Chinese Revolutionary Imaginaries and Political Identity in Servire il Popolo, 1968–1978

This thesis examines the Italian Maoist organization Unione dei Comunisti Italiani (marxisti-leninisti) (Union of Italian Communists [Marxist-Leninist]) and its later organizational forms between 1968 and 1978, especially the political experience widely known under the name of its organ newspaper Servire il Popolo (Serve the People), and analyzes how they used, translated, and reinterpreted the political language of the Chinese Revolution in order to construct their own political identity. This thesis does not treat Maoist China merely as a source of inspiration for the organization, but understands it as a core source of "externally sourced legitimacy": Mao Zedong Thought, the Cultural Revolution, anti-revisionism, and the mass line provided the organization with symbolic authority, political vocabulary, models of organizational discipline, and an ethical framework for revolutionary life. This thesis focuses on the transnational circulation and reception of the image of the Chinese Revolution in international relations. By analyzing organizational texts and historical developments, it mainly draws on Servire il Popolo and its successor publications, organizational political documents, internal materials, and relevant scholarship, in order to examine how this image was transformed by an Italian Maoist organization into political identity and organizational practice. The thesis first reconstructs how the Chinese revolutionary imaginary was translated into concrete political practice in the Italian context after 1968, entering fields such as factory struggles, the Southern question, youth mobilization, family life, sexual morality, organizational discipline, and party-building. Maoist China therefore did not remain merely an external reference, but was transformed into a basic framework through which the organization understood Italian reality, drew boundaries between enemies and friends, shaped member identity, and regulated everyday life. On this basis, the thesis further analyzes how changes in China's political and diplomatic line during the 1970s weakened this structure of legitimacy. The Lin Biao affair, Nixon's visit to China, Mao Zedong's death, the arrest of the "Gang of Four," and the post-Mao turn forced the organization and its later forms to repeatedly explain, defend, and eventually attempt to distance themselves from the Chinese revolutionary symbols on which they had originally depended. The thesis argues that the decline of Servire il Popolo was not mechanically determined by changes in Chinese politics, but resulted from the interaction between the shaking of an external revolutionary reference and the organization's internal leadership crisis, line struggles, exhaustion of resources, and insufficient mass base. Therefore, Servire il Popolo was not merely a kind of student political farce, as its critics mocked it. It should rather be understood as a small-scale transplanted realization, in the Italian context, of the official Maoist ideology and self-representation exported by China in the late 1960s. Precisely because it possessed real mobilizing capacity between 1968 and the first half of the 1970s, and precisely because its legitimacy depended heavily on and remained synchronized with this official Chinese image, a series of Chinese political changes represented by the Lin Biao affair in 1971 and Nixon's visit to China in 1972 triggered an interpretive crisis that it could not resolve. China shaped and accelerated its decline, but was not its only cause. Its failure should be understood within the broader picture of the overall ebbing of the Italian Extra-Parliamentary Left and the global decline of "Maoism as a revolutionary model." As a historical case, it reveals how transnational revolutionary imagination could generate both political mobilizing power and structural fragility.