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This week, TIME provides an insight into the rise and fall of Mme. Mao, with excerpts from an upcoming book that is one of the most revealing portraits of a Communist Chinese leader ever to reach the West. Comrade Chiang Ch'ing will be published by Little, Brown and Co. next month. Its author, Roxane Witke, had 60 hours of interviews with Mme. Mao during the summer...
While a captive, Mme. Claustre said, she taught herself to read and write Toubou, the language of the rebels, and performed normal cooking and cleaning chores done by Toubou women. "They understood my distress," she said. "And I tried as much as I could to integrate myself into their family life...
...equivalent of a U.S. Peace Corpsman-and a West German doctor and his wife. In the rebels' attack, the doctor's wife was killed. West German officials quickly arranged a payoff for the doctor's return. Later, the coopérant escaped to Libya, leaving Mme. Claustre alone in the hands of a Maoist rebel leader named Hissène Habré, who demanded a ransom that included 80 tons of arms and ammunition in return for the release of his hostage. But France could not supply the arms without affronting the government of Chad President...
Even after her liberation, the ordeal of Mme. Claustre continued to rankle in French public opinion. She and her husband, flown by a special Mystère 20 jet sent by Giscard, evaded hordes of newsmen in Paris. The couple immediately checked into a clinic for a series of intensive tests. But many Frenchmen were still asking why the affair had taken so long-and cost so much horror and humiliation-to resolve...
Against this background, Hua in his Peking address proclaimed that China's "central task for 1977" would be "to expose and repudiate" Mme. Mao's followers totally and "move toward the goal of the great order." Behind Hua's rhetoric lay an admission that few if any of the professed goals of China's new leadership can be realized until Hua establishes a Mao-like absolutist rule over the nation. To do this, analysts noted, the new Chairman needs the army: only the generals who supported Hua in his bid for power last autumn can keep him there...