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...
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