Soft Sell
A Curtain of Ignorance. By Felix Greene. (Cape, 35s.) China in Crisis. By Sven Lindqvist. Translated by Sylvia Clayton. (Faber, 25s.) Sow: years ago I was sent, with the connivance of the British Foreign Office, to deliver a series of lectures on China from one end of the United States to the other. I had astonishing reactions and receptions, from warm support in Washing- ton for China's admission to the United Nations, to howls of rage and accusations of being a Communist in Dallas, Texas, and bored in- difference in Colunibus, Ohio. Yet the recollec- tion that stands clearest in my memory was the eager, informed intelligence of rows of young Americans in an auditorium in the University of California on the hills overlooking San Fran- cisco. To me they represented all that is best in young America.
Mr. Felix Greene has now written a book, motivated apparently by the experience of lec- turing, also on China, in the US. He sets out to show how America has been deceived about what has happened in China since 1949. He assembles a vast array of press cuttings to prove his point. And, while I acknowledge at once the , fundamental mistake of the American refusal to recognise China, I regret that I must have visited a different country to the one that Mr. Greene has so frequently lectured in. Whereas Mr. Greene appears to find almost all Americans now totally stupid about China, I found then, and subsequently, that good American students of Chinese current affairs are more numerous and more knowledgeable than in any other country in the world. Whilst it is true there are the dis- tortions and exaggerations in America, they make only part of the picture that Mr. Greene seeks to portray as the whole.
I finished A Curtain of Ignorance with a sense of distaste at the author's hypocrisy and blatant use of the double standard. Almost everything that the United States has done about China in recent years is wrong and based on lies, accord- ing to Mr. Greene. On the other hand, things in China are almost as perfect as could be. The Indians were in the wrong, but not so the Chinese. The Dalai Lama's case was largely a sham, and the Chinese were really liberators in Tibet! Even the stories of Russia's attempted infiltration into Northern China, now admitted by the Chinese, are lies. There is never a word of protest, of course, from the author about the biggest piece of bare- faced lying by the leaders of any nation against another in this century—the Chinese germ-
warfare accusations against the Americans at the time of the Korean war. Thus it emerges that the most revealing aspect' of this book is of Mr. Greene's personal position. He appears as the soapiest seller of any doctrine since the late Frank Buchman. But Dr. Buchman was much better at the task and Mr. Greene should study his technique more closely if he wishes to suc- ceed in his self-chosen goal.
China in Crisis, by Sven Lindqvist, is a very different work. It is as unpretentious as Mr. Greene's is the reverse. It gives interesting, at times amusing, sketches of China as she is, with her problems and her achievements. It also con- tains some excellent examples of photography by the author's wife. For those who want to have a journalistic picture, it makes absorbing read- ing in places. Meanwhile, we still await a definitive work on present-day China.
DESMOND DONNELLY
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