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Dear Marty:

	Thanks for your China trip report.  I have a few comments.

	I have only been to China once and then only in Peking.
However, I have been to the Soviet Union more than ten times, and
have read many of the books about both countries by journalists
and some of those by scholars.

	1. It seems to me that you have discussed exclusively the
formal power structure and the formal goals of the regime and its
predecessors.  Socialism today resembles feudalism.  There is a
hierarchy of lords and vassals.  Vassals acquire perks from their
lords in exchange for support and redistribute some of them to their
subvassals.  These perks are both legal and illegal.
The Chinese version of these phenomena are touched upon in Mosher's
excellent book.  However, I know of no general discussion of this.
It seem to me that trading Marxist quotations with the Chinese
is unlikely to uncover such phenomena.  It might resemble what one
Yugoslave communist said: "The main present theoretical problem is
to develop a Marxist theory of war between socialist countries".

	The point isn't to win the CCNY arguments of 1940 between the
Stalinists and the democrats.

	It seems to me that in understanding the dynamics of
communist ruled countries, the point isn't to apply Marxist theory.

	Marxist theory isn't much use in understanding communist
ruled countries - not even with revisions.

	1. You should have asked why the possible presence of secret
police made it inadvisable to talk to students.  It is hard to imagine
that you would suffer, although the students might.  Perhaps this
was an attempt at intimidation.  Was it successful in the sense that
you avoided such conversations thereafter?

	2. While I have made many trips to the Soviet Union, my
opportunities to interact with Russians were far less than those
of newspaper correspondents or the emigres themselves.
However, there were some specific opportunities uniquely available
to a computer scientist.  Therefore, I have found it valuable to
combine my own experience with what I have read and learned from
conversation with other visitors and with emigres.

	3. As for China, the books by Fox Butterfield, Simon Leys,
and Steven Mosher have been most informative.  It is interesting
to compare them with Edgar Snow's writings in order to see how
a movement that produced such a strong positive impression on
an enthusiast could evolve into one that produced the negative
impressions of the more recent books.  The information obtained
x and Miriam London from interviews with refugees has proved in
retrospect to have been mainly accurate, although it was denigrated
by scholars at the time.

	4. In general I have found that conversations in both
China and the Soviet Union produce and impression of open-mindedness
that is far from realized by subsequent events.

	5. I'm a bit surprised that you didn't expect a third world
nation.  Statistics have always been available that demonstrate that.

	6. I appreciate the bits that needle the leftists, but
the point isn't just to win the old arguments with them.

	7. I'm impressed by the lack of emphasis on communist
institutions, even though I didn't experience any such emphasis
in either the Soviet Union or China.  However, a computer scientist
is certainly going to have a different experience in this respect
than a political scientist.