Just months after Nixon's 1972 visit to China, the author of The Guns of August Tuchman made her own six-week trip to that country. Barbara Tuchman's reportage was one of the first evenhanded portrayals of Chinese culture that Americans had ever read; these observations capture the people as they lived, from office workers and party bosses to farmers and educators. This edition also includes her essay, "If Mao Had Come to Washington in 1945"—a tantalizing piece of speculation on a proposed meeting between Mao and Roosevelt.