those who after Mao’s death proclaimed themselves to be the orthodox purveyors of Marxism-LeninismMao Tse-tung Thought, and who regarded Mao’s successors as having betrayed the ideas and actions of the deceased leader, to try to found a Maoist Comintern. Their efforts gave rise to the establishment of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM).
The initiative for forming such an organization came from the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Chile. They drew up a document entitled “Basic Principles for the Unity of Marxist-Leninists and for the Line of the International Communist Movement,” which they circulated among a number of other parties and organizations that considered themselves to be orthodox Maoists and were supporters of the so-called Gang of Four, who had played key roles in the Great Proletarian Revolution and had been arrested soon after the death of Mao Tse-tung. This document served as the basis for the first meeting of these like-minded Maoist parties and groups.
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