AWAKENED CHINA: The Country Americans Don't Know

Englishman Felix Greene, an American-based correspondent, who has visited Communist China twice during recent years, has now amassed his observations of that country and given it a virtually carte blanche eye. Traditionally British in its tidy prose and cool outlook, it contains no horrendous accounts of Red evil and regimentation and will therefore be attacked in many quarters as bigoted or naive, or at any rate create controversial interest. Green makes his way from Hong Kong to Peking, a bustling metropolis, then on to the huge and growing cities of Shenyang and Anshan, and from there to rural communes, urban communes, universities, kindergartens, and the valley of the Yangtze. he has a very enlightening interview with Chou En-Lai; he details the rise of Mao Tse-tung; speaks liberally with many workers, intellectuals, even cabmen, and learns the psychological tenor of the country, so different from the West, and presents a long chapter depicting- and to an extent defending- the Chinese case. While Greene is faithful to the Old World democracies, he refuses to look at the new land with blinkers, He writes of what he has seen and draws no moral conclusions, only pragmatic ones. Many of them will appear all too superficial- and too trusting- in terms of China's foreign policy. And a number of the ""happy"" sociological advances he extols will remind some readers of Orwell's 1984. It is an important report, timely and welcome.