Books: Mission to Tragedy

FIFTY YEARS IN CHINA (346 pp.)—John Leighton Stuart—Random House ($6.25).

In 1946, when China was still the great country of the open door, Leighton Stuart had long personified the U.S. tradition of humanitarian service in China. From boyhood as a missionary's son under the Manchus down to wartime imprisonment by the Japanese, he had shared the tumultuous experiences of the nation's modern awakening. As founder and president of Peking's Yenching University, the greatest of China's Christian colleges, he had won the affection and trust of a generation of rising Chinese leaders.

Then, at the age of 70, writes Dr. Stuart in Fifty Years...