A renewed interest in private gain has little chance of improving China’s statecontrolled economy
In the capital city, a traveler can sense the yearning of the Chinese for the urbanized, technological life that inevitably awaits them.
Not in recent history has Asia been so ready to exchange swords for ploughshares. Can U.S. policy take advantage of the new mood?
“Now Dulles has a successor,” said Mr. Chou with a laugh that was not a laugh of amusement, “in our Northern neighbor.” Part II of Professor Terrill’s report from China reveals the thoughts of Chairman Mao’s associates on the Kissinger and Nixon trips, the Sino-Soviet-American power balance, the United Nations, and Japan. He shows how the ideologues of Peking are also masters of Realpolitik.
The China we do not know is opening to view, albeit slowly and selectively. Back from his second extended visit to the mainland, Professor Terrill, a native Australian now teaching at Harvard, tells what life is like in China today.
“There could be few follies more costly than to believe that Japan will ‘take over our responsibilities in Asia.’ Take them over she may seek to do, but in her own, not unknown manner, nobody else’s.”
America lost its way in Asia in the 1960s in part because we pretended for twenty years that China was ours to “lose" to Communism. This is the story of a State Department China Hand who refused to play “let’s pretend” about America’s Mission in the Far East, who was purged for his realism, but whose assessments and spirit have survived the inroads of Dulles, Joe McCarthy, Time, and time.
The ATLANTIC this month devotes its entire Reports section to this account of how the Paris peace negotiations began to progress toward an accommodation. Mr. Terrill,an Australian journalist and political scientist ivho has written extensively about the Far Fast and Communist countries,made five visits to Paris for this assignment.