Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now.

New York, NY Doubleday: Anchor Books, 1997. Paperback First Ed thus; First Printing indicated. First Ed thus; First Printing indicated. Very Good in Wraps: shows indications of careful use: barely discernible spine lean; very light wear to extremities; faint soiling to the title page and inside the front cover; binding secure; text clean. No longer 'As New', but remains clean, sturdy, and quite presentable. NOT a Remainder, Book-Club, or Ex-Library. 8vo. 405pp. Illustrated with vintage photographs in black & white. A Time Magazine "Best Book of 1996". Trade Paperback. This book contains a detailed description, from a first person point of view, of the tremendous changes that occurred in China from 1972 to 1996, starting with the great move backward by a ruthless dictatorship under Mao, to the beginnings of the economic advance in China under Deng, starting in the 1990's, by someone who experienced it all first hand. Particularly detailed and of interest is the hour by hour eyewitness description of the Tiananmen Square massacre in which the troops of the People's Liberation Army fired volley after volley into masses of peacefully protesting Chinese who simply wanted a little better life, killing at least 3000. No wonder this book is banned in China. A Canadian-born Chinese female author who learned to speak Chinese in college was able to blend into the Chinese people and able to experience what it was like under the regime of Mao, including the repression and favoritism and domination by the Communist Party. She, as a true believer, began by working in factories and fields. She left China and later returned as a foreign correspondent for Canadian newspapers. The book is filled with many details of everyday life, but with a perspective of someone from Canada, and it is difficult to see how anyone else could have been in such a place to have written such a book. Jan Wong has an incisive way of analyzing and describing what she sees, and it is a book which describes frankly her own personal development. In the end although she went to China to see how a socialist government could care for its people since she thought that the socialist way would be the best, but she discovered there were more social support systems in Canada and far more freedom for the individual, and she began to appreciate those things about daily life that people in North America take for granted.