ALONE ON THE GREAT WALL by...

ALONE ON THE GREAT WALL by William Lindesay (Fulcrum Publishing: $14.95). Running the length of the fabled Great Wall of China could be a romantic adventure, a gesture of international friendship or a grueling test of athletic prowess; William Lindesay’s pedestrian narrative makes it seem like a damnfool stunt dreamed up by a publicity hound. He arrived in China throughly unprepared, bringing only a sleeping bag, a few changes of underwear and socks and some inadequate maps. He didn’t even bother to take a spare pair of running shoes--for an estimated journey of 1,500 miles! His lack of foresight is matched only by the shallowness of his grasp of Chinese history. Reflecting on the disastrous policy of the Cultural Revolution that destroyed the careers and lives of many professionals by reducing them to manual laborers, he comments: “It was a devastating directive, forcing breadwinners to leave their city families for the remote countryside, yet it was responsible for huge areas of land being pressed into production and ambitious engineering projects being completed,” which is a bit like noting that 19th-Century factory owners may have worked children to death, but they sure put out a lot of cloth. Lindesay blithely expected the peasants he encountered along the way to feed and shelter him, and ignored the laws that prohibited foreigners from entering large areas of China. When arrested, he dismissed the government officials as “bureaucrats” and continued his trip, switching passports when he was expelled from the country. His failure to take elementary precautions landed him in Chinese hospitals more than once, and the spectacle of an irresponsible drone from an industrialized power posing as an ambassador of good will while sponging off the inadequate resources of a Third World country makes for a singularly irritating book.