The Man on Mao's Right: From Harvard Yard to Tiananmen Square, My Life Inside China's Foreign Ministry Book

It is a bit difficult to pinpoint why I am giving this one five stars. I suppose at some level it must have to do with a "next-to-the-throne" person spending his youth in America and only then becoming a part of the mix in the world's most populous country as a government functionary whose English skills, learned in New York and at Harvard, were in the middle of 20th century world politics.

And "Little Ji" (his nickname) is not above having been disciplined harshly in the Mao years of cultural revolution and spending time in re-education camps planting rice. He recalls his earlier years working on a Vermont farm, and somehow they become marginally equable. For all that I am still, after finishing his book, not clear that his politics would have been much different without the exposure to the inner workings of the Chinese Communist Party - he comes across as a remarkable individual.

He seems never to have entirely lost his sense of humor even as his Foreign Ministry bosses never quite trusted his wife due to Taiwanese associations. He does share a few instances of wild disappointment at things that transpired in Chinese politics when people that he admired were removed. And while he does not go into gory detail he does acknowledge that injustice ran rampant at times. This story is passing into history, but I think it has lessons already for understanding the peculiar relationship between the United States and China.