Stuart R. Schram, Physicist and Mao Scholar, Dies at 88 Stuart R. Schram was a Minnesotan who made his way to Paris, an Army nuclear physicist who became an expert in French political history, and a mind wide awake in a world remade by war and its cold aftermath. By the late 1950s, having already worked on the Manhattan Project, published scholarly works in French and German, and taught himself Russian and Japanese, he turned his considerable intellect to a divisive and mysterious subject far across the globe and accessible to the West almost solely through written works and transcripts: Mao Zedong. It was an ambitious and rewarding move. Over the next 50 years, Mr. Schram, who died on July 8 in France at 88, completed a seminal biography of Mao just before the disasters of the Cultural Revolution, and spent much of the rest of his life translating into English exhaustive volumes of Mao's words, in the process shedding critical light on a rapidly changing China. To other China scholars, Mr. Schram provided cleareyed analysis of Mao at a time when many people were eager to reduce him to either an evil dictator or a visionary hero. Mr. Schram's works, they say, are touchstones in the study of how Mao adapted Marxism for consumption by one of the world's oldest cultures. "He struck a middle ground between cold war anti-Communism and armchair revolutionary paeans and praise," said Timothy Cheek, a China historian at the University of British Columbia. He had this monster textual capacity where you just had read more than anyone else and on any given question you can cite a bunch of stuff. Mr. Schram was working at the Institut d"Études Politiques de Paris, or Sciences Po, when he began learning Chinese. He soon became an authority on China and Mao by using the principal source available: the written record. He completed "The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung" in 1963. Three years later, he produced the biography "Mao Tse-tung." "Now you can go to the grass roots and talk to real Chinese," said Roderick MacFarquhar, an expert on China at Harvard who knew Mr. Schram. In those days, none of us could get into China. You couldn't talk to people in China, but what you could do was try to analyze what the leaders were thinking and doing. Rendering a level assessment was not made any easier by McCarthyism and the volatile politics of postwar America. Several former colleagues suggested that Mr. Schram found more freedom to work in Europe, where he would not be suspected of being an apologist for Communism. Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, the penultimate governor of Hong Kong before Britain ceded control and a former colleague of Mr. Schram's, noted in an interview that China Quarterly, which was edited at different times by Lord Wilson and Mr. MacFarquhar (Mr. Schram was on the board), was founded in London even though much of the best work on China was being done by Americans, often underwritten by philanthropies like the Ford Foundation. "It made more sense to establish a journal that was trying to be totally objective in Britain than in the United States," Lord Wilson said. Mr. Cheek said Mr. Schram's earliest works still stand up to scrutiny. "The questions he was addressing were not the questions readers come to today," he said. The difference is time and place. People were not worried about the Taliban or global financial collapse or would China take over the world. In the 1960s, people were trying to explain, how the heck did the Communists win and Chiang Kai-shek fail? Even as Mr. Schram delved into Mao's early failures - he suggested that he agreed with estimates that nearly 40 million people died from starvation resulting from Mao's Great Leap Forward of 1958 - he was surprised by the damage done by Mao's 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, colleagues said. "Stuart had noted over the years that Mao was very proud of Chinese history," Mr. MacFarquhar said. He was surprised Mao was willing to countenance this kind of destruction. Mr. Schram enjoyed applying his research skills to French wine and food and sometimes read a book a day, including detective novels, said his wife, Marie-Annick Schram. He eventually traveled to China every year and was in Beijing during the protests in Tiananmen Square. "I think he had very mixed feelings about Mao," Ms. Schram said. I would not use the word admiration, but of course he was very intrigued.