PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... highly readable ... I am wary of any tendency among academics to play down the Chairman’s wrecking activities. I was glad to see little sign of it here ... The most impressive sections of Ms. Lovell’s book are well-researched accounts of Maoism in Indonesia, Cambodia, Africa, South America and India ... Ms. Lovell’s account of the Maoist cult in Europe is sound, and damning ... She might have said more about Maoist dupes in British academia, of whom there were plenty ... entertainingly written and beautifully produced but not without flaws. Ms. Lovell rightly notes that China provided foreign aid in order to compete with Russia for global revolutionary leadership, but she makes bold claims about its extent, seeming to suggest that this extravagance in part explains the Chinese penury of the 1970s ... Today, Ms. Lovell suggests, Xi Jinping is China’s most Maoist leader since Mao, as he seeks to turn residual adulation of the Helmsman to his own benefit. I know what she means, but there is a difference: Xi and those around him are far smarter and better informed than the insular, irrational, overpraised, stupendously self-defeating Chairman. Which makes today’s China all the more formidable.
