EVENING CHATS IN BEIJING: Probing China’s Predicament...

EVENING CHATS IN BEIJING: Probing China’s Predicament by Perry Link (Norton: $10.95; 321 pp.). Link interviewed dozens of prominent Chinese professors, writers and scientists during the months he spent in Beijing prior to the Tian An Men Square massacre. The Confucian belief that a scholar must take responsibility for the welfare of his country remains strong in China, but the intellectuals Link spoke to expressed only frustration with the corrupt, inefficient Chinese bureaucracy that stymies efforts to do significant work in the sciences and humanities. Recent reports of crackdowns on artistic expression confirm Link’s portrait of China’s leaders as a cadre of aging, venal mandarins clinging to the tattered vestiges of Mao’s prestige, and suggests that China will maintain its pseudo-Marxist regime, despite the collapse of the former Soviet bloc.