Books: The True Black Hand

THE WIND WILL NOT SUBSIDE: YEARS IN REVOLUTIONARY CHINA, 1964-1969

by DAVID MILTON and NANCY DALL MILTON 397 pages. Pantheon. $1 5.

“I am alone with the masses, waiting,” confided Mao Tse-tung to Andre Malraux in 1965.

The “Great Helmsman” did not wait long. Within months he had launched the century’s most idiosyncratic social upheaval: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It was originally an ideological pursuit of a “handful of people in authority taking the capitalist road”—stigmatizing those who would create a bureaucratic class of privilege as in the U.S.S.R. Later, the revolt degenerated into a witch hunt for the “Black Hands”: i.e., anyone who opposed the movement. After three years of near anarchy, Mao himself was ready to call off the chase. “The Black Hand is nobody else but me,” he told a group of Red Guards. That tragic admission provides the climax of The Wind Will Not Subside, an absorbing, provocative narrative of China’s Cultural Revolution.

Authors David and Nancy Dall Milton were English teachers at Peking’s First Foreign Languages Institute until the Revolution. The couple describe themselves as “Pierres at Borodino,” who, like the character in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, survey the battleground less as participants than as observers. Their experience provides intimate details of the often mysterious doings of the cultural movement.

Here are the diplomatic wives who abruptly favor baggy proletarian garb. Here are commonplace people who refuse to take medicine when they are sick; as the Miltons explain, “denial of the flesh” was the sole means of self-sacrifice demanded by Maoism. When the upheaval spreads fear among “rightists,” many join ultraleftist factions in frantic overcompensation.

Little Generals. Intended as a rite of purification, the Cultural Revolution soon becomes a naked power struggle. The issues that concern Mao are lost in sectarian hostilities. Student extremists —the so-called “little generals”—organize combat teams that go at each other in factories and institutes. They skirmish with catapults, battering rams and sometimes submachine guns, until a despairing Mao asks, “Who could have foreseen this kind of fighting?” and prepares to let the army restore order. Even then, as the authors indicate, irony is not played out. Parvenu ultraleftists are branded “counterrevolutionary,” and the rightists are restored to power.

The story of the Black Hands is as complex as it is gripping. Yet the Miltons tell it without losing their way in the labyrinth of raw material. The Wind Will Not Subside contains occasional patches of grandiloquent prose echoing the stilted polemics of

Peking. But the book keeps an appreciative eye out for ambiguity, as when the Great Helmsman personally calls a halt to the Red Guards’ activity. In the students’ fiery intransigence Mao must have seen embers of his own youth.

Yet he also recognized the melancholy lesson of his Revolution: fighting for power is far more exhilarating than wielding it .