Word: cantons
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...them all one better. In 1966 he helped bring back to the United States one slim, suave Cantonese-who happened to be a China watcher's dream. This was Edward Chung-man Ch'an, a living, breathing former member of the Chinese Communist Party who had worked in the Canton area from 1950 until his escape...
Vogel and Ch'an settled down to work in a corner of the East Asian Research Center on Cambridge St. By plowing through Canton newspapers with Ch'an and picking his memory, Vogel gradually put together this history of Communism in Canton since...
Vogel's story of Canton rattles along like a rollercoaster ride, with some dizzying ups and downs. The Cantonese greeted the liberation in 1949 with hope and enthusiasm, then struggled up through years of land reform and collectivization in the early 1950's. After the Great Leap Forward in the late fifties forced a heartbreaking drop in production and morale, the Cantonese began a slower, more cynical climb toward economic and political security that came to a halt again during the wild street fighting of the Cultural Revolution...
...accident that this one city's story parallels the story for all China since 1949. Above all else the Communists brought a unified, nation-wide program to the once broken up Middle Kingdom. Canton Under Communism in this way becomes one of the clearest, best written histories of Communist China to date. Unhappily for all but the most bleary-eyed Sinophiles, Vogel some-times buries the story in detail-the footnotes run for almost 40 pages in the back of the book. But blessed with a sociologist's concern for human suffering, he throws out lucid summaries along...
...details do help capture the ironic twists of Canton's fight against waves of outside agitators sent from, the north by Peking to enforce, national policies. This makes enlightening reading for Americans, who have often misunderstood the on-again, off-again struggle between local and central power in China. American General Joseph Stillwell, for instance, was furious when Chiang Kai-shek ignored his advice to reorganize the Chinese Army in 1942. "With the U. S. on his side and backing him," Stillwell wrote in his diary, "the stupid little ass fails to grasp the big opportunity of his life...