CHINA AND OURSELVES

According to Edgar Snow's introduction, the authors' youth constitutes the main significance of this anthology: ""young,"" hence unscarred by cold-war, McCarthyist pressures. The essays, by four Americans, three Australians, a Filipino, a Japanese and a Canadian, concentrate on the Cultural Revolution, the construction of socialism, and China's world role. Their close acquaintance with the works of Mao is best evidenced by Stephen Fitzgerald's piece on the Cultural Revolution, which he and Ray Wylie view as an egalitarian campaign with important breaks from the Soviet model of socialism. Various dimensions of Chinese uniqueness are developed by John Saari, Feliciano Careiro, and Neale Hunter (author of Shanghai Journal, 1968/9); Kazuhiko Sumiya adds an imaginative but tenuous comparison of the Long March with the biblical Exodus. The remaining articles analyze the U.S. State Department's response to ""losing"" China, with a notable appraisal of the Dulles-McCarthy 1953 attack on the Department's Far Eastern expert John Vincent. The editors conclude that Mao has broadened Marxist socialism by his concern for social relationships rather than industrial production alone. The final impression is one of sympathy with China's ""problems"" and potential; the collection will be noticed by specialists, but its foremost appeal will be to general readers and students as a more partisan complement to Dick Wilson's China After the Cultural Revolution (p. 1310, 1969).