n132  2238  29 Oct 76
 
BC-BOOK REVIEW 2takes 1,000
(CULTURE)
By JOHN LEONARD
c.1976 N.Y. Times News Service
    WIND IN THE TOWER. Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Revolution
1949-1975, By Han Suyin. 404 pages. Little, Brown, $12.95.
 
    (UNDATED) - One reads the news from China as if one were
reading a science-fiction novel. It's another planet, an
entirely different ecology.
    What does it mean that Mao's widow, Chiang Ching, has been
arrested along with three ''leftist'' colleagues? Only a
few months ago the ''right1sts'' were supposed to be the
ones in trouble. Miss Chiang is accused of having gone to
the archives and ''tampered'' with Mao's directives, changing
a sentence that should have said ''Act according to the principles
in the past'' into a sentence that said ''Act according to
the principles laid down.'' We seem t, be talking abuqt the
fingernails 
r the bone splinters of a saint, rather tan
the worlds of a man.
    Han Suyin certainly pumps for sainthood. Dr. Han, born in
China in 1917 of a Belgian mother and a Chinese father, is
a novelist (''A Many-Splendored Thing,'' etc.), autobiographer
(''The Crippled Tree,'' etc.) and essayist (''Asia Today,''
etc.). She has been working on her biography of Mao for 20
years, visiting China every year, interviewing the principals.
Her first volume. ''The Morning Deluge; Mao Tse-tung and
the Chinese Revolution 1893-1954,'' was published in 1972.
''Wind in the Tower'' concludes that project.
    If this is the man warts and all, then he had no warts.
Dr. Han is much taken with the ''great vision and fire and
poetry, by the elemental strength which is Mao Tse-tung,''
and tends to gush: ''At 60, vigorous and vital, still the
same young Mao who at 33 had seen a tornado of peasant power
and peasant revolution, Mao walked the Chinese earth, felt
the great stir of new life, and encouraged it with all his
might.'' And: ''Like Antaeus, he touched the earth and was
strong again, vital with the spirit of his people.'' And;
''Mao's contribution to all mankind would that he opened
wide the doors to mass self-understanding and self-humanization.
Knowing mankind in its infancy, he did his share to catalyze
its maturity.''
    But ''Wind in the Tower'' reads for the most part like the
minutes of the Chinese revolution, edited down to 400 pages,
from the 12-year agricultural policy of 1949 to the Fourth
National People's Congress in 1975, with stops along the
way at ''thought remolding,'' communes, the Great Leap Forward,
the Sino-Soviet split, the Cultural Revolution, nuclear power,
Vietnam. Nixon's visit and a seat in the United Nations.
The pages bristle with bureaucratic details: the Three Criteria
and the Three Great Differences, the Four Olds and the Four
Cleanups, the Five Good Origins and the Five Bad Elements,
the First Ten Points and the Later Ten Points and the Ten
Great Relations and the 23 Articles and the 36 Stratagems,
not to mention the Su Fan movement, the Hu Feng clique, the
Wang Ming line, ''economism,'' ''commandism,'' ''rectification'
and the February Adverse Current.
    They also bristle with jargon and polemical abuse. Among
the many sins for which the 20th century will some day be
held accountable is what our politics has done to language.
Sampling at random from ''Wind in the Tower,'' I found: retrograde
individuals, capitalist-roaders, gangsters, hooligans, lackeys,
''freaks and monsters of the black line,'' the privileged
literocracy, rightist bureaucratism, petty bourgeois fanaticism,
parliamentary cretenism, recrudescent warlordism, dispersionism
and mountaintoppism, ''smash the dog's head,'' ''rebuff the
schismatics,'' and so on into the dreary night.
(MORE)
    
1030 0138aed
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n453  0525  25 Oct 76
Attention: Book editors; (Jack Hafferkamp is a Chicago Daily
News writer with a special interest in Chinese history and culture.)
By JACK HAFFERKAMP
(c) 1976, Chicago Daily News
(Transmitted Oct. 25)
    Wind In the Tower: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Revolution,
1949-1975, by Han Suyin (Little, Brown, $12.95).
    
Cold is the west wind,
    Far in the frosty air the
     wild geese call in the
     morning moonlight.
    In the morning moonlight
    The clatter of horses'
     hooves ring sharp,
    And the bugle's note is
     muted.
    Do not say that the strong
     pass is guarded with iron.
    This very day in one step
     we shall pass its summit,
    We shall pass its summit!
    There the hills are blue like
     the sea
    And the dying sun like
     blood
    - Mao Tse-tung, ''Nineteen Poems.'' 1958.
 
    Mao Tse-tung is dead.
    But what he wrought in China will live on to affect the entire
world. Admire his image or revile it. Mao was one of those rare
men in whom heroic vision and pragmatic power came together to
alter the course of history. The China he created is a force
for the world to reckon with.
    In basic terms, Mao inspired, pushed and led China from weakness,
crushing poverty, foreign domination and national humiliation
to a position of economic self-sufficiency and nuclear strength.
He gave the people of the world's most populous nation adequate
food and housing, a new sense of dignity and national purpose, and a
new social order. Mao revolutionized China. And that struggle to
remake the lot of one-quarter of mankind lasted virtually all
his life.
    In this country there is an unfortunate tendency to think of Mao
as an all-powerful, Stalin-like dictator who seized control of the
Chinese Revolution and ruled with an iron fist, crushing all those
who stood in his way. Yet if it is true that Mao could be ruthless
in pursuing his vision of a New China, it's also true that his
ability to remain at the top of the Chinese Communist Party
hierarchy for nearly 50 years largely was based on his moral
authority.
    Always Mao emphasized his trust in the people of China. He exhorted
them to take command of their own destiny. He told them they had
the right to defy orders from above that they knew were wrong. He
argued that struggle is good for revolution, because only through
struggle does the correct path emerge.
    Publication of Han Suyin's new political biography could not
have come at a more appropriate moment. It puts into perspective
the whole tumultuous period from the unification of China under
Mao's Red banner in 1949 through the end of 1975, when it was clear
that Mao's days were numbered.
jj    (more) 10-25
 
 
cd
...
(End missing.)
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