Gonzalo in the Middle Kingdom: What Abimael Guzmán Tells Us in His Three Discussions of His Two Trips to China PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF IDEAS PODCAST

While thousands of Latin Americans traveled to China during the Mao years (1949-1976) to learn from the experience of the Chinese Revolution, only Abimael Guzmán went on to lead a Maoist people’s war in his home country. Chinese records on Guzmán’s time in China are closed, but Gu zmán has on three occasions talked in some detail or written about his experiences in China. This paper closely examines what Guzmán has said and written in order to better understand this pivotal time in the development of one of the most important figures in twentieth century Peruvian history.


The Texts
There are three texts in which Guzmán gives details about his time in China. None are lengthy, but each one tells a little something different about his China experience. The first, and best known, text is the interview that Guzmán gave to El Diario editors Janet Talavera Sánchez and Luis Arce Borja.
Talavera and Arce were sympathetic to the Shining Path, and the interview which they conducted with Guzmán in July 1988, toward the end of the Shining Path's first party congress, was billed as the "Interview of the Century," and did not feature any critical back and forth between the participants.
It was the only interview given by Guzmán before his capture, and was an opportunity for the mysterious leader of the ascendant Shining Path to expound on a wide range of political and ideological themes, as well as to give some brief personal autobiographical details. One question concerned Guzmán's time in China and whether he had met Mao, and the 538-word answer that Guzmán gave was all we had for many years on his time in China.
The next text to become available where Guzmán discussed his time in China came as part of a series of interviews which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) conducted with Guzmán and Elena Yparraguirre1 Revoredo between April 2002and April 2003. In the May 28, 2002 interview Guzmán was questioned on his personal and political development, and in the course of the interview more details came out on his time in China. While these interviews were never published, they have been available for use by researchers since the mid-2000s. Guzmán's participation in the CVR interviews was somewhat reluctant, and this needs to be kept in mind when reading this text.
Some members of the CVR were long-time political opponents of Guzmán, dating back to well before the war, and the Peruvian truth and reconciliation process is notable internationally for excluding one of the major protagonists in the war (the Shining Path) from its deliberations and organized process, except as interview subjects.2 The third and final account of Guzmán's time is in the book Memorias desde Némesis, which recounts Guzmán's life until the eve of the war.3 Both Guzmán and Yparraguirre are given as coauthors, but the book is written as an autobiographical account by Guzmán. The manuscript was prepared in the mid-1990s by Guzmán (and, presumably, Yparraguirre), but had to be smuggled out of prison during court dates and was released on the internet only in 2014. Editions were then published in France, Mexico, Argentina and perhaps elsewhere. The date of October 12, 1996 is given at the end of the book, presumably as the date the manuscript was completed. However, the Mexican edition of the book contains a prologue by Elena Yparraguirre which gives 1994 as the year when the manuscript was prepared (10). This text is almost certainly meant as Guzmán's official version of his life, written both for posterity and as ideological guidance for his followers.
A modified version of Guzmán's interview with El Diario has achieved wide circulation, and so should be mentioned here. Apparently unsatisfied with the level of detail which Guzmán gave in the El Diario interview, in the book La cuarta espada: La historia de Abimael Guzmán y Sendero Luminoso, Santiago Roncagliolo added a number of details to Guzmán's account. In addition to being pure fabrications, they change the overall meaning of what Guzmán conveyed in his answer. In the interview, Guzmán remarked on how during his military training course in Nanjing, at the end of the class the instructor demonstrated how anything could be made to explode: "we picked up a pen and it blew up, and when we took a seat, it blew up, too (79)."4 Guzmán's takeaway from this was to keep in mind "what the masses can do, they have inexhaustible ingenuity." In other words, while the passage can be seen as representing a fascination with explosions and violence, Guzmán ends the anecdote by discussing how the Chinese instructor told the class that making odd things explode was a form of ingenuity that the masses of Chinese people came up with during the long course of the Chinese Revolution.5 When Roncagliolo changes and adds to this quotation, he makes the instructor say that anything can be a weapon. Not only can pens explode, as in Guzmán's actual anecdote, but they can be used to stab people, trees can be used as swords, and so on. What comes across is more a sense of animal brutality rather than ingenuity in making odd things blow up (70-71). Roncagliolo's book lacks citations, but comparing the text of the original interview with El Diario with Roncagliolo's account allows one to see what he took of the original and where he decided to invent new words. While La cuarta espada has been widely read, its scholarly pretensions are minimal. Sadly, the account in La cuarta espada has been imported wholesale into the recent English language popular history of the Shining Path by Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna, The Shining Path: Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes.
They even name their second chapter, which deals with Guzmán's time in China, "A Tree Can Be a Weapon," mistaking Roncagliolo's invention for Guzmán's actual words (46). As is often the case with the Shining Path, scholars are advised to take accounts by sensationalist writers with a grain of salt and go back to original sources, especially when those sources are well-known and easily available.
In addition to Guzmán's own accounts of his time in China, it is likely that at some future point in time a whole other set of sources will become available, based on Chinese archives. A few years ago, Patricia Castro Obando, a Peruvian professor at Beijing University, found a document in the Beijing University archives relating to Guzmán's time in China. After requesting the document from the librarian, it was moved to an inaccessible archive, presumably the closed party archive where other records of this nature are held. While Chinese archives dealing with foreign communists who trained in China are totally inaccessible for the foreseeable future, at some point in the future they will probably become available, and when that happens we will probably learn a lot more.6 Finally, in addition to the three sources on Guzmán's time in China enumerated above, a lot can be inferred about his experience from the memoirs of other China travelers who had similar experiences. Despite the relative brevity of Guzmán's own accounts, we know that his experience in China, particularly during his longer stay when he received formal training in politics and military affairs, was shared by thousands of other revolutionaries from around the world (mainly, but not solely, from the Global South). The coincidence in the accounts of many of these other China travelers allows us to make relatively solid assumptions about Guzmán's own experience.

The 1965 Trip
According to both the CVR interview and Memorias desde Némesis, Guzmán was in China from February until July in 1965, with July 22 being given in Memorias as the precise date of his return to Lima's airport (the El Diario interview gives no dates at all for Guzmán's time in China) (Guzmán and Yparraguirre, CVR 17-18;Guzmán and Yparraguirre, Memorias 82-85 [2014]).7 There are two possible sources of confusion on these dates which should be dispensed with. In the CVR interview, while discussing some details of his 1965 trip, Guzmán suddenly states that "in October I had occasion to learn some things in China."8 Given the dates that Guzmán clarifies for the 1965 trip a little later in the interview, and which he also repeated in Memorias, I believe that Guzmán either slipped into mentioning something from his 1967 trip here, or that he made an error. It is also possible that the transcript is incorrect. The recording which the transcript was made from is terrible, and errors have been found in some of the CVR transcripts of other interviews (the high quality in general of the CVR transcripts is remarkable, given the poor quality of the recordings). A second possible source of confusion on the dates of Guzmán's 1965 China trip comes from the widely read book La guerra senderista: Hablan los enemigos. In this book the author, Antonio Zapata, writes "According to his memoirs, Guzmán returned quickly and directly to Peru in December 1965."9 When one looks up Zapata's citation of Guzmán's Memorias, one can see that Zapata made a mistake (Ch. 1).10 Each of the three texts identifies three aspects of Guzmán's 1965  In China I had the chance, which I would like for many others to have, to be in a school where politics came first, from international questions to Marxist philosophy, they were masterful lessons given by proven and highly competent revolutionaries, great teachers. Among them I can remember the teacher who taught us open and secret work, a man who had dedicated his life to the Party, absolutely to it, a man of many years, a living example, an extraordinary teacher; he taught us many things, he wanted to teach us more but some of us did not want him to, in short, there is everything in life.11 In the interview with the CVR, Guzmán only said: "I went to a cadre school, a school that had two parts, the first was political, it began with the study of the international situation and ended with Marxist philosophy, there were several courses."12 In Memorias, Guzmán gave a bit more detail: Eight of us came together in the cadre school on that occasion: three from the Confederación Campesina del Perú, very close with Paredes, three from the Regional del Norte, one from Cuzco, a follower of Sotomayor, and me; among them three members of the Central Committee, one of whom led the delegation (a militant from the north of the country). In the school in Beijing, and in the following order, we studied: international situation, centered on the struggle against revisionism and on proletarian internationalism; general political line, the laws and experiences of the democratic revolution in China; peasant work, the antifeudal struggle for the land developed by the peasantry, principal force of the revolution; United front, the union of the proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie based on the worker-peasant alliance led by the proletariat; Party-building, fundamental problems and principles of Party-building based on the correct political and ideological line; secret work and open work, principles and experiences of clandestinity in party organization and mass work; mass line, the masses make history and how to mobilize them with consciousness and willingness, learning from them and serving the people with a whole heart; philosophy, starting with contradiction as the only fundamental law of politics for solving the problems of the class struggle, of the Party and the revolution. Eight masterful courses on the extraordinary and inexhaustible experience of the Chinese Revolution led by the Communist Party of China, product of the fusion of Marxism-Leninism with its concrete reality, as well as, mainly, source and application of Mao Zedong Thought, according to the term used in the Sixties.13 The excerpt from Memorias gives us the subjects of the eight classes. But the question remains, how were they taught? These are potentially very expansive subjects, and could be taught a number of different ways and might use any number of sources. But, these courses were also standardized, so it is reasonable to infer that the description given by someone else who took these classes would at least roughly correspond to how they were taught when Guzmán attended the course. José Sotomayor Pérez, one of the two leaders of the pro-Chinese faction which met with Mao in December 1963 and got the go ahead to form a separate pro-Chinese Communist Party in Peru, had attended a similar course in 1959. In his description, the classes were conducted in the following manner: The courses covered questions dealt with at length in the works of Mao Zedong and the works of the Chinese leaders: the united front, the peasant question, the mass line, the armed struggle in the Chinese Revolution, the Chinese party in conditions of clandestinity and while legalized, the struggles inside the party, Mao Zedong's philosophical thought. The speakers made a detailed exposition of each of these topics, in two or more sessions, and finally gave an account of books and pamphlets which should be consulted. All, absolutely all, were works by  Given the list of topics covered, it seems likely that Sotomayor's course was almost exactly the same as Guzmán's. If Guzmán's experience was similar to Sotomayor's, then each class consisted of at least two lectures per subject, followed by an orientation on how the topic is dealt with in Mao Zedong's works. Based on the quote that we took from Guzmán's interview with El Diario ("Among them I can remember the teacher who taught us open and secret work, a man who had dedicated his life to the Party, absolutely to it, a man of many years, a living example, an extraordinary teacher"), there was probably a separate instructor for each topic. The courses were arranged by the Chinese Communist Party's International Liaison Department, whose records have remained so secret that even the location of its offices during the 1950s to 1970s is still an official secret (Lovell 13). Therefore, it is no surprise that the identity of the instructors of these classes has also remained secret. If each of the eight topics was covered in "two or more sessions," it seems unlikely that the period spent on political training was more than a month, unless other activities like political meetings and tourism were held between sessions. It is also possible that there was downtime between sessions if the teachers were in demand to teach other groups of foreign revolutionaries, or if they had other party tasks to attend to.
This raises the additional question: were these classes given to the Peruvian comrades alone, to groups of Spanish-speaking communists, or to larger groups of political trainees who each had separate translation staff on hand for translation into their own languages? In 1959, Sotomayor's classes at least included some Ecuadorians, because he mentions a request by the Peruvians and Ecuadorians in attendance that the seminar cover the issue of minority nationalities in China.14 But, in 1959 a large number of Latin American communist leaders were brought to China in the hopes that they might be won over to China's side in the escalating Sino-Soviet split, and so they were kept together as a group (Sotomayor, Leninismo 47-48; Sotomayor, Revolución cultural 71). When Guzmán attended his training classes in 1965, it is possible that the Peruvians were kept compartmentalized from others training in China for security purposes. That certainly happened at times, and was probably the norm. For example, Julia Lovell tells the story of Juan (not her informant's real name), who spent two and a half months in Nanjing alone with only his interpreter and eight teachers during his guerrilla training course (310-311). An important difference between Juan and the eight Peruvians in Guzmán's group was that Juan was being trained to go back to his home country and start recruiting for a new group of his own, while the Peruvian Maoists already belonged to a party which had fraternal ties with the Chinese and other parties, and so it might not have been appropriate for the Chinese party to exercise the degree of control over them that it did over Juan. Reflecting on its own negative experience with the Soviet Party, the Chinese Communist Party insisted that fraternal parties treat each other as equals. While clearly this may have been difficult to achieve in practice when the Chinese party was after all giving lessons in politics and war to cadres from fraternal parties, the extent to which this was actually the case surprised many Latin Americans who had felt belittled in the Soviet Union (see, for example, Peralva 24-25).
There were large numbers of foreigners passing through Beijing and Nanjing in 1965.15 And it's tempting to think of Guzmán sharing a classroom with a cohort of other radicals, such as Pol Pot or the Zimbabwean revolutionary Josiah Tongogara, who were also in China receiving training at the same time (Lovell 4). Based on a wide range of interviews on this subject with Latin Americans and others who were in China during the Mao years, what seems most likely is that, for security purposes, Guzmán's group of eight Peruvians were kept separate from others for their training courses, but perhaps did come together with others during events, such as banquets, which were often held for foreigners and where a large number of people who were visiting China for different periods of time and for varying purposes might gather for an evening. The travel literature is replete with descriptions of such banquets.
One issue to consider about the quality of the small group experience of Guzmán's delegation is whether the separation of different revolutionary visitors to China had more to do with security for the visitors or with Chinese efforts to exercise control over the visitors. While concern over visitors' security is not incompatible with attempts to control visitors, the two concerns do stem from different motivations and have different aims in mind. There is a tendency in the literature on foreigners in Maoist China to emphasize efforts at control of foreigners.16 This tendency dovetails with popular prejudices which assume communist dishonesty. And while some degree of 'control,' or 'management,'17 was certainly involved, security was definitely a major issue. Eduardo Ayllón, who worked on Radio Peking broadcasts to Latin America during the 1970s, describes security as the main issue at the base of restrictions on foreigners in China at the time (Ayllón). After all, many foreigners who went to China could get in serious trouble just for having been to China. And in the case of those being trained in guerrilla warfare, the risks were all the greater. If the cadre training courses were large, then any graduate who turned informant or who was captured and broke under questioning could undermine insurgent forces not only in their own country, but in others as well.
We can infer something about the quality of relations among the eight Peruvians thrown together in the delegation that Guzmán participated in from the El Diario interview and from Memorias.
In the El Diario interview, Guzmán complains in the quote given above that while the teacher who gave the lessons on the relationship between clandestine and open political work wanted to teach the Peruvian delegation more, there were others in the group who thought they had learned enough on this topic. Elsewhere in the interview, when asked if he had met Mao while in China, Guzmán responded: "I repeat that I was not lucky enough to meet him; the delegation that I was in made many mistakes and acted with presumptuousness and arrogance, I think that determined that we were not granted that privilege."18 Meeting Mao was not a particularly uncommon privilege for foreign communist delegations in China, and meeting other well-known leaders such as Zhou Enlai or Zhu De was even more common. These meetings were meant to generate good will among and also to give political capital to pro-Chinese foreigners. The fact that Guzmán's group did not have such a meeting may just have been due to scheduling difficulties or due to some other trivial matter, but such meetings were common enough that Guzmán's assessment that the Peruvians were denied a meeting with Mao due to squabbling among themselves (and possibly with their Chinese hosts) cannot be dismissed. At the beginning of the extended quote from Memorias above, Guzmán identified the members of the delegation as belonging to four different factions of the PCP-Bandera Roja ("Eight of us came together in the cadre school on that occasion: three from the Confederación Campesina del Perú, very close with Paredes, three from the Regional del Norte, one from Cuzco, a follower of Sotomayor, and me"). Soon after the delegation returned to Peru, in November 1965, Sotomayor and his followers would leave PCP-Bandera Roja to form PCP-Marxista-Leninista, mainly over issues of how to analyze the nature of Peruvian society and the strategic issues which ensued from differing definitions. For example, among other doctrinal differences that developed, Sotomayor saw President Belaúnde as representing the 'national bourgeoisie,' and thus representing forces which could be allied with in fighting imperialist domination of Peru, while the Bandera Roja majority saw Belaúnde as representing the big bourgeoisie aligned with imperialism, making him an enemy of the revolution.
Over the next few years, the northerners would leave with the formation of the PCP-Patria Roja, and finally Guzmán and his followers would leave Paredes's Bandera Roja to form Sendero Luminoso.
Based on the disputatious future ahead for the four factions represented by the eight people in the delegation, one can imagine that there may have been quite a bit of squabbling among them. That Guzmán was still complaining about it decades later makes one think that the Peruvian comrades may have been quite unpleasant company for each other.
The cadre training course continued in Nanjing with lessons in military affairs. In Memorias, Guzmán gives a list of classes taken in Nanjing, just as he did for the political classes taken in Beijing: We attended the military school in Nanjing: people's war, fundamentally its part corresponding to the development of the war on the path of encircling the cities from the countryside; army building, training, structuring and preparing the new type of army to fulfill the political tasks of the Party and the revolution; strategy and tactics, war in its totality according to the stages of its development, its modalities, tactics and forms of combat, especially ambushes and assaults. Three equally masterful courses with their pertinent and indispensable practices; concentrated expression of the experience of the Chinese Revolution, in its main form of struggle, raised by Chairman Mao to the military line of the proletariat.19 It is noteworthy that in this passage Guzmán emphasizes essentially theoretical aspects of warfare: the Maoist theory of protracted people's war; the methods of building up an armed revolutionary force; and concrete issues of formulating strategy and tactics. In the El Diario interview, the emphasis is somewhat different. Here Guzmán says: Then they taught us military questions, but it also started with politics, people's war, then construction of the armed forces and strategy and tactics; and the practical part having to do with ambushes, assaults, troop movement, as well as preparing demolition devices. When we handled very delicate chemical elements, they recommended us to keep ideology in mind at all times and that it would make us capable of doing everything and doing it well; and we learned how to make our first demolition charges.20 This passage, particularly when combined with the anecdote which follows and which was quoted earlier in this article regarding how unexpected items were made to explode at the end of the course, places much more emphasis on learning about chemicals and explosives, even though it does reaffirm the importance of the political and ideological aspects of military affairs. Perhaps in 1988 Guzmán was more concerned with signaling his ability to manage practical military affairs (despite his bookish image even at the time), while once in prison he was more concerned to emphasize theoretical leadership and to distance himself from the day-to-day aspects of the armed struggle. Indeed, Guzmán has been careful to disavow personal responsibility for ordering particular military attacks since his arrest.
Regardless of the degree to which bomb-making techniques and other applied aspects of guerrilla warfare were taught in the military part of the cadre training course, there is no evidence that Sendero Luminoso applied any bomb-making techniques that could not easily have been learned in Peru itself, and it is hard to imagine Guzmán, ever the quintessential ideologue, as being the best guide in the most practical aspects of guerrilla warfare. However, there is at least one document from the Shining Path that does connect the tactical aspects of guerrilla warfare applied by the group to Chinese military training. Presumably in order to help train the growing number of guerrilla squads which the Shining Path was forming at the time, in March 1983 the Shining Path's Ediciones Voz Popular issued Documentos de información, which discusses basic practical issues concerning the armed struggle, such as bomb making and the formation of small armed squads and the coordination of tasks in those squads.
This document advocates using the tactic of "four groups and a squad," whereby an armed squad is divided into four different groups with different responsibilities in carrying off an attack: "shock," "fire," "aid," and "escape." The document attributes this method of organizing armed groups to Lin Biao, a leading figure first in Mao's Eighth Route Army and later during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. It seems highly likely that at least the method of organizing guerrilla squads discussed in this document came from the training course in China, although whether Guzmán brought this method back to Peru with him or another Shining Path leader who trained in China is responsible, it is impossible to say without more evidence.
Aside from the political and military cadre training, the other major programmed activity that also claimed that China delivered weapons to the MIR, but it seems more likely that money was delivered that was used to buy weapons (Toledo 149-154; Brown 319). However, the MIR operated on such a tiny budget that if it did receive millions of dollars as the CIA claimed, then it misused the money in a spectacular fashion. More likely, much smaller sums of money were involved, as the CIA is well-known for overestimating and even fabricating claims of foreign aid to Latin American guerrilla groups.
When the MIR armed struggle broke out, Guzmán and the two other Peruvian central committee members present in China with him met with Chinese leaders about the armed struggle.
The MIR was not a Maoist organization, and was politically much closer to Guevara's focoist ideas than to Maoism. The standard Maoist critique of focoism is that it attempts to replace mass struggle with the struggle of a small band of heroic fighters, and that it places military affairs above political affairs. If Maoists argue that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," what follows from the famous Mao quote is that "the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party (Mao 552)." Guzmán reports in Memorias that in this meeting he weighed in on the MIR saying that "such a guerrilla movement would not prosper because it had no mass base."23 In any case, the question of further Chinese support for the MIR, or of PCP collaboration with the MIR, would soon be a moot point, as the MIR was crushed militarily within a few months.

The Second Trip
Ascertaining the dates of Guzmán's second trip to China presents certain problems. Guzmán gives contradictory dates for the second trip in the CVR interview and in Memorias. However, he also discusses the trip in Memorias in relation to another event in a way that calls into question his memory of when he traveled. In the CVR interview, Guzmán says that he was in China for "about two months, maybe August and September, but I wasn't there for the anniversary, for October."24 In Memorias, Guzmán writes that "my second trip to China was in October 1967"25 and that "I left Beijing on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution."26 The October Revolution refers to the Russian Revolution of October 1917, which actually occurred on November 7, because at the time of the revolution Russia was using the Julian calendar, which is 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar which most of the world uses. During the CVR interview, it is clear that Guzmán remembered leaving before an October anniversary, but he seems to have been confused about which anniversary he missed. The People's Republic of China celebrates its founding (National Day) on October 1. Based only on these two statements, it would appear that Guzmán had probably been in China from early October to early November 1967. However, in Memorias Guzmán gives a detailed account of attending the Albanian Party of Labor's Fifth Congress in Tirana before returning to Peru and then being swiftly dispatched to China. The problem is that the Fifth Congress of the Albanian Party of Labor (this is what the ruling communist party's formal name was in Albania) took place from November 1 to 8,1966. Given the lucidity of his description of events during the congress in Albania, it seems most likely to me that Guzmán went to China at the end of 1966, not in 1967, and that his memory of missing the anniversary of the October Revolution is because he arrived not long after the anniversary, not because he left just before the anniversary. Additionally, in the El Diario interview, Guzmán says that he arrived in China "when the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution started,"27 which would be a more accurate statement for 1966 than 1967. Given these discrepancies, I think we can safely say that Guzmán went to China for a month or two between November 1966 and November 1967, but that beyond this approximation it is very hard to be certain without more sources coming to light which don't rely on Guzmán's memory.
The purpose of Guzmán's second trip to China was to deal with party business, but the effect was to expose Guzmán to the Cultural Revolution, with dramatic results for Peruvian history. In both the CVR interview and in Memorias, Guzmán reports that he was sent to China to check on why the Chinese Communist Party had cut off its monetary subvention of the Peruvian party (CVR 26;Memorias 192 [2014]). Guzmán was informed by the Chinese party that: Chairman Mao has argued, I was informed, that it is wrong to continue providing economic aid in this way, it is a revisionist form that does not serve the revolution but, on the contrary, damages it; the main form of support is to make and develop the revolution; and that each revolution must be supported by its own efforts, among the masses, thus maintaining itself will maintain self-determination and political independence. That would be the policy that the CCP would follow on this point, from now on.28 While this is undoubtedly what the Chinese Communists told Guzmán, it is not the whole story. The Chinese Communist Party did continue giving monetary support to some revolutionary groups around the world during this time period, even as it encouraged others to stand more fully on their own feet and to be more independent by developing and relying on a mass base in their own countries.
In particular, the Chinese Communist Party seems to have cut off money and encouraged selfreliance in response to sectarian, dishonest or careerist behavior among its foreign supporters. As Paredes, as well as positions and expositions that they had given in various visits to China, and I was asked about their veracity. I responded by providing evidence and analyzing realities. In summary, the Party's strength and capacity had been inflated, as well as its influence on the masses and the possibility of generating, at any moment, a great peasant uprising supported by partisan armed forces. A total and complete lie. I think the Chinese comrades simply confirmed the suspicions they already had; they underlined the responsibility of the leaders and the tasks of the communists, they ended by reflecting on the complexities, difficulties and risks that the Communist Party of Peru was entering into.29 What thoughts the Chinese Communist Party's International Liaison cadres had of the PCP-BR Maoists one can only guess, as here the group's Organization Secretary (Guzmán) told them that the General Secretary (Paredes) and others had vastly inflated the group's influence and the possibility of an imminent mass uprising in Peru. One doesn't wonder that the CCP decided that the PCP-BR was a bad investment, at least for the time being. Many other pro-China organizations had their funding cut off around the same time, so in no way was the PCP-BR particularly singled out when it was told that it needed to rely on its own resources, and that this ultimately would make it a stronger organization. But, to reiterate, Guzmán's perception that every pro-Chinese foreign group had its funding cut off at this time is not accurate. In the CVR interview, the first concrete thing that Guzmán mentions about the second trip is "we had a chance to go to a book purification, I remember a famous writer, Mao Dun."31 It is odd that this was what came first to Guzmán's mind during the interview. Mao Dun was an internationally celebrated writer who had participated in the 1919 May 4th movement, and had served as Minister of Culture until 1965. Like many formerly celebrated progressive writers, his works were attacked as rightist during part of the Cultural Revolution. That Guzmán highlighted his witnessing the destruction of the books is telling. In the propaganda materials of international Maoism, such events are treated more as embarrassing excesses, not as central themes, of the Cultural Revolution. But here, Guzmán is saying that this event impressed him deeply, and that it informed his own political practice.
In another passage from the CVR interview, Guzmán states that the high level of mass mobilization during the Cultural Revolution also had a major impact on him: "The marches were different, very profound changes, in all fields. Of course, much bigger political changes. When I was there, I was in the same center, with military protection. When I was there in '65 it was conventual, silent; '67 ... '67 was thunderous, at certain times of the day, marches."32 What was it exactly about this that impacted Guzmán? Was it the military pomp and coordination of the marches, which the world would later see on display in the disciplined cultural productions of Shining Path prisoners? Was it the sense that a socialist society could draw masses of people into political action in order to continue revolutionizing the society, rather than degenerate into a bureaucratic morass? It is hard to say exactly, but whatever it was, people who knew Guzmán remarked that he came back to Peru after his second visit a changed man, energized and on a mission, imbued with a new sense of possibility (Coronel;

Tapia 4).
There is one intriguing comment that Guzmán made during the CVR interview regarding the second trip to China which concerns a major change in the quality of his interactions with his Chinese hosts: "things that impressed me, profound changes, from the way in which foreigners were received before and during the Cultural Revolution."33 Unfortunately, Guzmán does not say what these changes were. What we do know, though, is that on his first trip he was part of a delegation that was being trained and shown around China, and that the infighting within this delegation, and whatever else was meant by 'necias petulancias' (translated as 'presumptuousness and arrogance' in the discussion above), were apparent to his Chinese hosts. Here, Guzmán was in China as the representative of a fraternal party, and at least by his own account he engaged in comradely and confidential exchanges This passage confirms that Guzmán saw himself as learning from the Red Guards, but sadly tells us nothing new about the content of that learning. In passages like this the most remarkable thing is how stereotyped language can be used to say so little with so many words.

It is not surprising that Cuba would have been a topic of conversation between Latin American
Maoists and Chinese Communists, but given the inaccessibility of Chinese archives, Guzmán's confirmation that such conversations did take place is significant. One only wishes he were more forthcoming about the content of the "extraordinary presentations" that he received on the topic.

Conclusion
One final remarkable aspect of Guzmán's time in China is just how unremarkable it was. Thousands of other revolutionaries were hosted in China and trained by the Chinese Communist Party. Many of them spent more time there, and enjoyed greater access to the great figures of the Chinese Revolution, including Mao himself. It was China's goal that many more of them would go back to their home countries and do precisely what Guzmán did. But in Latin America, he was the only one who led a major revolutionary effort. Others, such as Florencio Medrano in Mexico and Oscar Zamora in Bolivia, tried to start a Maoist people's war and either died or capitulated long before they could gain the traction that Shining Path achieved within months of beginning its armed struggle (Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries). When looked at through a comparative lens, Guzmán was the most successful of the many Latin American graduates of China's training programs.