Social Science Zeros In on Mao

Mao’s Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture By Richard H. Solomon California, 604 pp., $16.75 I suppose it was inevitable: after the spate of interpretive and analytical studies of Maoism as political style and ideology that have appeared in recent years someone felt the need to do it again with the aid of what Professor Solomon calls “the techniques of socialscience analysis.” In the case of the present volume this meant interviewing 91 Mainland-born Chinese in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and correlating the results with published documents, observations by other scholars, writings and speeches by Chinese Communist leaders, and articles in the Mainland Chinese press, so as to get a fix on Mao’s relation to the “political culture” of China.

Professor Solomon, who teaches at the University of Michigan, is not unaware that a sample of 91 respondents may not accurately reflect 700 million Chinese. But he apparently believes that the diversity of ages, regional backgrounds, educational experiences and occupations of the sample, though admittedly weighted in favor “of that ‘bourgeois’ element of Chinese society which Mao has struggled against most of his life,” helps in overcoming that problem. Rorschach and Thematic Apperception tests, attitude surveys, “a set of open-ended questions about social attitudes and life experiences,” and so on, administered to Solomon’s interviewees, presumably did likewise.

JK

About the Author

Justus M. Van Der Kroef

Featured Tags

Manage following

China

Communism

Mao’s Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture By Richard H. Solomon California, 604 pp., $16.75 I suppose it was inevitable: after the spate of interpretive and analytical studies of Maoism as political style and ideology that have appeared in recent years someone felt the need to do it again with the aid of what Professor Solomon calls “the techniques of socialscience analysis.” In the case of the present volume this meant interviewing 91 Mainland-born Chinese in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and correlating the results with published documents, observations by other scholars, writings and speeches by Chinese Communist leaders, and articles in the Mainland Chinese press, so as to get a fix on Mao’s relation to the “political culture” of China.

Professor Solomon, who teaches at the University of Michigan, is not unaware that a sample of 91 respondents may not accurately reflect 700 million Chinese. But he apparently believes that the diversity of ages, regional backgrounds, educational experiences and occupations of the sample, though admittedly weighted in favor “of that ‘bourgeois’ element of Chinese society which Mao has struggled against most of his life,” helps in overcoming that problem. Rorschach and Thematic Apperception tests, attitude surveys, “a set of open-ended questions about social attitudes and life experiences,” and so on, administered to Solomon’s interviewees, presumably did likewise.