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.