China As I See It – Pearl S Buck (1970) (1st ed)

S$48.00

China As I See It – Pearl S Buck (1970) (1st ed)

S$48.00

Title: China As I See It

Author: Pearl S. Buck, Theodore F. Harris

Publisher: The John Day Company, 1970. First edition.

Condition: Hardcover, with dust jacket. Former library book, with all library markings. Slight dust-soiling to bottom edge. Text very clean, binding very tight. 303pp., app 8.5″x5.5″.

SKU: buck-china Categories: ,

From jacket flap:

With Communist control of China in its third decade, Pearl Buck takes a long view of a country that measures its history by millennia.

China As I See It is made up of a selection of Pearl Buck’s writings and speeches beginning in the 1930s, with a long final chapter newly written to summarize the Communist takeover, its background and its consequences.

She says:

“China is more than a part of me. She is in my heart and soul and mind. My first conscious memories are of her people and her landscapes. They formed my childhood world, they shaped my adolescent years, they brought me to my maturity. Chinese in education and feeling, I knew I was American on the day I very nearly lost my life at the hands of a Communist army which invaded the city where I lived.

“I have never returned to China since and it may be that I never shall. But through the years of exile from China I have continued to learn everything I could about the strange new life that is going on there. From time to time I have written of China and her people hoping to help my American people to understand the Chinese better, as somehow we must. These papers I have gathered together in this book.

“After 1951 I ceased abruptly to write on Chinese subjects because no reliable information came to me from China. But I have continued to read, especially the writings of Europeans who could go to China, and while I myself have no direct correspondence with old friends there, I do hear from Chinese friends in the United States who are in desultory and secret correspondence with their relatives in China. Hence, in the concluding chapter I have written what I have been able to gather from such sources.

“The book is timely, for soon we shall see changes in Chinese attitudes toward the outer world, or so I believe, and we must be ready. Even old tigers like Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kai-shek cannot live forever. There is always a tomorrow.”