China without Mao: The Search for a New Order; China Diary
The first book is a balanced and thoughtful account by a historian of Mao's failures as a nation-builder and of the new path now being followed by his successors. Modernizing China, says the author, will remain a slow and laborious process; there will be only moderate progress in the next decade or two. The travel diary by Stephen Spender and David Hockney is pretentious and trivial: "China is like the Boy Scouts and Mao was the Chief Scout." When the book is not naïve, it is apologetic: "A revolution which is based on the transference of power from one social class to another cannot afford to let the opposition speak until the principles of the revolution have become accepted by the whole society."
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