MAO AND CHINA: FROM REVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
by STANLEY KARNOW
592 pages. Viking. $15. One of the best-known characters of Chinese folklore is Monkey, who is
forever running amuck and terrorizing celestial Establishment figures
like the Jade Emperor. As Stanley Karnow notes in his account of the
Cultural Revolution, Monkey also happens to be one of Mao Tse-tung's
favorite characters. He has even likened himself to Monkey in a poem,
wielding the great cudgel of “class struggle” against his enemies and
history. Viewing Mao as a latter-day Monkey may be the only way to make sense out
of the Cultural Revolution. Six years after it began, five years after
it peaked, the largest civil disorder of modern times remains largely
mysterious. Yet, amazingly, there was a continuous stream of
information flowing out of China during those years of turmoil. From
regional radio broadcasts, newspaper stories, wall posters, speeches,
government documents, refugee tales and many other sources came a
provocative mixture of facts, accusations, propaganda, rumors and
half-truths. As a correspondent stationed in Hong Kong , Karnow monitored enough of this
material to be able to see it for what it really was—the first
approximation of a free press ever known in Communist China. His idea,
brilliantly carried out, was to sort the mess into reliable narrative
history. Karnow considers the Cultural Revolution a culmination of the long
conflict between Mao's romantic dream of permanent revolution and the
Chinese people's natural drift toward realism. Repeatedly, whenever Mao
sensed that the bureaucrats seemed to be taking over, he forced a
return to basic revolutionary principles, often at chaotic cost to the
country. He skirmished with intellectuals, with army professionals who
thought that modern weapons were more important than revolutionary
lan, with economic planners who thought the Great Leap Forward to
instant industrialization was dangerous nonsense . In the early 1960s, an aging Mao had grown increasingly isolated and
possibly ill. He could see that the people were bemused by economic
improvement and that the entrenched party structure was uninterested in
risking itself for anybody's dream. This must have infuriated him. “To
expose our dark aspect openly,” as he later put it, Mao launched the
Cultural Revolution by appealing to China's students, the one group
eager for a call to arms. Mao's support had a narrow base. His Cultural Revolution directorate
included only his private secretary, his wife, his former bodyguard and few
others of note. What really counted, as always, was his godlike status. He
took pains to enhance it with Little Red Books, parades and ritual. This
worked so well that when Mao was forced to take the desperate step of
calling out the troops, he could still pretend that the country was well on
the way to a Communist Utopia.
