Volume 30, Number 21 & 22 · January 19, 1984
Utopian Fevers
By John K. Fairbank
The Origins of the Cultural Revolution Vol 2: The Great Leap Forward, 1958-1960
by Roderick MacFarquhar
Columbia University Press, 470 pp., $35.00
One Billion: A China Chronicle
by Jay Mathews, by Linda Mathews
Random House, 353 pp., $17.95
The heart of China's twentieth-century revolution has been the revival of the Chinese state. Until the 1890s the Chinese empire had remained the most durable of the universal kingships of the ancient world. Its transformation into the state now known as the People's Republic has left the Chinese public saddled with a political order still deficient in our sort of civil liberties. To be sure, the old China had worked out certain customary limits to despotism, but how such limitations are to be institutionalized in the revived state remains still uncertain. Now that China's great revolution is in remission and off the front page, scholars and journalists are reaching mature verdicts both about Mao's despotic part in it and about the quality of life that the new order has brought the Chinese people. Like tornado survivors, many Chinese have been wondering what hit them, and a flow of memoirs and more relaxed contact with outsiders have combined to give us a clearer view, at least for the moment.
Review, 2780 words
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