THIS is a strange, sad book. It is Chiang Ch'ing's attempt to reach out to the world as herself, woman and revolutionary, rather than as Mrs. Mao Tse‐tung, the former film actress. It is also Roxane Witke's attempt to relay that message out of China and into the West, and to make the message both significant and respectable by treating the material as soberly as a historian.
For some years now, students of modern China have known of the great opportunity that came to Roxane Witke on her visit to China in 1972, when Chiang Ch'ing granted her some 60 hours of interview time. Witke, a young historian well known in the field for her work on the women's movement in China, was allowed a transcript of the first interview that Chiang Ch'ing gave, but all the later transcripts were withheld from her (although she was allowed to bring her own extensive notes back to the United States). Some evidence from those withheld transcripts was apparently later used as part of the attack on Chiang Ch'ing in 1976, when she fell from power and was imprisoned as one of “the gang of four,” following the death of Chairman Mao.