I Saw Red China Summary

Words: 925
Pages: 4

I Saw Red China, written in 196and chronicles her experience in Communist China in 1965 just prior to the start of the Cultural Revolution. Birnie was an Australian born journalist, who worked for the San Francisco Examiner at the time of her journey to China. Her presence in China at the time is significant because she became the first journalist for a U.S. newspaper to enter China since 1955 and she became the first U.S. female journalist to enter China since the Communist came to power in 1949.
Birnie’s went to China and wrote her book during a very important period of Chinese Communist history. Birnie arrived in China four years after the end of the Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap Forward was an economic development policy instituted by the Chinese Communist Party. Mao envisioned a Great Leap Forward where accelerated industrialization and mass collectivization would leapfrog China into socialism. Despite these goals, the industrial and agricultural policies did nothing to aid in China’s socialist development. Backyard furnaces resulted in the production of useless steel and poor state planning for collectivization and poor weather resulted in a mass famine.
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She does not enter China as a journalist for an American newspaper, but as an Australian tourist. The book chronicles her guided trip to major Chinese cities and the observations she makes about Chinese society and life under Mao and communism. Birnie encounters what she believes to be a thriving, well developed economy. She tours factories and observes the work that workers are doing, and make note an abundant food supply, where one bread shop had the capability to feed over 15,00 mouths. Birnie, along with these findings, does note the presence of state propaganda. At a school, Birnie does witness children damning American imperialists for their action in Vietnam. And a play leaves she speechless after is depicts American