The Real Red China

Communist China 1949-1969: A Twenty-Year Appraisal Edited by Frank N. Trager and William Henderson New York University Press, 356 pp., $9.50 They didn’t assign books like this when I was in East Asian Studies at Yale and Harvard. They didn’t then, they don’t now, and they won’t tomorrow. A book like this confounds the Ivy League intelligentsia’s accepted wisdom about Mao’s China that, oh well, it’s not the best of all possible worlds, but it’s ever so much nicer than Chiang Kai-shek’s China, and things really are getting better, and after all, we simply must get on with the business of building bridges. And so on. They don’t assign books like this in schools like that because the essays are scholarly, well argued, manifestly unenthusiastic about China today, and Edgar Snow wouldn’t like them one little bit.

Messrs. Trager and Henderson have compiled a book that can’t be ignored, but is—have you read a review of it anywhere else?—and which should be assigned reading for all students of China, the better to counter the euphoria of sinophiliacs like Hans Koningsberger (Love and Hate in China), Mr. Snow (Red China Today) and the whole dreary Table Tennis-Ash Can School of Sinology (Let a Hundred Ping-Pong Tournies Commence, and Dump Chiang’s Taiwan in the Rubbish Heap).

DB

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David Brudnoy

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Communist China 1949-1969: A Twenty-Year Appraisal Edited by Frank N. Trager and William Henderson New York University Press, 356 pp., $9.50 They didn’t assign books like this when I was in East Asian Studies at Yale and Harvard. They didn’t then, they don’t now, and they won’t tomorrow. A book like this confounds the Ivy League intelligentsia’s accepted wisdom about Mao’s China that, oh well, it’s not the best of all possible worlds, but it’s ever so much nicer than Chiang Kai-shek’s China, and things really are getting better, and after all, we simply must get on with the business of building bridges. And so on. They don’t assign books like this in schools like that because the essays are scholarly, well argued, manifestly unenthusiastic about China today, and Edgar Snow wouldn’t like them one little bit.

Messrs. Trager and Henderson have compiled a book that can’t be ignored, but is—have you read a review of it anywhere else?—and which should be assigned reading for all students of China, the better to counter the euphoria of sinophiliacs like Hans Koningsberger (Love and Hate in China), Mr. Snow (Red China Today) and the whole dreary Table Tennis-Ash Can School of Sinology (Let a Hundred Ping-Pong Tournies Commence, and Dump Chiang’s Taiwan in the Rubbish Heap).