My gallery of American folk heroes

1. C'est ne pas une caricature

2. Prince Macaroon

3. Michael Bloomberg, conqueror of the world 

4. POTUS

5. Mitt Romney

6. No drama Obama.  

Michael Bloomberg, former and future Democratic/Republican/? candidate for President

Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History

An erudite but totally dissembled book. It mainly describes events peripheral to the emergence and development of Maoism, such as Maoist inspiration for the 1968 revolutionaries in France.

Why is that? Because Maoism was developed first as an ideological foundation of the Sino-Soviet conflict and only then Mao adapted it to serve other geopolitical and domestic purposes . In the current climate of neocon political correctness even a pretty grim description of the Soviet policies will be censured as long as it describes Soviet leaders as rational political actors with rational goals. 

We must begin with the fact that Mao, at first, did not purport to be anything but an orthodox follower of the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin bloodline. Only after the death of Stalin and the armistice on the Korean peninsula, which obviated the need for the military alliance with USSR, he decided that time has come for him to become the fifth founding member of this lineage. Obviously, he recognized that Khruschev's campaign against "The Cult of Personality" and the turnover of the Communist Eastern European leaders (Rakosi in Hungary, Bierut in Poland, Gheorgiu-Dej in Romania, etc.) threatened his own control of China. So, after XX Congress of CPSU (1956) Mao had to proclaim himself, rather than tactless and bothersome leaders in Moscow, the titular head of the world Communism.  

With time, he developed his own alliances--with Tito in Yugoslavia, Enver Hoxcha in Albania, Ceausescu in Romania, Pol Pot in Cambodia--to further his own political goals. But the above list demonstrates that his primary goal was rivalry with the Soviet Union rather than designing an alternative model for the revolution in the Third World. Certainly, the Chinese Government was involved in affairs of Southeast Asia and Africa--war in Vietnam, independently, but together with the USSR and a botched attempt at a military coup in Indonesia--and had to adapt to realities and aspirations of these countries and their leaders. So, "proletarian revolution" and the "dictatorship of the proletariat" had to be de-emphasized (rather than ditched) and his own neo-Confucian elevation of the peasantry to be proclaimed. 

As did the Soviets before him, he had to realize that regimes he supported, economically and militarily, sometimes imitate his style and appropriate his synthesis of Stalinism, Legalism and neo-Confucianism  (Kim Il Song in Korea, Ho Chi Ming in Vietnam, Pol Pot in Cambodia) rather than become his political allies. Vice versa, these regimes built their own version of economic autarky and xenophobic nationalism as he did to oppose the Soviet Union. 

With this conceptual framework, one can turn to Lovell's book and read historical anecdotes, which I am unable to supply.