Books: Life and Death in China

THE CHINA CLOUD by William L Ryan and Sam Summerlin. 309 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

REVOLUTIONARY IMMORTALITY by Robert Jay Lifton. 178 pages. Random House. $4.95.

THE RED BOOK AND THE GREAT WALL by Alberto Moravia. 170 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95.

Watchers of the China phenomenon are divided into two groups: a majority, which maintains diplomatic relations with Peking and therefore has entree to the country; and others, like the Americans, who must gaze at China from the Hong Kong end of the Lo Wu Bridge. These three books offer views from both sides of the checkpoint.

In The China Cloud, two Associated Press editors have put together an impressive research project dealing with the origins of China’s nuclear know-how. It was the U.S. that gave China its start. Since the 1930s, a number of young Chinese science students had been arriving on U.S.-sponsored scholarships; many contributed to America’s nuclear and missile technology. During the feverish Red hunts of the early 1950s, many of the scientists fled the U.S., while others were deported. Eighty returned to China—taking with them vast amounts of information—and were pressed into Mao Tse-tung’s service. Ryan and Summerlin offer evidence that some would have stayed in America if given the chance.

The authors attempt to trace their subjects’ activities back home, but, predictably, the book teeters for lack of authoritative information. It is clear enough, however, that the returning scientists did their job well.

Militant Rectitude. In Revolutionary Immortality, China’s bomb is viewed as a deterrent to be employed against any foreign power that tries to snuff out the revolution. Robert Jay Lifton, an Asian specialist and psychiatry research professor at Yale, believes that the death of the revolution—whether by nuclear means or otherwise—is Chairman Mao’s greatest fear.

With the decay of a revolution, Lifton writes, “the dying revolutionary can envision nothing but the total extinction of his own self.” Because Mao and a few around him suffer from this “sur vivor paranoia,” China “must be made to convulse.” Thus the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was contrived by Mao and his aging comrades in a quest for the rebirth of zealous Communism in China. To stoke the fires of fanaticism, the leaders called forth specific images of hate: “American imperialism,” “bourgeois remnants,” and “modern revisionism,” and turned the Red Guard loose in the streets.

Despite all this, concludes Lifton, the “militant rectitude” of the revolution continues to be threatened. The dan gers, he says, lie in the protean nature of man, whose “psychological style is characterized by easy shifts in belief and identification.”

Though intriguing, Lifton’s thesis is simply a psychiatric twist on similar findings of other China-watchers. It is not new, just considerably more arcane; observers have duly noted similar death rattles in Communist revolutionaries from Marx to Castro.

22 Days. Mao’s dilemma is similarly reflected by Novelist-Journalist Alberto Moravia, whose Italian passport and sympathy for the revolution allowed him 22 days in China during 1967. “Mao’s great enemy is not the United States,” he writes in The Red Book and the Great Wall, “but fundamental Chinese Confucian conservatism. The danger is that, once Mao is dead, his thought will be embalmed and his figure deified.”

Moravia is not a Communist but considers himself a Marxist humanist. For this reason, he found in Chinese poverty a refreshing contrast to what he considers the economic excesses of the West. In a sentence reminiscent of Man as an End, his collection of essays published between 1941 and 1963, he writes: “Poverty and chastity are the two normal conditions of man, or at least they ought to be in the world today.” In China’s destitution and Mao’s efforts to eradicate the past, Moravia finds the possibility of rejuvenation. For, once the past has been destroyed, says he, echoing Mao, it “will be replaced by a future that is equally rich in wisdom and refinement.”

At 60, Moravia has an eye for detail that remains unblurred. His descriptions of a visit to the Great Wall, a dinner of duck in Peking’s only remaining Westernized restaurant, and the sight of Red Guards parading beside his train are fascinating and vivid.