Mick Hartley

Last night I finished reading Frank Dikotter's Mao's Great Famine. A more solidly researched book than Jasper Becker's ground-breaking Hungry Ghosts, certainly, but without some of the punch that Becker's book had: the difference, I suppose, between a historian and a journalist.

So, how opportune to read about Mao's continuing relevance at the Guardian's CiF this morning. It's Pankaj Mishra: Today Maoism speaks to the world's poor more fluently than ever. Oh yes. "Aside from the bland icon of the new China, there is a much more dangerous Mao, whose ideas retain their vitality":

It is tempting to denounce Mao as a monster, and to dismiss the Maoists of today as no less criminally deluded than Peru's Shining Path guerillas, or the Khmer Rouge. Certainly, the scale of the violence Mao inflicted on China dwarfs all other crimes and disasters committed during the course of nation-building in the last two centuries. But political and economic modernisers elsewhere also exacted a terrible human cost from their allegedly backward peoples. In the last century alone, millions died due to political conflict or hunger and were brutally dispossessed and culturally deracinated in a huge area of Asian territory, from Turkey and Iran to Indonesia and Taiwan.

You see? People are always dying due to political conflict. Political and economic modernisers elsewhere extracted a terrible cost in human lives too. So the 45 million or so who died or were killed in the Great Leap Forward as a direct result of the insane policies of a ruthless megalomaniac may stand out in terms of numbers but their deaths are unexceptional in the great scheme of things. We must resist the easy temptation to denounce Mao as a monster.

Nearly half a century ago, nationalist groups in Vietnam and Cuba successfully realised Mao's strategy of encircling the cities from the countryside. Now it is economic globalisers, encircling the countryside from the cities, who provide a freshly receptive soil for Mao's theory and praxis. Far from being rendered irrelevant, they have become attractive again to many people who feel actively victimised rather than simply "left behind" by an expansionist capitalism.

Quite what does it take to persuade some people that a particular political ideology is worthless? 45 million dead clearly isn't enough. And that's without the devastation of the Cultural Revolution, set to follow on from the Great Leap Forward as Mao consolidated his grip on power.

Searching for the continuing vitality of Mao's ideas? It's like those starving Chinese peasants, desperately scrabbling through the dirt and the shit for the odd undigested grain of rice they could eat.