Word: mao
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...Solomon it is no accident that Mao Tse-tung attempted to justify the violent birth of his new China with a culinary image: "A revolution is not a dinner party." After all, for thousands of years, Chinese civilization centered on the problem of food. Eating developed into the country's most important social ritual. Farming and eating not only bound countless generations together, but also resulted in one of the world's most highly evolved cuisines...
...huge agricultural communes obviously indicate. Solomon points out that food images still dominate the way the Chinese formulate their political concerns. In Chinese the verb to suffer literally means to eat bitterness. The Chinese customarily talk about conflict in terms of "consuming enemies" or "being eaten" by them. Recently Mao himself described the temptations of bourgeois life as "sugarcoated bullets," more dangerous to the proletarian purity of the Chinese revolution than the lead bullets of the class enemy...
...Miltons are unable to fully resolve that question. Part of the answer, they suggest, lies in the desire of Mao and his closest associates to politicize the working masses and enable the Maoist leadership to recapture the straying devotion of his party. The Miltons cannot really explain how that desire was materially translated into the groups of Red Guards who took over the capital, who kept the population up at night with their loudspeakers blasting away at the ideological opponents; but it is clear they consider the dimensions of the revolution--which ultimately enveloped the national intelligentsia...
...been elected foreman, who shows little of the deference to foreigners that characterized the older management, but whose capable leadership has made the factory more productive than it ever was before the uncrossable lines between management and worker were broken down. It is this kind of worker participation that Mao's clique hoped to establish, as well as ending the technocracy developed during the Great Leap Forward. What was hard to see in the schools and the Red Guards' marches becomes apparent to the Miltons in Shanghai, that there was an ideological purpose behind the rhetoric, and that that purpose...
...Miltons try to avoid making judgments about the Cultural Revolution, which may be the reason for their analysis's lack of depth. They are, of course, full of admiration for the Chinese people, but they never seem quite comfortable with the extent of Mao's power, or with the Cultural Revolution's effect on foreign policy. For the six years of the raging debate, all energy turned inward, ambassadors were withdrawn; at the end, when the cultural group that led the fight against elitism decided the country needed time to rest, the debates ended, students were sent to the countryside...