Word: mao
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...MAO AND CHINA: FROM REVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION by STANLEY KARNOW 592 pages. Viking...
...From a raggle-taggle beginning came the forces that overwhelmed the French at Dien Bien Phu and fought American troops to a standstill. Giap's classic work on guerrilla warfare (People's War, People's Army) is essentially a Vietnamese variation on the military doctrines of Mao Tse-tung, stressing, as does Mao, the vital importance of broad popular support. Asked in 1964 about the situation in South Viet Nam, Giap replied: "We are in no hurry. The longer we wait, the greater will be the Americans' defeat...
...best-known characters of Chinese folklore is Monkey, who is forever running amuck and terrorizing celestial Establishment figures like the Jade Emperor. As Stanley Karnow notes in his account of the Cultural Revolution, Monkey also happens to be one of Mao Tse-tung's favorite characters. He has even likened himself to Monkey in a poem, wielding the great cudgel of "class struggle" against his enemies and history...
...Viewing Mao as a latter-day Monkey may be the only way to make sense out of the Cultural Revolution. Six years after it began, five years after it peaked, the largest civil disorder of modern times remains largely mysterious. Yet, amazingly, there was a continuous stream of information flowing out of China during those years of turmoil. From regional radio broadcasts, newspaper stories, wall posters, speeches, government documents, refugee tales and many other sources came a provocative mixture of facts, accusations, propaganda, rumors and half-truths. As a correspondent stationed in Hong Kong (originally for TIME, later...
Karnow considers the Cultural Revolution a culmination of the long conflict between Mao's romantic dream of permanent revolution and the Chinese people's natural drift toward realism. Repeatedly, whenever Mao sensed that the bureaucrats seemed to be taking over, he forced a return to basic revolutionary principles, often at chaotic cost to the country. He skirmished with intellectuals, with army professionals who thought that modern weapons were more important than revolutionary élan, with economic planners who thought the Great Leap Forward to instant industrialization was dangerous nonsense (which...