The Foreign Service Journal, February 2009

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 61 failed; so, by a process of elimination, communism became the accepted means of modernizing the nation for the Ji clan. The 10-year-old Ji was sent to New York City in 1939. There he gradu- ated from the City and Country School and the Horace Mann Lincoln High School before enrolling at Har- vard in 1948. Convinced that the ad- vance of U.S. forces in North Korea to the Chinese border would bring Bei- jing into the Korean War, preventing his return home, he abandoned his studies and flew back to China, arriv- ing on Oct. 25, 1950. Over the course of his diplomatic career, Ji interpreted for many top leaders; he expresses unqualified ad- miration for few, if any, of them in this memoir. He was persecuted by those suspicious that his 11 years in the United States raised questions about his loyalty, as well as by those who viewed the prospect of closer ties with Washington as inimical to their posi- tions in the kind of China they favored. Ji saw his nation from the top (as “the man on Mao’s right”) as well as from the bottom. He was sent to labor in the rice paddies in 1959 during the Great Leap Forward-People’s Com- mune Movement and numerous times during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. This is not a scholarly work with footnotes and document references. Its unique value is as a firsthand ac- count of how China has viewed the rest of the world over the past 70 years. It also explains why, despite being brutally mistreated by their own government, Ji and his wife, Wang Xi- angtong, chose to remain in China rather than come to America. In ad- dition, those interested in Chinese his- tory will find here a clear and readable account of how the new communist regime conducted foreign affairs dur- ing a chaotic epoch. Herbert Levin, a Foreign Service offi- cer from 1956 to 1991, was the au- thor’s roommate at Harvard Univer- sity. The two men have maintained personal and professional ties ever since. After retiring from the Service, Levin spent five years as a special ad- viser to United Nations Undersecre- tary General Ji. B O O K S