> Mao was also Chinese, and therefore exotic. It's an
> Orientalism thing.
>
> --- Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> Western left wing intellectuals like him (Mao) for the
>> same
>> reason as Western disgruntled working class youth
>> likes the Nazis - he has a shock value that pisses
>> off
>> parents, teachers and authority figures.
============================== It was mostly an anticapitalist thing.
I wasn't a Maoist, but could understand why the Chinese Revolution had the same widespread appeal for my generation as the Russian had for the preceding one.
These revolutions moved hundreds of millions of hopeful, courageous, often hungry but not always critical-minded people worldwide. Intellectuals in the West and elsewhere mostly identified with them for good and sound reasons. In both cases - and certainly in their immediate aftermath, during their "heroic phase" - they brought social justice, honest government, land reform, advances in social welfare and the cultural level of the people, and national sovereignty. China's impressive growth today owes much to the reforms introduced into the country after 1949.
It's simplistic and insulting to say that the intellectuals who supported these historic revolutions were mostly motivated by the desire to shock and, in China's case, also by romantic racial stereotyping. You'll recognize these as the typical criticisms of right-wingers who feared and never tried to understand these revolutions in all their complexity - including the reasons why so many bright and serious people found them so attractive - and I've come to expect better from you both.