On a freezing November night in Beijing in 1974, with flurries of snow on Chang'an Avenue and just an hour or so before the camel trains from Mongolia were allowed their brief freedom to enter the City, there was a knock on the door of the room at the Beijing Hotel where I was staying as part of a visiting British Sinological Delegation. At the door was Solomon Adler. “Sol,” as he was universally known, was a very left-wing economist, originally from Leeds, but with experience as a US Treasury official in Washington and wartime Chongqing. Shortly after a spell in Cambridge, where he instructed us in the ways of socialist planning in the Soviet Union and China, Sol moved and finally settled in Beijing for last 30 years of his life. He died in 1994. His second wife, Pat, a very well-liked member of the Beijing expatriate community, died in 2015 at the age of 89. Holed up in the Peace Hotel, where with others he had been placed for protection against Cultural Revolutionaries, he had seized the opportunity for a long gossip and exchange of views with visiting Western economists such as myself and Kenneth Walker. Sol is just one of the fascinating array of foreigners that Beverley Hooper has written about in this absorbing book.

Although a classic on publication, this is not an entirely easy book to review, since reviewers and readers will come to it from very different backgrounds of knowledge and experience. To younger readers this is all history. To older readers such as myself, so many of the figures that flit across the pages are people later known to us in many different forms and guises.

The volume of material dealt with is formidably large and the author has handled it, first, by dividing the foreigners into distinct groups: the “old timers”; the Korean War “remainers”; students and teachers of English; and the press and the diplomatic corps. And then by developing certain themes such as the relationships between and within the main groups, their evolution through time and their reactions to the upheavals of the environment they were living in.

Prominent among the “old timers” were some who dated back to pre-war and Yan'an days. This group includes the doctor George Hatem (made famous by Mao's obituary of him), other doctors and Rewi Alley, who had a 20-year career developing industrial cooperatives and technical education before Liberation in 1949. Later arrivals included the Crooks (Isabel and David) and Anna Louise Strong.

What did all these people do for so many years? Isabel Crook wrote up a well-known description of rural change (Revolution in a Chinese Village: Ten Mile Inn, 1959). Alley and Strong became full-time propagandists, writing numerous English-language pamphlets and books. In addition to his still useful descriptive works relating to “New China,” Alley even produced a small volume of translations of the Tang Poet, Du Fu. Several other foreigners also worked for the Foreign Languages Press assembling issues of Peking Review and China Reconstructs. A small, select group were even given the prestigious task of translating Volume IV of Mao's Selected Works.

This group had lifestyles which, by the standards of ordinary Chinese, were very privileged. Higher salaries, access to food, and above all good accommodation. A less fortunate group were the “Korean War remainers.” Some of these were allowed to study – although in pretty Spartan conditions – but most were sent off to do rather basic types of work in factories. Eventually there was a minor revolt by these workers and the stories of their experiences of returning to the United States are often very interesting.

The life of the “Corps,” both diplomatic and press, are in many places hard to take seriously. There were some distinguished journalists who worked in China in the “closed” years, including Nigel Wade, David Bonavia, Norman Webster and Anthony Grey. The story of their tortuous relationships with officials and any “contacts” they made are good reading. Ultimately, however, as an interested party at the time, it always seemed to me that the Hong Kong-based journalists were better placed as guides to what was going on in China. Even today, the levels of secrecy and the poor and declining quality of domestic journalism surrounding Party activities, limits the value of conventional reporting in Beijing.

Finally, there are the diplomats: not allowed contacts with “real” Chinese; spied on by their servants; circumscribed by strict travel restrictions, but generously allowed picnics at the Ming Tombs. Most of their activities sound a better fit for Gerald Durrell or a new Ann Bridge than for serious study. These activities also involved a questionable use of their domestic taxpayers’ money. As with journalism, Hong Kong-based work by diplomats without access to China appears in the 1950s and 1960s to have been more valuable than anything that diplomats were able to accomplish in Beijing.

However, the one event that brings to life all these narratives is the Cultural Revolution. This had its impact everywhere. Foreigners battled to participate, battled each other, and suffered violence, humiliation and bureaucratic tortures of various kinds. The journalists on the ground could begin to report and even the diplomats were, for a while at least, able to garner information from unofficial sources. The most notorious events in this period were the imprisonment of Anthony Grey and the burning of the British Embassy and mistreatment of its staff. (Ironically, according to an impeccable source, one later result of these events was our 1974 visit referred to at the beginning of this review. Apparently, the Chinese Foreign Office was so embarrassed by what had happened that they agreed to the visit, in spite of the fact that the Cultural Revolution had not yet concluded and the Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius was in full swing.)

Anyone who finds this book interesting must, if they have not done so already, make straight for Julia Boyd's A Dance with the Dragon: The Vanished World of Peking's Foreign Colony (2012). This describes the expatriate community at a time when the foreign powers were in command; when they could do much as they pleased; and could observe domestic politics as if it were a theatrical show, not connected with them in any real way. The focus is somewhat narrower, but the huge literature on which it is based is, like Beverley Hooper's, extraordinarily interesting, and its ending – when the Japanese take Beijing and march them off to prison camp – unforgettable.