Essay: WHAT THE U.S. KNOWS ABOUT RED CHINA

EXCEPT for flies, beggars and Americans, Communist China is not a Forbidden Land in the way in which that celebrated term applied to Tibet. In an age of satellite eyes-in-the-sky, it is certainly not Terra Incognita; its huge land mass, slightly bigger than all 50 U.S. states, lies naked before the orbiting cameras. The figurative curtain that it has drawn around itself is not of iron but, more appropriately for the Orient, of pliable bamboo. Yet of all the earth's too many closed societies, that of Red China ranks as the most ominously...

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