ABSTRACT
Non-Chinese Maoists observed the advent of Deng to power in post-Maoist China with similar misgivings. In the United States, Charles Bettelheim saw Deng’s projected policies as an explicit repudiation not only of Maoism but of Marxism in general. In Canada, Michel Chossudovsky warned that the policies of Deng Xiaoping were not only anti-Maoist and “bourgeois” in essence but threatened a “restoration of capitalism” as well as a fallback to the policies of the reactionary Kuomintang. Before the passing of Mao Zedong, Maoists argued that the preoccupation with growth and technological development implied an infatuation with foreign industrial systems and generated an abiding admiration for “all things foreign” among the people of China. Deng Xiaoping clearly recognized substantial compatibilities between Mao’s “new democracy” of the 1940s and the anti-Marxist developmental convictions of Sun. The identification of Sun’s developmental nationalism with “protofascism” recalls, once again, the similarities shared by many reactive nationalisms in the twentieth century.
