Son of the Revolution/China:

...the other, a few days later, of two Red Guards raping a girl on the train which carried him home to Changsha...

...I am...

...in 1981 Peking released a long statement setting forth the currently orthodox version of its own history...

...Furthermore Deng has, after a short-lived experiment with intellectual liberalism (remember "Democracy Wall...

...We must continue to wish her well, and to do what we can to help...

...There it was that he met, courted and ultimately (with the help of Vice-Chairman Deng Xiaoping) wedded his English teacher, Judith Shapiro, with whom he wrote the book, and with whom he now lives in New York...

...Butterfield cites the mistakes that have been made in rapid industrialization...

...Butterfield's description of China is not an encouraging one, and its picture of a gray, corrupt, and inefficient Stalinism replacing the dynamic (if often wrong-headed) dynamism of Mao may well be too bleak...

...and the first step is to see China as she is, and not (as we've done so often in the past) as we wish her to be.t) as we wish her to be...

...in 1966 it was now his turn to be pilloried as a reactionary, to endure the humiliations which were the lot of intellectuals and professionals in those days...

...I'm still a Jew...

...William Hin-ton, Han Su-yin and others wrote of the new China, of the miracles that had occurred in the two decades since liberation, and of the ever bright future facing the country under the leadership of the Great Helmsman...

...Nicholas R. Clifford TEN or a dozen years ago, at least half of the students in my courses in modern Chinese history would have considered themselves to be, if not Maoists, then at least sympathic to Mao's aims for the Chinese revolution...

...But because of China's size alone, what happens to her will affect us all...

...Neither is written by a three-week tourist, an official guest, or a China-watcher forced to do his research in the Hoover Institute or Hong Kong...

...and through his friendship with the daughter of a high-ranking Party member (their preliminary courtship cut off by her father, who does not want his girl to marry beneath her into the proletariat) he gained entrance to the University to study English...

...Those who still want to believe in a Maoist China that has conquered the problems of the past will find Butter-field's work (which has recently won the American Book Award) deeply disturbing...

...This is one of the aspects of communism in China that Fox Butterfield finds particularly distressing...

...In 1973, however, with the publication of his Chinese Shadows, Simon Leys broke sharply with this orthodoxy, and although many dismissed his views at the time, much that has come out since the death of Mao has validated them...

...His China is a country that still practices infanticide, where girls are still sold, and where millions of peasants live barely above the level of subsistence...

...Those were the years in which rapturous visitors told us that China was a country that had conquered not only the problems that had beset her throughout history - famine, flood, corruption, drugs, and the like - but also many of the problems that have beset the modern West - alienation, purposelessness, greed, and the emptiness of a consumer society...

...The Jews think I have apostasized, and the Catholics think I am a Jew...

...But Deng's China has its problems too, and it is clear that the goal of making China a "great socialist state" through the Four Modernizations by the end of the century is not going to be easy...

...But me...

...It a society where wealth counts for little (there is little that money can buy) it is rank that is sought after, for rank gives access to te quan (privilege...

...He cites recent findings showing that during the three years after the Great Leap (1959-1961), some sixteen and a half million more people died than would have done so normally...

...Liang Heng's is a painful book to read, the autobiography of a young man who found himself, at the age of twelve, caught up in the storms of the Cultural Revolution...

...his unusual height and his talent for basketball led to a job in a factory, and a coveted Changsha residence card, so that he could play for the team...

...I sometimes felt there was a double standard - one for the Russians, who are Europeans, another for the Chinese, who are Asians and therefore not supposed to have the same feelings for human rights and life, Fox Butterfield China achieve their ends in ways similar to those that Chinese have used for centuries, and which have survived Mao's efforts to build a "new socialist man" with a new socialist morality...

...Cut loose from his family, young Liang, like so many others, found in the Cultural Revolution a chance to travel, marching with his Red Guard friends to Jinggangshan (the birthplace of Mao's peasant Communism in 1927), to Canton, and to Peking, developing the kind of teen-age street-wise skills that were necessary for survival in those days...

...its gist is that while Mao was indeed a "great proletarian revolutionary," towards the end of his life his success went to his head, and thus he led his country into the disasters of the Great Leap Forward of 1958 and the Cultural Revolution of the late sixties...

...Yet the story has a happy ending, if that is the word for it...

...he is where he is today in part because of his access to privilege...

...And they're right...

...that during the Cultural Revolution some four hundred thousand people were killed, and suggests that the true figure may be somewhat higher, including not simply the "counter-revolutionaries" who were hounded or tortured to death, but those who were caught up in the fighting of 1967-1968, which in some parts of China reached the proportions of a civil war...

...Liang Heng was not only intelligent but also lucky...

...Nor are such opinions restricted to westerners...

...They don't think of Jesus and Mary as Jewish...

...Both books under review here are important for this revaluation of Maoism...

...Athletic privilege leads to more privilege (in China as in America...

...Caught up in the ecstasy of the early days of the Revolution, he soon came to see the dark side as well, and there is a poignant juxtaposition of two scenes: one of a crowd in the Chinese capital, rushing to touch the hand of a man who had touched the hand of Chairman Mao...

...His mother, denounced in the anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, had been divorced by her husband, who wished to protect not only his own career I am both Jew and Catholic, whether Jew or Catholic like it or not, and generally they do not, usu-ally have no use for each other, in fact, and even less for me...

...has now - like Stalin, like Mao - cracked down on the cultural life of the country...

...Even those without rank may, if they are in the right place at the right time (as Liang was) "go through the back door" (dzou hou men) and If a Russian writer or artist is banished to Siberia,' it is front-page news in Europe and the United States But if a Chinese dissident is exiled to Qinghai, Peking's equivalent of Siberia, the story is cut to a few paragraphs on an inside page or not printed at all...

...Precisely because, unlike their counterparts in Russia and Eastern Europe, they are hardly known in the West, this is one of the most valuable parts of the book...

...Mao's death has brought something of a surcease from the Chairman's style of government by mass movement...

...Butterfield managed to meet and to speak to a number of the members of Peking's small dissident community...

...I admire their, our, faith, adopted it in fact, but I wish they loved learning more, as they loved it in the High Middle Ages, loved science and art more, . . .just as they loved them in the age of the great Giotto and Roger Bacon and the monk Copernicus and the great Galileo . . . We are a church of sinners, yes, but can't sinners love science and art...

...Catholics are a queer lot - I've never really gotten used to them...

...Liang Heng is Chinese and Fox Butter-field a Harvard-trained China scholar who brought a knowledge of China's language, history, and culture to his work as the first correspondent for the New York Times in Peking since 1949...

...the great new steel works at Wuhan which need so much electricity that they can operate only one or two days a week, and the huge Baoshan complex at Shanghai, built to use the most modern Japanese, German, and American technology, but which proved to be unable to use Chinese low-grade ore, making necessary the importation of Australian ore, and the building of a new seaport 130 miles south to accommodate the bulk carriers which could not reach Shanghai...

...Walker Percy Lost in the Cosmos as journalist, but also the future careers of his children...