The United States is better informed about Communist China today than is any other country in the Free World. Our government provides daily translations of the mainland press and periodicals for general use, it translates for its own purposes a great variety of specialized Chinese printed material, some of which it puts at the disposal of scholars. There are about a dozen major universities with libraries and staff sufficient to provide the student with advanced graduate training on China. Courses in the Chinese language can be taken at hundreds of universities and colleges. The financial support provided by private foundations and by the National Defense Education Act has been instrumental in giving us hundreds of scholars well trained in the Chinese language and one or more of the disciplines. Our library holdings on Communist China are very extensive, and we publish more studies on Communist China than all other non-Communist countries put together. The combined resources of England, France, and Germany, both human and material, are small indeed when compared with those of the United States.
The American scholar, it has been pointed out, cannot go to Communist China and therefore loses a valuable asset. This is true; the Communists will not allow him in. There is no substitute for being in the land, but in some cases there is not a great advantage. Most of the correspondents of other countries who have resided in Peking are quite frank about the difficulties and frustrations facing the journalistic profession in that country. Hong Kong is a far more valuable source of information about Communist China than is Peking.
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