The winds of change were blowing in China. "Every day," Mr. Buckley begins,

"a fresh victim of one of Mao's purges is exonerated; tomorrow they may disentomb Mozart at the rate they are going . . ." To help us sort it all out, we have one of the English-speaking world's leading journalists, whose China-watching goes back to the decade he spent in China as a young man just out of Harvard. To take just one sample: THW: "They keep coming back to me, these memories of the Saturday-night dances at Communist headquarters in Yenan.... They would go waltzing around and sashaying, and the commander-in-chief, Chu Teh, would sit there with his wife like a grandmother and grandfather seeing a Jewish wedding, and there would be Yeh Chien-ying, who is now the Defense Minister, and Lin Piao, who has been purged and his throat cut, and P'eng Te-huai, who has been purged and is now being resurrected, I am told... To see these men in that lyrical period when they were the underdogs, when they were fighting the Japanese, when they were behind the Japanese lines and risking their lives every day--to see their comradeship and their brilliance and their camaraderie was to be carried away by it." WFB: "You sound like John Reed." THW: "But John Reed died too soon to see what happened later, to see Stalin knock off Trotsky, and knock off Bukharin and knock off Zinoviev. I have lived to see these comrades in arms ... poisoned with power, shoot each other down, exile each other. It's a terrible thing. ... I think ours is the only revolution in all history where the revolutionaries did not kill each other off."

Alternate title: What Should Be Our Chinese Policy?