by Bruce Madish
During the late 1950s, man ventured into space; by the late 1960s, he had walked on the moon. A proud Wernher von Braun, NASA's claimant to the mantle of Daedalus, compared the achievement to that moment in evolution "when aquatic life came crawling onto land."
Now we seem to be crawling back. The moon landing, for all the impact it had during that sultry July night in 1969, has scattered into small effects upon us. Our expectations fulfilled, we now seem to have l...
science fic- tion. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857- 1935), for example, credited Jules Verne with planting the "first seeds" of the idea of interplanetary flight.
During the 1890s, Tsiolkovsky built the first wind tunnel to test aerodynamic designs. 1903 -the year the Wright brothers first flew their plane at Kitty Hawk -Tsiol-kovsky was tackling the theoretical problems of rocket engines (heat transfer, navigation mechanisms, and fuel-supply maintenance). His research feats are described...
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MANKIND'S BETTER
MOMENTS
In her prize-winning A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Four- teenth Century (1978), historian Barbara Tuchman focused on a "violent, bewildered, suffering, and disintegrating age." She went on to see a few parallels with our own troubled times. But we should not be blinded by our present predicaments; every age has its ups and downs, as she explains in this essay adapted from the National Endowment for the Humanities' Jefferson Lecture, which she delivered...
Gim Nebiolo, Priuh & Verlucca, publishers.
"Everybody reads the works of Mao" is the title of this 1967 poster. Times change. The once ubiquitous portraits of Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) have been removed from most of China's public places -including the Great Hall of the People, or parliament building, in Beijing (Peking).
The Wilson Quarterly/Autumn 1980
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Mao Zedong died in 1976 after leading the Chinese Communists to victory and ruling the People's Republic for 27 years. His...
As every Chinese schoolboy knows, Mao Zedong (Mao Tse- tung) was born into a poor peasant family and grew up amid the hunger and degradation of daily existence in late imperial China. Though he never went to a university, he became head- master of an elementary school in provincial Changsha in 1920, and a major political force in his native Hunan province. From there, he went on to become the supreme ruler of a quarter of mankind for a quarter of a century, an unprecedented feat in human history.
Mao...
To assess the Maoist experiment, however, one must look not to official retrospection but to the condition of China's people.
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REAPPRAISING
THE CULTURALREVOLUTION
by Harry Hayding
The changes in Chinese politics in the four years since the death of Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) have been breathtaking. But none has been more significant than China's repudiation of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the tumultuous movement that dominated Chinese life for a decade, and that Mao's associates once described as their country's greatest con- tribution to Marxist theory.
The Cultural Revolution, as one Am...
live in Hong Kong; between 1972 and 1976, Frolic ques- tioned 250 of them. To protect his subjects, Frolic kept their exact identities confidential. Here we present selections from six of his interviews.
The Backdoor
An intellectual from the southeastern coastal city of Fuzhou discusses the paradox ofprivilege in the People's Republic:
Chairman Mao tells us, "To know the taste of a pear, you must eat the pear." He means that you cannot understand life from the outside, by just sitting...
nine centuries of "chastened, sober, often grim and drab maturity."
The causes of that languid decline are set forth Mark Elvin, an Ox- ford economic historian, in The Pat- tern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, 1973). Like the United States at the end of the 19th century, China began to "fill up" with people. But rather than look to foreign outlets for its ex- panded economy as the Americans did, the xenophobic Chinese turned inward, reducing their overseas trade and contacts.
Ironically,...
race or family in- come.)
In elementary schools, 40 percent of one-parent children, but only 24 per- cent of two-parent children, were clas- sified as low achievers (having "D" or "F" averages). Only 17 percent of single-parent grade schoolers and 2 1 percent of secondary students earned "A" or "B" averages. But 30 percent of two-parent students in elementary school and 33 percent enrolled in junior high and high school qualified as "high achievers."
One-parent...