CHINA-WATCHING has always been as much art as science. In the early 20th century, China's splendid culture and baffling style convinced observers that understanding the Chinese meant first penetrating an "inscrutable" facade--empathizing with some elusive oriental essence. After 1949, the inscrutability became artificial. The communist revolution seemed to fit China into the categories of Western social science, but at the same time deprived students of the facts to support their generalizations. China was revealed to be a modernizing state and a communist state, but the bamboo curtain clacked shut to hide the hows and whys. China experts were left to reconstruct a tower out of the cotton candy spinning out of Hong-Kong: a dribble of official publications, captured documents, refugees and personal accounts of travel in China.

Thus even the most hard-headed political and economic accounts of Communist China take on a literary quality. They try to handle existing information, but rely heavily on extrapolation from Chinese history, or from the experiences of other communist states. Of necessity, they are hopeful attempts at ordering unknown facts.

It is well to remember all this in reading Robert J. Lifton's new book, Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The work attempts to formulate what Lifton calls a "psychohistorical" model of China's Cultural Revolution, the baffling internal convulsion which has kept China on the verge of anarchy since the summer of 1966. As social science, the book's contribution is uncertain. It suggests fruitful insights, but some of its observations verge on the obvious, and most are impossible to document.

As literature, however, Revolutionary Immorality is much more notable. It conveys with surprising force the staggering personal tragedy of Mao Tse-tung, a leader who has spent his lifetime designing one of the great political triumphs of history, and now seems to be systemically shattering his work.

Lifton undertook his book to supply an ingredient which he felt was lacking in current accounts of the Cultural Revolution: namely the link between psychological phenomena and historical framework, between the feeling of individuals and the events taking place around them.

Briefly, Lifton argues that individuals relate to history and to other men by means of symbols. The symbols themselves vary in response to the historical context--different events make different symbols relevant. But their ultimate purpose is to give men a sense of connection with their past and future: to provide a sense of unity with other men and with history--a sense of immortality.

LIFTON'S concepts become intelligible only when he relates them to the specific case of China. "The essence of the 'power struggle' taking place in China," he argues, "as of all such 'power struggles' is power over death." The symbol of immortality linking Mao with the mass agents of upheaval is the Revolution. As an old man facing death, he has seized on his political work and vision as his connection with Chinese history. The knowledge that they will outlive him allows him to face death, and the threat of their corruption stimulates an almost paranoid response--a need to obliterate all enemies and an emphasis on absolute purity. It is this purity of vision which Mao is forcing on China.

The symbol of Mao and his revolution, in turn, link the masses to Chinese culture and history. With ancestor worship and family under attack from the communist leadership, the revolution is a substitute for the biological line. This explains the deification of Mao, and even more than Mao, Mao's Thought. Mao's Thought must be the sole (thus unchallenged) basis for the order which survives him. The hysterical attack on all tradition is an attempt to clear the field for the rise of a new cleansed Maoist order, and youth is the bearer of the new tradition because it symbolizes the vitality of rebirth. One of the most stirring passages of the book is a paraphrased second hand account of the first Red Guard rally in Peking in August, 1966:

One observer, Franz Schurmann--noting the extraordinary scene of a million people gathered in the great square singing "The East is Red," Mao Tse-tung powerful in his presence though walking slowly and stiffly ... then moving out into the masses on the arm of a teenage girl--spoke of the formation of a new community. I would suggest that this new community, in a symbolic sense, is a community of immortals.

It is clear that symbols do play an important role in ordering a society. State ideologies are little more than collections of symbols, and as some China scholars have argued, the peculiar appeal of Marxist-Leninist symbols goes a long way toward explaining the ability of the Party to organize 700 million people in the short space of twenty years.

LIFTON'S approach, then, has a certain intuitive and empirical weight. But in seeking to pinpoint one key symbol and stretch it into a foundation for China's chaos, he strains his hypothesis. Lifton has an exceptional command of the data on the Cultural Revolution, and his scheme explains most of its history. But few of his observations (as he readily admits in the introduction) cannot be explained by political, sociological and economic theses. This would not argue against his approach if it were not for one thing: the tremendous difficulty of verifying generalizations about the psychological make-up of vast masses of people with whom one has no direct contact. Lifton often interprets as support for his thesis data which supports it only tenuously.

Lifton has a particularly hard time convincing us that the Red Guards who have spearheaded Mao's movement actually share his concern for the revolution--or at least that they are concerned for the same reasons that Mao is. The youthfulness of the Red Guards (most were between 10 and 18 years of age) is logical from Mao's viewpoint, since they symbolize for him a vital new order. But it seems hard to understand why youths should be so violently afraid of death and fearful for their immortality. Lifton quotes extensively from Red Guard statements, most of which in fact emphasize the destruction of the old and its replacement with the new. But this does not imply a concern with immortality. It could just as easily be the kind of radical effort to force their own identity on reality which Erikson attributes to adolescence.

Or it could be something totally different: a response to a particular political order and the grievances it engenders. If symbols gibe with certain psychological needs, it may also be true that particular kinds of political order cultivate certain psychological states. The lot of the Chinese student (as efforts to reform the educational system indicate) was not an easy one. Like society as a whole, the Chinese educational structure has been arbitrary in the extreme and rigidly ideological in orientation. China has been so gutted with students that many are being sent back to do agricultural labor because there are not enough skilled jobs to accommodate them. All these circumstances would make Chinese youth particularly responsive to an open season on party bureaucrats--which is precisely what the cultural revolution has been.

LIFTON'S account of Mao's peculiar obsession and its role in explaining the cultural revolution is far more satisfying than his account of mass response to that obsession. This side of the collective-individual relationship is much easier to document and far better researched than the motivations of China's millions. The image of Mao which emerges has all the features of high tragedy. Mao will undoubtedly be recalled as one of the great political geniuses of all time. Over a span of thirty years he personally molded a classic revolution and within three years of his victory, had crisscrossed China's vast expanse with the most complex and effective political apparatus the country has ever known. The accomplishment cluded Chian Kai-shek for as many years, as it cluded the warlords for ten years before him.

Mao was, by Lifton's account, a man confident of his cluded the warlords for ten years before him.

Mao was, by Lifton's account, a man confident of his own abilities and of his immortality, a man who transcended life while still alive, not by mystic experiences, but by facing death and overcoming it. Lifton speaks of a characteristic quality of tone and content that, more than any other, shaped the psychic contours of the Cultural Revolution. I refer to the kind of existential absolute, an insistence upon all or none confrontation with death.

Now, facing death, Mao has evidently lost his contempt for it, and fears the collapse of his vision and the loss of his life's work. Mao's vision has turned on him, out of control. It has undermined the party, while failing to achieve its total reform of Chinese society. It has tried to remake human nature and failed. It may not destroy China or even Chinese Communism, but his radical effort has brought China to the end of an era.

Lifton's account of Mao would be far more powerful if it were not for the "psychological idiom" in which he couches it. Indeed throughout the book, one has an annoying sense that jargon is making the obvious complicated. This problem, of course, is endemic to the psychological approach to social science, and would not be too great a price to pay for a comprehensive account of the Cultural Revolution. If Lifton's is not comprehensive, it probably comes as close as any unitary scheme can. Until China opens up to the West, and maybe for a long time thereafter, art and science will be inseparable in studies of China. In the meantime, Robert Lifton's art brings us closer to reality than does Dean Rusk's science.