This new report to young Americans on modern China covers a lot of time and people. It leads us from a tribe in the Yellow River Valley, in the year 2000 B.C., to the most populous nation on the face of the earth in the twentieth century.

We travel from tribes to Empire to Republic to a nation divided: a Communist mainland and an island government, each of whom claims to be the "true China." In the course of the trip, we suffer through disasters: floods and drought and hordes of locusts. When these wipe out the crops, we are so hungry we sometimes eat the potato peelings meant for the pigs. Our mouths water at the wistful mainland nursery rhyme beginning: "O cabbage, what a size you are!"

In island China, we meet the aborigines whose ancestors were its earliest settlers. We rediscover many old Chinese customs—Dragon Boat and Ghost Festivals and smearing the mouth of the kitchen god with sugar, so he will speak well of the family.

Though the Chinas are fighting each other today, one of their greatest needs, we realize, is the same: to build factories and dams, to mine the earth and make use of its riches. The two parts of the country are going about it in different ways. Someday, one part will take over the other. Who will win? the author asks. What will the unwritten last chapter of this book contain?

From the dust jacket