My first memories of China go back almost 50 years. Sitting in front of our 10-in. Philco television, over milk and peanut-butter sandwiches, my closest third-grade friends and I watched, with fascination and terror, the grainy news footage of Chinese soldiers crossing the Yalu River into Korea. It was 1950, the year after Mao Zedong and the communists had taken control of China, exiling General Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Party to Taiwan. And now they were fighting us.
That fascination and terror would grow in the decade to come as I, and millions of other Americans, grew up reading Henry...