Subject: CND Books and Journals Review, May 30, 1993

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 30 May 1993 11:56:32 +1000

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            |  \/___| |/    China News Digest     | |/__/  |/
             \_______/  (Books & Journals Review) |_______/

                              May 30, 1993

**CND B & J is part of CND-Global News Service. Broadcast once a week, it
attempts to bring to readers news and reviews related to Chinese arts and
literature, and articles of interest to supplement daily CND packages ***

No. Subject                                                      # of Lines
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1. News Brief (1 Item) ................................................. 22

2. "The Man Who Stayed Behind"  by Rittenberg & Bennett ................ 73

3. Special Report Series - 5
   Technology - The Legacy of Wan Hoo:
   After centuries of false starts, the nation's science
   is finally poised for takeoff ...................................... 122

4. Industry - Building on Success:
   Foreign investment has transformed the country into a behemoth of
   light industry. But much remains to be done in modernizing heavy
   industry and creating infrastructure ............................... 191

5. Book Reviews -
   "The Aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Crisis in Mainland China"
   "China in the Nineties: Crisis Management and Beyond"
   "China in Our Time: The Epic Saga of the People's Republic from the
    Communist Victory to Tiananmen Square and Beyond" .................. 67
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Editor's Note:  We welcome all CND readers to contribute to this column. If
                you encounter any China-related books  or journals that you
                would like to share with  other CND readers, please send in
                comments, newspaper reviews, journal articles, and excerpts
                etc to  [email-masked]   Thank you.

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1. News Brief (1 Item) ................................................. 22
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[DPA, 05/24/93] CANNES - The jury at the Cannes Film Festival was unable on
Monday to pick a single winner for the best-film prize - choosing instead to
give two Golden Palm awards to "The Piano" by New Zealand director Jane
Campion and "Bawang Bieji" by China's Chen Kaige. The Chinese co-winner,
which also bears the French title "Adieu my Concubine", was shot in Beijing
with actors from Hong Kong and financial backing from Taiwan. It is a three-
way love story in a theatre milieu to a backdrop of 50 years of modern
Chinese history.

Both movies received emotional standing ovations when they premiered last
week at the beachside Palais des Festivals, and have been highly praised by
critics and the public.

"Farewell to My Concubine" is based on a novel by Hong Kong writer Lillian
Lee, itself based on a 2,000-year-old Chinese opera about an imperial
concubine who commits suicide when she fears her lover will lose his empire
and his life to rival warlords.

The film recounts the lives of a male Chinese opera singer and his wife, a
former imperial courtesan, and a female impersonator who is homosexual and
falls in love with the singer, poisoning his marriage.
(Forwarded by: Wenfeng and Zhao Hua)

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2. "The Man Who Stayed Behind"  by Rittenberg & Bennett ................ 73
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edited and forwarded by: Zhen Gu ([email-masked])
Source: The New York Times Book Review 5/30/93
Review written by: Merle Goldman

"The Man Who Stayed Behind"
by Sidney Rittenberg and Amanda Bennett
New York: Simon & Schuster. $25

Sidney Rittenberg has led an extraordinary but troubling life. His story
reveals to what degree ideological zeal can lead even someone reared in
Western democratic values to act in ways diametrically opposed to those
values.

Like a small number of foreigners, he had gone to China in search of a
cause, and a desire to find acceptance. Though the only son of a prominent
Jewish family in SC, he never felt truly accepted until he found a role for
himself in the Chinese revolution.

Rittenberg, in his book written with Amanda Bennett, a Wall Street Journal
reporter, tells us that he was motivated by a sense of idealism. While at
the University of South Carolina in 1940, he joined the Communist Party. He
organized workers and sought improvement for the blacks in the South. In
1942 he was drafted and sent to China.

Rittenberg saw the Chinese Communism as bringing order out of chaos. He made
his way to Yanan, where he became an adviser to the English- language
broadcast news service.

In helping the party, he says, he believed he was acting in an American
revolutionary tradition, but in reality he became a fanatic believer in the
Communist regime, even when he was arrested in 1949 and imprisoned for 5
years as an American spy. He sustained himself by reciting poetry, studying
Mao's works and keeping his room clean. Though the party admitted it had
made a mistake when he was released in 1955, his desire to be accepted by
the Chinese Communists had in fact intensified.

Rittenberg could have chosen to return to US, but instead, he stayed on in
China and became the leader of a group of foreigners who had also come to
China because of belief in the Communist regime. He rose in the ranks of the
party. He was made a party member in Yanan, where he played cards with Mao,
Zhou Enlai and other top officials. In 1955, he joined the broadcast
administration in Beijing and was given all the privileges of a high
official, plus access to classified cables seen only by top party officials.
In 1963-64, he was the only foreigner cleared to translate into English
China's ideological criticism of the Soviet Union.

Along with some other foreigners, Rittenberg participated whole-heartedly a
series of campaigns that Mao launched against Chinese dissidents. He
publicly attacked a number of his Chinese friends in the anti-rightist
campaign in 1957-59. When Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966,
Rittenberg led the purge of his colleagues and then joined an even more
extreme faction initially allied with Mao's wife, Jiang Qing.

After the Cultural Revolution degenerated into anarchy that threatened Mao's
own power, Mao turned against radicals and made Rittenberg one of the
scapegoats for the anarchy that Mao himself had instigated. Rittenberg was
again arrested in 1967 as an American spy. This time he spent 10 years in
solitary confinement. Yet even then he continued to believe in the party and
its regime.

When he was released in 1977, his wife and children told him about all the
terrible things that had happened in the Cultural Revolution, he refused to
believe them. Only after several years of painful re- examination did he
begin to question Mao, as well as Marx and Lenin. In 1980, he returned to US
with his family. In a revealing last chapter he admits that "I wanted so
hard to believe that I saw what I want to see, bent reality to fit my own
notions."

However, he does not come truly clean. Other foreigners imply that he
implicated foreign as well as Chinese colleagues. Certainly to come through
almost 16 years of solitary confinement and remain sane reveals a person of
tremendous inner resources. Perhaps he had to continue to believe to survive
such an ordeal.

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3. Special Report Series - 5
   Technology - The Legacy of Wan Hoo:
   After centuries of false starts, the nation's science
   is finally poised for takeoff ...................................... 122
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded by: Zuofeng Li
Source: Time 5/10/93
Written by: Philip Elmer Dewitt

The world's first attempt at manned space travel was not auspicious. Five
hundred years before Yuri Gagarin, a Chinese official named Wan Hoo strapped
himself to a chair equipped with 47 high-powered fireworks rockets, held a
kite in each hand and ordered the fuses ignited. He died, still earthbound,
in the ensuing inferno.

Not so long ago, Wan Hoo's doomed mission could have served as an emblem for
technology in China, a vast country brimming with ideas (from waterwheels to
parasols) yet incapable of making many of them fly. Insulated from the
Industrial Revolution, isolated from Western science and, when it finally
turned outward for technology, jinxed by having chosen as mentor the Soviet
Union, China seemed destined to be left behind by a capitalist world
rocketing toward a high-tech future.

No more. After centuries of fits and starts, China may be on the brink of
regaining its scientific promise. High-tech exports are booming - up nearly
40% last year, to $3.9 billion. Electronics and computer components are
selling briskly overseas, and the country has become a world leader in
biotechnology and superconductivity. Even the space program has taken off -
shades of Wan Hoo - powered by Long March rockets, sprinkling Asiasat
communications satellites across the heavens and undercutting American and
European rocket-launching services 30% to 50%. "Our launch technology is
simple and cheap," says Chen Shouchun, vice president of China Great Wall
Industry, the country's premier satellite-booster company.

Scientists are starting to make their mark internationally, despite chronic
shortages of funds and equipment. An assessment of research articles
conducted last year by SRI International, a Menlo Park, California, think
tank, found that the number of published papers listing Chinese authors
climbed 40% between 1988 and 1990; the number of those articles cited in
other research studies - an important measure of their significance - rose
nearly 60%. U.S. experts familiar with their work say Chinese scientists are
rapidly catching up to their Western counterparts on a broad front, and in
several key fields may be pulling ahead. Among them:

- LASER5 AND OPTICS The Chinese lead the world in certain crystal-growth
techniques for making special-purpose lasers. Chinese lasers are widely used
in medicine, as an alternative to scalpels and to beam data down fiber-optic
cables

- BIOTECHNOLOGY Using modern gene-splicing tools, Chinese scientists have
developed a new hepatitis-B vaccine, new strains of high-yield rice,
virus-resistant potatoes and tomatoes, and the first genetically engineered
tobacco plant. Cigarettes made from the high-tech tobacco will hit the
market later this year

- SUPERCONDUCTORS In the late 1980s, physicist Zhao Zhongxian and his
colleagues at the Academy of Sciences in Beijing captured world attention by
creating a superconductor that worked at the (relatively) high temperature
of -194.5C. The SRI study describes current Chinese research as "world
class."

- CARBON ISOTOPES Western scientists have been surprised by the prominence
of Chinese research in the brand-new field of carbon fullerenes, or
buckyballs - those strange spherical molecules of pure carbon that may
someday be used to make everything from tiny ball bearings to
superconducting wires.

China's basic scientific strength, unsurprisingly, lies in population
numbers: it has more than 7 million scientists, engineers and technical
personnel, many of them educated at top U.S.  and other Western
universities. But making effective use of its trained minds has never been
easy: the barriers have been as much cultural and political as financial and
technical.

When the People's Republic was founded in 1949, the country had 400,000
scientists and technicians and by most estimates lagged more than 50 years
behind the developed world. The communists were infatuated with the idea of
technological progress and turned to the Soviets for support. From the 1950s
to the mid-'60s, high-tech equipment flowed from Moscow to Beijing. By 1964
China was producing computers and had tested its first atom bomb.

But progress slowed as relations with the Soviets soured, and it came to an
abrupt halt in 1966, when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. In the
revolutionary frenzy, science was branded an elitist activity. Schools and
labs were closed; researchers were sent to work in factories or on
collective farms. "Some were tortured.  Some were even killed," says Wendy
Frieman, director of the Asia Technology Program at Science Applications
International Corp. in suburban Washington. For years afterward, scientists
and other intellectuals were scorned and intimidated.  Some professors still
earn less than hotel waitresses.

Now, in Deng Xiaoping's bid to make up for lost time, the party has launched
a series of modernization programs aimed at achieving parity with Western
science and technology by the year 2000. One of these plans was code-named
863 after the year and month (March 1986) when four prominent scientists
proposed it to Deng.  It focuses scientific resources on seven strategic
technologies: biotech, energy, new materials, information, automation,
lasers, space and (an eighth, added as an after-thought) telecommunications.
Another program, code-named Climb the Mountain, encourages basic research. A
third, called Torch, establishes high-tech industrial parks (sometimes with
cheap housing and other perks) to keep scientists from fleeing to the
private sector and to help them move their research from the lab to the
market.

The notion of commercial applications does not come naturally after decades
of communism. "Linkage between the research sector and the economy in China
has been quite dreadful." says Richard Suttmeier, professor of political
science at the University of Oregon. Nor has the mainland in the past been
concerned with advancing the frontiers of pure science. The triumph of
Western technology in the 20th century has been the speed with which
inventions have been generalized into scientific laws and those laws applied
to further advance technology. "The Chinese approach has tended to be
experimental, pragmatic, but not in a fundamental sense scientific," says
Kenneth Lieberthal, professor of political science at the University of
Michigan.

The leadership has been trying to change that since the late 1970s by
showering cash and benefits on the scientific elite, stressing the
importance of practical applications, encouraging pure - and non ideological
- excellence, opening doors to the West and allowing 200,000 students to
study abroad. Beijing seemed to be doing everything right - until Tiananmen
Square.

Bitter memories of the crackdown linger in the scientific community.
Research projects suffered, as foreign universities and research labs
suspended ties with the Beijing regime. Some of those projects are now back
on track. But 120,000 students are still living abroad. By some accounts, a
third of them have decided not to return. The Chinese government is actively
recruiting the rest, trying to persuade them that China is now safe for
science. Many remain unconvinced. What they decide may determine whether
Chinese technology surges back into the forefront or goes the way of Wan Hoo
and his nonflying chair.

[Reported by Daniel S. Levy/New York and Mia Turner/Beijing]

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4. Industry - Building on Success:
   Foreign investment has transformed the country into a behemoth of
   light industry. But much remains to be done in modernizing heavy
   industry and creating infrastructure ............................... 191
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded by: Zuofeng Li
Source: Time 5/10/93
Written by: Barbara Rudolph

To get rich is glorious, Deng Xiaoping once said - and China is doing its
best to comply. Thousands of export-oriented factories are producing
brand-name television sets and tape decks, sportswear and silk, for
consumers around the world. In a joint venture between American Motors and
the Beijing Automobile Factory, 27,000 Cherokee Jeeps will be rolling off
assembly lines in Beijing this year. Volkswagen produces 65,000 of its
Santana cars and 10,000 Jettas in China. Nike, the leading U.S. manufacturer
of sports footwear subcontracts to six Chinese factories that manufacture a
fifth of its global production - 90 million pairs of shoes a year - and
plans to increase that share soon.

The roll call of famous name brands active in China is a Debrett's Peerage
of industry: Gillette. Cardin, Siemens, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, McDonnell
Douglas and many others. So far this year, nearly 84,000 joint ventures,
cooperative enterprises and exclusively foreign-funded firms have been
registered: more than 47,000 were added to the roster last year.  The value
of the exports generated reached $85 billion last year, and should increase
to $93 billion in 1993 and to $150 billion by the year 2000.  China ranked
as the world's 13th largest exporter at the end of 1992.The country's
industrial output rose 21% last year, a performance that should he repeated
in 1993.

The industrial leap forward has outsiders dazzled - and marketeers gleeful
at the prospect of selling to Chinese worker whose incomes are steadily
growing, thanks to the expansion. In the special economic zone of Shenzhen,
per capita income has officially reached $320 annually. That statistic may
grossly underestimate the region's real earning power. According to McKinsey
& Co. consultants, per capita income in Shenzhen city may be as much as
S2,300 a year.

Beneath the glitter, however, lies a more complex - and potentially
troublesome - reality.  For the economy Beijing is building, to some degree
with foreign help, remains a hybrid. It is topped by a thick layer of
relatively efficient light industry that powers the export surge, taking
advantage of a cheap, semi-skilled labor force and economies of scale in
mainland-size version of the industrial revolution that transformed Taiwan
in the '60s. Beneath it lies a ponderous, state-owned sector of heavy
resource and manufacturing industries that resembles the economic core of
the former Soviet Union. China counts about 10,000 large and medium-size
state firms that make steel, machinery, textiles and other industrial goods.
For all the inroads of the free market, the state sector still accounts for
55% of industrial output and employs more than 70% of the 148 million urban
workers. The state enterprises provide social-welfare benefits for their 106
million employees: guaranteed lifetime employment, subsidized housing, free
schools for workers' children, generous pension plans and free health care.
Says a western economist in Beijing: "These companies are minisocieties."
Adds a Chinese expert: "The state enterprises are the basis for socialism.
Without them.  what is socialism?"

Transforming the state enterprises into viable players in a free market is
the real challenge of Deng's economic reforms, whose success or failure in
this area will determine whether China emerges as a true economic giant in
the next century. Nor is it the only task that has to be tackled soon: if it
is to achieve its ambitions. China must simultaneously upgrade antiquated
and overtaxed transport and communications systems, the starved energy
sector and nascent capital markets. Despite bold declarations of intent
stretching back to 1978, Beijing is only beginning to turn to these aspects
of modernization.

Significantly, foreign investors, who funneled $11 billion into China last
year alone, have largely sidestepped the state sector, mainly because one of
its major products is red ink: state enterprises absorbed $7.8 billion in
subsidies in 1992; the entire budget deficit for that year was S4.1 billion.
Like the old Soviet plants from which they drew inspiration - and often
blueprints and capital equipment - the sate industries are dilapidated,
overmanned more than 10% and produce shoddy goods that hardly anyone wants
to buy. Says an economist: "It might be better to close them and just start
over."

Easier said than done. China has been wrestling with the problem since the
mid-1980s, and all the more energetically of late as it tries to make
exports more competitive and pushes for membership in the 108-nation General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which bans many subsidies. In 1986 Beijing
passed a ground-breaking law that authorizes state firms to go into
bankruptcy - taboo in the heyday of Maoism - and ordered some closures, but
the program stalled in the conservative backlash that followed the l9S9
Tiananmen massacre.

Now, under Deng's prodding, the scheme is once again being pursued with some
vigor. In the first 10 months of 1992, 346 firms, 104 of them state owned,
declared bankruptcy, with the result that 1.4 million urban workers lost
their job. In November, for example, the Chongqing General Knitting Factory
in Sichuan province went out of business with debts of $14 million; about
2,900 employees were let go. In the past, workers were automatically
transferred to the payroll of another state-owned enterprise. These days
they are either transferred to service companies set up by the state-owned
firms or merely given a severance package. These closures can be explosive
in social terms: last year 2,500 workers, or half the staff, at the
government-owned Seagull watch factory in Tianjin went on a rampage,
smashing equipment after they were laid off.

The government's intent - in this instance with positive effect - is
illustrated by Shougang (Beijing Capital Steel), a far-flung complex on the
outskirts of the capital. The firm was once China's leading steelmaker,
turning out 5.7 million tons annually.  It still has 250,000 people on its
payroll and is profitable.

In a policy shift. Shougang was allowed to bypass state trading firms and
deal directly with foreign companies. It set up its own commercial bank and
gave managers the freedom to make investments without government approval in
projects worth as much as $35 million. Most important, the company was
permitted to keep a greater portion of its profits for reinvestment. With
these reforms, as well as with updated technology and offers of incentives
to workers for improved performance, earnings rose 35% to $550 million last
year. As part of its modernization strategy, the firm bought a steel mill in
Los Angeles and had it dismantled and shipped to China.

The steel case is a rarity, however. Moreover, inefficiency in the state
sector extends to the infrastructure. Growth in the rail network, for
instance. has been lagging well behind overall economic expansions: China
built an average of 900 Km of railway line annually during the '60s and
'7Os; in the 1980s the figure dropped to 350 km. As a result, shipments
totaling more than 40 million tons were seriously delayed last year. The
rails may be in dismal shape, but most manufacturers still prefer to ship
their goods by train, avoiding the long-neglected, congested high way
system.

Foreign business people are most sorely frustrated by the primitive
condition of much of the telephone system. A few modern complexes in Beijing
and elsewhere have access to direct international dialing, but an up-to-date
telecommunications network is still a dream for much of the country, and
will remain just that well into the next century. By the end of 1992, 19
million telephones had been installed - an average of 16 phones for 100
people.  (By contrast, Brazil has 9.3 telephones per 100 people.)

The economy's most pressing need is for flexible, responsive - and rich -
capital markets. At the moment, funding is still largely fed to industry
through a banking system that works along political lines: firms looking for
investment money must curry favor with government agencies that hold the
purse strings. State-owned companies, whether they lose money or not,
usually have first call. The central hank is not autonomous and exerts no
control over the money supply. Last year, for all of Beijing's pro-market
rhetoric, state enterprises received $61 million in bank loans, up 20% from
the prior year; privately held firms are generally denied loans. Though
banks can provide foreign firms with such simple services as letters of
credit and traveler's checks, they play a relatively inconsequential role in
those companies' financing plans.

Two years ago, Beijing took an important step forward by creating a market
for government bonds. Last year, however, speculation by underwriters nearly
destroyed the system. A variety of underwriters, including state banks and
financial institutions, were given $7 billion worth of government debt to
sell.  Speculating that prices would improve, the underwriters held on to
the paper - and took a bath when the value of the issue plunged. This year
the government reverted to past form and simply ordered local governments
and state enterprises to by up $6 billion worth of debt.

China's two official stock markets, launched in 1990 and 1991, are a little
more advanced. Market capitalization is more than $34 billion, compared with
Hong Kong's $167 billion, and only 69 firms trade shares on the exchanges of
Shenzhen and Shanghai, which recently allowed three foreign brokerage firms
to take seats. As investors in these markets, foreigners can buy only
nonvoting shares. Since China's regulatory commission is no equivalent of
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, both markets invite abuse.
Insider information is routinely shared; annual reports are rare, principles
of accounting are unknown or ignored. Many financial statements, for
example, make no mention of profits, and losses are often disguised by
overestimating the value of inventories. While the exchanges handle an
impressive volume of trading, and effective securities law - a basic
necessity for most foreign investors - has been delayed by government
wrangling.

The exchanges do serve an important need in soaking up part of a $210
billion pool in national savings. But the better-run state companies are
looking beyond China's capital markets and starting to sell their stock
abroad. One company, the Bermuda-based Brilliance China Automotive Holdings,
a producer of minivans in Liaoning province, is now listed on the New York
Stock Exchange. The stock has performed well, and is seen as a promising
entry in an emerging market. Hoping to tap into Hong Kong funds, Beijing has
announced that nine firms, including the Shanghai Petrochemical Complex,
will issue shares on the colony's exchange starting in June. China's
fast-growing Guangdong province recently announced it would issue $150
million in five-year bonds on European exchanges.

The best way to convert government losses into profits, as Beijing well
knows, is to sell off state-owned behemoths to private interests, provided
buyers can be found. Last June the government approved the sale of the first
such firm to a foreign investor when Wuhan No.2 Printing and Dyeing Works
was sold to Hongtex Development, a Hong Kong company. Though the firm had
lost $5 million a year, the new owners quickly turned the business around,
mainly by laying off 1,146 of 1,920 workers. Several hundred of the
dismissed employees were given jobs in guesthouses or shops affiliated with
the new owners, but others were put on short-term contracts.

Along similar lines, Jilin province plans to sell 200 small firms to foreign
investors; in Sichuan, 16 state enterprises are on the block. That kind of
transformation is likely to take decades, not years. Officials stress that
the moves to privatize constitute no more than an "experiment." But if China
is to achieve its industrial aspirations, the experiment cannot fail.

[Reported by Mia Turner/Beijing]

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5. Book Reviews -
   "The Aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Crisis in Mainland China"
   "China in the Nineties: Crisis Management and Beyond"
   "China in Our Time: The Epic Saga of the People's Republic from the
    Communist Victory to Tiananmen Square and Beyond" .................. 67
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded by: XU Ming Yang
Source: Books in Print

Book 1

"The Aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Crisis in Mainland China".
DS779  92-12348   0-8133-1407-0 Title main entry. Ed. by Bih-jaw Lin et al.
Westview Press, c1992. 460 p. $39.95 (pa)

In 19 contributed chapters, scholars from Taiwan and the US analyze the
wide-ranging effects of the Tiananmen crisis on the role of ideology; the
Party; the military; social and legal reform; economic reform; Taiwan and
Hong Kong; and foreign relations. Published in cooperation with the
Institute of International Relations, Tapei, Taiwan. Annotation c. by Book
News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Book 2

"China in the Nineties: Crisis Management and Beyond"
DS779  91-17277 CIP ed. by David S.G. Goodman and Gerald Segal. Oxford, 1992
(c1991). 226p index ISBN 0-19-827362-2, $54.00;; ISBN 0-19-827363-0 pbk,
$22.00

Edited by two Sinologists, this heavily revised edition of the same editors'
China at Forty (1989) takes into account the sudden retreat from economic
reform in late 1988, the protests throughout China in the spring of 1989
against corruption and the Chinese Communist party leadership, and the
subsequent political repression. The articles, by an outstanding group of
China specialists, range from Chinese Marxism, human rights, and issues
surrounding the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident to the army, China's foreign
policy, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.  Goodman compellingly argues that the impetus
for change in the People's Republic of China is not likely to produce a
liberal democracy; we are more likely to witness a pluralist yet
authoritarian regime, one in which the Chinese Communist party still plays a
role.  Further, as the articles on economic reform and foreign policy also
conclude, China's traditional xenophobia has far less effect on policy than
it did until the 1980s: "foreign economic relations remain the cornerstone
of China's development strategy." Most articles agree that far-reaching
economic reforms have not yet led to significant political reforms but that
the socioeconomic trends they have set in motion are inherently
destabilizing for the political system.(S. Ogden; Northeastern University)

Book 3

"China in Our Time: The Epic Saga of the People's Republic from the
Communist Victory to Tiananmen Square and Beyond" by Ross Terril. June 1992.
384p. index. illus. Simon & Schuster, $25 (0-671-68096-X)

Harvard don Terrill first journeyed behind the bamboo curtain in 1964, in
the calm before the anti-Western, anti-intellectual, anti-everything of
Mao's Cultural Revolution, and his last peek through the shoots afforded him
a personal view of the Communists' bone-crunching crushing of the 1989
student demonstrations. His recording of the latter event, taking up
one-third of these personalized annals, reflects his undiminished
fascination with the country, which is probably shared by a readership
inclined to consume its recent Chinese history with interpolations of
Terrill's academic career. It began with a New Left orientation in the
1960s, when he classed the country's fate under Maoism as a lesser evil than
America's sins in Vietnam, but now he has come around to a more critical
view of the regime. Well, crow comes in small bites. The other two-thirds of
his wide-ranging retro of career and country mixes up chats with personal
Chinese contacts, backgrounders on articles he has written, clips from
diaries of his trips, and bio-vignettes of Mao and Jiang Qing (the subjects
of his two full-length biographies), and the tortuous, authoritarian
guidance their successors have given the country since their fall in 1976.
Overall, a spotty work that seems like a seat-warmer until Terrill's next
serious work--could it be a biography of Deng Xiaoping? America's libraries
could use one. (Gilbert Taylor)

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