In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to relations between China and Latin America. The Chinese economic boom has created strong demand for Latin American raw materials and agro-exports, such as copper or soya beans. How this plays out in terms of trade patterns, investment flows, and, more generally, global geopolitics – in terms of both the development prospects and the internal politics of particular Latin American countries – is of great interest to scholars working in a number of social science disciplines. Meanwhile, historians interested in an earlier globalized age have begun to explore the economic and cultural impact of silver trade flows from Mexico and to a lesser extent the Andes to China in the early modern period. Matthew Rothwell's fine book offers a third, and promising, angle from which to examine Chinese–Latin American relations: the impact of Maoism on Latin America and, more broadly, the circulation of ideas between China and Latin America in the context of the Cold War.
Transpacific revolutionaries is a short book, the main text no more than a hundred pages long, and it is structured around three brief case studies on Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia. Rothwell's goal is to challenge what he sees as China-centred viewpoints on the transmission of Maoism to Latin America. These are viewpoints that minimize or negate the agency of Latin Americans in shaping this transmission. In his introductory chapter, Rothwell identifies some of the channels of transmission, such as experiences of travel to China, Chinese newspapers distributed in Latin America, classrooms where teachers influenced by Maoism drew on Maoist materials (such as Mao's writings) in their pedagogy, and indeed Maoist parties, which emerged from the ways in which the Sino-Soviet split was replicated in Latin America. He explains that his approach is inspired by recent trends in the historiography of the Cold War, which shift the focus away from the key centres of Cold War struggle (Moscow, Washington, and Beijing) and pay attention to how the Cold War was experienced from below.
Rothwell draws on a number of sources, including the archive of the political police in Mexico, several interviews with protagonists, and accounts of travel in China written by key actors in the transmission of Maoism to Latin America. Most of these sources are in Spanish; no Chinese sources were used and no Chinese informants were consulted. This is perhaps inevitable: the relevant Chinese archives, Rothwell tells us, are closed and, in any case, his focus is on the agency of Latin Americans in shaping the transmission of Maoism to the region. Nevertheless, the Chinese side of this story seems important. We can glimpse it in the travelogues of different Latin American visitors to China. For example, to judge from the number of visitors who obtained direct access to Chou Enlai or to Mao himself, it would seem that Latin America was of some interest to the Chinese, certainly until the 1970s. Sources other than those consulted by Rothwell would tell us more about how and why the Chinese became interested in Latin America and how they perceived the Latin American adaptations of Maoist theory and practice.
In all three case studies, Rothwell focuses on the ways in which China came to represent a new model for both armed struggle and economic development for a small number of Latin Americans. Unlike the USSR, the Chinese case appeared to be closer, more familiar, and therefore more relevant to Latin America. In both Mexico and Bolivia, two countries that had experienced ‘bourgeois’ revolutions and that maintained a sizeable agrarian sector, the Chinese revolutionary experience seemed to offer ways in which to deepen the reforms that had begun in 1910 and 1952 respectively. Rothwell shows that, during visits to China, the Mexican labour leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano and the Bolivian MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario) cadres Mario Torres Calleja and Germán Quiroga Galdo were dazzled by China's economic progress and became convinced of the need to apply lessons drawn from the Chinese experience to their own countries.
For others in Mexico and Bolivia, too, China offered a different kind of example: armed struggle. However, in both countries Maoist-inspired insurgencies (led by Florencio Medrano and Oscar Zamora respectively) were unsuccessful. In contrast, as is well known, in Peru the Maoist-inspired Shining Path proved far more successful in ‘domesticating’ (to use Rothwell's term) Maoism to Peruvian conditions, although it too was eventually defeated after a long armed conflict that left some 69,000 victims. In all three cases, Rothwell argues, there was a tendency among the insurgents – which he attributes to a faith-like adherence to Maoism – to apply the Chinese experience rather too rigidly to the local experience, as in the case of Medrano's decision to focus his insurgency in the border region between Oaxaca and Veracruz ‘mimicking Mao's actions in the Jiangxi–Fujian border region’ (p. 91).
Perhaps inevitably, as a historian of Peru, I found the chapter on the Shining Path a little weaker than the others. Its interpretation of the Shining Path, or of its links to Chinese communism, is not very different from those already available in other texts, including the report of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Rothwell also misses an opportunity to explore some issues that demonstrate the domestication of Maoism by the Shining Path, such as the party's use of the iconography and theatrics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in its representational apparatus, as shown in its posters or in the parades organized by its militants (all dressed in Mao jackets) in Peru's prisons. However, the strength of this volume is to be found in its comparative and transnational approach. Students of ‘global’ Maoism and of the transnational influence of the Chinese Revolution, as well as students of the history of the Left in Latin America and of the region's experience of the Cold War, will find much that is of interest in Transpacific revolutionaries.
