In 1975, Roland and Annette Trotignon, French language teachers in Canton, China, gave their son Nicolas a teddy bear purchased in Hong Kong. “The people of Hong Kong have not yet been liberated!” the boy declared. Nothing could have been more obvious to the five-year-old, who spent his days alongside Chinese children in a state-run nursery: The people of Hong Kong could not yet have been liberated “because they still ha[d] toys.” Nicolas and his family had access to better food than their Chinese colleagues, a hot bath every six months, and the freedom to travel to Hong Kong. The Trotignons lived in China, but, as Nicolas might have said, their lives were not yet “liberated.”

Nicolas Trotignon's story does not appear in Beverley Hooper's Foreigners under Mao: Western Lives in China, 1949–1976, but it very well could have. It follows the general outline of many of the personal and family stories Hooper recounts, documenting the artificial world the foreigners lived in, the contradiction of material deprivation and relative privilege, as well as how Maoist politics colored all aspects of Western lives in China, right down to the place of toys in a five-year-old's worldview. Hooper's book challenges the commonplace that Westerners had no access to China during the Mao era. Drawing on published and unpublished first-hand accounts, archival sources from four continents, interviews and correspondence with four dozen individuals, and material gleaned from a wealth of secondary sources, Hooper succeeds, moreover, in “giv[ing] a voice to those Westerners who lived in Mao's China, whether for a few years or for the whole era” (p. 6).

But these Westerners, as Hooper demonstrates, hardly spoke with one voice. After all, even though they all experienced some form of privileged segregation, their living conditions varied greatly. Similarly, politics, while always present, structured their lives in different ways, especially during the anti-right campaign of the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution. Nor did the regime treat them as one group. State propaganda lumped all Westerners together, denouncing them as bourgeois imperialists, but the regime recognized differences among, and the distinct utility of, different categories: “foreign comrades,” “POW turncoats,” diplomats, the press, “foreign experts,” and students.

First, and first to arrive in communist China, were the “foreign comrades” or the Westerners who came to support the communists both before and after 1948. Americans such as Sidney Shapiro and George Hatem, New Zealander Rewi Alley, Briton Gladys Yang, and others set off to China out of ideological or humanitarian conviction. For some, these convictions only strengthened in China. Others stayed on not out of ideological commitment but because they had fallen in love with China and had built families and lives there. They became important public figures and, when the political winds shifted, targets of persecution and imprisonment.

The “POW turncoats”—the twenty-one American GIs and one British soldier captured in Korea who in 1953 decided to go to China instead of returning home—are the subject of part two. The Chinese government paraded these foreigners on the national and international stages as symbols of communism's ideological superiority. But, with the exception of two Americans, all had left China by May 1966. Hooper's attention to what they did next suggests that, for most of these men, free-market America was no paradise either.

The diplomats from the Western powers that recognized China before 1976 who appear in part three lived in China for shorter periods, benefited from superior material conditions, and enjoyed greater personal freedoms than other foreigners. But, as Hooper shows, they also became the targets of violence—most notably during the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards stormed and set fire to the British embassy in Beijing.

The Chinese insisted on treating correspondents for the Western press, the subjects of part four, as representatives of their respective governments, despite journalists’ objections. The “free” Western press arrived in the mid-1950s with representatives from Reuters and Agence France-Presse—part of an exchange, worked out at the 1954 Geneva Convention, to allow Xinhua correspondents in Britain and Western Europe. Most had no knowledge of Chinese (the government preferred this) and thus limited access to informants and fixers. Doing anything more than copying official press releases could get them kicked out of China. Or they might be punished for no fault of their own, as Reuters correspondent Anthony Grey found out in 1967 when he was confined to house arrest and held for over twenty-six months. Eager to maintain access to China, until the mid-1970s the foreign press rarely reported on subjects likely to raise the ire of government officials.

The subjects of part five, the “foreign experts,” largely came to China to teach Western languages in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split. They too struggled with the tension between “redness” and “expertise,” especially when confronted with the ideological requirements that banned authentic language materials in favor of manuals of translated Chinese ideas and turns of phrase (p. 164). But as language instructors, they also had access to something most of the other foreigners lacked: informal, daily contact with Chinese people that could transcend state-imposed barriers.

These barriers were the bane of the members of the group discussed in part six, the students who came from Sweden, France, Italy, Britain, Australia, and so forth, most of them in the early 1970s. Some came because they were fervent Maoists, products of the interest in Maoism that swept Western student movements in the late 1960s. Others admired classical Chinese culture and language. Both were often disappointed. They chafed most notably at the state control over their physical, intellectual, and sexual lives. Here Hooper herself and the photographs she took as a student in Beijing in 1975–77 become part of the story. She mixes her experiences with written accounts and interviews with fellow students, some of whom went on to be China studies luminaries.

Finally, part seven reads across the groups to describe how national communities formed (or failed to form) across group divides. Sometimes the diplomats courted the students, for example, hoping to gather information from them. At other times, diplomats stayed clear of them, viewing the freewheeling post-68 youth as a liability.

Foreigners under Mao offers a valuable contribution to the history of Western-Chinese relations in Mao-era China. It is useful for the kaleidoscope of experiences it recounts, combining well-known stories—of French embassy worker-turned-spy Bernard Boursicot, for example—with those of countless students, language teachers, and embassy workers. The structure is repetitive at times, but following the Westerners group by group also allows Hopper to highlight commonalities, from the longing for Western food and the slow and sporadic contact with the world beyond China to the tragedy of forbidden friendships and romances (always more tragic for the Chinese partner). Western writing about Western sympathizers with communism often asks how they could have been “duped.” Hooper jettisons this Cold War framework in favor of a measured exploration of how these people lived their day-to-day lives, carefully weighing what her subjects said about their political and/or humanitarian convictions and what they did. Individual chapters would work well for undergraduate or graduate courses, and this book will become an essential starting point for those curious about individuals living in Mao's China. Such a historical study feels even more important as the publishing world (at least in France) enjoys a new taste for pictures and memoirs of Western lives lived in Mao's China.Footnote ¹