China Hands - Hardcover

Rand, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684808447 ISBN 13: 9780684808444

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1995

Synopsis

A history of the American journalists who covered the Great Chinese Revolution chronicles how these adventurous dreamers brought the attention of the world to these momentous events and shows how their coverage helped shape those events. 10,000 first printing.

About this title

From Booklist

The phrase "China Hands" is familiar to many, but few Americans under 50 know much of the stages of China's twentieth-century revolution(s)--or about the American diplomats and journalists who observed and sometimes participated in that distant nation's history during the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. Novelist Rand--whose father went to China for the Office of War Information in 1943 and later covered China and Asia for the New York Herald Tribune and the New Yorker (and committed suicide in 1968)--examines this period in American history in a sweeping narrative that is also an effort to come to grips with his father's past. Rand's chapters focus on the China journeys of specific journalists (Rayna Prohme, Harold Isaacs, Edgar and Helen Foster Snow, Teddy White, and Rand's father, Christopher), but each chapter also offers portraits of many other journalists and a narrative of shifting power and politics among the "newsmakers" --including Dr. and Madame Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang, Chou En-lai and Mao Tse-tung--they covered. A vivid mural of a generation of "individualists and writers . . . lost and found in China." Mary Carroll

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0684808447
• ISBN 13: 9780684808444
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352