The Fruits of Hatred

"I remember Mao Tse-tung saying to me that Americans thought the Communists would lose." Old China Hand Theodore H. White is no mean hand at that kind of name-dropping. He also recalls being warned by Chiang Kaishek, in 1941, that "the Japanese are a disease of the skin, but the Communists are a disease of the heart." Such recollections are heart and parcel of China: The Roots of Madness, a 90-minute television documentary to be syndicated on 101 channels in 41 states between Jan. 30 and Feb. 5. For those whose knowledge of the past century of Chinese history is a little hazy, the White-scripted special should be virtually required viewing.

In addition to crackling prose of a caliber rarely heard on TV, the Xerox Corp.--sponsored program is livened by the affecting personal reminiscences of Pearl Buck, among others--and the crisp editing of David Wolper Productions Inc.

In the can since last month, the show makes only passing reference to the Red Guards. Even so, it is less outdated than validated by China's present upheaval. The thrust of Roots of Madness is, baldly, that 100 years of colonial humiliation and continuous civil blood shed left a fractious population unifiable only by tyranny and by a paranoiac "primitive hatred of the foreign devil."

Eerie Fanaticism. The earliest foot age, shot in 1900 by Professional Traveler Burton Holmes, contains a profusion of reminiscent vignettes: U.S. occupation troops play broomstick polo in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion; a throne-room sequence shows the last Manchu ruler, the depraved Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi. There are shots of Sun Yat-sen's founding of the Kuomintang, and of his 1925 funeral; and there is a portrait of 33-year-old Mao the next year, already glowing eerily with fanaticism. The impressive wedding ceremony of Sun's Wellesley-trained sister-in-law to his heir, Chiang, is followed by Mao and Chiang on screen together, toasting each other at the 1945 truce conference arranged by U.S. Ambassador Patrick Hurley.

The one omnipresent picture is death --by warlord's broadsword or Japanese bombardment, by starvation or, simply, "in gusts of senseless cruelty." The end result is shown in the present generation of young girls caroling: "Last night I dreamed of Chairman Mao." Teddy White also sees visions of the Commu nist revolutionary he remembers from the 1930s and 1940s. A film of Mao to day comes into view while the voice-over narrates: "His aging mind still lusts for permanent strife; the theme he preaches to old and young alike is hate."

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