Books: Showdown in China

LAST CHANCE IN CHINA (408 pp.)—Freda Utley—Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

In 1927, the Labor Party asked Freda Utley to stand for Parliament in Manchester, but she declined. She joined the Communist Party and left for Moscow, there married a Soviet government employee she had met in England. It was in Moscow that she bought her first corset. Into it she stuffed the secret dispatches entrusted to her by the Comintern to deliver to the Chinese Communists.

Her husband had been assigned to Japan; they spent a year there, and another six in Moscow. One night in Moscow in 1936, her husband woke her and said:...

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