Maoism, the Great Leap Forward and the Sino-Soviet Split

One of the Khmer Rouge's central slogans called for a 'super great leap forward'. The original had killed somewhere in the order of forty-five million Chinese people less than two decades earlier, and the Cambodians knew that. They intended to do it faster.

Time Period Covered: 1949 to 1962

Why was one of the most prominent slogans of the Khmer Rouge about a 'super great leap forward'? What is Maoism, and why did the People's Republic of China provide a new ideological source for the world? Why did the USSR and the PRC split in the 1960s?

This episode could be considered the third instalment in the history of communist ideology in the series. Lachlan discusses the Chinese Civil War, the People's Republic of China, Mao, Maoism, and the circumstances surrounding the Great Leap Forward and its terrible consequences. The Chinese communists will provide the Khmer Rouge not only with material and economic aid once they come to power, but also with an ideological framework, a program, that the Cambodians will seek to recapitulate. This is an explanation of that program, as well as another hugely important factor in the coming chaos in Indochina: the ideological schism between the USSR and the PRC known as the Sino-Soviet Split.

Sources

Philip Short Mao
Julia Lovell Maoism: A Global History
Richard Baum The Fall and Rise of China
Frank Dikotter Mao's Great Famine