Word: mao
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...something dashing about the passionately militant young Malraux, for instance. At 22, in 1923, this Malraux was arrested for trying to smuggle Khmer statuary out of Cambodia. Already an anticolonialist, he helped form those revolutionary forces that would eventually drive his countrymen out of Indo-China and make Mao Tse-tung master of China. The Malraux of the middle period had much to recommend him too. As an almost mythical liberal of the 1930s and a famous novelist (Man's Fate, Man's Hope), he helped organize and then commanded the brave, ramshackle Republican air force that flew...
...episodic mixture of action and reflection, frequently obfuscated by Malraux's fondness for flights of impenetrable Gallic rhetoric. The book includes part of an early novel, some narrative accounts of his adventures in the French Resistance and elsewhere, and long replays of longer interviews with Mao Tse-tung and Nehru, both of whom he visited in 1965 not only as a former fellow revolutionary but as an informal emissary from De Gaulle...
...Mao was, by Lifton's account, a man confident of his own abilities and of his immortality, a man who transcended life while still alive, not by mystic experiences, but by facing death and overcoming it. Lifton speaks of a characteristic quality of tone and content that, more than any other, shaped the psychic contours of the Cultural Revolution. I refer to the kind of existential absolute, an insistence upon all or none confrontation with death...
...facing death, Mao has evidently lost his contempt for it, and fears the collapse of his vision and the loss of his life's work. Mao's vision has turned on him, out of control. It has undermined the party, while failing to achieve its total reform of Chinese society. It has tried to remake human nature and failed. It may not destroy China or even Chinese Communism, but his radical effort has brought China...
Lifton's account of Mao would be far more powerful if it were not for the "psychological idiom" in which he couches it. Indeed throughout the book, one has an annoying sense that jargon is making the obvious complicated. This problem, of course, is endemic to the psychological approach to social science, and would not be too great a price to pay for a comprehensive account of the Cultural Revolution. If Lifton's is not comprehensive, it probably comes as close as any unitary scheme can. Until China opens up to the West, and maybe for a long time thereafter...