The Belgian sinologist Pierre Ryckmans (pen-name “Simon Leys”) was once asked for his opinion of Mao Tse-tung’s poetry. He replied: “Well, if poetry were painting, I would say that Mao was better than Hitler … but not as good as Churchill.”

Ryckmans’ quip suggests the moral dilemma in confronting Mao’s poetry. Imagine yourself at an art show featuring numerous obscure painters. You spot a piece you rather like. On enquiry, you find that the price is acceptable but then, on the point of buying it, you learn that it is one of Hitler’s Vienna pieces. Do you withdraw from the purchase? Most of us would, I think.

What, then, of a poem by Mao Tse-tung, whose sinified version of Marxist-Leninism brought about the untimely deaths of tens of millions of his own countrymen, stifled all literary and intellectual activity in China for forty years, and established a terroristic police state that still, though with techniques of repression somewhat modified, monopolizes political power and prohibits the rise of rational, consensual government today, not only in metropolitan China but also in the old non-Chinese Manchu suzerainties?

You could argue that even to glance at one of these poems is a small act of disloyalty to the unknown, unnumbered thousands of far better poets who were terrorized to silence under Mao’s brutish tyranny, or who went unpublished because their work was judged insufficiently “correct” by brainless Party hacks, or who were murdered without pity by the Maoist goon