Volume 29, Number 9 · May 27, 1982
China on the Rocks
By John K. Fairbank
China: Alive in the Bitter Sea
by Fox Butterfield
Times Books, 468 pp., $19.95
From the Center of the Earth: The Search for the Truth about China
by Richard Bernstein
Little Brown, 260 pp., $15.95
Our relations with China are notoriously subject to swings of opinion. Idealization and disillusion, euphoria and cynicism, follow each other as though our national psychology were regulated by some manic-depressive clock. The current trend toward disillusion about the quality of life in China is no doubt part of a cycle, swinging back from the overblown enthusiasm of the early Maoist revolution of the 1950s. But the new disillusion may also represent a new fact of life, that the Chinese people are in an unprecedented quagmire created by history as well as by the Maoist revolution. Since their hard fate affects ours, it is a time for understanding and for thinking twice. Disillusion could become a reciprocal process.
Review, 2835 words
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