Volume 22, Number 7 · May 1, 1975
Numero Uno
By John K. Fairbank
Chairman Mao Talks to the People, Talks and Letters: 1956-1971
edited by Stuart Schram, translated by John Chinnery, by Tieyun
Pantheon, 352 pp., $2.95 (paper)
The Second Chinese Revolution
by K.S. Karol, translated by Mervyn Jones
Hill and Wang, 472 pp., $12.95
The World and China, 1922-1972
by John Gittings
Harper & Row, 303 pp., $11.00
You Can Get There From Here
by Shirley MacLaine
Norton, 249 pp., $7.95
Interpreting Chairman Mao and his revolution has become an industry. But to appreciate his achievements, Americans must grope for his structural ideas through the successive veils of the Chinese language, the Marxist-Leninist terminology, and Mao's application of these European concepts to China. So Mao is perhaps best interpreted from Europe, where a peasant-feudal background makes the idea of class struggle more intelligible and socialism a more widely accepted ideal. American social scientists, on the other hand, so sincere and intent on empirical data, lack a national experience of peasant rebellion and foreign invasion. Feudalism and imperialism can hardly be the chief protagonists of history in American thinking as they can be in Eurasia.
Review, 2483 words
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