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SWEDISH MAOISM After the People's Republic of China Was CHAPTER EIGHT SWEDISH MAOISM It was people such as these who helped create an image of the human face of China (Colin Mackerras on Jan Myrdal and Sven Lindqvist 1991, 186). After the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, West- erners were driven out of the country. The new leaders considered the Westerners to be imperialists, and the Chinese state took first their property and then businesses away from them.1 Many had already left because of the Japanese occupation and, apart from a small contingent of Communist sympathizers, those remaining were now forced out. This also spelled the end for the adventurous Western geological expe- ditions and collecting trips. But in Sweden, interest in China survived this setback and rebounded even stronger in the 1970s. The focus of that decade, however, had little to do on the surface with the study of ancient China that had occupied Bernhard Karlgren and Johan Gunnar Andersson. The new Swedish China fever was all about the future. The promise of a New China that would change the world per- meated the Asianist community, and the Swedes were there to glorify the coming utopia. During the sixties and seventies, young Swedes were engaged actively in the ideology of Maoism while they fervently praised the Chinese style of Communism.2 The Swedish media at the same time moved to the left. High-ranking editors wrote lyrical opinions about China’s Cultural Revolution that appeared in Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s lead- ing daily. When state monopolized television started a second channel in 1968, many staff members were from the radical left.3 The Maoist 1 Sections from the following pages are included in a chapter in The Cold War in Asia: The Battle for Hearts and Minds, edited by Zheng Yangwen, Hong Liu and Michael Szonyi, published by Brill. 2 “An insane quarter of a century,” as politician and critic Per Ahlmark has called the period. 3 One employee at Swedish Television expressed this metaphorically: “They all ate with chopsticks” (Burgman 1998, 73). At the time most journalism schools were also dominated by socialist ideas. 156 chapter eight political party, Kommunistiska förbundet Marxist-leninisterna / Sver- iges kommunistiska parti (KFML/SKP), was established at the same time. When in 1968 Sweden’s new prime minister walked side-by-side with the North Vietnamese ambassador to Moscow in a protest rally against the American War in Vietnam, a Western country seemed to have changed sides in the global conflict between capitalism and communism. The following chapter attempts to explain why Mao Zedong’s China was so popular in Sweden and to describe how Maoism developed alongside the Swedish Chinese Friendship Association. In the exist- ing literature about the Swedish left, China is often downplayed, if not completely excluded from the narrative.4 This chapter on Swed- ish Maoism will keep the focus steadily on China—the real as well as the imaginary. How did the Swedes represent China and what func- tion did this representation play in the ideological discourse of the left? Finally, what was the role of the Chinese Communist Party in the emergence of the Swedish China friends? Political Pilgrims With the People’s Liberation Army winning the Chinese civil war and expelling Chiang Kai-shek’s forces to Taiwan, where they set up a gov- ernment in 1949, a delicate problem appeared on the international political stage. Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China (PRC), while Chiang Kai-shek insisted he represented the Republic of China (ROC). The world suddenly had to choose between two govern- ments for only one China. The Americans had supported Chiang Kai-shek both in the war against Japan and in the subsequent Chinese civil war. In the Cold War environment that followed immediately in the wake of World War II, the United States could not accept Communist leadership in China. Instead it continued to support the nationalist government— now in exile on the island of Taiwan—as the legitimate rulers of China. The Soviet Union and its puppet regimes in Eastern Europe instead supported Mao Zedong. Initially only the United Kingdom, which of the Western nations had the highest level of economic 4 Studies like those of Arvidsson (1999), Bjereld and Demker (2005), or Östberg (2002). .
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