"Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called the 'cities of the world', then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute 'the rural areas of the world'"
About this Quote
A chilling bit of geopolitical poetry: the world recast as a single nation where some regions get to be “cities” and everyone else is condemned to the countryside. Lin Biao’s metaphor isn’t just descriptive, it’s a power map. “City” signals capital, technology, culture, command. “Rural” suggests extraction, backwardness, and dependence. By shrinking continents into a familiar domestic hierarchy, he makes global inequality feel natural, almost inevitable - then invites revolt against it.
Context matters. Lin was a top Chinese Communist leader during the high Maoist era, when Beijing was trying to position itself as the authentic voice of anti-imperial struggle and, increasingly, as an alternative pole to both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. This framing dovetails with Maoist “people’s war” logic: the countryside encircles the city. Translate that to the Cold War and the message becomes tactical: the so-called periphery (Asia, Africa, Latin America) isn’t marginal; it’s the demographic and revolutionary majority that can surround and ultimately break the wealthy cores.
The subtext is also a pitch for leadership. If the “rural world” is the engine of history, then China - neither Western “city” nor colonized “village” in the old narrative - can claim to be the organizer of the countryside’s uprising. It’s solidarity language with a sharp edge: it flatters the Global South while quietly drafting it into a Maoist strategy, turning development gaps into a revolutionary timetable.
Context matters. Lin was a top Chinese Communist leader during the high Maoist era, when Beijing was trying to position itself as the authentic voice of anti-imperial struggle and, increasingly, as an alternative pole to both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. This framing dovetails with Maoist “people’s war” logic: the countryside encircles the city. Translate that to the Cold War and the message becomes tactical: the so-called periphery (Asia, Africa, Latin America) isn’t marginal; it’s the demographic and revolutionary majority that can surround and ultimately break the wealthy cores.
The subtext is also a pitch for leadership. If the “rural world” is the engine of history, then China - neither Western “city” nor colonized “village” in the old narrative - can claim to be the organizer of the countryside’s uprising. It’s solidarity language with a sharp edge: it flatters the Global South while quietly drafting it into a Maoist strategy, turning development gaps into a revolutionary timetable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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