Wang Fanxi (1907–2002) was a Chinese Trotskyist leader of the 1930s. He was imprisoned by the nationalists for several years for his revolutionary ideas. After the victory of Mao's revolution in 1949, he escaped to Hong Kong before going into exile in the Portuguese colony of Macao, where he continued his political activities. In the early 1960s, Wang wrote a manuscript “Mao Zedong Thought”, which was finally published in 1973. In the face of pressure from the Chinese authorities, Wang lost his teaching job in 1975 and faced certain dangers. Gregor Benton, a well-known expert on Chinese Trotskyism, and Tariq Ali were instrumental in bringing Wang to Leeds, in the UK. There, over the course of the next two decades, Benton and Wang collaborated on several publications about the Chinese revolution. Now, as Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University, Benton has edited Wang's Mao Zedong Thought and translated it into English.

When Mao Zedong Thought was first published, little was known about Mao outside China beyond what could be gleaned from official Chinese publications and some writings by Western journalists and scholars. Now, one might wonder why a book on Mao Zedong thought published almost fifty years ago might be relevant for scholars today.

In his introduction, Benton provides an overview of Wang's life, his writings, and his relationship with the Trotskyist movement in China and abroad. As a student at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow in 1928, Wang became a supporter of the Trotskyist opposition first in the Soviet Union and then, after his return in 1929, in China. In the factional battles inside the Comintern, Leo Trotsky had criticized the United Front of the Chinese Communists (CCP) with the Nationalist Party (Guomindang). This strategy was supported by Bukharin and Stalin. In 1927, the new leader of the Guomindang, Chiang Kai-shek, turned against the CCP and massacred the urban labour movement in Shanghai. The Trotskyists saw this disaster in China as proof that their rejection of the United Front and promotion of a “permanent revolution” of the urban proletariat was the correct strategy to follow. The leader of the CCP, Chen Duxiu, was made the scapegoat for the failure of the United Front by the Comintern leadership. Like Wang, he subsequently turned towards Trotskyism. However, the Trotskyists remained a marginal group in China, not only as a result of Nationalist and Maoist repressions. Many Trotskyists saw in Mao little more than a Chinese Stalin and had difficulties explaining how he could have led the Chinese revolution to victory in 1949. Benton considers Mao Zedong Thought as a self-critical attempt by an unorthodox Trotskyist to understand the failure of his own movement.

Wang's book is not focused on the life of Mao. Instead, it analyses Mao's writings and ideas in great detail. Wang considers Mao a creative mind and brilliant tactician. Mao would have been able to integrate ancient Chinese wisdom of warfare and dialectics into his modern revolutionary politics. However, according to Wang, Mao began to study Marxist writings seriously only in the mid-1930s, and he would never have been able to develop a coherent Marxist theory to explain the successes and failures of the Chinese revolution. For example, as a “middling strategist” Mao adopted the “Stalinist” concept of New Democracy, a government based on a multi-class alliance, which was unsurprisingly rejected by Trotskyists. Wang believes that with the socialist transformation in the early 1950s, Mao came closer to a strategy of “permanent revolution”, but was unable to express this at a theoretical level. Wang is also very critical about the Great Leap Forward in 1958, because he sees it as a nationalist strategy of self-reliance, echoing Stalin's theory of “socialism in one country”. For Wang, Mao's internationalism was always subordinated to his Chinese nationalism.

The appendix provides translations of two articles by Wang written during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Wang regarded the movement as both a power struggle within the ruling bureaucracy and a popular unrest. Mao would have been part of the left wing of the Stalinist bureaucracy, but Wang still hoped in 1967 that the movement could be the starting point for a genuine revolution of workers to create a socialist democracy. His hopes resulted in conflicts with Trotskyist mainstream organizations and ultimately failed to materialize, as we know today.

The translation and publication of Mao Zedong Thought is timely because many of the more recent publications on Mao do not take him seriously as a revolutionary thinker, and instead portray him only as a politician hungry for power. Furthermore, the opening up of the Soviet archives in the 1990s has shown that Stalin and the leadership in Moscow had a tremendous influence on Mao and his comrades until the 1950s. However, Wang's book is also a child of its time, and of the Marxist strategic debates of the 1960s and 1970s. Mao Zedong Thought can be recommended for everyone interested in the intellectual history of Chinese and global Trotskyism in relation to the Maoist revolution. Benton provides footnotes and short introductions to each chapter, so that non-China experts can also follow the arguments of his hero.