Everybody Would Leave

China: Alive in the Bitter Sea By Fox Butterfield

Times Books, 468 pp., $19.95 The patrician Fox Butterfield was the first New York Times reporter to be permitted to live and work in Communist China. From 1979 to 1981 he was based in Peking and traveled as far as Sinkiang and Tibet. Now he has written what is generally and rightly judged to be the best single book on life in China today, which in his own key word he found “bitter.”