Chinese Banquet

By Richard Bernstein

A REVOLUTION IS NOT A DINNER PARTY: A FEAST OF IMAGES OF THE MAOIST TRANSFORMATION OF CHINA by RICHARD H. SOLOMON 199 pages. Anchor Press/Doubleday. $9.95.

This ingenious attempt to explain the mysteries of Chinese politics to Western readers has two unusual features. First, Richard Solomon, a China analyst with the National Security Council, and his collaborator Talbot W. Huey, a political science teacher at the University of Massachusetts, have assembled a kaleidoscope of photographic images for which their lucid text serves as a kind of continuous caption. The result is an intentionally McLuhanesque message about China rather than systematic exposition. It is impressionistic, incomplete and even a bit whimsical. But it provides as vivid a sense of the complexities of Maoist China as any book yet published.

Second, Solomon has organized his "feast of images" around the basics of Chinese life: such matters as eating habits, the respect given to the written word and fear of isolation from the community. China's political behavior--something that has eluded Western understanding for centuries--derives, in the author's view, from these psychological and cultural fundamentals.

To Solomon it is no accident that Mao Tse-tung attempted to justify the violent birth of his new China with a culinary image: "A revolution is not a dinner party." After all, for thousands of years, Chinese civilization centered on the problem of food. Eating developed into the country's most important social ritual. Farming and eating not only bound countless generations together, but also resulted in one of the world's most highly evolved cuisines.

Food production is still a national preoccupation under the Communists, as China's huge agricultural communes obviously indicate. Solomon points out that food images still dominate the way the Chinese formulate their political concerns. In Chinese the verb to suffer literally means to eat bitterness. The Chinese customarily talk about conflict in terms of "consuming enemies" or "being eaten" by them. Recently Mao himself described the temptations of bourgeois life as "sugarcoated bullets," more dangerous to the proletarian purity of the Chinese revolution than the lead bullets of the class enemy.

Penal Collar. Solomon is equally perceptive about China's preoccupation with the printed word. He traces its cultural continuity from the Confucian classics to the thoughts of Chairman Mao. An ancient government bureaucrat advanced by studying the classics. Today his ambitious counterpart must master Marxism as the primary qualification for success in virtually any field.

Several of the author's themes are rooted in the profound conservatism and family-centeredness of the Chinese. The copying of the perfect model, whether aesthetic or moral, was considered a higher achievement than expressing originality. The Communists have perpetuated this tradition by extolling new kinds of political models, individuals or institutions that embody all the Maoist virtues, like the soldier Lei Feng or the Tachai production brigade. Because of China's collectivism familial past, the worst punishment an individual can receive is to be isolated from the commu nity and ridiculed by his neighbors. Solomon illustrates this with a 19th Century photograph of two people suffering the cangue, or penal collar, in which their faces are framed for public censure. A postrevolutionary picture shows fanatical Red Guards parading an alleged "capitalist reader" who was forced to wear a dunce cap.

Political Corpses. The notion that Mao's China is partly a captive of its his tory has been developed by an entire generation of China scholars. Most have discussed the tenacity of tradition in sketchy, abstract terms. Solomon's skillful blend of words and pictures brings the past and present into sharp focus.

His method has its hazards. It is often difficult to tell if a national trait derives from an unconscious attachment to tradition or simply from the weight of practical circumstances. A Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party does not adequately explain some of the darker aspects of China's modern experience: the nearly irrational passion of such campaigns as the Cultural Revolution, or Mao's tendency to litter the political arena with the corpses of former friends. By ignoring these parts of the Chinese reality, or treating them as derivations of the past, Solomon sometimes appears a bit apologetic for the China of Mao. Nevertheless, his book should help to clarify the traditional image of China in the American mind, an image that has of ten swung capriciously from sentimental enthusiasm to angry disappointment and back again.

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