Wait Till You Meet Mao

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER (810 pp.)--Edgar Snow--Random House ($10).

In 1936, when Mao Tse-tung had a price of $100,000 on his head and was hiding in a cave village with his dwindling Red army, a young correspondent named Edgar Snow tramped across north China to the Great Wall, found Mao and spent weeks talking social progress with him. He then hurried home to write Red Star Over China, an ardently naive treatise that predicted the ultimate victory of Mao and his Chinese Communists, who were not really Communists but agrarian reformers.

Two years ago, Snow returned to China to see Mao again and, as he reminds himself on nearly every page of his portly new book, his second visit was as much an achievement as his first. Reluctantly accredited by the State Department ("someone we feel cannot be objective") and enthusiastically accepted by the Peking government, Snow traveled 12,000 miles through New China, spent hours with Mao (the only American to interview him in ten years) and days with Chou Enlai. Just as time has not diminished Snow's zest for a story, neither have events darkened his view of Mao's China. Blue River. There is, of course, the matter of food shortage. But Snow argues that the famine of 1960 was vastly exaggerated by the Western press--even though Chou himself has pronounced it "the worst series of disasters since the 19th century." Moreover, says Snow, what is a famine in New China would have been a feast in Old China. On this trip, he saw no starvation and little malnutrition. Everywhere he was struck with the sight of new cities, new highways and railroads, burgeoning new industries, happy people, smiling children. Crime has all but vanished, slums are clean and filled with bookstores and nurseries, soldiers are as dedicated as young priests, everyone conscientiously does his daily t'ai chi ch'aun calisthenics. Even the Yellow River, now dammed and tamed like everything else in China, runs blue--"blue as the Aegean," Snow says.

But if China is wonderful, wait till you meet Mao. He is revered in Snow's China like no one since Confucius. He speaks in witty epigrams, travels humbly among the people, even wears old cotton socks that droop charmingly around his ankles. Mao's dearest wish, Snow reports, is to visit the U.S., if only to swim the Potomac. And though Snow argues that the U.S. ought to quit its "aggressive outposts" like Formosa, Japan, South Viet Nam and South Korea, he sees the rude failure to invite Mao over for a visit as the "great error" in U.S. policy.

Iron & Steel. What little Snow finds bad in New China he justifies by presuming that it would be much worse if Chiang Kai-shek were in charge. Promising later discussions that never materialize, he skims over the regime's faults to exult in its virtues.

Snow also reports with pride every good crack he got off while in China: "What do you know of iron and steel, Mr. Snow?" "Never touch the stuff." The account grinds endlessly on and in such poor organization that putting his observations together and in order is like contour plowing. Often, he writes of the present in the past tense in imitation of "historical distance." But history, even before his publication date, has betrayed him. After pressing the argument that Russia and China will never split severely, he insists that China will never fight India to win a "map victory" along the mountain frontier.

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