The Foreign Service Journal, February 2009

60 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 9 B O O K S The final chapter of the book, “To- morrow’s Diplomats,” points out that “since the end of the Cold War, diplo- matic tools have been allowed to weaken” and that “[t]oday there is a fairly broad consensus across the gov- ernment and the foreign affairs com- munity that America’s diplomatic establishment must be upgraded.” Practicing FSOs will doubtless want to make Career Diplomacy part of their library and provide copies to foreign counterparts. John Brown, who was in the Foreign Service for more than 20 years, com- piles “The Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review” (http://publicdiplomacy pressandblogreview.blogspot.com/ ). China from Top to Bottom The Man on Mao’s Right Ji Chaozhu, Random House, 2008, $28.00, hardcover, 354 pages. R EVIEWED BY H ERBERT L EVIN In April 1952 the Chinese Foreign Ministry assigned Ji Chaozhu, an Eng- lish-language expert, to the North Ko- rean-Chinese delegation at the cease- fire talks with the United States- United Nations side in Panmunjom. Over the next four decades, until he retired in 1996 after five years as a U.N. undersecretary general, nearly all Americans with an interest in China would come to know Ji personally. This highly personal memoir tells how a boy who grew up in rural Shanxi province managed to be sent to the U.S. for education as a chemist, and then became a diplomat with a life- long commitment to fostering Sino- American relations. Though Ji was from a traditional family, his father had studied in Japan and spoke English. In addition, his elder half-brother, Ji Chaoding, had been a Boxer Indemnity scholar at Columbia University. After the col- lapse of the imperial system, the war- lords who dominated Shanxi in Ji’s youth brought only a fracturing and weakening of China, allowing Japan- ese conquest. Republican China had