til he had read every line of Richard Walker’s book. He might then emerge to rewrite Mandarin Red with the background knowledge necessary to interpret, and draw valid conclusions from, the variety of his experiences in travelling oyer a large part of the “enormously exciting but oddly depressing” land of China. His ignorance of the Chinese language, and his consequent dependence on government-supplied interpreters, was no greater a handicap than his determination, in his own words, “to lean over backwards to give honor to the triumphs of the Revolution”; “to see the best through a smokescreen of hokum”; and to believe that the Communists have “produced a nation happier than ever before.”
Mr. Cameron does, however, have a sense of humor, midway between laughter and tears, and at the margin cannot control his revulsion against the drab and dreary Communist way of life, where almost everyone of both sexes, “from the Prime Minister to the postman,” is garbed in the same depressing and formless blue “boiler suit,” and where everyone everywhere endlessly repeats the clichés of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist dogma. Despite his desire to believe what he was told; therefore, he cannot ignore the evidence of the compulsions that ensure the conformity. His book, like the curate’s egg, is very good in parts. Certainly it is unlikely to make anyone believe that Communism is an improvement on the “capitalist system,” or better even than Western colonial rule, or in any way preferable to what the author persists in describing in Communist terms as the “vicious system” of Kuomintang rule.
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