It has sometimes been suggested that the British Left was insular and that it liked to pretend that the rest of the world did not exist. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, British socialists from the earliest days onward were profoundly concerned with events elsewhere in the world. H. M. Hyndman plagiarized Marx. Some years ago the late Duncan Tanner showed the extent to which Edwardian socialists were concerned with the detail of debates within continental European social democracy. The importance of the empire for the British Left continues to provide much material for debate. Labour was profoundly involved with plans for peacemaking after both world wars. Of course, British interest in events such as the Spanish Civil War has provided considerable room for discussion and controversy. But the relationship between Britain and China, although of obvious current topicality, has until recently received very little decent historical analysis. On broad issues, this has changed over the last fifteen years or so, with the work of Robert Bickers and others. But until now there has been no serious, sustained analysis of the relationship between the British Left and China. This is in some ways all the more surprising given the seemingly endless stream of material that continues to come out about the British Left's relationship with another revolutionary exemplar, Russia.

Tom Buchanan, author of the superb Britain and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge, 1997), seeks to rectify this with East Wind, which considers the period between the mid-1920s and the death of Mao with some valuable further comments on the years since then. Buchanan shows that there was a relationship and that it did matter. China was successively an exemplar of a revolutionary situation, of civil war, of antifascism, of resumed civil war, and finally of a Communist regime. He is quick to admit that the impact was not as great as that of Russia, but he is right to claim that the British Left—or at least elements of it—paid attention, and sometimes close attention, to what was happening in China.

The book is highly scholarly and always readable. The broadly chronological structure makes it easy to follow yet also allows themes to develop over time. The early identification of the communications problems between the two countries is important, as are the periodic references to the sheer lack of information about China (e.g., the fact that there was no Western journalist witnessing the Long March). This all gives a much stronger impression of some of the logistics than exists in any of the existing literature. Long-run questions about “otherness,” globalization, and so on, are treated deftly and in such a way as to really draw out the contemporary significance as well as the historical record. Buchanan shows great adeptness in resurrecting now-obscure figures like Lord Marley, Cecil Malone, and the like. He is very good indeed on key players like Bertrand Russell, Joseph Needham, and Alan Winnington. Buchanan uses a wide range of archival and other source materials to uncover a wide range of left-wing attitudes. He has three points of focus: the non-Labour Left, primarily the Communists; the Labour Left and the trade unions; and intellectuals spanning both Communist and non-Communist organizations. He shows how China impacted upon each in turn and how the nature of that impact changed over time. In particular, he offers a sensible and sensitive appraisal of attitudes within the Communist Party and some really insightful and detailed comment on the significance of Maoism in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. One thing that comes out very positively is the basic goodwill of many on the Left—the willingness to go to extra effort to raise money in a good cause and to help the ordinary Chinese people who, usually through little or no fault of their own, were the real victims of the sequence of wars, revolutions, and misguided ideological initiatives that characterized Chinese history in the period. More depressing, though, is reading about the tendency of some people toward self-delusion: for example, the views of the perpetual apologist D. N. Pritt, whose comments about the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s were as ill judged, ill formed, and potentially harmful as those he had made about Soviet prison camps and other matters a quarter of a century earlier.

This is, in short, an excellent book. It breaks new ground and should be read by all historians of the British Left, and it also has a lot to say to specialists in the history of modern China. It represents scholarship of the highest caliber. It also acts, perhaps, as a caution to those who today rush rather too readily toward a rather uncritical appraisal of the achievements of contemporary China.