One evening in March 1965, I was at the University of Columbia Library of East Asian studies in New York. There, upon the steel shelves, were the publications delineating the beginning and the growth o the Chinese Communist Party. With almost hysterical passion, with an ecstasy of hatred akin to love, the American experts on China seek to document China for themselves. China is an abiding passion with them, they scarcely talk or think of anything else. And the phenomenon, so unexpected, of an Asian nation driven to the depths of abject misery, and rising again so swiftly, against all the rules and maxims of their expertise, is a frustration “which makes them foam at the mouth,” as my friend Colonel David Barrett writes. “We can never forget that we lost China, we’re going crazy about it, we’re half insane, like people who kill what they cannot possess and then commit suicide.