Continuing my conversation with Professor Sean McMeekin, his new book, To Overthrow the World,

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism.

Karl Marx is a Prussian, a European.

Vladimir Lenin is a Russian, a European.

Mousie Dong is neither.

He is a man who comes from the peasant, pigtail-wearing Chinese, born in 1893, so much younger than the older revolutionary communists that we've been watching in Europe.

However, he is radicalized as a student, especially something called the May 4th of 1990, I believe,

in reaction to what was considered to be a sellout of China at the Versailles Treaty.

That is not his Marxism, however.

He comes to Marxist-Linism later on, reading the

Communist Manifesto, reading what he can of Marx. However, Professor, again, congratulations

for this. In reading the Europeans in their struggle with Marx when he was obtuse and when he was rhetorical,

Marx is a great writer.

He would have been successful in Hollywood for making up titles and easy ways to explain motion pictures.

However, I'm struck by the fact that Mautzy Tong and his followers were not Marxists.

What were they?

How did they regard Marx's writings that was supposed to be the genesis of their revolution?

Well, I think the key to understanding some of the differences of Marxism and later communism in Asia, is that in some ways it's

agglomerative, you're taking some of what you had in Europe already ideas about this kind

of binary struggle between oppressor and oppressed. But it's blended together with this very

sharp anti-imperialism, because of course this is a country which is not in Europe, a country

which had been prey to a lot of exploitation.

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