People's History of Ideas Podcast · Matthew Rothwell

How Brainwashing was Good and Maoist Propaganda was True: An Interview with leading China scholar Aminda Smith

March 7, 2026·58 min·3 clips

Clarence Adams said, “They didn’t brainwash me. They unbrainwashed me.”

1. People's History of Ideas Podcast episode 133 centers on Aminda Smith and the history of Maoism in the People's Republic of China. 2. The host introduces Dr. Aminda Smith, Associate Professor of Chinese History at Michigan State University, and her book Thought Reform and China's Dangerous Classes. 3. The episode asks why “good PRC history is left history” and how Maoist logics shaped Chinese revolutionary history. 4. Smith says historians should not assume Maoism was merely evil, cynical, or a facade for state power. 5. She argues that Maoism had its own internal logic, and that many people in the PRC tried to understand and apply it seriously. 6. Smith says the dominant specialist narrative has often treated Maoism as irrational, even when it inspired people around the world. 7. She describes an earlier generation of China scholars, activists, and historians who initially admired the PRC and later described disillusionment after visiting China. 8. Those scholars, according to Smith, sent graduate students into the archives with instructions to “go find the truth.” 9. Smith says her cohort read grassroots sources and produced histories that treated the project as real but unfinished rather than fake from the start. 10. She notes that some senior scholars welcomed this shift while others rejected it and dismissed younger historians as naïve. 11. Smith says papers that treated Maoist ideas seriously were often rejected, and she mentions nearly missing tenure because of publishing difficulties. 12. The host brings up Stephen Andors and China's Industrial Revolution as an example of a scholar who paid a professional cost for his views. 13. Smith says newer scholars have changed the field so that peer-reviewed work now has to engage Maoist logic at least a little. 14. She adds that a younger generation of graduate students is approaching socialist history with renewed curiosity rather than automatic dismissal. 15. Smith links these shifts to broader political climates, including McCarthyism, the post-Cold War moment, and recent harassment of scholars. 16. She says her own work on brainwashing starts with Korean War footage, Chinese-managed POW camps, and Edward Hunter’s claims. 17. Smith argues that treating Chinese thought reform as a joke helps erase the socialist challenge it posed to capitalist assumptions. 18. She also acknowledges that her earlier work did not sufficiently criticize incarceration and that she later reconsidered that issue. 19. The interview has a reflective, academic style, with detailed back-and-forth and examples drawn from archives, pamphlets, and oral histories. 20. Listeners interested in PRC history, Maoism, or archival debates will likely stay engaged, while readers wanting a brief anti-communist overview may skip it.

As heard by us

A thoughtful interview that makes thought reform and historical framing feel newly worth arguing about.

People's History of Ideas makes episode 133 feel like a real conversation instead of a polished lecture, and that works in its favor. Dr. Aminda Smith brings the kind of scholarly weight the host says listeners have been asking for, while the discussion stays centered on thought…

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Why you'd press play

You want a Chinese-history conversation that treats "brainwashing" as a historical question, not a slogan.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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