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A journalistic tour de force, this wide-ranging collection by the writer of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography Stilwell and the American Experience in China is a vintage in its own right.
During the summer of 1972—a few short months after Nixon’s legendary visit to China—master historian Barbara W. Tuchman made her own visit to that country, spending six weeks in eleven cities and a number of rural settlements. The resulting reportage was one of the first evenhanded portrayals of Chinese culture that Americans had ever read.
Tuchman’s observations capture the people as they lived, from employees in the city and provincial party bosses to farmers, scientists, and educators. She demonstrates the breadth and scope of her expertise in discussing the alleviation of famine, misery, and exploitation; the distortion of cultural and historical inheritances into ubiquitous slogans; news media, schools, housing, and transportation; and Chairman Mao’s techniques for reasserting the Revolution. This edition also includes Tuchman’s “fascinating” (The New York Overview of Books) essay, “If Mao Had Come to Washington in 1945”—a tantalizing little bit of speculation on the proposed meeting between Mao and Roosevelt that could have changed the span of postwar history.
“Shrewdly observed . . . Tuchman enters another plea for coolness, intelligence and rationality in American Asian policies. One can hardly disagree.”—The New York Times Book Review
