Politics & Power Quote by Lin Biao

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.