Bobbing in a Sea of Proverbs

...In his discussion of Confucian ideology Bloodworth tries to be clever, but comes off snide when he proclaims Confucianism a great gift to tyranny "and a device well designed to turn China into a land fit for Neros...

...Out of this occasionally entertaining, certainly diluted potpourri of 4,000 years of Chinese history and culture come some plausible accounts of Chinese behavior...

...Whether Mao passes into history as merely another Chinese rebel or a demi-god like Confucius will only be determined, Bloodworth believes, by his quotability in the year 3.000...

...Bloodworth's best chapter is on the Chinese language??also a powerful molder of thought and behavior...

...About seven-eighths of the way through the book the reader may wonder how the other half lives, for virtually nothing has been said about the Chinese living under Communism...

...This is at best a half truth, and the ring of Western smugness does not exactly encourage the sympathy so necessary for a "broader understanding" of a foreign culture...

...It shaped all its institutions and through the //??the Confucian rules for proper conduct??structured the social and moral relationships of everyone from the lowliest peasant to the emperor...

...the au courant interjection...

...Perhaps as a last desperate resort Mao has launched the Red Guards, hoping the fury of teenage adolescent rebellion will succeed in toppling family togetherness...

...The success of the first Communist revolution inexorably presses him to wage a second revolution, one for a better life...

...Most important, Confucianism inspired the most durable and equitable civil service the world has known and kept the Chinese empire operating for over 2,000 years...

...When a parent died, a civil servant took off from his job as long as 27 months, the proper mourning time...

...He has broken up big families, set son to spy on father, and tried to pound allegiance to both the state and himself into 700 million heads...

...Bloodworth does not speculate on the outcome of this internal struggle...

...Bobbing in a sea of proverbs, metaphors and anecdotes, Bloodworth casts around for every conceivable stylistic device to entice a neophyte into more serious fare: the East vs...

...Even the older overseas Chinese, many of whom fled Communism and would be horrified if their adopted land of Malaya, Hong Kong or Thailand went Communist, "applaud Mao from afar" because he did what the Nationalists and the Manchus before them could not do: He threw out the foreigners who had humiliated China for over 100 years and restored its prestige and dignity...

...Earlier Communist successes may also appear to have acted like a shot of lsd...

...West upmanship game?Chinese drama flowered . . . some 300 years before Shakespeare scribbled for a living...

...Mao rushes in where Engels feared to tread...

...Unfortunately, in places the author's stylistic gymnastics become overbearing and undermine the book's purpose??to build a broader understanding toward China...

...only in the late 19th century did the concept of China as a nation-state arise...

...He points out that the Chinese not only have great patience but a great revolutionary tradition, which Mao should note in his "private looking glass...

...Other forces, however, including his own personality, are boxing him in...

...The Mongols might be crashing down the gates, but there was no doubt where one's first duty lay...

...To increase literacy the Communists have tried to reduce the number of characters from 8,000 to 3,000 and to simplify them so that they will be easier to memorize and write...

...Bloodworth even has an explanation, albeit too neat, for the hideous tortures the Chinese have dreamt up over the centuries...

...As for the "potato face man in the gray boiler suit," the Master himself, Bloodworth thinks he may be losing his greatest talent and the secret of his success??flexibility...

...The family, in fact, was the state with its own hierarchy, laws, customs and economy...

...But to keep the country from plunging into chaos and undoing all his work, he must restrict the war on the revolutionists, despite the threat they pose to his power...

...When the emperor broke the li, the people, under the Mandate of Heaven, had the right to revolt??provided they were, in a pragmatic twist of logic, successful...

...Of the several dialects still used in China, the one now being officially taught on the mainland as well as on Taiwan is Mandarin...

...In part this is because Bloodworth writes out of his experience with the overseas Chinese, but also because he believes the psyche and soul of the Chinese varies very little despite the effect of Mao-think...

...Chinese torture, he says, is largely inspired by the principle of criminal law that a man should not be condemned unless he has confessed...

...To keep the revolution pure and in his own image, he inaugurated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and its agents, the Red Guards...

...In Imperial China a son who lifted his hand to his father could be beheaded, and it was unthinkable for any young man to go off to be a Lawrence, a Gauguin or a Schweitzer unless he had made certain his family was well provided for and he was entering an honorable profession...

...Bloodworth explains that the Chinese penchant for the family??whether in San Francisco, Saigon or Singapore ??goes back to Confucius, who preached that the basic tenet of life was filial obedience...

...The author acknowledges at the outset that he is writing for the beginner, not the China expert, who will find nothing in this book "he does not already know or reject...

...Hence the clinical resort to such gory techniques as painting cloth strips over the backs of victims and pulling them slowly off when dry, along with the skin...

...The stripped-down language, of course, also makes it easier for the regime to drum into the malleable young such slogans as "Western Imperialist Warmongers" and "All American Imperialists Are Paper Tigers...

...In Communist China today, the family remains one of Mao Tse-tung's biggest headaches...

...and the royal pun...

...Reviewed by DAVID KALES Carnegie Fellow, East Asian Institute Columbia University Western stereotypes of the Chinese as comic laundrymen, greasy restaurateurs or sinster Dr...

...In The Chinese Looking Glass, Bloodworth, for 12 years the London Observer's Far Eastern correspondent, attempts to dispel many of these archaic images and to provide some understanding of what makes the Chinese "tick...

...The last part of the book contends that, far from eradicating the 4,000-year old civilization, Mao has built upon it...

...Actually, Confucianism provided the philosophical underpinning for China...

...Still the family system has not been destroyed...

...Fu Manchus, says Dennis Blood-worth, are like "a dog-eared poker hand of unrelated cards, most of them left over from the last century...