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Agents of Subversion reconstructs the remarkable story of a botched
mission into Manchuria, showing how it fit into a wider CIA
campaign against Communist China and highlighting the intensity-and
futility-of clandestine operations to overthrow Mao. In the winter
of 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the CIA flew a covert
mission into China to pick up an agent. Trained on a remote Pacific
island, the agent belonged to an obscure anti-communist group known
as the Third Force based out of Hong Kong. The exfiltration would
fail disastrously, and one of the Americans on the mission, a
recent Yale graduate named John T. Downey, ended up a prisoner of
Mao Zedong's government for the next twenty years. Unraveling the
truth behind decades of Cold War intrigue, John Delury documents
the damage that this hidden foreign policy did to American
political life. The US government kept the public in the dark about
decades of covert activity directed against China, while Downey
languished in a Beijing prison and his mother lobbied desperately
for his release. Mining little-known Chinese sources, Delury sheds
new light on Mao's campaigns to eliminate counterrevolutionaries
and how the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party used captive
spies in diplomacy with the West. Agents of Subversion is an
innovative work of transnational history, and it demonstrates both
how the Chinese Communist regime used the fear of special agents to
tighten its grip on society and why intellectuals in Cold War
America presciently worried that subversion abroad could lead to
repression at home.
By now everyone knows the basic facts of China's rise to
pre-eminence over the past three decades. But how did this
erstwhile sleeping giant finally manage to arrive at its current
phase of dynamic growth? How did a century-long succession of
failures to change somehow culminate in the extraordinary dynamism
of China today? By examining the lives of eleven influential
officials, writers, activists and leaders whose contributions
helped create modern China, Wealth and Power addresses these
questions. This fascinating survey moves from the lead-up to the
first Opium War through to contemporary opposition to single-party
rule. Along the way, we meet titans of Chinese history,
intellectuals and political figures. By unwrapping the intellectual
antecedents of today's resurgent China, Orville Schell and John
Delury supply much-needed insight into the country's tortured
progression from nineteenth-century decline to twenty-first-century
boom. By looking backward into the past to understand forces at
work for hundreds of years, they help us understand China today and
the future that this singular country is helping shape for all of
us.
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Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
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R398
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