AustLit

Authors' note: If you are so far over on the Right or Left wings that, from where you sit, you can't see the middle, you're not going to like this book. Before the mad mullahs of McCarthyism have flipped half a dozen pages they are going to find some sentence, some cartoon that doesn't unequivocally ridicule, or damn, China, and they're going to holler 'The poor suckers have fallen for the old conducted-tour confidence trick; they've been brainwashed.' And the foam-flecked members of the lunatically Left soapbox set, noticing the odd hint, here and there, that Mao the messiah hasn't yet led his people to a party paradise, are going to set up and squawk that we are nothing but the hired lackers of capitalism. We have compiled our report of what we saw in China in the belief that there are important numbers of sane people in the centre who still like to hear both sides of any story.