ABSTRACT
Mao Tse-tung's ideal was most closely approached during the Yenan period, while the civil war period saw a strong trend toward a more conventional "military line." In 1959, with the replacement of P'eng Te-huai as Minister of Defense by Lin Piao, Mao began his counterattack against "revisionism." "Maoism" has come to be identified with the radical rhetoric of the Red Guards and the official Chinese press during the Cultural Revolution. The standards and terminology of "Maoism" were legitimately rooted in the revolutionary experience, and were reiterated long and loud from 1965 to 1976. The spokesmen of radical "Maoism" during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution created a highly distorted version of Mao's earlier military and political thought. Mao himself encouraged this for tactical political reasons. The "Maoism" of the Cultural Revolution held a similarly radical opinion on the motivation of the individual soldier.
