Books: Pai-hua

LIVING CHINA—Edited by Edgar Snow —Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.50).

In China, biggest and oldest civilized country in the world, few people can read and write. Of those few, many fewer know the "correct," classical language, in which all Chinese masterpieces have been written, time out of mind. In 1917, when China's civilization began to come rapidly apart, plain speech (pai-hua} began to be literarily respectable, is now the accepted written language for China's literates. To give a sample of what present-day Chinese are reading, Journalist Edgar Snow last week published a translation of...