The China Watchers [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION by ANTHONY AUSTIN and ROBERT CLURMAN Nothing is more important for peace in the second half of the 20th century than to know and understand what is going on in China; never in our lifetime has such knowledge and understanding been more difficult to come by. In the twenties, thirties and forties, China was felt to be a neighbor, however distant and strange. There was some fine reporting by American correspondents in China; missionaries, educators and businessmen in China made developments in that country a matter of personal concern to many Americans; a succession of popular books, from Alice Tisdale Hobart's Oil for the Lamps of China and Pearl Buck's The Good Earth to Lin Yutang's My Country and My People and Theodore H. White's Thunder Out of China, whetted American interest in China as a land of an exotic civilization, intriguing current history and a long-suffering but appealing people. In the fifties, with the Communists in power in Peking, all this changed. China was ringed not only by a new Great Wall—^the isolation from the non-Communist world that was partly of American, partly of Chinese Communist making—^but by walls within walls: the regime of secrecy and deviousness that kept vital areas of political, economic and cultural activity and decision in China closed off not only from foreign but from Chinese eyes; the totalitarian techniques, more effective than anything tried in Moscow, for keeping the few remaining foreign residents in Peking and other cities fenced off from normal contact with Chinese intellectuals, students and other segments of the population; the support for Communist policies that whole classes of Chinese were compelled to profess in the struggle to remake Chinese society. With rare exceptions, an interested foreigner fortunate enough to get through the "bamboo curtain" found himself conveyed along a well-prepared propaganda circuit; he tended : ,t