The Belgian author and scholar of China Pierre Ryckmans, who has died aged 78 of cancer, was more widely known under his pen name of Simon Leys. His diary dissecting Maoism and the cultural revolution, Les Habits Neufs du Président Mao (The Chairman's New Clothes, 1971), echoed the title of the Hans Christian Andersen fable and made its thesis plain in its first few words. The cultural revolution, he said, had nothing revolutionary about it except the name and nothing cultural about it except the initial tactical pretext: "It was a power struggle waged at the top between a handful of men and behind the smokescreen of a fictitious mass movement."
This pioneering attack on the cultural revolution and its associated mythology did not initially create a great stir, even in France, where the cult of Mao had reached rare heights. Le Monde gave it a brief and condescending mention, saying that, while some facts were accurately reported, there were mistakes and information that could not be checked. Sources, it said, were not usually quoted and the author clearly had no experience of that of which he spoke. Others were less charitable, accusing Ryckmans of being a CIA agent, and the book became steadily more controversial, the more so when a later volume, Ombres Chinoises (1974, translated as Chinese Shadows, 1976), appeared, in which Ryckmans made plain his contempt for the gullible but ignorant self-appointed sinophiles who were treated to visits to China during which they were shown nothing of the real life of the masses with whom they felt such empathy.
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