Dragon in Ambush by Jeremy Ingalls is a critique and new
translation of the first twenty poems of Mao Zedong's published
poetry. This seminal work stands out from previous translations of
Mao's poems in seeing them as an expression of his core political
beliefs, rather than for their poetic effect. Instead, Dr. Ingalls
shows in consummate detail that Mao was careful and deliberate in
employing imagery in his poetry to lay out procedures for political
supremacy in which the central drive was his will to psychological
domination. That is, domination of the minds of others is the
unifying theme of Mao's verse-sequence. The crux of Prof. Ingalls'
work lies in her focus on the symbolism in the poems. The poems
are, in Mao's use of them as a means of communication, meaningless
on their surface. No image, however seemingly commonplace, is ever
employed for merely lyrical or aesthetic description. Every image
functions as a factor in an entirely political calculus. According
to Dr. Ingalls, "When Mao mentions streams or mountains, suns or
moons, clouds or winds or icicles, horses, elephants, snakes,
tigers, leopards or bears, specifies kinds of trees or birds or
fish, flies, brooms, mats or bridges, these and all his other
images have, as their primary function, neither happenstance
descriptions nor whimsical metaphor. They all have politically
symbolic functions in Mao's algebra of versified political
discourse." Furthermore, in her analysis, Prof. Ingalls downplays
the significance of Marxism-Leninism in the Thought of Mao Zedong.
She shows that throughout his career, Mao regarded Marxism-Leninism
as a political convenience, not as a doctrine permanently essential
to his master-plan. Just as Mao used the Nationalists of Chiang
Kai-shek and Stalin's Soviet Union as means to further his own
political ambitions, so did he manipulate Marxist-Leninist ideology
to hoodwink and attract, at home and abroad, professional
revolutionaries to help do his bidding. Mao's aims express, in
their worldviews, an entirely Chinese tradition. In his poems Mao's
dialectics, his materialism, and his authoritarianism all take
their points of reference from within the Chinese cultural order.
Dragon in Ambush is a thoroughly unique and revolutionary approach
to understanding the Mind of Mao Zedong.
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