China Hands: The Adventures and Ordeals of the American Journalists Who Joined Forces with the Great Chinese Revo

Novelist Rand here presents the legendary American journalists who covered China during the 1920s, '30s and '40s-such as Edgar Snow, Harold Isaacs, Theodore H. White, Agnes Smedley and Christopher Rand (the author's father)-tracking their methods of gathering material and their individual perceptions of the political turmoil in the country. Their sympathies were for the most part with the Chinese Communists, and Rand pays particular attention to the 1946-1949 civil war between the Communists led by Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist regime. He examines the mood in the U.S. at the time, McCarthyism and the right-wing charge that China was ``lost'' by American ineptitude, a charge that caused a purge in the State Department of diplomats such as John Stewart Service. Rand vividly recreates the period, lucidly and penetratingly presenting the Chinese experiences of the journalists for whose careers the revolution proved to be the watershed. The book concludes with an account of the revisit, in 1985, by China hands Tillman Durdin, Annalee Jacoby and Pepper Martin at Beijing's invitation. (Nov.)