22 JANUARY 1983, Page 19

Maligning Mao

Sir: In my piece from China dated 4 December, trying to describe the sexual electricity evidently crackling in the photographs of the late Chairman Mao with his third wife, Chiang Ching, leaderess of the celebrated 'Gang of Four', you have me writing: 'The Chairman may have fan- cied a bit of Shanghai flesh,' While even a scholar is entitled to his share of The Other, what I actually wrote was 'fancied a bit of Shanghai flash'. The flesh underneath is better, perhaps, left to the counter- revolutionary imagination.

Murray Sayle Repentance Creek, New South Wales, Australia