There was a time when Australian writings on China were first-class._
C.P. Fitzgerald’s classic, for example, ‘The Birth of Communist China’ gave us a unbiassed insight to the factors that propelled the Communist forces to their 1949 victory.
Postwar, the few who managed to get into China gave us a useful view of the various insanities that gripped the early Communist regime - the anti-sparrow campaign, the Great Leap Forward (or rather the great leap backwards and the resulting national famine), the madness of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and so on. They showed us the stupidity and cruelty indoctrinated Chinese can inflict on each other.