A week or so ago, while trying to locate a book in my large but rather chaotically arranged library, my eyes fell upon a dusty red book. It was Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (aka the Little Red Book).

I had completely forgotten about it, despite the fact that an edition of the book which I possess sold for 13,000 dollars in December 2002, at an auction in New York.

What I have with me is a 1966 edition of the book — a book which went on to become perhaps the most read, quoted and cherished possession of ‘Maoists’ and an assortment of leftists around the world.

The book was a central prop during the tumultuous ‘Cultural Revolution’ in China launched by the country’s senior-most communist leader Mao Tse-tung.

Millions of copies were printed and distributed from 1964 onwards, reaching a peak during the height of the Cultural Revolution, between 1967 and 1973.

This Chinese icon of communist propaganda is implicated in unprecedented chaos but also inspired Qaddafi and Z.A. Bhutto

The Cultural Revolution came to an end in 1976 with Mao’s demise but by then the book had already been translated into over 20 languages in 117 countries.

The book was a consequence of a power tussle in the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC). On the one side of the wrangle were pragmatists who had criticised some of Mao’s sweeping economic policies which had caused famine and mass starvation in China’s countryside. On the other end of the tussle were those who had accused the ‘lingering presence of the bourgeoisie and feudal mindset in the country’ for ‘sabotaging’ Mao’s communist initiatives.

Mao was the main ideologue and architect of China’s 1949 communist revolution. But in 1960 during a large CPC convention he was almost sidelined by the party. However by 1962 he had managed to return to the fore and regain control of the CPC. He launched a purge and ousted hundreds of CPC members who he believed were ‘counter-revolutionaries’. It was during this period that the Little Red Book first appeared.

The book contains hundreds of quotes culled from Mao’s writings, lectures and speeches. These quotes cover various ideological, economic and social issues, commented on by Mao in the framework of how he understood Marxism-Leninism in the context of Chinese culture and polity, and also of the revolution in general.

In 1966 during a session of the CPC supporters of Mao insisted that counter-revolutionaries had infiltrated the party and state institutions. They said that the only way to identify them was through ‘the telescope and microscope of the Mao Tse-tung thought.’

It was decided that a cultural revolution will be launched to completely eradicate the ‘counter-revolutionary mindset’. Soon after, Mao and his supporters willingly allowed large groups of young Chinese students and youth to begin undermining the authority of state institutions and enact an anarchic and fanatical reign of terror in which teachers, professors, doctors, actors, authors, civil servants and sometimes even one’s own parents were beaten up and publicly humiliated by gangs of youth. These young Chinese went around doing this while profusely mouthing quotes from the book.

Millions of Chinese men and women perished in the chaos. All of them were accused of being counter-revolutionaries after being tried in spontaneous ‘peoples courts’ through ‘the telescope and the microscope of the Mao Tse-tung Thought’ (basically the Little Red Book).

China plunged into anarchy. But it was madness engineered from the top of the CPC hierarchy where Mao sat navigating the cleansing of the Chinese society.

Once he was able to use the chaos to oust his possible rivals in the party and drown the memory of his disastrous economic policies, he suddenly brought in the powerful Chinese military and sent thousands of his fanatical followers to the countryside to work on farms. Thus the Cultural Revolution began to lose its intensity from the early 1970s and came to a complete halt when Mao passed away in 1976.

By 1980, leaders damned and ousted by the Cultural Revolution were brought back into the party fold. The Little Red Book that had fuelled the imagination and ambitions of so many revolutionaries in the 1960s and 1970s came to be seen as a lethal instrument of propaganda and after the end of the Cold War, a curious ideological artefact of a bygone age.

In Pakistan, the book had first arrived in 1967. It was translated into Urdu and thousands of copies were distributed by the Chinese embassy between 1968 and 1973.

What I have with me is an English version of the book but which was printed in China in 1966. A late friend of mine, Irfan Malik, had gifted it to me in 1986, when both of us were young Marxist pretenders.

The book belonged to Irfan’s father who bought it in 1966 after a trip to China. Since his father had gone on to become a successful businessman, Irfan believed that the book would look better sitting on my bookshelf!

The book was initially inspired by History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a propaganda textbook that was widely published and distributed in the Soviet Union in the 1940s. It was largely based on the thoughts and theories of Soviet communist dictator, Joseph Stalin. It was also translated into Chinese and a copy of it had landed in the hands of Mao while he was leading communist forces in pre-Revolution China. Though the publication of the book was halted after Stalin’s death in 1953, it was kept in circulation in China by Mao.

The Little Red Book in turn inspired Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi to author his Green Book in 1975 in which he presented his theories on Islam and Socialism. Just as the Red Book had become compulsory reading in China (till 1976), Qaddafi’s book became compulsory reading in Libya. In fact it remained so till the fall of his regime in 2011.

In 1974 the PPP published Quotations of Chairman Bhutto, a book containing quotes of Z.A. Bhutto on democracy, socialism and Pakistani nationalism. I have this book too but I don’t think it would fetch 13,000 dollars today.

A colleague of mine advised me to put my copy of the Red Book for sale on eBay. I told him I found that to be a rather distasteful idea. But only until he emailed me a picture of a portrait of Mao nonchalantly hanging inside a McDonald’s restaurant in Beijing. Oh, well, in that case …

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 11th, 2016