According to conventional narratives, the Maoist regime that ruled over China from 1949 until Mao’s death in 1976 was driven by a materialist worldview that led it to enforce an unrelenting atheism.

In this second installment of my series on the theocratic origins of the modern Chinese state, I propose instead that the Maoist regime was in fact a theocratic regime engaged in aggressive proselytizing and endless religious wars.

To begin to understand this thesis, we need to reassess the origins of Marxist thought, recognizing the religious structure therein.

In his Meaning in History (1949), Karl Löwith does precisely this: highlighting the echoes of familiar religious narratives and beliefs within Marxist teachings, opening onto a reinterpretation of Marxism as a fundamentally religious narrative in atheist garb.

There is, for example, the idea of the downtrodden proletariat as the chosen people: the group that exists on the fringes of the present society designated by the higher power of history to forever transform and redeem human society.

In order to achieve this redemptive transformation, there will be a final struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, echoing the messianic and eschatological vision of the inevitable final struggle between the two opposing camps of the Christ and the Antichrist.

According to this narrative, the victor in this struggle will usher in a communist paradise: creating a new Kingdom of God on earth, without God in the familiar sense yet still very much endowed with theological meaning.

The core insight of Löwith’s analysis is that the self-described materialist, scientific, atheist mode of Marxist theory remains firmly entrenched in prophetic religious narratives, reinjecting messianic meaning into the world, and thereby providing an escape from the suffocating boredom of post-Enlightenment secular disenchantment. One could not, after all, bring millions to rise up in the ecstatic fervor of communist rebellion throughout the twentieth century with a science of history based solely in matters of fact.

One of the millions of people inspired by this new religious vision was none other than Mao Zedong, who in turn deployed Marxist teachings to reshape China in his vision.

Why was Mao drawn to Marxism? Treating Marxism as a materialist and scientific theory makes this question impossible to answer. Both Marxists and anti-Marxists agree, China in the 1920s did not in any way resemble a society on the verge of a socialist revolution as envisioned by Marx: China was not an industrialized capitalist society at the time, and for this reason lacked a substantive proletariat, the main actor in the Marxist narrative of revolution. Nothing, in short, seems to match.

Yet if we draw upon Löwith’s theological reading, Marxism’s appeal to Mao becomes obvious: theocratic re-enchantment of the world masquerading under the cover of scientism.

Because Marx placed the marginal and downtrodden proletariat at the center of a narrative of global redemption, first Li Dazhao and later Mao were able to reimagine China as a “proletarian nation.” This pessoptimistic vision provided the perfect narrative structure to resuscitate Sinocentrism (discussed in the first installment of this series) from its own collapse in modernity: China’s perceived marginalization in relation to the global system in the modern era made it destined to play a redemptive role therein as the proletariat designated by the laws of history to transcend this order and usher in history’s next and indeed final stage.

For this reason, Maoist internationalism always had a decidedly nationalist tone, a fact belied by the notable lack of solidarity and indeed ruthless competition for primacy among the nominally proletarian regimes of the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and beyond.

Such international competition for primacy as the great global redeemer had its domestic counterpart in sectarian wars suppressing all other belief systems. From Christianity to Buddhism to Islam to Confucianism, all forms of religious belief in China after 1949 were forced to yield to the domination of Maoism. This is not, as some assume, because the Maoist regime was scientific and atheistic and therefore determined to stamp out so-called feudal superstition, but rather because it was monotheistic and determined to enforce its own feudal superstitions without competition: the suppression of opposing and competing forces of course being the defining mark of actually existing communism.

Yet as other religious beliefs were suppressed, the theological and indeed mystical elements of Maoism became increasingly evident. From the frenzied mass mobilization of an imagined Great Leap Forward to a pseudo-secular heaven on earth, to the religious reverence for Mao embodied in such model figures as his good soldier Lei Feng, to the reorganization of society and culture around Mao worship and zealotry during the Cultural Revolution, the fundamentally theocratic core of Maoism revealed itself ever more clearly as other belief systems receded.

Practices from the Cultural Revolution most clearly reveal the mutually reinforcing relationship between a top-down state enforced monotheism and a genuine bottom-up interest in and passion for Maoist monotheism. Mao’s core teachings were condensed into sacred scripture in the form of the portable and accessible Quotations from Chairman Mao, designed for commitment to memory and recitation. Subjects had daily-state organized study sessions on Mao’s writings, decorated their attire with symbolic Mao talismans and adorned their houses with Mao images and busts. The most devout of subjects would seek guidance from one’s resident Mao in the morning and provide a complete report of one’s behavior to him in the evening.

What has previously been called the “Mao cult” would thus be better understood as a Maoist monotheistic theocracy, resuscitating both the Sinocentrism and mystical legitimation inherent in premodern state forms. And although undoubtedly state enforced to the exclusion of all other belief systems, this religion also had genuine popular appeal in constructing a seemingly complete interpretation of the world, providing answers to all questions, and endowing people’s existence with a sense of purpose and meaning, no matter how misguided, self-destructive, and indeed at times evil, leading directly to the death of tens of millions of compatriots.

The taboo on heresy was so great that even as Mao’s belief system pushed the People’s Republic to the brink of self-destruction, there was no space to break away from his failed teachings while he remained alive. Yet although the most openly religious aspects of Maoist monotheism were abandoned after his death, I will argue in part three of this series that the contradiction of the theocratic undergirding of nominally atheist state power remains firmly in place in China today: on the one hand distorting people’s understanding of their relationship to the state and the broader world, while on the other hand rescuing subjects from the boredom and triviality of a purely secular world vision.

(Kevin Carrico is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University)

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