Red Spectacles
China's Millions. By Anna Louise Strong. (Gollancz. 15k'.) Miss STRONG, a voluble and adventurous camp-follower of the Soviet regime, has written what should have been an absorbing and important book. Hankow in 1927 was full of interest. Borodin and the Russian advisers who had come up with the Northern Expedition from Canton were slowly and painfully awakening to the realisation that their services, having been exploited to the full, were being dis- pensed with and that the Left Wing of the. Nationalist move- ment had been left in the air. Mr. Vincent Sheean, in his autobiographical In Search of History, has admirably described and assessed the disillusionment and incoherence of this period. Miss Strong submerges its atmosphere and its significance in a flood of second-hand dossiers and anecdotes about " workers " and agitators. She shows no signs of understanding • the Chinese mind or the Chinese character, and her failure to gauge the relative worth and standing of prominent Chinese with whom she was brought into contact detracts from the validity of her political conclusions. Of Eugene Chen, for instance, she writes, " He also believed in co-operation with Communists," for all the world as though this professional turncoat was really capable of believing in anything. Her writing is at times infected with that Y.M.C.A. lyricism which sometimes embarrassingly trans- figures the closing sequences of Russian films " I remember how her arm shot into the air when she rose on tiptoe to shout a slogan, with eyes uplifted in ecstatic loyalty, and the sudden embarrassed grin with which she sank back into her seat when once she made a mistake and shouted a slogan all alone." In the chapters on Chinese Communism and its relations to the Revolution one could forgive her partisan- ship if only she had made her case clear and interesting ; but from the jumble of meetings and proclamations, " atrocities " by the Whites and " acts of justice " by the Reds, no coherent picture emerges. Even those most in- terested in Miss Strong's subject will find her handling of it valueless and boring.
The second half of the book is not dull. In July, 1927, Borodin and the other Russian advisers abandoned the sinking ship and went home by the only route open to them. They travelled north by lorry through Shensi, Kansu and Ninghsia and then launched across the Gobi to Urga, the capital of Outer Mongolia, whence the Trans-Siberian Railway is easily accessible. No part of their route was as uncharted as Miss Strong seems, or would like us, to imagine ; but for all that it was a wild scramble through little-known country, and not even the humourless and inaccurate Miss Strong can wholly spoil it in the telling. She does what she can, though. Having, in the first part of the book, spoken of someone as following the profession of a cow-herd in South China (as who should mention a big-game-hunter in Surrey or a snake-charmer in Greenland) she discovers that Kansu is inhabited by " Tartars " and allows her companions to hunt " wild goats " (from motor-cars) in the Gobi. In the eyes of any competent authority, her first-hand material— her descriptions of things that she actually saw—is worthless ; the value of her book may accordingly be gauged by the fact that it is very largely composed of second-, third- and fourth-hand material. The narrative of her journey is,
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