CHINESE COMMUNISM AND THE RISE OF MAO

Rooted in a profoundly scholarly understanding of the hairline divergences and particularizations of Communist theory, techniques and terminology, this study of the complexities of Communism as it has developed in China is way beyond the average reader's comprehension. Schwartz writes more as a scholar than a participant, but examines the incaclies of infiltration, the slow progress of Marxism-Leninism among the Chinese, the conviction that an unindustrialized country like China was not fertile ground for revolutionary change- and the ways in which the student movement- the intellectuals- the new forces of labor-and finally the -seized upon one part or another. He feels that in each phase, collaboration with the Kuomintang, the leadership of successive men, the new lines as old lines failed, on to Mao, demonstrated his central theme, that a communist party can exist apart from an urban proletariat. ""An elite of professional revolutionaries have risen to power by itself on the dynamic of peasant discontent."" He draws no conclusions, nor does he go beyond Mao's ssion to leadership, after harsh and bloody conflict. Sometimes one feels that his study is set in a vacuum, ignoring the world outside the Soviet orbit. But he does bring pertinent facts to the fore which inevitably alter one's conception of the roots of Chinese Communism. A book for students of political science and ideological philosophy and history.