ABSTRACT
Talk of China becoming the next global power broker is no longer considered outlandish, although the topic is hotly debated. Optimists suggest China will be socialized into the prevailing liberal world order, pointing to Xi Jinping’s (selective) embrace of globalization, as opposed to President Trump’s go-it-alone transactional approach. By way of evidence, they underscore that over the past two decades China resolved all its land-border disputes with the exception of India. Pessimists on the other hand usually point to the militarization of the South China Sea, and draw alarming comparisons between contemporary China and Germany on the eve of World War I. Against this backdrop, it is a little surprising that the great bulk of the academic literature on China and globalization before 2013 had been focussed on the latter’s impact on Chinese society. In other words, before the launch of the Belt-and-Road Initiative, much more had been written on how the West changed China than on how China changed the developed as well as developing world. For this reason, and many others, the publication of Julia Lovell’s Maoism:A Global History is an important milestone. In this chapter, I will aim to identify Lovell’s path-breaking contribution to the field of Chinese studies, the ways in which her book fills large gaps in our knowledge, as well as areas where lacunae in our knowledge remain.
