Getting an Education — Hitler, Stalin and Mao Today, Part II

Seeds of Fire Celebrates Forty Years

法日斯

 

In this chapter of Seeds of Fire: China Heritage Annual 2026 we continue our series on Hitler and Stalin Today, a lecture program devised and coordinated by Timothy D. Snyder, historian and author in 2016 of the book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, for The Munk School, University of Toronto.

On 4 July 2026, we marked the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence with Professor  Snyder whose work formed an earlier chapter of Contra Trump titled Twenty Lessons for a Nation Sleepwalking into Autocracy.

Hitler and Stalin Today is an open-access lecture series and we are reproducing it in four parts:

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Although the term ‘Leninism’ enjoys renewed currency among some international China watchers when they describe Xi Jinping’s brand of Marxist nationalism, when discussing the ideological underpinnings of post-1949 China, here at China Heritage we have long preferred the term ‘Stalino-Maoism’. It remains salient today.

Since 2019, we have also employed Professor Xu Zhangrun’s shorthand expression for the ideological matrix of the Xi Jinping era (2012-): ‘Legalistic-Fascist-Stalinism’ 法日斯 Fǎ-Rì-Sī. Xu observed that essentially Xi Jinping Thought is cobbled together from strains of traditional harsh Chinese Legalist thought (法 fǎ, or 中式法家思想), an admix of the Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist interpretation of Marxism (斯 sī, as in 斯大林主義) along with the Germano-Aryan form of fascism (日 rì, as in 日耳曼法西斯主義). (See Xu Zhangrun, Viral Alarm: When Fury Overcomes Fear.)

In 2022, the first chapter of Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium featured a discussion of the Stalino-Fascist-Maoist legacy in contemporary China. See We Need to Talk About Totalitarianism, Again. Since then, we have frequently returned to the topic, in particular in Contra Trump — America’s Empire of Tedium, a series devoted to the authoritarian turn in American politics and its resonances with Xi-era China.

In many respects, China is a mature fascist army-party-state. Taking into account its reformist decades and mercantilist strategy, we have also described it as a Semi-Feudal, Quasi-Capitalist Party-State.

We would suggest that the lecture series Hitler and Stalin Today could easily be expanded to include the living legacy of Mao Zedong, its global relevance and its looming threat. To that end, we will suggest readings drawn from China Heritage, which marks its tenth anniversary this year.

On 9 September 2026, the Chinese state will commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Mao’s death and, on 26 December, popular celebrations will mark Mao’s birthday. For a selection of our own lessons on Mao’s legacy, see:

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The rubric of this chapter in Seeds of Fire is 法日斯. It is also included in the two series Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium and Contra Trump.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
18 July 2026

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Related Material:

 

Hitler, Stalin & Us

Democracy is an attitude toward the future that demands a reckoning with the past.

In Hitler and Stalin Today, Timothy Snyder examines the Nazi and Soviet responses to the new globalized world they shared. The course begins with the colonial background that made totalitarianism possible, and which remains an essential element of our politics now. Their ideologies are described as worldviews and as practical politics, with an emphasis on the reasons for their appeal. Attention to their policies of mass killing, essential events of twentieth-century history, instruct us about how “it” can happen here. The study of dissident thought helps us to see connections between historical predicaments and our own, and instructs us about possible reactions as individuals and as citizens. The course asks what we have learned from the twentieth century, and what we should.

— Hitler and Stalin Today, The Munk School, University of Toronto

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Class 2: A World of Empire

Totalitarianism did not emerge from nowhere. It was a response to the world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and more particularly to the empires that Europeans had created during the previous four or five centuries. In order to understand the aims of Hitler and other fascists, of Lenin and Stalin, we must first understand the world in which they matured, one in which Europeans dominated others and applied law only to themselves. In some ways the fascists and the Leninists sought to break this world order, in that they wanted to transcend other empires; in some ways they took imperial practices to a radical extreme.

Readings:

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Class 3: What is Fascism?

Guest Lecturer: Marci Shore

For about twenty years fascism seemed like the future for millions of people. It was a way of appealing to the past that was mystical and inspiring; it was a way of seizing the future by taking technology and pushing it towards dreams of rapid military conquest. Fascism reacted to and in some ways admired Bolshevism: it borrowed the idea of the one-party state and of a revolution based not so much on interests and history as on will and conjuncture. Fascism was a way of seeing the world that denied reason—preferring conspiratorial thinking and the arbitrary choice of enemies—and so is hard to define precisely; but what cannot be denied is that this way of seeing the world is gaining followers now.

Readings:

  • Zeev Sternhell in Iordachi, ed., Comparative Fascist Studies, 2010, 53-59.
  • Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works, New York; Penguin, 2018, 57-92.
  • Corneliu Codreanu, “A Few Remarks on Democracy,” 1937.

[Note: See also Trump’s Inauguration — Can we call it fascism yet?]

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Class 4: What is Communism?

Communism was a lived reality for hundreds of millions of people in the twentieth century and remains a lived reality for many in the twenty-first century. It is based in an analysis of capitalism and a theory of history proposed by Karl Marx, which is the main subject of this lecture. Marx’s ideas were revised by Vladimir Lenin so as to allow the individual (or the party elite) much greater latitude to choose the timing and the place of revolution. Lenin’s very success in making a revolution in a country that Marx regarded as backward led to the Stalinist program of accelerated development and associated starvation and mass terror. That model was then copied in China and elsewhere.

Readings:

  • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848.
  • Vladimir Lenin, “What is to be done?” 1902.
  • Judt and Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, 2012, ix-xvii, 75-105.

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Source:

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史 shǐ, ‘to record, a person who makes a record, history’, in various hands