CHINA: Reaching for the Clouds

China had traditionally celebrated the New Year with firecrackers and dragon dances; 1976, the Year of the Dragon, was heralded in Peking last week with a literary event. Newspapers throughout the People’s Republic printed two newly released poems by China’s No. 1 revolutionary and poet, Chairman Mao Tse-tung. The poems, published one week after the Great Helmsman’s 82nd birthday, were written just over ten years ago, as China was about to begin the chaotic Cultural Revolution. It seems likely that their release now was intended to recall some of the fervor but none of the violence of that period.

One of the poems, Chingkangshan Revisited, is a characteristically Maoist bit of revolutionary exhortation. “I have long aspired to reach for the clouds,” Mao says, as he returns in his mind to the mountainous spot (“our old haunt”) in Kiangsi province where his rural revolution got started. His visit reminds him of the vastness of humankind’s potential:

We can clasp the moon in the ninth

heaven

And seize turtles down in the five seas: We’ll return amid triumphant song

and laughter.

Nothing is hard in this world If you dare to scale the heights.

The second poem, “Two Birds: A Dialogue,” is a sarcastic, earthy blast against what Chinese editorials have long called the “goulash Communism” of the Soviet Union. It depicts a conversation between two birds, one a giant roc that soars over the earth, with “the blue sky on its back,” and the other a timid sparrow “scared stiff” in his bush. The world is in chaos (“Gunfire licks the heavens,/ Shells pit the earth”), and the sparrow wants to escape to “a jeweled palace in Elfland’s hills.” The roc replies angrily:

Stop your windy nonsense! Look you, the world is being turned upside down.

Mao’s message is clear. While the sparrow—presumably the Soviet Union —hopes for an easy paradise, the roc —a symbol of China—knows matters can be improved only by a revolution that turns the world “upside down.”

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