A defining moment in the history of US radicalism’s Maoist turn remains Black Panther Party (BPP) founder Bobby Seale’s recollection of the role of Quotations from Chairman Mao in building the Panthers’ organization and ideology. As Seale recalls it, in early 1967 he and Huey Newton came up with the idea of purchasing sixty copies of the Little Red Book from China Book Store in San Francisco in order to sell them for $1 apiece on the University of California Berkeley campus. The money was to be used to purchase weapons to arm BPP members against police brutality on the streets of Oakland. Ideologically, Seale writes, the book also became the Panthers’ urtext for internationalizing black struggle in the USA:

Quotations from Chairman Mao (Mao Zhuxi Yulu), known colloquially as the “red treasure book” (hong baoshu) in Chinese, was the most prominent icon of the Cultural Revolution. It was printed just over one billion times between 1966 and 1971, and in terms of print circulation ranks second only to the Bible. In China in the late 1960s it achieved supreme importance as the ultimate guide to political action and moral behavior. Several factors explain the Little Red Book’s enormous distribution numbers and its resonance with the Chinese populace. First, the compilation was not a novel phenomenon in Chinese culture; collected sayings dating back to the Confucian Analects frequently were employed to spread the wisdom of religious or secular sages. Second, communist claims to represent the absolute truth of a scientific worldview encouraged utmost reverence for works in the Marxist–Leninist canon. The ingenious physical format of the Quotations presents a third distinctive feature. Fourth, and without doubt the most important reason, was the political environment. As the former propaganda establishment came under heavy attack for having hampered the spread of Mao Zedong Thought, the new leadership raised production numbers as proof of revolutionary loyalty. Finally, in the absence of a functioning party bureaucracy, the decontextualized quotations could be employed for highly diverse aims, and supplied skillful orators with a means of empowerment in local power struggles. This chapter traces the fascinating and contingent history of the Little Red Book in China, from its traditional predecessors and its humble origins in the General Political Department of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in May 1964, through the high tide of its cult status during the Cultural Revolution, and finally on to its withdrawal from circulation in February 1979.

At the Ninth National Congress of the Communist Party of China in April 1969, Chairman Mao’s wife Jiang Qing issued a surprising broadside against a form of music that had once seemed to embody the political passions of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: the quotation song. These songs, which had been promoted nationwide since September 1966, set the Chairman’s maxims to music, and were deliberately conceived as a musical analogue and mnemonic device for Quotations from Chairman Mao, more popularly known as the Little Red Book. Upon watching a televised song-and-dance program extolling the Chairman, Jiang Qing is reported to have said:

She continued, “They’re wearing red stars and waving red flags, but they’re swing dancing. They may as well be naked.”

In early February 1967, the Soviet Union evacuated women and children from its embassy in Beijing. When the evacuees got off the plane at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, hundreds of Muscovites were gathered to greet them. The arriving women gave their names – Olga, Natasha, Marina – and brief accounts of their departure from China. Babies in their arms, they told of running a gauntlet of hostile Red Guards to board their plane. At least one Chinese hurled a copy of the Little Red Book at the Russians, and it hit an eight-month-old girl on the head. Or so the Soviet press reported. Whereas for communists in many parts of the world, the Little Red Book functioned as a physical manifestation of the rejuvenation of leftism, for the Soviet Union it was anything but. While radicals from Berkeley to Bengal may have pocketed their books with hope and pride, nobody – really, absolutely nobody – in the Soviet Union would have been caught dead with one.

On the contrary, the book was universally perceived as a weapon. Its symbolism operated on several levels intellectually, politically, and socially, and had different implications in different contexts. Orthodox party members saw a rival ideology to refute; dissidents found an example of communism at its worst to brandish in their battle with the regime; ordinary people sensed a more concrete, literal threat. But all interpretations began from the same place: the Little Red Book and the Maoism it embodied were an assault, one that began rhetorically but could end physically.

The meeting with Mao was arranged in secret, late in the summer of 1967. The two guests, who had come all the way from Albania, explained their mission to the Chairman: editing his Little Red Book of quotations, which the Chinese had recently translated into the Albanian language. With the Cultural Revolution underway, Mao had left Beijing for Shanghai in great secrecy. No one was supposed to know his exact location, including high-ranking Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee members. The Chairman agreed to the meeting anyway – evidence, Kang Sheng explained to the visitors, that Mao cared deeply about the tiny Balkan ally. But what Mao had to say on account of the Little Red Book came as a shocking surprise to the guests. His quotations were “worthless,” he told them, and they could not possibly be of any value to the Albanians. The book was “nothing more than a collection of materials with historical insights into China.” Mao went on to explain that he had given instructions to publish Marx’s quotations, as well as Engels’, Lenin’s, and Stalin’s. But his inferiors had neglected the classics. “Now we ought to do this,” the Chairman added. “Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin have authored a lot of works and, in order to popularize them, we must publish their quotations.” Utterly baffled, the Albanians rushed to affirm that Mao’s quotations were of utmost political importance for their country. Comrade Enver Hoxha, head of the Party of Labor of Albania (PPSH), had entrusted them personally with this important task. “See if you find them useful,” Mao responded. “China’s experience may serve other countries, but they must judge this for themselves.”

You’ve got (Chinese) mail: Italy and Yugoslavia

In early 1971, a university student in Venice, Italy, wrote to the Chinese embassy in Rome expressing interest in receiving an Italian-language copy of the Little Red Book. At more or less the same time, a high-school student in Pakrac, Yugoslavia, wrote to the Chinese embassy in Belgrade expressing interest in receiving a Serbo-Croatian-language copy of the Little Red Book. Each Chinese embassy complied and sent free of charge “exotically packaged” bundles to their respective applicants containing a little red book with a gold star, a plastic covering, and Mao’s portrait inside. But with one difference: intent.

The university student in Venice was called into the Central Post Office to receive his mail from the Chinese embassy. And once he saw what awaited him, he was perplexed by the fact that the Chinese embassy had sent well over a hundred copies of the Little Red Book. With no way to carry such a quantity in a city with many bridges and no cars, the student corralled his friends to help him carry the books home. And once home, he opened a letter from the People’s Republic of China inviting him to distribute the books. The high-school student in Pakrac received no such surprises. Instead, he strolled along the busy provincial streets of his town in northern Yugoslavia to pick up, at the local post office, the single copy of the Little Red Book he had requested. To his delight, he also received a letter, but this one only expressed the guarded compliments of the People’s Republic of China.

The Little Red Book gained popularity in India with the outbreak of the Naxalite Movement, named for the hamlet of Naxalbari (in the Darjeeling district of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal), where in the early summer of 1967 a local communist unit led poor peasants to overthrow the local gentry in a land dispute. This so-called victory of the peasant insurgents was short-lived, but it had significant consequences. It split the communist movement in India for a second time, following the Sino-Soviet split of the mid-1950s, and introduced violent revolutionary Maoism (or Naxalism) into Indian politics. The Indian state considers Naxalism a security threat even today, with twelve of its twenty-eight states under some degree of pressure. However, the first phase of the Naxalite Movement ended with the death of its leader, Charu Majumdar, in 1972, after which the Little Red Book rapidly declined in popularity. As chief leader of the Naxalite Movement, Majumdar treated the Quotations like gospel, insisting in his writings and speeches that his comrades keep a copy of the Little Red Book on their persons at all times, to be studied in indoctrination classes and also read aloud to aid the illiterate peasants in the midst of their “armed struggle.” A good many students and intellectuals recruited to the organization took this directive seriously and did follow it. However, as will be shown later, no other senior functionary of the Naxalites put so much stress on reading the Quotations; in fact, as revealed later, many of them were opposed to reducing the entire Maoist ideology to the short passages in the Little Red Book. Majumdar’s closest comrades believed the Little Red Book to be of little consequence to the movement, and after his demise the importance of the Quotations among the Naxalites faded.

This introduction is not so much about Mao’s quotations themselves, but rather the effusive foreword that introduced Chinese and foreign readers to Quotations from Chairman Mao at the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Credited to Lin Biao, Mao’s top military man and tireless promoter of the Little Red Book, it described how the written word could transform ideas into a material force for revolution. According to the foreword, the Little Red Book was a weapon of mass instruction – the intercontinental delivery system for a potentially world-shattering ideological payload: “Once Mao Tse-tung’s thought is grasped by the broad masses, it becomes a source of strength and a spiritual atom bomb of infinite power.” Lin Biao’s metaphor was an adulatory exaggeration, of course, but it should not be dismissed as only that. I will show, through an extended exegesis, that the spiritual atom bomb was in fact a coherent concept within its own Maoist intellectual context. More broadly, I will argue that the spiritual atom bomb was also a telling symptom of anxieties about the Cultural Revolution in China, about the Sino-Soviet split within the socialist world, about the larger Cold War between capitalism and socialism, and about the global confrontation with the real prospect of nuclear Armageddon. Lin Biao’s foreword to the Little Red Book arose from historical conditions specific to China in the 1960s, yet it was also a product of the global Atomic Age. In that moment of global existential crisis, when faceless technology threatened to destroy all mankind, the spiritual atom bomb was an alternate vision of the atomic that affirmed the primacy of the spiritual over the material.

In December 1966, President Julius Nyerere embarked on a six-week tour of half of the regions in the newly independent East African country of Tanzania, which the national press enthusiastically dubbed his “Long March.” During this journey to both major regional centers and remote rural outposts, Nyerere called upon Tanzanians across the countryside to unite in pursuit of the country’s new developmental imperatives: self-reliance and socialism. In a pamphlet published several years earlier, Nyerere had already begun to outline these political principles, introducing the concept of ujamaa, or “familyhood,” into national discourse as the foundation for a proposed program of African socialism. It was not until the conclusion of his “Long March,” however, that Nyerere officially inaugurated the policy of ujamaa that would structure life in Tanzania over the next decade. On February 5, 1967, in a widely publicized manifesto issued in the northern town of Arusha, President Nyerere – popularly known as Mwalimu (Teacher) – announced the ideological contours of a radical approach to national development based upon collective hard work, popular agrarian transformation, and a resolutely anti-colonial stance.