Internationalizing Chairman Mao: Creation of the Mao cult in China Reconstructs and its reception in Latin America

Starting from the early 1950s, the China Foreign Languages Publishing Administration launched six kinds of official magazines such as China Reconstructs, People’s China and Peking Review. These publications circulated in large volume during the Cultural Revolution, and played a key role in spreading and perpetuating the Revolution and Maoism internationally. The radical revolutions and rebellions inspired by Mao’s doctrines occurred in multiple countries in Latin America for a long period of time. The phenomena provide case studies and proofs of Mao’s influence through propagandistic materials. This article attempts to delineate the three strategies that are encapsulated in the images in the periodicals. The strategies together create a fetish, in its nuance as a primitive religion or cult of religious superstition, of Maoism and the Maoist revolution. First, an ultimate goal or a possible future is rendered in the socialist realist painting and the staged photography. Second, by turning on a revolutionary mode where everything can be revolutionized, one automatizes the doctrine and creates countless paths through which the ideology can be implemented. Last but not least, international Maoism does not only aim for a result but also requires the consistency in the collective mobility in order to keep the doctrine vital. Here, the visual representation is more than resemblance to the present, but a creator of a futurist new reality if the Revolution perpetuates.