1

A SHINING BEACON: GLOBAL MAOISM AND

COMMUNIST MOVEMENTS IN PERU AND CAMBODIA, 1965-1992

Dr. Matthew Galway

Sessional Lecturer, University of British Columbia (Vancouver)

Post-doctoral Fellow, University of California, Berkeley

[email protected]

ABSTRACT. Karl Marx predicted that “the Chinese revolution will throw a spark into the
overloaded mine of the present industrial system and cause the explosion of the long-
prepared general crisis, which spreading abroad, will be closely followed by political
revolution on the continent.” A century later, Chinese leader Mao Zedong went further,
endeavoring to transmit the Chinese revolution globally. This paper examines how and
why Maoism emerged as a guiding ideology in two disparate case studies: Peru and
Cambodia. It argues that traveling intellectuals (José Sotomayor and Manuel Soria from
Peru, Saloth Sar from Cambodia) turned to Communist China as a model for their own
revolutionary designs. Upon visiting, they honed their ideology and developed a
sophisticated revolutionary raison d’être imbued with Mao’s ideological stamp. Their visits
to China coincided with the Sino-Soviet Split (1960) after which Beijing sought to set an
ideological example for others to follow. As senior Chinese Communist officials stressed
the worldwide suitability of China’s revolutionary experience, these intellectuals’ reception
of Maoism was dialectical in nature. By speaking back, as this paper argues, these men had
considerable agency over their interpretation of Maoism, and ultimately, in the production
of a new ideology.

I. Introduction.

對偉大顆毛澤東主席心懷一個 “忠”字. 對偉大顆毛澤東思想狠抓 “用” 字. (In

regard to the great teacher Chairman Mao, cherish the words “loyalty.” In regard to the
great “Mao Zedong Thought,” stress vigorously the word “usefulness,” 1967) 1

Cultural Anthropologist Clifford Geertz once stated that “ideas—religious, moral,

practical, aesthetic—must as Max Weber, among others, never tired of insisting, be carried by
powerful social groups to have powerful social effects: someone must revere them, celebrate
them, defend them, impose them. They have to be institutionalized in order to find not just an
intellectual existence in society, but, so to speak, a material one as well.” 2 Ideas, while tied
inextricably to materiality, are never static or fixed; rather people have agency over
interpretation, reception, adaptation, and inversion or perversion, and their surroundings help

1. Stefan R. Landsberger and Warren Van der Heijden, Chinese Posters: The IISH-Landsberger
Collections. (Munich: Prestel, 2009), 149. Duì wěidà kē Máo Zédōng zhǔxí xīnhuái yīgè “zhōng” zì. Duì
wěidà kē Máo Zédōng sīxiǎng hěn zhuā “yòng” zì.
2. Clifford Geertz, “The Politics of Meaning,” in The Interpretation of Cultures. (NY: Basic Books,
1973), 314. Emphasis added.
 2

to inform an idea’s appraisal as something useful to fill a void. 3 Yet one relevant question
emerges: how does one explain the rise of a radical idea, or ideology, which has been shaped
by one socio-cultural milieu, in others far removed from the point of origin? Our study focuses
on the emergence of one such ideology, Maoism (aka. Mao Zedong Thought 毛澤東思想,
Máo Zédōng Sīxiǎng, inside China), and its emergence outside China in two specific cases in
which shared political processes occurred to engender its rise. Despite a handful of existing
studies on Maoism outside China, no previous effort that compares the connection between
Maoism’s diffusion abroad and similar political processes and responses to the crises of post-
independence development in South American and Southeast Asia exists. 4
The failure of the Soviet brand of salvation to ameliorate conditions in the colonial and
semi-colonial worlds, and China’s lower stage of development, culminated in China’s
emergence as leader of a Third World revolution with Mao Zedong Thought, or “Maoism” as
we refer to it outside of a Chinese context, as its shining beacon. As Mao believed, the “correct”
思想 (ideology, sīxiǎng), when “applied to the international scene,” was the determining factor
in a revolution’s success.5 In both Peru and Cambodia, our two cases, progressive intellectuals
who founded Maoist movements, much like their Chinese and unlike their Euro-American
counterparts, experienced global capitalism as an alien hegemony.6 And not unlike Mao before
them, these men were networked individuals (Abimael Guzman Reynoso, aka Presidente
Gonzalo, from Peru; Saloth Sar, aka. Pol Pot, his nom de guerre, short for Politique Potentielle,
from Cambodia) in a situated thinking who, to borrow from Thomas S. Kuhn, “responded to
crises” (colonial subjugation, underdevelopment, political corruption, capitalist exploitation,
and socioeconomic disequilibria) by embracing Maoism as their guidepost.7 Maoism, however,

3. Alasdair Macintyre, “Incommensurability, Truth, and the Conversation between Confucians

and Aristotelians about the Virtues,” in Culture and Modernity: East-West Philosophic Perspectives.
Eliot Deutsch, ed., (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 117-118.
4. Such studies include the following: Robert J. Alexander, International Maoism in the Developing
World. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999); William R. Heaton, “China and Southeast Asian
Communist Movements: The Decline of Dual Track Diplomacy,” Asian Survey 22, No. 8
(August 1982):779-800; Thomas A. Marks, Maoist People’s War in Post-Vietnam Asia. (Chiang
Mai, Thailand: White Lotus, 2007), xv; Alexander C. Cook, “Third World Maoism,” in A
Critical Introduction to Mao. Timothy Cheek, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
288-312; Arif Dirlik, Paul Healy, and Nick Knight, eds., Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s
Thought. (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1997). Alexander and Heaton explain
Maoism’s global emergence through the scope of international relations and as a nationalist
response to the limitations of the Bolshevik model of organization. Marks, meanwhile,
examines the global impact of Maoism through the perspective of strategy and operational art
vis-à-vis Mao’s military tactic of People’s War. Cook and Dirlik et al. devote article length
studies to Maoism outside China, but do not discuss Mao’s concept model as a manner in
which to explain the grafting of Maoism to extant ideological and cultural forms in the various
Maoist movements.
5. James Chieh Hsiung, Ideology and Practice: The Evolution of Chinese Communism. (New York:
Praeger Publishers, 1970), 162-163; and “A Chinese Appeal for Third World Support,”
(February 1965), The People’s Republic of China 1949-1979: A Documentary Survey. Volume 2, 1957-
1965: The Great Leap Forward and Its Aftermath. Harold C. Hinton, ed. (Wilmington, DE:
Scholarly Resources Inc., 1980), 1027-1048.
6. Arif Dirlik, “Modernism and Antimodernism in Mao Zedong’s Marxism,” in Critical
Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s Thought. Arif Dirlik, Paul Healy, and Nick Knight, eds. (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), 70.
7. As Kuhn states: “Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones.” As for the
 3

was not merely grafted onto the Cambodian or Peruvian situation; rather, as this paper shows,
their reception was dialectical in nature; they spoke back by adapting Maoism to réalités conrètes.8 Their
reception, moreover, led to the domestication of Maoism so that it spoke to their present
situation and struggle.
Accordingly, we examine the two cases of Peru and Cambodia to trace preliminary
threads between them via shared political processes and efforts to make the foreign familiar
beyond a tight-knit group of avant gardistes. The first case, Peru, provides us with the only Latin
American country wherein a Maoist Party (Partido Comunista del Peru-Sendero Luminoso,
Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path) nearly seized power.9 The Peruvian case conveys the
ways in which a radical intellectual, Abimael Guzman Reynoso, combined Jose Mariategui’s
concept of indigenismo 10 and Andean cultural norms to make Maoism speak to the Party’s
would-be constituents, 11 thereby adapting Maoism to fit Peru’s geographical and cultural
contexts. The second case in Cambodia yields much of the same, with Paris-trained, Parti
communiste français (PCF) members encountering Maoism while pursuing advanced degrees in
the 1950s and engaging with it dialogically and dialectically in terms of how it could useful in
addressing Cambodian crises. To make Maoism speak to a disenfranchised Cambodian
peasantry to which none of the Paris Group had previous exposure, the Communist Party of
Kampuchea (CPK, គណបក្សក្ុុំមុយនីសក្មពុជា) marshaled it so that abstract terms spoke
clearly to local grievances, notably rural plight, socioeconomic inequity, and political
corruption.
How might one proceed in uncovering the forces at play that brought Maoism to the
forefront and how radicals adapted it creatively to render it congruent with contemporary
norms in their respective polities? Philip Kuhn’s approach to explaining the ideal socio-
contextual “fit” of exogenous ideas presents an important effort, and one that this study

response, he argues that when “Confronted with anomaly or with crisis, scientists take a
different attitude toward existing paradigms, and the nature of their research changes
accordingly.” Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2 nd ed. (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1970), 66-76, first quote from page 68, and 77-91, second quote
from pages 90-91. I also thank panel participants Timothy Weston (CU-Boulder), Christina Till
(University of Hamburg), and Shakhar Rahav (University of Haifa) for their input, and Wen-
hsin Yeh, as discussant, for some of the terminology. “May Fourth and Its Aftermath in a
Transnational Context,” (Association for Asian Studies Conference, Seattle, Washington, 1
April 2016).
8. Sasha Sher states that these avant-garde writings on Cambodian society, along with the 1976
Four Year Plan, represent the “only written texts on the [CPK’s] economic intentions for
Cambodia” (Radio Phnom Penh “hardly gives much depth” on this aspect of the Party’s
vision). Sacha Sher, « Le parcours politique des khmers rouges: de Paris à Phnom Penh, 1945-
1979 » (PhD Dissertation, Université Paris X – Nanterre, 2001), 72.
9. Matthew D. Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries: The Chinese Revolution in Latin America. (New
York: Routledge, 2013), 48.
10. Indigenismo: A Latin American social movement that pressed for an improved standard of
living for the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Indigenismo also sought to grant a greater
socio-political role for Indigenous peoples and the demanded a more steadfast recognition of
indigenous rights and including compensation and reconciliation.
11. Andean cultural and traditional norms: these include reciprocal justice, subsistence
communal agriculture, the Inkarri myth, Pankainti, and the messianic notion of reuniting all the
Andean peoples in a millenarian uprising against the state.
 4

applies.12 Kuhn’s methodology guides this paper’s explanation of the rise of Maoism in both
Peru and Cambodia as such a fit: textual language, historical circumstances, and the process whereby such
materials became important to others. Ours is thus a study that incorporates the myriad complexities
of the vastly different locales (Peru and Cambodia) into understanding the lived cultures of our
intellectuals (Guzman and Sar) who became Maoists. We examine the following variables to
explain Maoism’s fit in both our cases: 1) exposure to Maoist texts, whether in China or not, in
the intellectuals’ language, and their intellectual engagement with them; 2) the conditions of
their respective polities which made Maoism make sense as an alternative, radical course; 3)
their creative adaptation of Maoism to make it speak to local grievances in their countries.
II. Making Sense of the Foreign: An Approach to the Problem of Ideas across Cultures.

We begin with Philip Kuhn’s tripartite method, which helps to explain the origins and
cross-cultural dimensions of the Taiping vision. His approach to uncovering how thought is
related to social experience (or to borrow from sociologist Karl Mannheim, a “social milieu”), 13
moves us toward uncovering what contexts/mindsets the Communists who espoused Maoism
were in when they adopted and applied it. Kuhn’s method is three-fold: 1) the precise language
of the textual material that impinged on the host culture; 2) the underlying structure of the
historical circumstances into which this material [was] introduced; and 3) the process whereby
foreign materials became important to sectors of society outside the group that first appreciated
and received it and thereby becomes a significant historical force.14 He applies this method to
his analysis of how failed civil service student Hong Xiuquan (洪秀全, 1814-1864), a man who
made sense of his vision upon a second reading of the modestly educated Liang A-fa’s (梁發
1789-1855) heavily politicized “hellfire and brimstone” Christian tract 勸世良言(Good Words
to Admonish the Age, Quànshì liángyán). Key to Kuhn’s analysis is a group of bandits and
radicals formed by Feng Yunshan ( 馮 雲 , Hong’s cousin) called the 拜 上 帝 教 (God-
Worshipping Society, Bàishàngdìjiào) whose efforts reinforced shared dialect and faith founded
on Hong’s vision among the Guangxi Hakka in 1846. The Society, Kuhn argues, acted as the
disseminators of Hong’s vision to the Guangxi Hakka, who years later went on to support the
Taiping movement. The chiliastic Protestantism that the God-worshipping Society preached
ultimately fulfilled a social need for the Guangxi Hakka since the term “ethnicity” was merely a
“free-floating variable that demanded a new set of concepts for its expression,” and had “no
firm social base” in Guangxi Hakka society. 15
Kuhn’s study is particularly useful in relation to our case studies. Hong rejected Liang’s
politicization and did not have exposure to the conditions in Guangxi, yet his vision reached
an oppressed audience who used it to conceptualize their oppression in transcendent terms
and to contextualize their subjugation in terms of a collective conscience.16 The same is true
for Abimael Guzman, a middle class intellectual with rural origins, and the CPK intellectual
thrust, who all studied in Paris on elite scholarships. Although it was the “perfection of the ‘fit’
between Liang’s vocabulary and the underlying structure of the Hakka’s social plight that
facilitated the doctrine’s reception,” it was ultimately the “larger imperfection of the ‘fit’ with the

12. Philip Kuhn, “Origins of the Taiping Vision: Cross-Cultural Dimensions of a Chinese
Rebellion,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19, No. 3 (July 1977): 350-366.
13. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. (New York:
Harcourt, 1936), 265.
14. Kuhn, “Origins of the Taiping Vision,” 350.
15. Ibid, 365.
16. Ibid, 364-366.
 5

native culture”—the Chinese rejection of Christianity—that initiated such a change.17 This, too,
is useful in explaining the rise of Maoism in the Peruvian and Cambodian Maoist movements.
The relative failures of Marxism-Leninism as per the Soviet brand and the ongoing political
corruption and wealth disparities in both countries’ rural sectors forced progressives to turn to
more radical, practical alternatives. Both Guzman and Saloth Sar had read Marxist and Maoist
texts in their native tongues (Spanish and French), but it was their respective travels to China
that served as a “Hong Xiuquan dream,” which prompted a revisiting of it and application to
local conditions. Their subsequent engagement with Maoism made abstract materialist
interpretations of socioeconomic inequality speak to local grievances (political corruption and
rural/urban divides) not unlike the Taiping vision spoke to the Guangxi Hakka in transcendent
terms. Kuhn’s three-part method is ultimately particularly useful to uncover how elite
intellectuals, from Peru to Cambodia, received and normalized ideas and/or examples from
without in their respective polities and mobilized it to speak to status societies in their home
countries.

III. Un Sendero Luminoso al Futuro: Maoism and the Shining Path’s Revolution in Peru.

On 18 May 1980, Peru held elections for a civilian President after twelve years of
military rule. Just the day before, five masked members of the Communist Party of Peru-
Shining Path set fire to ballot boxes in the Ayacucho village of Chuschi. 18 Who were these
masked revolutionaries? What was their message and purpose for such a surreptitious
operation? The Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path (hereafter the Shining Path or Sendero
for short) adopted Mao Zedong Thought as the Party’s guiding ideology and launched a full-
fledged socialist revolution. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) defined pre-revolution
China with terms such as “semi-feudal” and “semi-colonial,” which resonated with Latin
American Marxists who regarded their region as sharing the same fate. 19 That the Chinese
revolution contained “lessons” for Latin American societies led intellectuals, such as Shining
Path founder Abimael Guzman Reynoso, to embark on a patronage to Beijing where they
studied Mao’s works and trained in the military art of people’s war. 20 Mao’s principle of
people’s war in particular, provided the Shining Path with a way of fighting and a way of life
that embodied “a vision of man and society and an approach to development built on
foundations of popular participation and egalitarian values.” 21 By the 1980s, the Shining Path

17. Ibid, 366.

18. Orin Starn, Carlos Ivan Degregori, and Robin Kirk, eds., The Peru Reader: History, Culture,
Politics. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995), 305, and Alexander C. Cook,
“Third World Maoism,” in A Critical Introduction to Mao, 87.
19. Matt Rothwell, “Transpacific Revolutionaries: The Creation of Latin American Maoism,” in
New World Coming, Karen Dubinsky et al. eds., (Toronto, ON: Between the Lines Press, 2008),
107.
20. Rothwell, “Transpacific…,” in Dubinsky et al., eds., 107. People’s war had three protracted
war stages: strategic defensive, strategic stalemate and the strategic offensive. People’s War was
not a strategy of aggression but instead was a strategy of aggressive defense. As Mao stated,
“the enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the
enemy retreats, we pursue.” Mao Zedong, “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire,” (5 January
1930), in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Volume 1. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), 124;
Mao Zedong, “On Protracted War,” (May 1938), in Selected Works, Vol. II, 115-117, 156.
21. Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1971), vii.
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consolidated itself as a Maoist organization and launched a protracted struggle that aimed—
and almost succeeded—at toppling the Alberto Fujimori government in Lima.
By no means is this paper trying to exonerate or present an apologia of the Shining Path
for its intra-Party violence and drug trafficking during and after the revolutionary struggle. Our
study adopts scholarly neutrality, as best it can, to evaluate its case objectively. While the
Shining Path undoubtedly used terrorism, betrayal, illegal transnational cocaine trade, murder,
and during the waning years of the People’s War, we must try not to fall into a temporal trap
by foregrounding later, more radicalized methods at the expense of giving due attention to the
Party’s earlier policies of indigenous outreach. 22 Indeed, too often have scholars of Sendero
relied solely on Truth and Reconciliation Commission tropes to foreground the later period to
make the Party’s radicalization, excessive violence, and drug trade, stand in for earlier policies
of indigenous outreach.23 Seldom have scholars explored the much more compelling ways in
which the Shining Path attained indigenous support, however minute, through the
appropriation of Jose Mariategui’s indigenismo policy of the 1920s and the evocation of Incan
legends, culture, and history.24 Sendero Luminoso, as it refered to itself, tried to base its revolution
organically. Accordingly, this section examines the ways in which the Shining Path created a
synthesis of Maoist precepts with Marategui’s Peruvian socialism and Andean cultural norms.
Before exploring the Shining Path’s adaptation of Maoism, we ought to investigate
briefly the present scholarly arguments on Sendero, many of which differ on the degree to
which the Party made Maoism appealing to locals. Some assert that the Shining Path never
truly reached out to the indigenous population, instead betraying the Andean peoples through
top-down elitist treatment of indios and, in cases, violence against them.25 Its relationship with
peasants, one scholar notes, was ambiguous since the Party took “a top down approach” to
their treatment of peasant and indigenous recruits. 26 The Shining Path insisted that the Party
had to serve the masses and bring them harmony, but had to “educate them and coerce them
into support when necessary.” 27 Sendero’s Maoism thus “eschewed completely any appeal to
'indigenous' or 'Andean' roots” while its political culture focused almost exclusively on class
struggle, anti-imperialism, and on the Party's primacy in revolution. 28 Others claim that
Guzman’s singular focus on ideological purity from the onset led to Sendero’s downfall, namely
that his “insistence on defining the Peruvian rural reality exclusively in the more abstract class
terms of and peasant rather than on ethnic grounds of mestizo and Indian proved to be much

22. On such efforts (in greater detail), see Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries, 60-66.
23. The TRC, which was borne out of the aftermath of a two-decade long struggle between the
Shining Path and the Fujimori government, brands Sendero as a terrorist group and has thus far
failed to bring any truth or reconciliation to a struggling Peru. Racial discrimination and social
divides remain dominant presences in the post-Fujimori years.
24. To localize Maoism, the CPP-SP appropriated Peru’s socialist hero, Jose Carlos Mariategui
and his theory of “indigenismo.” Like Mao, Mariategui argued that a socialist revolution should
evolve organically in a different context and be based on unique local conditions and practices
rather than the result of applying a Eurocentric formula to a non-European context.
25. Starn, Degregori, and Kirk, The Peru Reader…, 305.
26. Carlos Ivan Degregori, “Return to the Past,” in Shining Path of Peru, David Scott Palmer ed.,
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 33-44.
27. Degregori, “Return to the Past,” in Shining Path of Peru, 33-44.
28. Orin Starn, “Maoism in the Andes: The Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path and the
Refusal of History,” Journal of Latin American Studies 27, No. 2 (May 1995): 399-421, on pages
406-407.
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less convincing to Peru’s indigenous peasantry.”29 In so doing, Sendero “failed to build broad
support among Peru’s poor majorities” since their radical people’s war in mountainous
Ayacucho went down as “a gripping, yet historically doomed anachronism.” 30 Sendero “was
supposed to be a creative acclimatization of Marxism to the Andean highlands,” as Alex Cook
notes, but instead “assimilated many of the same feudal and colonial social divides it had
intended to destroy.”31 Nowhere is this more evident than in the Party’s forcibly imposed “war
planting schedule upon the villagers” and its serious disruption of their intricate agricultural
cycle.32 Sendero, in this view, was thus solely a movement of intellectuals, left-of-center activists,
and disillusioned Peruvian youths.33 One scholar goes so far as to state that it was “never a
peasant-based insurgency” since the “strategic equilibrium” that Sendero Luminoso34 hoped to
achieve in the countryside “was never achieved because of the insurgency’s misunderstanding and terrible
abuse of the peasantry.”35 The Party’s shift of the anti-government campaign to Peru’s capital and
largest urban center in Lima alienated much of the Party leadership and “broke with Maoist
principles.”36 Its gradual withdrawal from the countryside “meant a cut off of modest outside
support for projects like clinics, schools, and small irrigation projects.” 37 This led to the
emergence of peasant self-defense brigades known as Rondas Campesinas.38 As Peru’s peasantry
distanced themselves from the radical Maoist movement due to the insurgency’s destruction of
Peru’s rural infrastructure, many peasants organized into defense brigades to ward off Shining
Path members from entering the villages. 39
The problem with such accounts, however, is that they do not acknowledge that the
Shining Path’s Maoism resonated with at least some groups of indigenous peoples, and not
because the Party center merely grafted Maoist categories and analyses onto a host body. The
Shining Path’s appropriation of Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui’s ideology of

29. David Scott Palmer, “The Influences of Maoism in Peru,” in Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global
History. Alexander C. Cook, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 131.
30. Starn, Degregori, and Kirk, The Peru Reader…, 306-307.
31. Cook, “Third World Maoism,” in A Critical Introduction to Mao, 307.
32. Billie Jean Isbell, “The Emerging Patterns of Peasant Responses to Sendero Luminoso,”
unpublished paper, 1988, as cited in Daniel Masterson, “In the Shining Path of Mariategui,
Mao Zedong, or Presidente Gonzalo? Peru’s Sendero Luminoso in Historical Perspective,” in
Revolution and Revolutionaries: Guerrilla Movements in Latin America, Daniel Castro ed. (Wilmington,
Delaware: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1999), 181.
33. Carlos Ivan Degregori, El Surgimiento de Sendero Luminoso.(Lima, Peru: Instituto de Estudios
Peruanos, 1990), 270; and Masterson, “In the Shining Path…,” in Revolution and Revolutionaries,
181.
34. Sendero Luminoso: means “Shining Path” in Spanish. The nickname is homage to a maxim
of Jose Carlos Mariátegui, founder of the original Peruvian Communist Party in the 1920s. The
infamous phrase/slogan reads: El Marxismo-Leninismo abrira el sendero luminoso hacia la revolución
(Marxism-Leninism will open the shining path to revolution),.
35. Masterson, “In the Shining Path…,” in Revolution and Revolutionaries, 181. Emphasis added.
Masterson argues that the faith in the ability of Peru’s indigenous population to rebuild the
nation within the traditional communalistic framework has never been expressed by the self-styled
CPP-SP.
36. Ibid, 184.
37. Orin Starn, “Peasants at War: Rural Defense Committees in Peru’s Highlands,”
unpublished paper, 1991, as cited in Masterson, “In the Shining Path…,” in Revolution and
Revolutionaries, 182.
38. Masterson, “In the Shining Path…,” in Revolution and Revolutionaries, 181-182.
39. Ibid.
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indigenismo (textual language), the nature of Peruvian politics and society (historical conditions) and
the subsequent synthesis of Maoist precepts with Incan cultural forms and traditions (process
whereby Maoism became important to others) must receive due attention. While Sendero ultimately
failed to consolidate the vast majority of peasant and indigenous masses into a broad mass
movement, its efforts did resonate with at least some rural and indigenous peoples, however
briefly, and certainly among students and intellectuals. Rather than rely solely on evidence
forged around a temporal slippage, we must examine the ways in which Peru’s marginalized
Andean peoples may have endorsed Sendero’s message, which means that we must examine
how the Shining Path made Maoism speak to local grievances and outside of abstract
materialist terms that only its intellectual thrust could understand in relevant ways. At the very
least, Sendero succeeded in linking Maoism to the “disenchantment” of Ayacucho’s students
and intelligentsia, both of which “drew on the acute poverty and underdevelopment of the
Ayacucho countryside to mobilize the initial social base” for the Shining Path’s revolutionary
struggle.40
It did not start that way. Long before the Shining Path presented a new face to Peru’s
political culture that encouraged indigenous peoples to reject the subordinate status that the
central state had imposed on them for centuries,41 the men who founded Sendero alongside pro-
Chinese leftists visited China and studied Mao’s works and Maoist tactics closely there. 42 For
instance, two leaders of the pro-China faction within the Partido Comunista del Peru (PCP), José
Sotomayor and Manuel Soria, met with Chinese leaders, most notably Mao Zedong, in 1963 to
discuss breaking from the Party and forming a Maoist faction. They had become pro-China by
enrolling in a five-month seminar in 1959 that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) held
specifically to instruct Communists from Latin America in the lessons that the Chinese
revolutionary experience had for world revolution, writ large. As Sotomayor describes, the
courses discussed the following:

“… the works of Mao Zedong and the works of the Chinese leaders: the united front,
the peasant question, the mass line, the armed struggle in the Chinese Revolution, the
Chinese Party in conditions of clandestinity and while legalized, the struggles within the
Party, Mao Zedong’s philosophical thought. The speakers made a detailed exposition
of each of these topics, in two or more sessions, and finally gave an account of books
and pamphlets [that] should be consulted. All, absolutely all, were works by Mao
Zedong.”43

Students also toured China, visiting factories, schools, people’s communes, and other
sites that displayed vividly the triumphs of Chinese socialism in the daily lives of the Chinese
people.44 Both Sotomayor and Soria met with Mao, who stressed the universal applicability of
people’s war in capturing state power from imperialists and semi-colonialists. While the

40. Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries, 48.

41. Edward L. Cleary, “New Voice in Religion and Politics in Bolivia and Peru,” in Resurgent
Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change. Edward L.
Cleary and Timothy J. Steigenga eds., (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press,
2004), 43.
42. Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries, 49.
43. José Sotomayor Pérez, ¿Leninismo o maoismo?. (Lima, Peru: Editorial Universo, 1979), 48.
Also quoted in Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries, 53.
44. Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries, 53.
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meeting was brief, it was significant in that it at least gave the Peruvian Communists sub rosa
endorsement from Mao, the chief strategist and revolutionary intellectual thrust behind the
Third World movement against American and Soviet imperialisms. 45
The return to Peru by those who had participated in this Peruvian Communist
delegation wrote about their encounters and experiences, and such writings—notably Carlos
de la Riva’s Donde nace la aurora (Where the Dawn is Born)—served would-be revolutionaries
on the home front in Peru.46 One such intellectual was Guzman, who in 1965 attended a cadre
training school in China. He described his experiences in the following passage:

“I went to a cadre school… that had two parts, the first was political, it started with the
study of the international situation and ended with Marxist philosophy, there were
various courses and a second part which was military, held at a military school in
Nanjing, where I studied theory and practice in a deeper way.”47

“When we were finishing the course on explosives, they told us that anything can
explode. So, at the end of the course, we picked up a pen and it blew up, and when we
took a seat it blew up too. It was a kind of general fireworks display. These were
perfectly calculated examples to show us that anything could be blown up if you
figured out how to do it. We constantly asked, “How do you do this? How do you do
that? They would tell us, don’t worry… Remember what the masses can do, they have
inexhaustible ingenuity, what we’ve taught you the masses will do and will teach you all
over again… That school contributed greatly to my development and helped me begin
to gain an appreciation for Chairman Mao Tsetung.”48

In studying closely the Maoist canon (textual language) and techniques in waging
people’s war, and later, witnessing the Cultural Revolution firsthand, Guzman earned the
socialist capital that he required to make a case for himself as a leader in the Peruvian
Communist Party. 49 He also became enamored with the Cultural Revolution-style of Mao-
centric iconoclasm that would define Sendero’s movement and its leaders’ effort to launch a cult
of personality of his own.
Politics in post-WWII Peru, and historical antecedents, also played a part in pushing
progressive intellectuals further towards embracing Maoism. The political nature of Peru was
characterized by the state’s concerted effort to eradicate the “ethnic question” and to
“pauperize” its indigenous population. Peru’s indigenous peoples had yet to form a strong
national movement because of such efforts, and lacked a united voice to challenge the state’s

45. Ibid, 54.

46. Ibid, 54-55.
47. Comision de la Verdad y Reconciliacion (CVR), “Interview with Abimael Guzman and
Ekena Iparraguirre in Calla,” (28 May 2002), 15, as quoted in Rothwell, Transpacific
Revolutionaries,56.
48. Abimael Guzman, “Interview with Charman Gonzalo,” by Luis Arce Borja and Janet
Talavera, A World to Win, No. 18 (1992): 79, as quoted in Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries,
56-57.
49. Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries, 57. On Guzman’s witnessing of the Cultural
Revolution, see CVR, “Interview with Abimael Guzman and Ekena Iparraguirre in Calla,” (28
May 2002), 16.
 10

ongoing economic oppression. 50 As Matthew Rothwell notes, the Shining Path’s revolution
“drew on and was fueled by poverty and social alienation [that had] deep historical roots in
Peru… [it] was an expression of the long-standing divergence between Lima and Peru’s vast
Andean hinterlands.” 51 The Shining Path was, however, far from the first to address this
systemic socioeconomic issue in Peruvian politics and society. Decades before Guzman’s rise
to political relevance, Jose Carlos Mariategui, had emerged as one of the “few original Marxist
theoreticians Latin America has ever produced,”52 placing the ethnic question front and center
in his analysis of Peruvian economy and society. But who was Mariategui and why did he
matter to the Peruvian Maoists?
José Carlos Mariategui was born on 14 June 1894 in Moquegua to Francisco Javier
Mariátegui Requejo, a man who abandoned his family when José was still a boy, and María
Amalia La Chira Ballejos. As a child, José endured a series of health problems that affected
him for the rest of his life. But despite his physical ailments, his intellectual acuity was
unsurpassed by his peers. He worked as a journalist (for La Prensa and Mundo Limeño, then El
Tiempo), eventually launching his own periodical, La Razón, which marked his first forays into
socialism and Marxist critical writing.53 By the late 1920s, Mariategui gained recognition for
recognizing that Peru was a plagued country that suffered from semi-feudal and semi-colonial
subordination at the same time.54 While Marxian theory alienated world peasantries because of
its singular, Eurocentric focus on industrial sectors, Mariategui centered his ideas on the
“reality of Peruvian poverty, race, class conflict, and neo-colonialism.” 55 He believed strongly
that Peru offered a unique and interesting model for a groundbreaking form of Latin American
socialism.56 Mariategui identified in the “reciprocal communalism of Andean social tradition” a
form of “communism.” 57 His Communism was, in his view, a great improvement over the
highly “exploitative, individualistic, and foreign-dominated policies” that marginalized the
indigenous peoples and stripped Peru of its burgeoning potential as a continental economic
force.58 Mariategui thus saw the solution to Peru’s semi-feudal and semi-colonial subjugation in

50. Cleary, “New Voice in Religion and Politics in Bolivia and Peru,” in Resurgent Voices in Latin
America, 52. Campesin (peasant) replaced indio (Indian) while Indigena (indigenous) was reserved
for the people from the easternmost forest region.
51. Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries, 48.
52. Robert J. Alexander, International Maoism in the Developing World. (Westport, CT: Praeger,
1999), 153-154.
53. See Harry Vanden, José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology. (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2011); and José Carlos Mariategui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1997).
54. Mao Zedong, “On New Democracy,” Selected Works, Vol. II, 341.
55 Mariategui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 163-164; and Masterson, “In the
Shining Path…,” in Revolution and Revolutionaries, 172-174. Mariategui wrote that communism
“has continued to be the Indian’s only defense.” Individualism cannot flourish “or even exist
effectively outside a system of free competition. And the Indian has never felt less free than
when he has felt alone.”
56. Masterson, “In the Shining Path…,” in Revolution and Revolutionaries, 174.
57. Ibid. Mao Zedong was in the process of building his peasant-driven vanguard at around the
same time. Mao Zedong, “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,”
(March 1927)
[http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_2.htm]
(Accessed 27 January 2011)
58. Masterson, “In the Shining Path…,” in Revolution and Revolutionaries, 174.
 11

the application of traditional Andean social models to a contemporary socialist Peruvian

state.59
One of the keys to understanding the importance of Mariategui’s indigenismo and further
contributions to modern Peruvian socialism 60 is to “recognize his unique willingness to use
traditional Andean social norms as a workable model” for Peru’s current historical contexts.61 The
Peruvian Marxist asserted that traditional models of Andean socialism could be applied to
modern contexts “if an efficient educational system emphasizing primary schooling for the
masses, technical training, and a free and accessible university system was established as a
foundation.”62 However, Mariategui was not implying that Quechua63 Indian society required
westernization of any sort. Rather, he argued that the ayllu—a system of production and
community that dates back to Incan times—preserves two great economic and social
principles: to “contract workers collectively and to have the work performed in a relaxed and
pleasant atmosphere of friendly competition.” 64 Unfortunately, Mariategui’s Peruvian
innovation led to his dismissal from the Komintern conference in 1929, and he died soon
afterward.65
Mariategui’s political ex-communication and premature death notwithstanding, the
ideas that he set in motion are relevant in explaining the dual nature of textual language in
Sendero’s reception of Maoism. His work served as a Good Words to Admonish the Age that, upon a
second reading after witnessing China’s Cultural Revolution—a Hong Xiuquan dream of
sorts—Abimael Guzman understood more fully and put in service to Sendero’s own radical
vision and movement (process of reaching others/adaptation). As Rothwell contends, Sendero’s “most
explicit adaptation of Maoism to Peruvian conditions was the attempt to assimilate
Mariategui’s work into a Maoist framework… re-conceptualizing Mariategui in light of Mao…
[and] domesticating Maoism to Peruvian conditions.” 66 Lewis Taylor argues that Mao’s
concept of semi-feudal and semi-colonial society proved “highly compatible with Mariategui’s
description of Peru in the first half of the twentieth century, with multiple coexisting worlds:
indigenous peasant communities practicing primitive agrarian communism; colonial-era
haciendas maintaining a feudal economy in the highlands; semi-feudal coastal estates

59. Ibid.
60. Mariategui emphasized the dignity of labor as a key element of the human condition, but
unlike Marx, he did not view labor in exclusively economic terms. As Masterson notes, instead
of “wedding himself to the concept of ‘surplus value’, Mariategui viewed Andean labor in its
variety of reciprocal forms as a means of maintaining values and community solidarity.”
Masterson, “In the Shining Path…,” in Revolution and Revolutionaries, 174.
61. Ibid. Emphasis added.
62. Mariategui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. 77-124, as cited in Masterson, “In the
Shining Path…,” in Revolution and Revolutionaries, 174.
63. Quechua: the name of a people of the central Andes of South America and the descendants
of the Incas.
64. Mariategui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. 61. He stated that that up to now
“neither the science of sociology nor the empiricism of the great industrialists” have been able
to solve these two great economic and social principles satisfactorily.
65. Alexander, International Maoism in the Developing World. 154. Eudosi Ravines reorganized the
Socialist Party as the Communist Party of Peru, which became a full member of the
Comintern.
66. Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries, 69.
 12

producing crops for export; and bourgeois urbanites with ties to international capitalism.” 67
Matthew Rothwell agrees, noting that a “Maoist reading of Mariategui played an important role
in how the Shining Path defined itself politically,” and his early death meant that his successors
could interpret his “incomplete” quest openly. 68 Guzman explained in an interview that the
more he read Mao Zedong’s works, the more he began to see Mariategui as a “first rate
Marxist-Leninist who had thoroughly analyzed our [Peruvian] society.”69 Mariategui’s focus on
forming a rural base from which to launch a revolution against the forces that prevented the
advancement of Peru’s indigenous peoples became central to the formation of Sendero in the
1970s. It was not surprising, then, that Guzman appropriated Jose Mariategui, a man who
spoke out in favor of improving the standard of living of the Andean peoples, and reconciled
his own fascination with Maoism to create a new “sword of Marxism Leninism.” Mariátegui
ultimately provided the Shining Path with an analysis of Peru’s society while Mao Zedong
“provided the strategy to change it.”70
In 1970, Abimael Guzman Reynoso, then a philosophy professor at the National
University of San Cristobal de Huamanga in Ayacucho, founded the “Shining Path”—a direct
linguistic borrowing from Mariategui’s coining of the terms “the Shining Path to the future” in
reference to Marxism.71 Guzman arrived in Huamanga in 1962 from middle-class origins in the
town of Mollendo. 72 A “reserved yet self-confident man” who donned the Andean dress,
Guzman was part of a radical current of intellectuals in Peruvian universities who would look
to Marxism-Leninism and, later, Maoism, as radical alternatives to the corrupt political
situation that had ravaged the country’s disenfranchised poor and consolidated a wealthy
urbanite class as sole beneficiaries. 73 During the mid-1960s, Guzman became an admirer of
Mao Zedong, toured China during the later years of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution, and received small arms training at a Chinese cadre school.74 Guzman then broke
from the Communist Party of Peru and implemented many of Mao’s ideas, such as people’s
war, self-reliance, Third World anti-imperialism, and the Cultural Revolution.75 His avowal of

67. Lewis Taylor, Shining Path: Guerrilla War in Peru’s Northern Highlands, 1980-1997. (Liverpool,
England: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 10-11, as cited in Cook, “Third World Maoism,” in
A Critical Introduction to Mao, 305
68. Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries, 51.
69. “Interview with Chairman Gonzalo,” in El Diario. Peru People’s Movement trans. (Red
Banner Publishing House, 1988), Red Sun ; [www.redsun.org/pcp_doc/pcp_0788.htm]
(Accessed 7 January 2011)
70. Cook, “Third World Maoism,” in A Critical Introduction to Mao, 305.
71. Gustavo Gorriti, The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru. (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 46.
72. Starn, “Maoism in the Andes,” 404.
73. Starn, “Maoism in the Andes,” 404.
74. Starn, Degregori, and Kirk, The Peru Reader…, 305; Cook, “Third World Maoism,” in A
Critical Introduction to Mao, 304.
75. Central Committee of the Communist Party of Peru, “Interview with Chairman Gonzalo,”
11, as cited in Starn, “Maoism in the Andes,” 404; Cook, “Third World Maoism,” in A Critical
Introduction to Mao, 304. The Shining Path emerged from factional politics within the Peruvian
Communist Movement. Peruvian Maoists first split from the main Communist Party in 1964,
rejecting Soviet and Cuban influences. According to Starn, Guzman “belonged to the
Communist Party of Peru-Red Flag until 1970, when, apparently dissatisfied with the
unwillingness of the leadership of Red Flag to take up arms against the Peruvian government,
he led a splinter movement to found the Shining Path.”
 13

Maoism is most evident in his claim that the Shining Path’s armed struggle required the
mobilization of the peasants “under the infallible banners of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong
Thought.”76 Guzman’s choice of Ayacucho as a base from which to launch the people’s war
revolution also mirrors Mao’s base in the remote Chingkanshan Mountains where he fought
three successive revolutionary civil wars against Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek. 77 As
Guzman’s influence at the university waned, the Shining Path set up “popular schools” to
“increase class-consciousness among the peasantry, working class, and students,” which
entailed instruction in Maoist texts and guerrilla-style training. 78 He and his disciples
highlighted the Peruvian state’s corruption, its numerous failures and shortcomings, and
Mariategui’s creative Marxist analysis of Peruvian society.79 Popular schools also emphasized
the “need for class struggle, the incompetence of parliamentary democracy… [and] the Shining
Path’s plan for securing New Democracy.”80 Guzman soon gained a multifarious support base of
former students and local peasants and declared a war against Peru’s wealthy bourgeoisie. 81
The people’s war began with the Shining Path entering the first stage of Maoist revolution
(agitation and propaganda) in late 1970. In true Maoist fashion, the Shining Path constructed
their vanguard base on the backs of the country’s peasantry,82 and called for a peasant rebellion
against Peru’s large landowners for oppressive policies that since the 1800s had marginalized
the Peruvian indigenous and rural peoples.83 Fernando Belaunde Terry’s election in the early

76. Abimael Guzman, “We Are the Initiators,” 19 April 1980.

[http://www.duke.edu/~ems19/teaching/shining_path.html] (Accessed 16 January 2011).
77. Cynthia McClintock, “Why Peasants Rebel: The Case of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso,” World
Politics, 37, No. 1 (October 1984): 48-84, on pages 83-84.
78. Gabriela Tarazona-Sevillano, Sendero Luminoso and the Threat of Narcoterrorism. (New York:
Praeger, 1990), 197, as cited in Michael P. Arena and Bruce A. Arrigo, The Terrorist Identity:
Explaining the Terrorist Threat. (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 166.
79. Tarazona-Sevillano, Sendero Luminoso…, 197.
80. Arena and Arrigo, The Terrorist Identity…, 164. Emphasis added. Mao argued that
revolutions in colonies, or semi-colonial semi-feudal states, had to take place in two stages:
first, a “democratic revolution,” carried out by an alliance of different classes, and afterwards a
“socialist revolution.” Even though he was adamant that the bourgeoisie were “unreliable allies
who would turn tail at the first sign of trouble, the New Democracy phase of revolution was
“necessary and cannot be dispensed with.” Mao Zedong’s emphasis on the power of the
people as revolutionary forces further enhanced Mao’s theory of New Democracy. China's new
politics, economy and culture were “the politics, economy and culture of New Democracy,”
and called for the people to develop a revolutionary spirit that the Chairman himself regarded
as the driving force behind New Democracy. It was the duty of people throughout the world
to “put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism.” See Mao
Zedong, “On New Democracy,” Selected Works, Vol. II, 341-343.
81. Cook, “Third World Maoism,” in A Critical Introduction to Mao, 304. According to Cook,
“the locals called him the ‘Red Sun’ in their indigenous language, whereas his critics called him
‘Shampoo’ for his brainwashing abilities.”
82. Though the “peasantry” is an unclear social category because its meaning has been defined
and redefined to the point of nearly rendering the group as useless, Allen Isaacman gives us a
workable definition. See Allen F. Isaacman, “Peasants and Rural Social Protest in Africa,” in
Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin
America. Fred Cooper, Allen F. Isaacman, Florencia E. Mallon, William Roseberry and Steven J.
Stern eds., (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 205-209.
83. La Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Final Report. Lima, Peru: Comision de la
Verdad y Reconciliacion, 2001. [http://www.cverdad.org.pe/ingles/ifinal/conclusiones.php]
 14

1980s added fuel to the fire, as his newly reformed agricultural policies betrayed most of the
country’s agronomists in the southern highlands.84 Sendero’s leadership saw an opportunity to
appeal to the victimized “Indian” and wedded the suffering of the indigenous people to the
Party’s revolutionary program, guerrilla army, and the new state that it hoped to establish in
Lima after the successful fifth stage of Maoist revolution.85
The Andean peasants relied heavily on reciprocal economic justice and identified with
the Shining Path because its operations “acted as a reflection, and an expression, of their own
social and economic frustrations.” 86 City dwellers paid very little for agricultural work and
wealthy peasants did not make significant labor contributions. Many peasants resented the
upper classes vehemently as a result, holding animosity toward Peru’s wealthy with some
buying into Sendero’s social program of safeguarding indigenous rights. Through his use of
respondent data from the Ayacucho region, historian Ronald Berg argues cogently that there
was “considerable support” among pro-Sendero peasants for killing the mostly-mestizo 87
Peruvian wealthy. 88 As a number of Andean peasants stated, “I have nothing against their
killing the rich (los ricos)… I don't like it when they kill peasants (campesinos).” 89 One
sympathizer stated that the men who the Party killed “deserved what they got because they
were rich, had two or three houses, and had acquired their wealth through unfair exchange.”90
Support for the Shining Path evidently grew because at least some peasants and indigenous
peoples believed that it understood their aspirations, such as their desire to possess a measure

(Accessed 11 January 2011), and Ronald H. Berg, “Sendero Luminoso and the Peasantry of
Andahuaylas,” Journal of Interamreican Studies and World Affairs, 28, No. 4 (Winter 1986-1987):
165-196, on page 192.
84. McClintock, “Why Peasants Rebel,” 64.
85. Arena and Arrigo, The Terrorist Identity…, 164.
86. Berg, “Sendero Luminoso and the Peasantry of Andahuaylas,” 192; Cleary, “New Voice in
Religion and Politics in Bolivia and Peru,” in Resurgent Voices in Latin America, 52; Xavier Albo,
Pueblos Indios en la Politica [Indian Peoples in Politics]. (La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores, 2002),
181-182. Cleary and Xavier Albo argue that political parties, from the right and the left, wanted
to put an end to the idea of ethnic identities acting in opposition to the state. As Albo
mentions, the Peruvian state wanted to be universal and monopolistic in its control. Victor
Hugo Cardenas argues that a close reading of indigenous history shows that indigenous
communities have a quality of being mini-states. Thus, the indigenous peoples were being
“ethnically-cleansed.”
87. Mestizo: The intermarriage of Spanish whites and indigenous peoples. The creole offspring
dominated the hacienda economy for centuries and marginalized the Indian to near extinction.
88. Berg, “Sendero Luminoso and the Peasantry of Andahuaylas,” 188. As Berg notes, there
was an ethnic dimension as well. As he states, the Spanish word “campesino contains both
class and ethnic connotations. When asked to explain the term, people described a person who
is "poor, like us," i.e. like us of the villages. Yet there is a clear ethnic dimension as well, since
the "rich "live in the towns, do not speak Quechua, practice standard Catholicism, and
dominate the peasants. When people debated the morality of killing a person, the discussion
centered upon whether or not, or to what extent, he or she was a campesino/a.”
89. Berg, “Sendero Luminoso and the Peasantry of Andahuaylas,” 186. That said, violence
against peasants did occur. See Cleary, “New Voice in Religion and Politics in Bolivia and
Peru,” in Resurgent Voices in Latin America, 59-60.
90. Berg, “Sendero Luminoso and the Peasantry of Andahuaylas,” 187. Namely, unfair
exchange meant the buying grain at a low price and selling it at a high price. According to Berg,
the victims “had received bank loans, which gave them plenty of cash with which to buy
materials and hire laborers, while others had nothing.”
 15

of autonomy at the local level and the right to practice subsistence agriculture through land
ownership.91
The Shining Path also exploited the cultural significance of Incan myths and Andean
symbolism to broaden its revolutionary support base.92 Leaders, notably Guzman, espoused
elements of Quechua Indian culture, which Stefano Varese states “became increasingly evident”
in the Party’s activities.93 The most culturally significant myth was that of Inkarri, which recalls
a sixteenth century event where the Spanish colonizers dismembered, scattered, and buried the
body of the last Incan sovereign Tupac Amaru I.94 According to Arena and Arrigo, the Shining
Path represented its leader Abimael Guzman as “the modern day incarnation of the Inkarri.”95
Sendero posters portrayed Guzman at the center “dressed in a suit, wearing glasses, [Mao’s red]
book in hand, surrounded by masses carrying rifles and flags, with the great red sun setting
behind him.”96 Since Andean mythology held that the rise of the red sun meant the return of
Inkarri, the Shining Path’s Indian followers gave Guzman the Quechua title of “Red Sun:”
pukainti.97 The Shining Path’s Andean followers revered their new “Inca king” with “God-Sun
adoration” and entrusted his Party to bring the impoverished descendants of the great Incans
to a more prosperous and respectful future. 98 Another important symbolism that Sendero
mobilized for its purposes was the story of Tupac Amaru I. The Spanish had celebrated the
execution of Tupac Amaru I and placed his head on a stake to discourage further indigenous
uprisings. The Shining Path argued that Tupac Amaru’s body, which stood as the
quintessential Incan symbol for the dispersal of Indian tribes and the reverence of Incan
cultural heroes, was slowly reconnecting in the forms of the Peruvian clandestine movements.
Andean peoples believed that only when the desecrated head of Tupac Amaru I rejoined the
rest of the body or grows its new body underground would the Inca nation rise up and obtain
its pre-Columbian state of independence. 99 Shining Path cadres emphasized the 199th
anniversary of the Spanish execution of the Quechua Incan rebel Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui,

91. Ibid, 192.

92. Arena and Arrigo, The Terrorist Identity…, 163.
93. Stefano Varese, “The Ethnopolitics of Indian Resistance in Latin America,” Latin American
Perspectives 23, No. 2, Ethnicity and Class in Latin America (Spring 1996): 58-71, on page 65;
Cleary, “New Voice in Religion and Politics in Bolivia and Peru,” 43. Cleary states that the
resurgence of Indian populations in Latin America “is strongly evident in Peru” and the
reasons for the resurgence “concern the struggles to revitalize what were considered dying
traditional cultures.”
94. Varese, “The Ethnopolitics of Indian Resistance in Latin America,” 65, 70; Arena and
Arrigo, The Terrorist Identity…, 163, citing R.B. Davis, “Sendero Luminoso and Peru’s Struggle
for Survival,” Military Review 70, No. 1 (1990): 75-88. Tupac Amaru I was also referred to by his
divine name, Inkarri. According to Varese, this can mean Inka Rey and or the Inka-ri,
word/speech/spirit, founding principles of all things in the universe.
95. Arena and Arrigo, The Terrorist Identity…, 163.
96. Carlos Ivan Degregori, “Return to the Past,” in The Shining Path of Peru, 62.
97. Arena and Arrigo, The Terrorist Identity…, 163.
98. John Daly, “The USSR and Sendero Luminoso: Marxist Rhetoric versus Maoist Reality,”
Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement 6, No. 1 (1997): 27-52; D.W. Fitzsimmons, “Sendero
Luminoso: Case Study in Insurgency,” Parameters 23, No. 2 (1993): 64-73; Simon Strong, Shining
Path: The World’s Deadliest Revolutionary Force. (London: Harper Collins, 1992); G. Vasquez,
“Peruvian Radicalism and the Sendero Luminoso,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 21,
No. 1 (1993): 197-217.
99. Varese, “The Ethnopolitics of Indian Resistance in Latin America,” 65; Arena and Arrigo,
The Terrorist Identity…, 163.
 16

immortalized in Incan legend as “Tupac Amaru II.” 100 In the eighteenth century,
Condorcanqui launched a bloody anti-colonial revolution. The victorious Spanish captured
Condorcanqui and sentenced him to death in the same brutal manner that the Spanish had
killed Tupac Amaru I centuries before. Thus, according to Varese, the Andean tradition
“unites symbolically all other Indian revolutionary heroes, such as Tupac Amaru I (16 th century)
and Tupac Amaru II (18th century).” 101 After all, the Spanish ensured that the two indigenous
leaders suffered the exact same symbolic fate of gruesome public dismemberment and
disjointed burial across Peru’s highlands. The Shining Path promised that only when all the
indigenous peoples of Peru lent their support to Pukainti and his Shining Path movement shall
Peru’s “cosmic race” obtain their long sought-after salvation.102 Ultimately, the Shining Path’s
appropriation of indigenous cultural and traditional norms positioned the guerrilla organization
in place to use “ethnic survival” as part of its aggressive recruitment strategies.103
To summarize the events that followed, the Shining Path completed the second, third,
and fourthstages of Maoist revolution between 1980 and 1988. 104 The people’s war expanded,
and by 1989, the guerrillas prepared to launch the people’s war on Lima. 105 However, the fifth
and final stage that entailed the fall of the cities was never achieved. Nevertheless, the Shining
Path succeeded in launching “the largest insurgency on Peruvian soil since the Tupac Amaru II
rebellion two centuries before.”106 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission noted that the
armed conflict between 1980 and 2000 “constituted the most intense, extensive and prolonged
episode of violence in the entire history of the Republic.” 107 As the people’s war raged on, the
Shining Path radicalized increasingly and launched brutal internal purges to ensure longevity
and loyalty. Abimael Guzman, now named “Presidente Gonzalo,” 108 took advantage of his
personality cult status and taught his five thousand armed guerrillas that the Russians, Cubans,
the Chinese, and North Koreans were “weak and not true Communists.”109 The Shining Path’s
official party ideology ceased to be “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism,” and instead became

100. Ibid, 65, 70.

101. Ibid, 70.
102. Arena and Arrigo, The Terrorist Identity…, 163-164.
103. Ibid, 163-164.
104. Second stage of Maoist revolution: agitation and propaganda, reached on May 17, 1980.
Third stage of Maoist revolution: generalized violence and guerrilla warfare, reached in 1982.
Fourth stage of Maoist revolution: the conquest and expansion of the support base, reached in
late 1988. See Arena and Arrigo, The Terrorist Identity…, 158-160.
105. Cook, “Third World Maoism,” in in A Critical Introduction to Mao, 307.
106. Starn, Degregori, and Kirk, the Peru Reader…, 305.
107. La Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Final Report. Lima, Peru: Comision de la
Verdad y Reconciliacion, 2001. [http://www.cverdad.org.pe/ingles/ifinal/conclusiones.php]
(Accessed 11 January 2011)
108. Cook, Third World Maoism,” in A Critical Introduction to Mao, 304-305. Guzman described
himself as the “greatest living Marxist-Leninist.” As the intellectual successor to Marx, Lenin,
and Mao, his “Gonzalo Thought” became the “Fourth Sword of Marxism. According to Starn,
a Mao-like personality cult developed around Guzman very early in the movement, and the
CPP-SP would later make use of such Cultural Revolution agitprop staples as incendiary wall
posters and dunce caps for enemies, even to the point of reciting Mao songs in Mandarin. Orin
Starn, “Maoism in the Andes: The Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path and the Refusal of
History,” in Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong Thought. Dirlik et al., eds., 276.
109. Senate Congressional Record, “Peru and the Capture of Abimael Guzman,” (2 October
1992), S16332. [http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_cr/s921002-terror.htm]. (Accessed 11
January 2011)
 17

“Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Gonzalo thought.” 110 But Peruvian forces captured the “great

teacher” in 1992 and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Although the People's War
continued in an ever-degenerating state, Abimael “Presidente Gonzalo” Guzman’s
incarceration and subsequent official statement from prison effectively ended the Maoist
revolution in Peru.111
While one cannot deny that the Shining Path was a violent revolutionary movement,
the Party succeeded in domesticating Maoism and in reinvigorating Mariategui’s indigenismo to
serve its purposes in contemporary Peru. Whether historians classify Sendero as terrorists,
revolutionaries, or freedom fighters, it challenged the corrupt and anti-indigenismo Peruvian
state and exposed the limits of Peruvian agency. Its earlier devotion to indigenous activism and
social reform, however flawed and misguided at times, must not be shrouded by their later
extremism and controversial methods. Sendero managed to plant the seeds of Maoism in the
Andes Mountains and watched it grow into a formidable anti-government movement that
owed to Mariategui’s earlier formulations and its own Maoist attempts to wed foreign theory to
concrete national practice. While not without fault on many accounts, Sendero’s effort to apply
the universal theory of Marxism-Leninism to concrete realities in Peru kept in line with Mao’s
own emphasis on uniting knowing and doing, and making abstract thought fit national
conditions to resonate with the people that its message hoped to reach.112

IV. “We Must Combine Theory and Practice”: Maoism and the Cambodian Revolution.

For decades, the highly secretive, seemingly amorphous CPK have eluded scholarly
classification, declaring that “[w]e are not following any model, either Chinese or
Vietnamese… the Cambodian situation does not fit any existing model and thus requires
original policy.”113 Early descriptions of the CPK’s program varied, characterizing it as “rabidly
fascist,” a form of “medieval barbarity,” or that its apparent obsession with past glory and
national-revival was the basis of its radical social transformation. 114 More recently, scholars

110. Goritti, The Shining Path, 185.

111. Michael L. Smith, “Taking High Ground: Shining Path and the Andes,” in Shining Path of
Peru, 17.
112. Mao Zedong, “On Practice: On the Relation between Knowledge and Practice, between
Theory and Reality, between Knowing and Doing,” Mao Zedong on Dialectical Materialism. Nick
Knight, ed., (Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 1990), 148; and Mao Zedong, “實踐論 (On Practice,
Shíjiàn lùn),” 毛澤東集補卷第五卷 [Supplements to Collected Writings of Mao Zedong,
Volume V, Máo Zédōng jí dìwǔjuǎn]. Takeuchi Minoru, ed., (Tokyo: Suosuosha, 1983-1986), 234.
113. Der Spiegl, “Interview with Ieng Sary,” (May 1977), reprinted in News From Kampuchea 1,
No. 3 (August 1977): 1-3; and Roel A. Burgler, The Eyes of the Pineapples: Revolutionary Intellectuals
and Terror in Democratic Kampuchea. (Saarbrücken, Germany: Verlag Breitenbach, 1990), 59. On
the Party’s self-identification as Marxists-Leninists, see Michael Vickery, Cambodia: 1975-1982.
(Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984), 288-289; and Timothy M. Carney, “Continuity in
Cambodian Communism,” in Communist Party Power in Kampuchea (Cambodia): Documents and
Discussion. Timothy M. Carney, ed. (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Data Paper No. 106,
Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University, 1977), 5.
114. Vasilkov described the CPK as fascist in Y. Vasilkov, “Kampuchea: The Maoist
‘Experiment’ That Failed,” Far Eastern Affairs 3, No. 21 (1979): 44-45. On the Party obsession
with past glory, see Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over: The Voices of Cambodia’s Revolution
and its People. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 185-188, 200-202; and Ben Kiernan,
“External and Indigenous Sources of Khmer Rouge Ideology,” in The Third Indochina War:
 18

either foreground CPK nationalism,115 or state that it copied the Vietnamese Communist Party
(VCP) blueprint.116 An intriguing description that is most relevant for this study is that the
CPK was far from sui generis, anti-modern, or bereft of cultural and intellectual sophistication,
but in fact “Maoist”/“hyper-Maoist.”117 Supporters of this description identify similarities in
rhetoric, revolution, and socioeconomic transformation, but they fail to explain how and why
Maoism arose as a “fit” for the Cambodian context.118 The CPK was indeed Maoist, but we
need a more thorough explanation of how and why Maoism and not, say, Soviet Marxism-
Leninism, emerged among the CPK’s intellectual thrust. If we are to classify them more
appropriately and accurately as Maoist, then we require a genealogy of Cambodian Maoism
that begins with the social experiences of the would-be Maoists, delving deeply into their
travels, encounters, and ever-shifting weltanshauungen.
The CPK founders’ time in Paris, where they read Mao’s work for the first time and,
later, became Communists and Maoists, allows us to identify the point of origin in their
interest in Maoism (textual language). Membership in the Cercle Marxiste and its governing body,
the Stalinist Parti Communiste Français (PCF), gave them the brass tacks on the leftist canon and
organizational structure. Pol Pot, among others, discussed Lenin’s “On Imperialism,” Marx’s
Das Kapital, “Dialectical Materialism,” and The Communist Manifesto, Stalin’s collected works, and

Conflict Between China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, 1972-79. Odd Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn-
Judge, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 201.
115. Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in
Cambodia, 1930-1975. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 219-224, 259-268; and
Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge,
1975-1979 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 25-27. Kiernan acknowledged more
recently the CPK’s commitment to a proletarian-led Marxist-Leninist revolution. Ben Kiernan,
“Myth, Nationalism, and Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 3, No. 2 (2001): 187-206, on
196.
116. Stephen Heder, Cambodian Communism and the Vietnamese Model. Volume I: Imitation and
Independence, 1930-1975. (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2004), 3; and Ian Harris, Buddhism Under Pol
Pot. (Phnom Penh, Cambodia: DCCAM (Phnom Penh), Documentation Series No. 13, 2007),
49, 65.
117. Stephen J. Morris, Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1999), 13, 17, 39, 229; Henri Locard, Pol Pot’s Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar.
(Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2005), 5, 21, 185, 216, 340; Karl D. Jackson,
“Intellectual Origins of the Khmer Rouge,” in Cambodia 1975-1978: Rendezvous with Death. Karl
D. Jackson, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 241-250; Kenneth Quinn,
“Explaining the Terror,” in Cambodia 1975-78, 219-223; and Kate Frieson,“The Political Nature
of Democratic Kampuchea,” Pacific Affairs 61, No. 3 (Autumn 1988): 405-427, on pages 405-
406. On the CPK’s “high” modernism, see Alexander L. Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia
in the Shadow of Genocide. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 48, citing James
Scott, “Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia,” American Political Science
Review 66, No. 1 (March 1972): 91-113.
118. Many scholars assert that China was to blame for the CPK atrocities without explaining
how or why. See V. Simonov, Crimes of the Maoists and Their Rout. (Moscow: Novosti Press
Agency Publishing House, 1979); Wilfred Burchett, The China-Cambodia-Vietnam Triangle.
(Chicago, IL: Vanguard Press, 1981); Kenneth M. Quinn, “Origins and Development of
Radical Cambodian Communism,” (PhD Diss. University of Maryland, 1982), 180-215; and
Daniel Snyder, “Life After Death in the Kampuchean Hell,” Executive Intelligence Review
(September 1981): 19-31.
 19

Mao Zedong’s La nouvelle Démocratie and Lectures choisies des Oeuvres de Mao.119 All Cercle members
contemplated these works in French, though they conversed in Khmer as well since some
political terms lacked Khmer equivalents.120 Importantly, however, Cercle participants did not
merely read and discuss Marxism; rather, they interpreted Marxism through the lens of national
culture, which for them was Khmer Buddhism. While the CPK later banned Buddhism and
defrocked monks, in their Paris years as before, Buddhism was inseparable from Cambodian
identity.121 Saloth Sar (aka. Pol Pot), among other future CPK founders, became revolutionary
intellectuals who were convinced that Marxism-Leninism, and later, Maoism, could transform
Cambodia from a corrupt monarchical state into a nation that served the people.122
Politics on the home front also played their part in pushing the Paris Group of
Cambodian students towards Maoism (historical conditions). Sihanouk had dissolved the National
Assembly in January 1949 and ruled by imperial decree, which angered a Democratic Party that
had lobbied for a popular vote. 123 The tipping point for the Paris students was the January
1950 assassination of Democrat leader Ieu Kouess by an associate of Sihanouk’s uncle,
Norodom Norindeth, which left students with few political options. The Democrats continued
their push for elections, which they gained in 1951, and anti-Sihanouk demonstrations in May
1952 among students in Cambodia gave indications that the monarchy could no longer ignore
calls for reform. From Paris, Saloth Sar’s colleague and future CPK founder Hou Yuon
penned a letter in which he lauded the demonstrators’ efforts, situating their protests in a
global context: “These positive developments have become normal throughout the world,
whether in the European countries or the Asian ones, and especially in the countries where

119. Cercle members read French-language editions. Mao Tsé-toung, La nouvelle Démocratie.
(Paris: Editions sociales, 1951) ; or Mao Tsé-toung, La nouvelle Démocratie. (Beijing : People’s
Press, 1952). See Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, 120; David P. Chandler, Brother Number
One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 26, 33; Philip Short,
Philip Short, Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare. (London: John Murray, 2004), 50; Ian Harris,
Buddhism in a Dark Age: Cambodian Monks Under Pol Pot. (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii
Press, 2013), 53; David P. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution
since 1945. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 54, citing interviews with Keng
Vannsak and Pierre Brocheux; Thiounn Mumm letter to the author (November 1988); and
Francois Debré, Cambodge: La révolution de la forêt. (Paris: Club français du livre, 1976), 77-95. On
French versions of Mao’s works as Cercle materials, see Sher, « Le parcours politique des
khmers rouges » 78, 121; and Short, Pol Pot, 64-65.
120. Chandler, Brother Number One, 32-33; and James Tyner, The Killing of Cambodia: Geography,
Genocide, and and the Unmaking of Space. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 91.
121. Harris, Buddhism in a Dark Age, 53; and Short, Pol Pot, 65.
122. See Matthew Galway, “Boundless Revolution: Global Maoism and Communist
Movements in Southeast Asia, 1949-1979,” (PhD Diss., University of British Columbia, 2017),
184-198.
123. On the AEK’s support of the Democrats, see Saloth Sar, “រាជាធិបតេយយឬប្បជាធិបតេ
យយ? (Monarchy or Democracy?),” ខ្មែ រនិសសិេដប់បួន [Khmer Student 14], (August 1952), 39-
47, on page 39. Translated version in Khmers Rouges: Matériaux pour l’histoire du communism au
Cambodge. Serge Thion and Ben Kiernan, eds. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1981). 357-361, on page
357. On the coup, see Milton Osborne, Sihanouk Prince of Light, Prince of Darkness. (Honolulu,
HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 63-66; Chandler, Brother Number One, 29; Kiernan, How
Pol Pot Came to Power, 72, 121; and Nguyen-vo, Thu-huong, Khmer-Viet Relations and the Third
Indochina Conflict. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1992), 43.
 20

independence is being sought.” 124 The French position on Sihanouk was also a locus of
considerable contestation because they had cast him as the only hope for political stability, a
position that infuriated the pro-democracy Paris Group. As the French military commander
General Pierre de Langlade declared, “Democracy had no hope [here]… The parliamentary
experiment has failed… The Sovereign remains the only person capable of giving Cambodia
political direction… [He is] heir to the … mystique of the God-Kings, who for thousands of
years have guided the destinies of the land… Everything in this country has to be done by the
King.”125 Sihanouk thus had unchecked power, and again dissolved the Assembly on 15 June
1952 in a coup d’état. Sihanouk’s corruption had prompted the Paris Cambodian intellectuals
to embrace the Stalinism and dogmatism (and accompanying emphasis on clandestinity and
organization) of the PCF. In response to Sihanouk’s coup, Keng Vannsak levied harsh
condemnation in a 1952 issue of the AEK publication ខ្មែ រនិសសិេ (Khmer Student), declared
that:

“We, Khmer students of the AEK, consider that Your Majesty has acted illegally…
and that the policy of the Throne… will inevitably lead our Khmer Motherland into an
abyss of perpetual slavery… In your message to the nation, [you said that] Cambodia
faces ever greater dangers… What should the people think when Your Majesty’s Palace
has become a lobby for dishonest dealings which place within your hands the riches of
the country and the people?... Corruption in our country stems from the Throne and
spreads down to the humblest officials. The French oppress the whole country, the
King trades his Crown, the Palace and its parasites such the people’s blood… These
are the main causes of our country’s critical situation today… Your Majesty has sought
to divide the nation in two: the royalists, and those who struggle for independence.
[Your] policy is to set Khmers against Khmers…”126

Yet Cercle members realized the limits of theory (their two years of reading radical texts
in Paris had not brought them closer to reform), and they took a radical turn, forming the pro-
PCF Union des Etudiants Khmers (UEK) on 26 November 1953. 127 As Khieu Samphan, who
assumed leadership of the UEK in 1957, recalled: “my studies as well as my experiences
convinced me that the only way of implementing our ideals in general, and of building up our
backward agriculture in particular, is socialism. Thus, I became a communist. I did so out of
objective conviction and not out of daydreaming.”128 Sihanouk’s dissolution of the Democrat-
led assembly in June 1952 exacerbated the Paris Groups’ radicalization, with students flocking
en masse to join the PCF.129 In the PCF, Sar, and his colleagues learned the effectiveness of
staying out of sight and mind, especially in light of the French government’s crackdown on

124. Hou Yuon, “Message from the Khmer Students’ Association in France to all Students in
the Khmer Land,” (nd, np), as quoted in Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, 121.
125. Short, Pol Pot, 80.
126. « Lettre de l’Association des Etudiants Khmers en France à Sa Majesté Norodom
Syhanouk [sic], Roi du Cambodge » in ខ្មែ រនិសសិេ ដប់បួន [Khmer Student 14] (6 July 1952);
and Short, Pol Pot, 78. As Short notes, this issue was in handwritten Khmer. Short credits Ben
Kiernan and Mey Mann for French versions.
127. Kiernan , How Pol Pot Came to Power, 121. On UEK formation and date, see Marie-
Alexandrine Martin, Cambodia: A Shattered Society, Mark W. McLeod trans. (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1994), 99-100.
128. Christel Pilz, “Khieu Samphan: Giving Up on Socialism?” Asia Record (October 1980).
129. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History, 8.
 21

scholarship student participation in Parisian leftist groups. 130 By 1952, they had all “vowed a
lifelong commitment” to Communism, and never looked back.131
Maoism was the next logical step. As Cercle founder and Sar’s protégé Keng Vannsak
stated in an interview, “We wanted to take power and believed that we could do so only with
popular support, which necessarily means violence. We opposed the PCF’s view that we could
come to power through universal suffrage.” 132 Sar had by this time returned to Cambodia
(1953) to take up a regional cell secretary position in the Vietnamese-directed KPRP, yet
frustration mounted among cadres, who tolerated rather than embraced Hanoi’s
helmsmanship over the Cambodian Working Bureau in eastern Cambodia, and awaited
directives from Hanoi on what to do next.133 In Paris, the PCF discarded Stalinism (alienated
by Soviet revisionism and swept up in the tide of decolonization in France’s former colonies),
while Cambodian radicals had grown tired of Russian and Vietnamese support of their nemesis
Sihanouk. 134 As Vannsak, who had returned to Paris to finish his invention, the Khmer
typewriter, elaborates: “At the beginning, we were very Stalinist… We turned toward China in
the late 1950s because the Russians were playing the Sihanouk card and neglecting us… When
everyone began to criticize Stalin, we became Maoists.” 135 Why? One answer is because Soviet de-
Stalinization and “revisionism” propelled many radical students in Paris toward looking to
Communist China for answers to crises in Cambodia. The other is that Maoism provided an
alternative; it was borne from the Chinese revolutionary experience, stressed practice over
dogmatism, discarded the Eurocentrism inherent in Marxism-Leninism, and contained
emancipatory features. Marxism’s “liberating possibility” only became a reality when
“rephrased in a national voice, for a Marxism that could not account for a specifically national
experience… replicated in a different form the hegemonism of capitalism [under the guise of
univeralism].”136 Yet it was not until Sar, who had read Mao’s works while in Paris, returned
from a trip to Beijing in 1965-1966 that Maoism became the guiding force of the Cambodian
revolution.
The CPK’s adaptation of Maoism, whereby it rendered Mao Zedong Thought into
something that spoke to its people and movement, began with Sar’s return from Beijing in
1966 as a “faith Maoist,” a visit that serves as a “Hong Xiuquan dream” that compelled him to

130. David P. Chandler, “A Revolution in Full Spate: Communist Party Policy in Democratic
Kampuchea, December 1976,” International Journal of Politics 16, No. 3, Cambodia: Politics and
International Relations (Fall 1986): 131-149, on pages 132-133; Sacha Sher, Le Kampuchéa des
« Khmers rouges »: essai de compréhension d'une tentative de révolution. (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2004), 30;
and Craig Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1984), 174.
131. Chandler, Brother Number One, 28.
132. Martin, Cambodia, 99.
133. Chandler, Brother Number One, 27-28; and Thomas Engelbert and Chris Goscha, Falling out
of Touch: A Study of the Vietnamese Communist Policy Towards an Emerging Cambodian
Communist Movement, 1930-1975. (Clayton, Australia: Center of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash
Asia Institute, 1995), 54-55.
134. See Julian Bourg, “The Red Guards of Paris: French Student Maoism of the 1960s,”
History of European Ideas 31 (2005): 472-490.
135. Martin, Cambodia, 99; and Sher, « Le parcours politique des khmers rouges » 119.
Emphasis added.
136. Dirlik, “Modernism and Antimodernism in Mao Zedong’s Marxism,” in Critical Perspectives
on Mao Zedong’s Thought, 70.
 22

revisit the Maoist texts that he had read closely while a student in Paris (adaptation). 137 Sar
stayed at the 亞非拉培訓中心 (Asian, African, and Latin America Training Centre, Yà fēi lā
péixùn zhōngxīn) just outside of Beijing upon his arrival in late 1965. 138 The precise dates and
length stay of Saloth Sar’s 1965-1966 visit to Beijing are unknown.139 In accordance with the
CCP’s adherence to the Five Peaceful Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and its existing treaty
of noninterference with Cambodia, the official Chinese line was that Sar ought to support
Prince Sihanouk, who was an important strategic ally to the PRC. This meant that the CCP did
not publicize the young Cambodian Communist’s visit to Beijing, and the Chinese officials
who met with Sar (David Chandler names CCP General Secretary Deng Xiaoping, Head of
State Liu Shaoqi, and Kang Sheng) could not endorse the Cambodian Communist movement
outright.140 Regardless of the secrecy that surrounded the trip, the CCP viewed it as within the
bounds of its existing treaty with Sihanouk so long as any encouragement that they voiced for
Sar was sub rosa.141 The Cambodian movement’s inability to reciprocate any aid to China meant
that any Chinese offer of material support would not violate its existing deal—the Cambodian

137. “Faith” and “Bureaucratic” strands of Maoism from Timothy Cheek, Propaganda and
Culture in Mao’s China: Deng Tuo and the Intelligentsia. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 12, 219-
220.
138. Short states that Youqing Wang told him of the whereabouts of Saloth Sar’s residence
while he was in Beijing. Short, Pol Pot, 159, 484n159.
139. As Sihanouk’s opponent, Sar did not state explicitly that his 1965 visit occurred until years
later in an interview with the Communist Party of Thailand, and without a specific length of
stay. Zhang Xizhen claims that Sar (沙洛特紹 in Zhang’s book) was in Beijing by the autumn
of 1965 and stayed for three months. Zhang Xizhen, 西哈努克家族 [Sihanouk’s Family,
pinyin: Xīhānǔkè jiāzú]. (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenpian chubanshe, 1996), 154. David
Chandler, by contrast, states that Sar spent as much as eleven months between 1965 and 1966
on his trip through Laos, Vietnam, China, and North Korea, arriving in Beijing in 1966
experiencing the “early phase” of the Cultural Revolution. Chandler, Brother Number One, 66,
69, 71-77. Philip Short’s contention that Sar landed in Beijing in December 1965 and “spent
about a month there” coincides with the Vietnamese documents and Pol Pot’s own later
timing of his first Beijing visit. Short, Pol Pot, 159; Pol Pot, “Interview with Cai Ximei,”
(Phnom Penh, Cambodia: May 1984).
140. “不同製度國家友好共處的範例：中柬友好和互不侵犯條約昨晨在金邊交換批准
文書 (The Friendly Coexistence of Countries with Different Systems of Government a Model
Example: China-Cambodia Friendship and Non-aggression Treaty in Ratified in Phnom Penh
Yesterday Morning, Bùtóng zhìdù guójiā yǒuhǎo gòngchǔ de fànlì: Zhōng jiǎn yǒuhǎo hé hù bù qīnfàn
tiáoyuē zuó chén zài jīnbiān jiāohuàn pīzhǔn wénshū),” 棉華日報 [Sino-Khmer Daily (Phnom Penh)]
(3 May 1961); and Chandler, Brother Number One, 73-75. “Excerpts from the Document
Entitled ‘Pol Pot Presents the Cambodian Party’s Experiences to Khamtan, the Secretary
General of the Communist Party of Thailand: Informal Talks held in August 1977,’” Thomas
Engelbert trans. [Hanoi: TVQDND, 1977], 23; and 柬埔寨人民的伟大胜利： 热烈庆祝柬
埔寨爱国军民解放金边 [The Great Victory of the Cambodian People: Patriotic Soldiers and
Civilians Celebrate the Liberation of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Jiǎnpǔzhài rénmín de wěidà shènglì:
Rèliè qìngzhù Jiǎnpǔzhài àiguó jūnmín jiěfàng Jīnbiān]. (Beijing: Renmin dabanshe, May 1975).
Official Chinese sources did not begin to identify the CPK until 1975, and even then, the focus
was more on Lon Nol’s regime. Such official documents make virtually no reference to Pol
Pot.
141. Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, 210.
 23

Communists still responded to Hanoi, and the Kampuchean Worker’s Party (KWP) was not
yet in a position to offer fair exchange due to its limited base areas and small membership.
Sar’s visit coincided with events in the PRC that left a lasting imprint on him. For
instance, Sar experienced to some degree the rising tide of Maoist revival that came with the
Socialist Education Movement (SEM), which placed primacy on curbing cadre corruption in
rural areas and broadened previous campaigns to include rather than exclude peasants.142 Then
there was Lin Biao, the champion of faith Maoist zealotry, who had released his seminal
pamphlet “Long Live the Victory of People’s War!” only months before Sar’s arrival. While
Vietnam was preoccupied with the war against American imperialism, Lin’s lauding of the
effectiveness and universal applicability of Mao’s military strategy cast light on to a tried and
true method to defeat a numerically and technologically advanced adversary. His emphasis on
indigenous self-sustaining revolution “struck a sympathetic chord with Sar,” as did Mao’s
emphases on permanent revolution, the role of subjective forces in waging struggle, and the
inclusion of peasants into the revolutionary vanguard under the directorship of the
proletariat. 143 Mao’s heir apparent also applied people’s war macrocosmically to the entire
world, wherein the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America would “encircle the cities”—the
first and second worlds—much like China had done by 1949. 144 This application served to
recognize smaller, underdeveloped countries like Cambodia as valuable actors in a global
struggle against superpower domination. Cambodia thus had incredible potential if its
movement could just get off the ground.
As for the CCP response to Sar’s arrival, CCP members Deng Xiaoping, Mayor and
First Secretary of the Beijing Committee of the CCP Peng Zhen, and Liu Shaoqi welcomed
him with a warm reception.145 Sar likely spoke to his hosts through an interpreter since he did
not speak Chinese. Mao apparently read a translated version of Sar’s program and lauded it
overall, calling his class analysis and assessment of Cambodian realities by-and-large correct.146
Alternate member of the CCP Politburo Kang Sheng even touted him as the “true voice of the
Cambodian revolution,” implying that the Chinese Foreign Ministry supported “a reactionary
prince” by keeping its ties with Sihanouk intact.147 A Vietnamese source states that Chinese

142. Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Vol. 2, The Great Leap Forward,
1958-1960. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 218; and Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime,
125-126. China’s foreign minister, Chen Yi, described the post-Great Leap retrenchment
period as “very tense,” and that after the Leap’s failure “[t]here were very many chimneys
from which no smoke came; factories [did not] have machines; our money had gone.”
143. Chandler, Brother Number One, 73.
144. Cook, “Third World Maoism,” Critical Introduction to Mao, 290-291; and Short, Pol Pot, 159-
160.
145. Despite their inclination to a bureaucratic Maoist approach, these officials still cited pieces
by Mao and supported his “people’s war” and “three worlds” theory that were prominent at
this time.
146. Christoph Goscha, “Interview with Pham Thanh,” (Hanoi: 10 June 1989); Chandler,
Brother Number One, 72; Ben Kiernan, “Origins of Khmer Communism,” Southeast Asian Affairs
(1981): 161-180, on page 178; and K. Viviane Frings, “Rewriting Cambodian History to ‘Adapt’
it to a New Political Context: The Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party’s Historiography
(1979-1991),” Modern Asian Studies 31, No. 4 (October 1997): 807-846, on pages 838-839.
147. John Byron and Robert Pack, The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng—The Evil Genius Behind
Mao—and His Legacy of Terror in People’s China. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 356-357.
By endorsing Pol Pot, Kang “did more than express a desire to bring revolution to Cambodia:
he advanced his own cause within the CCP leadership.” Madame Deng Yingchao, Zhou
 24

officials supported his programme, stating that the “Cambodian Party, like any other Party,
must deal with American imperialism immediately as well as when they widen the war in
Indochina… Every Party, including the Cambodian Party, has the task of fighting American
imperialism in order to preserve peace and neutrality… And if one desires to oppose the plots
of American imperialists, including their plot to escalate [the war], then one must take hold of
the peasantry.”148 Pol Pot recalled this vote of confidence in a 1977 interview: “Our Chinese
friends whole-heartedly supported our political line, for they were then battling revisionism at a
time when classes were struggling with each other at the international level… It was only when
we [the Khmer Communists] went abroad that we realized that our movement was quite
correct and that our political line was also fundamentally correct.”149 CCP approval of Sar’s
programme reinvigorated his sense of revolutionary worth. It was from then on that he pinned
the Cambodian Communists’ star to Maoism instead of VWP’s course, and he returned to
Cambodia in 1966 with “a few pieces of French translations of Selected Works of Mao” with the
intent to plot his movement against Sihanouk’s Government. 150
In September 1966, Sar’s faith Maoist influence began to take shape in the form of
some important changes that he put into effect within the WPK. In 1966 he officially changed
the WPK’s name to the Chinese-influenced “Communist Party of Kampuchea” (CPK)—a
name that remained in effect until the Party’s dissolution in 1981. 151 The CPK also established
two new journals that reflected his adherence to faith Maoism: 1) ទង់ប្ក្ហម (“Red Flag”),
which was a Cambodian equivalent of the Great Leap Forward-era Chinese journal Red Flag;
and 2) រសែ ីប្ក្ហម (“Red Light”), which borrowed its name from a Chinese student newspaper
that emerged in France in the 1920s. 152 But perhaps the best indicator of this shift is a letter
penned by Sar (most likely translated from French into Chinese by an interpreter, as Sihanouk
had used in meetings with Chairman Mao) that he sent to Beijing in 1967:

Enlai’s widow, “was so outraged by Kang’s meddling in Cambodian affairs that she told a Thai
delegation to China in the early 1980s that Kang Sheng had been responsible for China’s
backing of Pol Pot.” See also “人物介紹： 波爾波特， 喬森潘， 英薩利 (Introduction:
Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, and Ieng Sary, rénwù jièshào: Bō ěr bō tè, Qiáo Sēnpān, Yīng Sàlì),” 東南
亞研究資 [Southeast Asia Research] 1 (1979): 92-94, on page 92; and Jean Daubier, A History
of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. (New York: Vintage, 1974), 37, 76, 259.
148. Engelbert and Goscha, Falling Out of Touch, 79-80n102.
149. “Excerpts from the Document Entitled ‘Pol Pot Presents …,” 23; Engelbert and Goscha,
Falling Out of Touch, 79; and Frings, “Rewriting Cambodian History…,” 839n119.
150. “Excerpts from the Document Entitled ‘Pol Pot Presents…,” 23; and Short, Pol Pot, 160.
On Sar’s acquisition of a French-language Quotations, see Sher, « Le parcours politique des
khmers rouge » 121. Ben Kiernan states that the CPK’s internal history, which it produced a
few months after the revolt, attests to the Party’s sponsorship of the uprising: “’Samlaut’ and
‘Pailin’ in Battambang, etc… show the great strength of our people under the leadership of the
Party which dares fight and defeat the enemy.” Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, 126n102. He
references ប្បវេត បក្សសតងេ ប] (Short History of the Party),” ទង់ប្ក្ហម [Red Flag (Phnom
Penh)] Special Issue (September-October 1967), 71. Khmer added by author in place of
phonetic spelling.
151. “A Short Guide for Application of Party Statutes,” in Communist Party Power in Kampuchea,
56; and Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, 190.
152. Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, 219-224; Timothy Carney, “Cambodia: The
Unexpected Victory,” in Cambodia 1975-1978, 24; and Daubier, A History of the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, 226.
 25

“Comrades, we are extremely pleased to report that in terms of ideological outlook, as well
as our revolutionary line, that we are preparing the implementation of a people’s war which
has been moved towards an unstoppable point. Simultaneously, in terms of organization,
there are also favorable circumstances, as well as for the execution of working affairs. Thus,
we dare to affirm that: although there are obstacles ahead, we will still continue to put into
effect the revolutionary work according to the line of the people’s war which Chairman
Mao Zedong has pointed out in terms of its independence, sovereignty, and self-
reliance.”153

Here, Sar makes several Maoist precepts central to the Cambodian revolution, many of
which he had certainly read about while a student in Paris (namely the 1951 French-language
edition of Mao’s “On New Democracy”). 154 Yet his experiences in Beijing showed him
firsthand the rewards of such theories if followed. As he recalled in a 1984 Cai Ximei interview,
“[w]hen I read Chairman Mao’s books, I felt that they were easy to understand.” 155 Pol Pot
seldom shied away from boasting of Democratic Kampuchea’s “Chinese friends to the north”
who “gave us [the CPK] the advantage” in the struggle against imperialism. 156 He valued the
Thought of Mao Zedong above all else, claiming that Mao Zedong Thought “is the most
precious aid… Comrade President Mao never ceased his support to support our efforts [and]
we express with deep emotion our respect for his and the CCP’s heroic and unswerving
commitment to the international Communist movement.”157 The suppression of high-ranking
left-minded government ministers in the wake of Samlaut notwithstanding, the CPK, now
equipped with Maoism as its principal weapon, grew to become the preeminent revolutionary
Party in Cambodia.158
The 1965-1966 visit was an intellectual awakening for Sar, and his experiences there
convinced him that Lin Biao’s faith Maoism could reverse the Cambodian revolution’s

153. Engelbert and Goscha, Falling Out of Touch, 80-81.

154. Mao Zedong, La nouvelle Démocratie [On New Democracy]. (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1951).
Pol Pot’s mentor in Paris, Keng Vannsak, recalled that “Au début nous étions très staliniens…
nous nous tournés vers la China à la fin des années cinquantes car les russes jouaient la carte de
Sihanouk et nous négligeant… Quand le monde a commence e critique Staline, on est devenue
maoistes. (At the beginning we [ the Cambodian Cercle Marxiste] were very Stalinist… We
turned toward China in the late 1950s because the Russians were playing the Sihanouk card
and neglecting us… When everyone began to criticize Stalin, we became Maoists).” Marie-
Alexandrine Martin, Le mal cambodgien. (Mesnil-sur-l’Estrée, Phnom Penh: Société Nouvelle
Firmin-Didot-Hachette, 1989), 105.
155. Pol Pot, “Interview with Cai Ximei.”; and Short, Pol Pot, 477n70.
156. Pol Pot, “Entretien Sino-Kampuchéen le 29 September 1977,” (29 September 1977).
157. Pol Pot, « Allocution du Camarade Pol Pot, Secrétaire du Comité Central du Parti
Communiste du Kampuchéa, Premier Ministre du Gouvernement du Kampuchéa
Démocratique: Chef de la délégation du parti communiste du Kampuchéa et du gouvernement
du Kampuchéa démocratique a l’occasion du banquet de bienvenue organisé en son honneur
par Le Comité Central du Parti Communiste Chinois et le Gouvernement de la République
Populaire de Chine » (28 September 1977), 8; and “Speech Made by Pol Pot, Secretary of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, Prime Minister of the
Government of Democratic Kampuchea, At a Banquet Given in Honor of the Delegation of
the Communist Party of China and the Government of the People’s Republic of China,”
(Phnom Penh, 5 November 1978), 1-19.
158. Andrew Mertha, Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979. (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2014), 22.
 26

stagnation. Although Sar initially sought help from China as a reaction to Vietnamese
paternalism, the visit to Beijing convinced him that Maoist China was the leading force of a
worldwide Third World movement. Cambodia became an epicenter for China’s Third World
outreach, as the hosting of foreign revolutionaries, regardless of whether they stood as national
leaders or potential opposition forces, lent revolutionary credence to their just struggles against
imperialism. In a 1977 issue of 人民日報 (People’s Daily), the resonating force of Saloth Sar’s
visit and conversion to Maoism was loud and clear:

“For us, the parliamentary road is not feasible. We have studied the experience of world
revolution, especially the works of Comrade Mao Zedong and the experience of the
Chinese revolution of the period that has an important impact for us. After assessing the
specific experience of Kampuchea and studying a number of instances of world revolution,
and particularly under the guidance of the works of Comrade Mao Zedong, we have found
an appropriate line with China's specific conditions and social situation for the realities of
Kampuchea. Thus, our Party committee set the Party’s line, and this line was debated and
approved by the first congress, held at Phnom Penh on September 30, 1960.” 159

Here, Pol Pot identifies that he and his comrades had read Mao’s works before the
1960 founding of the Party, though the actual date for its first congress remains was 1951—
long before Pol Pot’s turn to Communism. 160 Though antedating his 1966 visit, Pol Pot’s
interest in China and Maoism, which began in Paris, came together as he realized the
stagnation of the Vietnamese-led KPRP/WPK. Although Pol Pot wanted revolution against
Sihanouk, he had to obey his VWP superiors, who wanted the Prince’s favor so that they could
transport arms to guerrillas fighting in South Vietnam via Cambodian territory. Not unlike
Hong Xiuquan, who had the “Taiping vision” after reading (and initially dismissing) Liang A-
fa’s Good Words, Pol Pot’s 1966 visit to Beijing gave him the “dream” that would make Mao’s
ideas (as he read in Paris) important to him. Thereafter until the demise of Democratic
Kampuchea, Pol Pot regarded Communist China and Mao Zedong as the brilliant beacons on
world revolution.

159. “波尔布特同志在京举行记者招待会介绍了柬埔寨共产党光辉的战斗历程和柬埔
寨人民在柬埔寨共产党领导下各方面所取得的伟大胜利柬埔寨党政代表团成员英萨
利、温威和秀臣出席(Comrade Pol Pot at a Conference Held in Beijing Describes the Great
Victory in All Aspects of the Cambodian Communist Party and the Glorious History of the
Cambodian People’s Struggle Under the Leadership of Communist Party of Cambodia,
Delegates Ieng Sary, Wen Wei and Han Xiuchen in Attendance, Bō ěr bù tè tóngzhì zàijīng jǔxíng
jìzhě zhāodài huì jièshàole jiǎnpǔzhài gòngchǎndǎng guānghuī de zhàndòu lìchéng hé jiǎnpǔzhài rénmín zài
jiǎnpǔzhài gòngchǎndǎng lǐngdǎo xià gè fāngmiàn suǒ qǔdé de wěidà shènglì jiǎnpǔzhài dǎng zhèng
dàibiǎo tuán chéngyuán yīng sà lì, wēn wēi hàn xiùchén chūxí),” 人民日报 [People’s Daily], (3 October
1977), 1; and Tribunal Populaire Révolutionnaire Siégeant à Phnom Penh pour le Jugement du
Crime de Génocide Commis par la Clique Pol Pot-Ieng Sary, “Extrait du discours prononcé à
la conférence de presse tenue à Pékin le 29-9-1977 par Pol Pot lors de sa visite en Chine et
publié le 3-10-1977 par le Renmin Ribao,” (August 1979, Document N. 2. 6. 04D).
160. យុវជនបដិវេត ន៍ [Revolutionary Youth], (September 1976), 3. On the Party’s change of its
founding date from 1951 to 1960, see David P. Chandler, “Revising the Past in Democratic
Kampuchea: When Was the Birthday of the Party?” Pacific Affairs 56, No. 2 (Summer 1983):
288-300.
 27

The flight of the leftist, Paris-educated group, too, brought an intellectual component
to the fledgling Party, as these men had adapted Maoism on paper as a fit for Cambodia while in
Paris.161 As they capitalized on peasant fervor that arose with Samlaut, the meeting of the two
strands (Sar’s “faith” Maoism and the managerial Maoism of the former ministers) into a single
cohesive Cambodian Maoism under Sar’s leadership led the CPK to mobilize peasants. CPK
leaders spoke in a political language of traditional society and a rational-bureaucratic language
of modernizing states,162 as Mao had done in Sinifying Marxism. As Hinton describes, the CPK
“combined new and old into ideological palimpsests, sketched upon the lines of cultural
understandings, at once transforming and transformed.”163 Its “national democratic revolution”
thus represents the adaptation of Mao’s Yan’an canon (and, vicariously, the Cambodian
intellectuals’ dissertations for that matter).164 But how exactly did the CPK rally peasants to its
revolutionary cause?
Growth in CPK support stemmed from its peasant outreach, which consisted of
efforts to make its ideology speak to rural cleavages and grievances. The Second Indochina
War and the fallout of the US secret bombings of Cambodia during Operation Menu (18
March 1969-26 May 1970) played their part,165 and the Party received a significant boost when
in 1970 the deposed Sihanouk, whose reverence among peasants was substantial irrespective of
his corruption, lent his support for the CPK. Yet the Party’s capitalization of rural problems,
about which they had theorized in Paris and fought for from political or revolutionary posts,
allowed them to penetrate into peasant society despite their elite origins. Sihanouk certainly
helped in this regard; several campaigns throughout the 1960s, including the resettlement of
landless peasants in Battambang and the exploitative ramassage du paddy (which established a
lucrative rice export industry that only benefitted merchants) had worsened many peasants’
lot.166 The CPK recognized their plight, and sought to “give leadership to the movement” and
“suspended temporarily the armed struggle in Battambang until the whole country could
complete its preparations.”167 As Sar elaborates in a particularly Maoist fashion:

161. Galway, “Boundless Revolution,” 203-229.

162. Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: the Leninist Extinction. (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1993), 4, 16-18.
163. Alexander L. Hinton, “Oppression and Vengeance in the Cambodian Genocide,” in
Genocide by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory and Practice. Nicholas A. Robins and Adam
Jones, eds. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 85.
164. ទង់ជាេិបដិវេត ន៍ដប់មួ [Revolutionary Flag, No. 11] (11 November 1976), 76. DCCAM
(Phnom Penh) Document, Number D21419.
165. William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience. (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1985). By 1969, US forces had conducted 454 covert missions in
Cambodia, which increased to 558, and then 1,885 by 1972. Estimates of Cambodian casualties
of the 1969-1973 bombing campaigns “run as high as 150,000.” Tyner, The Killing of Cambodia,
69. See also Kenton Clymer, Troubled Relations: The United States and Cambodia since 1870.
(Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 137.
166. Kiernan, “The Samlaut Rebellion, 1967-1968,” in Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942-
1981. Ben Kiernan and Chanthou Boua, eds. (London: Zed Press, 1982), 166-195; Tyner, The
Killing of Cambodia, 66-68; and Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History, 164.
167. Pol Pot, « Discours prononcé par le camarade Pol Pot, secrétaire du comité du parti
communiste du Kampuchéa au meeting commémorant le 17è anniversaire de la fondation du
parti communiste du Kampuchéa et a l’occasion de la proclamation solennelle de l’existence
officielle du parti communiste de Kampuchéa,” (Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 27 September 1977),
38-39.
 28

“We proceeded according to the line that we traced for ourselves already. We needed
to keep the principal contradictions in sight at all times. The principal contradictions were
with imperialism and the feudal, landlord system, which we had to combat. As to the
secondary contradictions, they had to be resolved by reciprocal concessions that allowed the
union of all the forces against imperialism, particularly American imperialism, and the
system of the feudalists, landlords, and reactionary “compradores”. 168 … Our policy
had to be correct, that is to say, our reasons were founded. We had to make sure they could
understand those reasons. It was equally important for our policy to conform with their interests
for them to give us their support. We talked to them, had meetings with them. Sometimes
they agreed with us, sometimes they did not. We came back again and again. First they
did not see the true nature of American imperialism. But over time, they came to view
it increasingly clearly and united with us to combat it, to win independence, peace, and
neutrality.”169

The CPK’s approach to recruiting peasants shared much in common with Mao’s
during the Chinese Civil War. As Mao mobilized peasants on a range of grievances and
exploited every possible cleavage as a way to build popular support, so too did the CPK,
whose cadres “live[d] in the midst of the people, in close touch with them, like them, and serve
them heart and soul.” 170 Both assessed their country as backward, semi-colonial, and semi-
feudal states that bore the brunt of an agonizing war of imperialist aggression, and carried
confidence in persevering against all odds by way of self-reliance and the people’s indomitable
revolutionary spirit. For the CPK as with the CCP, it was necessary that the national revolution
based itself in the “réalités concrètes [concrete conditions]” in the country.171
To “sell” its Maoist vision to Cambodians, the CPK needed to pitch it to ordinary
people in a way that tapped into local frustrations while also selling its vision of a modern
nation. This meant that it ought to spark “class ardor and fury” among workers and peasants
by marshaling their Maoist class analysis into something that “tapped into preexisting feelings
of dissatisfaction, unrest, anger, and spite,” thereby instilling revolutionary political
consciousness.172 This entailed portraying itself as the genuine representative of the workers
and peasants, which it did via radio broadcasts and speeches. During the Party’s struggle
against the right-wing deposer of Sihanouk, Lon Nol (1970-1975), 173 it broadcast via secret
radio its devotion to the workers and peasants. “In Cambodia’s history of struggle,” a May
1971 broadcast stated, “Cambodian workers and peasants constituted a basic force in which
Cambodian workers were always the most advanced, most valiant, and most active
vanguard.”174 Another asserted that the CPK was a “Party of the workers and representative of

168. Ibid, 30. Emphasis added.

169. Ibid, 30-31. Emphasis added.
170. Ieng Sary, “Kingdom of Cambodia National United Front of Kampuchea: Cambodia
1972,” (1 January 1970), 5. DCCAM (Phnom Penh) Document Number D240105.
171. Pol Pot, « Discours prononcé par le camarade Pol Pot » 70-71. See also Mao Zedong,
“The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party,” (1930) in Selected Works II, 305-
315.
172. Alexander L. Hinton, “A Head for an Eye: Revenge in the Cambodian Genocide,”
American Ethnologist 25, No. 3 (August 1998): 352-377.
173. Serge Thion, “Journal de marche dans le maquis,” in Khmers Rouges, 43-97.
174. Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), Daily Report, No 86 (4 May 1971).
 29

the interests of the people and… of the nation and youth.”175 Though the Party later stressed
that the peasants, who (echoing Samphan’s assessment in 1959) constituted 85% of the
nation’s populace, was the vanguard force, this earlier proclamation represents one of the
earliest and few remaining evidences of CPK avowal of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Speeches
on the frontlines or in the camps were equally effective, especially when given by the Party’s
charismatic intellectual thrust. CPK candidate member Ith Sarin remembers that at a 10 May
1972 mass meeting in Kat Phlouk primary school in Tonle Bati, “Mr. Hou Yon [Hou Yuon]
gave a two-hour speech [that] was much applauded.”176
The Party also tried its hand at politicization. Sar emphasized that the principal
contradiction was in fact between the landlords and the peasants, thus Party leaders believed
that peasants would endorse the CPK program of “independence-mastery [ឯក្រាជយភាព-
ម្ចាស់]” and espouse its guiding Maoist ideology through “’seepage’ [ការប្ជាប],” 177 which
sought to turn ordinary people into extraordinary revolutionaries. The CPK carried out
“intensive agitation work” among the peasants, organizing them into “patriotic peasants’
associations” and document reading groups.178 Through this, the Party hoped to feed peasant
hatred of corrupt urbanites, the evil feudal lords, and the oppressive US imperialists. Party
promises to restructure all of Cambodia’s relations of production to destroy feudalism and end
exploitation of the peasants and workers also helped convince many to lend their support to
the CPK, with leaflets concentrating on succinct, simplified descriptions of the core themes of
the dissertations by Yuon, Samphan, and Nim. One leaflet explained to peasants that feudalists
and capitalist enemies “live in affluence at the expense of the working class and the masses,”
who “live in misery, bled by them.” 179 An issue of Party newspaper យុវជននិងយុវនារ ី
បដិវេត ន៍ពីរ (Revolutionary Youth) identified these same classes as regarding youths from the
rural poor as merely a “source from which they can suck out their interests in the most
delicious manner and as a major source of strength to perpetuate their oppression and protect
their treasonous state power.” 180 The CPK also reached out to the Buddhist Sangha, which
often served as a link between periphery and core, spiritual and mundane. As Ieng Sary noted
in a 1972 pamphlet, monks “have been the only literates,” held tremendous appeal among
peasants, and represent a cultural nexus of power in the countryside. 181 Cambodia’s history,
Sary continues, was replete with “heroic feats against colonial rule creditable to the ‘achars,’
who are former Buddhist monks… in our revolutionary war of national and popular liberation,
they take an active part in the mobilization of the patriotic forces… the Buddhist monks fight

175. “បក្សក្ុមមុយនីសតក្មពុជានិងបញ្ហានិងយុវជននិងយុវនារ ីបដិវេត ន៍ក្មពុជា [The

Communist Party of Kampuchea and the Problem of Young Men and Women of Kampuchea]
យុវជននិងយុវនារ ីបដិវេត ន៍ពីរ [Revolutionary Youth, No. 2] (August 1973), as quoted in
Carney, “Continuity in Cambodian Communism,” in Communist Party Power in Kampuchea, 1.
176. Ith Sarin, “Nine Months in the Maquis, US Embassy, Phnom Penh trans.,” in in Communist
Party Power in Kampuchea (Cambodia): Documents and Discussion. Timothy M. Carney, ed. (Ithaca,
NY: Southeast Asia Program Data Paper No. 106, Depart. of Asian Studies, Cornell
University, 1977), 34.
177. Hinton, “Oppression and Vengeance in the Cambodian Genocide,” in Genocide by the
Oppressed, 87.
178. Sary, “Cambodia 1972,” 8; and Sarin, “Nine Months in the Maquis,” in Communist Party
Power in Kampuchea, 51.
179. Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, 231-232.
180. “បក្សក្ុមមុយនីសតក្មពុជានិងបញ្ហានិងយុវជននិងយុវនារ ីបដិវេត ន៍ក្មពុជា,” in Communist
Party Power in Kampuchea, 31.
181. Sary, “Cambodia 1972,” 13-14.
 30

stubbornly out of ardent patriotism.”182 Support from Buddhist monks joined with the Party’s
ability to posit itself as the Party of the desolate poor to give the CPK legitimacy in
Cambodia’s rice regions. The Party’s ranks ultimately swelled with fed-up peasants who
subscribed to the millenarian Maoist vision that the Party leaders preached to them.
Besides political indoctrination and politicization, the CPK leadership adapted Maoism
to contemporary norms in the same way that Mao “Sinified” Marxism: it infused Maoism with
the personal charisma of the Paris Group and couched a Maoist vision in Cambodian
peculiarities. The central pillar of Cambodian Maoism was the notion of the Party as the
Angkar. As Sarin recalled, the CPK referred to itself as the “revolutionary organization,” or the
“Organization (Angkar)” as early as March 1971, 183 using it to play down Party leadership of
the revolution to stress collective involvement. 184 Hinton describes Angkar as constituting a
CPK “ideological palimpsest linking high-modernist thought, communist ideology, and local
understandings to idealize a new potent center.” 185 Indeed, the term Angkar itself held
resonating significance:

Angkar … [means] “organization” but includes an array of connotations not captured

by the English word. Angkar is derived from the Pali term anga, meaning “a constituent
part of the body, a limb, member,” and proximately from the Khmer term [អងគ ],
which has the primary meaning of “body, structure, physique; limb of the body” but is
also used to refer to “mana-filled” objects such as monks, royalty, religious statuary, or
Siva lingas… Thus Angkar can be properly glossed as “the organization,” but it also
connotes a structure that orders society, a part-whole relation… and an organic entity
that is infused with power.186

Whether or not peasants responded to the notion of a benevolent organization because

of these links, the Party made its intentions clear. At the center of the powerful, human will-
driven Party machine would be the Angkar, which cared for all, as a national pater familias. As
Party slogans reveal, it was true that the CPK leadership “sold” itself as such: អងគ ការជាម្ចតា
បិតារបស់ម្ចរាក្ុម្ច រ ីនិងយុវជនយុវនារ ី (“The Angkar is the mother and father of all young
children, as well as all adolescent boys and girls”) and អងគ ការថ្នាមបងបអ ូនពុក្ខ្ម៉ែ (“The
Angkar tenderly looks after you all, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers) lend credence to
this self-perception.187
Once the Communists took Phnom Penh in 1975, Democratic Kampuchea, as the
country would become, was to be governed as one big cooperative or mutual work team,

182. Ibid.
183. FBIS Daily Report: Asia and Pacific, IV, No. 54 (19 March 1971); and FBIS Daily Report: Asia
and Pacific, IV, No. 183 (20 September 1976). Only in September 1976 did the Angkar espouse
Marxism-Leninism publicly as its ideology. Pol Pot, « Discours prononcé par le camarade Pol
Pot » 16.
184. Ith Sarin, ប្សត ោះប្ពលឹងខ្មែ រ [Sympathy for the Khmer Soul]. (Phnom Penh, Cambodia,
1973), 56.
185Hinton, Why Did They Kill?, 126-127.
186. Ibid, 127, quoting TW Rhys Davids and William Stede, The Pali Text Society’s Pali-English
Dictionary. (Oxford: Pali Text Society, 1992), 6; and Robert K. Headley, Jr., Kylin Chhor, Lam
Kheng Lim, Lim Kah Kheang, and Chen Chun, Cambodian-English Dictionary. (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 1977), 1314.
187. Locard, Pol Pot’s Little Red Book, 107-108.
 31

which Yuon, Samphan, and Nim proposed (in lesser terms) in their dissertations. The whole
country, in fact, was to be state-centric so that it could cast off the shackles of foreign
exploitation. As Sary described during the resistance, the prices of goods “are set according to
the principle that business transactions should benefit the population, the resistance, and the
traders who must not seek exorbitant profits at the expense of others. To facilitate price
control, we have been extending the network of supply and marketing cooperatives. All these
measures have made it possible to stabilize the prices of commodities.” 188 Unproductive
industries would not remain; only rice and water, the Cambodian lifeblood that coursed
through the veins from its beating heart, the Mekong River Delta. Beneath the glossy veneer of
the all-loving Angkar was something truly insidious: the Party claimed omnipresence and
omniscience as a display of its awesome might. Indeed, Michel Foucault notes that the “perfect
disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything.” 189 Although
the Party assumed a faceless character when it took power, it would supervise everything and
exercise its disciplinary power by way of total invisibility. This was the motivation from its
terrifying slogans អងគ ការខ្្ា ក្ម្ចាស់ (“The Angkar has [the many] eyes of the pineapple”) and
អងគ ការដឹងប្បវេត ិរ ូបមិេតអស់តហើយ! (“Comrades, the Angkar already knows your entire
biography!”).190 Though some recognized Khieu Samphan and his colleagues Hou Yuon and
Hu Nim, by the 1970s no one in the country could identify the CPK leader since it ruled
collectively and in secrecy. Yet its omnipresence, as it displayed through the total supervision
of its people, augmented the Party’s central authority. 191 Through this combination of the CPK
leadership’s personal charisma, contemporary norms, and Maoist analyses from the intellectual
thrust’s dissertations, the Party portrayed itself as peasant visionaries despite its leadership’s
elite origins. Upon penetrating into rural society, the Paris Group turned the tides on Lon Nol
and captured Phnom Penh, applying once again useful tenets of Maoism’s ideological system
(people’s war and New Democracy).

V. Conclusion.

As this essay has endeavored to show, radical intellectuals such as Guzman (Peru) and
Sar (Cambodia) who became Maoists were networked individuals within a situated thinking,
who responded to crises such as post-independence underdevelopment and political
corruption, capitalist imperialism, and urban/rural socioeconomic disequilibria by taking a
Maoist turn. The reception of Maoism by these Communist Parties’ intellectual thrust,
moreover, led to its transformation into a variant that was congruent with contemporary
norms and conditions. As textual exegesis and analyses of the political practices of these
Maoists reveal, this reception was dialectical instead of genuflection. These radical intellectuals
spoke back, revivifying, and investing Maoism with new signification, without abandoning the
universality of the original theory (its Russian or its Chinese accretions), which stood as a
global model for waging national revolution and socialist transformation.192 In this way, this
empirical study has sought to contribute to a better understanding of radical thought.

188. Sary, “Cambodia 1972,” 10.

189. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Modern Prison. Alan Sheridan trans.
(New York: Pantheon, 1977) 173.
190. Locard, Pol Pot’s Little Red Book, 112-113, 136.
191. Tyner, The Killing of Cambodia, 154.
192. On this point, I agree with Arif Dirlik and Nick Knight. Dirlik argues that Mao’s Marxism
is at once locally Chinese and universally Marxist: “Mao did not reduce Marxism to a Chinese
 32

Maoist precepts, for one reason or another, resonated among some groups who
supported the Shining Path, a Party that sought to reverse negative historical trends in semi-
feudal and semi-colonial Peru. The Shining Path domesticated Maoist principles by combining
them with what it regarded as Peru’s particular cultural forms. It also appropriated Mariategui’s
notion of indigenismo to consolidate further support from Quechua peoples, and gained a
enough strong peasant following in its millenarian struggle against the Peruvian government.
The Shining Path succeeded at least marginally in extolling the importance of Andean culture
and symbolism, promoting the advancement of indigenous rights, and tracing threads between
the present struggle and past Peruvian attempts to end the unjust oppression of the Peruvian
people. Contemporary scholars may fall into a temporal trap by merely foregrounding the fact
that the Peruvian Maoists resorted to terrorism, cocaine trafficking, and extreme violence in
their waning years of resistance. Yet the Shining Path presented a genuine challenge to the
crooked Peruvian Government and made concerted efforts to improve the indigenous peoples’
and peasants’ standards of living, however ill-fated and ultimately unsuccessful such efforts
were in the end.
Sar’s 1966 return from China, meanwhile, coincided with the Paris Group’s break with
Sihanouk, and soon, they combined to form the ideological basis of the CPK’s armed struggle.
His conversion to Maoism signaled the beginning of his transformation from failed student to
“Brother Number One,” a name that he held before his 1977 “big reveal” that the Angkar was
in fact the CPK, and he was its mysterious (and insidious) leader. But before he and his Paris
cohort went down in infamy as genocidal leaders of a brutal human experiment, they sought
actively to find a method to liberate their motherland from exploitation and used it (Maoism)
to identify problems and provide solutions. The Party’s Central Committee, as we have seen,
had tremendous acumen when it came to peasant grievances since its membership contained
those who had experienced that life before. Sar, though by no means one who experienced
duress during his upbringing, was nevertheless a charismatic orator who had proven his worth
on the revolutionary front. The Party’s realization of its Maoist vision after 17 April 1975—the
day that they captured Phnom Penh—was sadly the beginning of a four years project that
would set the already downtrodden country back several decades, and cost nearly a third of its
people their lives.

V. References and bibliography.

version or view China merely as another illustration of universal Marxist principles. His
exposition of the relationship is at once metonymic (Chinese Revolution reduced to aspect or
function of Marxism in general) and synecdochic (intrinsic relationship of shared qualities).
The result was a conception of the relationship that insisted on China’s difference and yet
represented Chinese Marxism as an embodiment of Marxism.” Arif Dirlik, Marxism in the
Chinese Revolution. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 97-100. Nick Knight,
meanwhile, asserts that Mao’s “‘Sinification of Marxism’ was an attempt to discover a formula
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Chicago Press, 1995) 190-192; and Hans Van de Ven, “War, Cosmopolitanism, and Authority:
Mao from 1937 to 1956,” in A Critical Introduction to Mao, 96. Marxist features that remained in
toto include the materialist concept of history (conflict between social classes), critique of
capitalism’s exploitation of the urban proletariat, and the theory of a proletarian revolution .
 33

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