April 1973

Some Chinese refer to their lives before and after the Cultural Revolution as if that storm of the Sixties were a religious conversion. Like John Bunyan writing with enthusiastic horror of his unregenerate days, the cadre or craftsman today says he was chief of sinners before 1966, then as grace abounded in the form of the cultural revolutionary line he suddenly saw previously unrecognized differences between dark and light. Recent visitors to China who knew the country only before 1949, as well as those in China for the first time, have naturally been swayed by such testimony.