By comparison with contemporary conflicts elsewhere, such as the much briefer Spanish Civil War, the dozen or so years of constant warfare in China that preceded the revolution in 1949 produced very little writing by British observers that has stood the test of time, though much American reporting on China now regarded as classic, such as that by Edgar Snow, Jack Belden, and Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby, did appear in British editions as a new China was slowly and painfully born, and the works of the first two had their status confirmed by Penguin reprints here during the era of the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution. That era also saw in America the reprinting in 1967 of an edition of Graham Peck's Two Kinds of Time, graced like Snow's republished Red Star Over China with a preface by John K. Fairbank, who had been at one point a recipient of Peck's hospitality during his own wartime travels in China. American friends, however, soon discouraged me in those days from seeking out the 1967 reprint, in that by cutting out the second half of the original it excluded most of Peck's trenchant analysis of the roots of America's failed policy in pre-Communist China. It was no doubt this trenchancy that ensured the republication of Peck's work in full in Beijing in 2004 as part of the Foreign Language Press series “Light on China”, though that stout hardback, while preserving Peck's characteristic illustrations, was completely reset and so ended up – if only a little longer – with new pagination.

By contrast, this affordable reprinting in paperback from the University of Washington now restores the full original edition produced by Houghton Mifflin in Boston in 1950 unaltered, save for the addition of a useful introduction by Robert A. Kapp demonstrating how a generation younger than that of Fairbank has come to appreciate this extraordinarily vivid and telling portrait of the “baseline” from which the post-1949 regime has now brought China through to the end of six decades of turbulent transformation. Peck's style here is every bit as vibrant as in his earlier Through China's Wall, which was published not only in Boston but also in London by Collins in 1941, an arresting mixture of predictable Yankee impatience with the Chinese lack of get up and go, far less predictably overborne by a generous helping of humour and of profound compassion. In this later work the humour inevitably becomes a little bleaker as the madness of conflict unwinds interminably, but Peck is always readable – and for those who want to know how it was then, will probably always be read. Congratulations, then, to Robert A. Kapp and to the publishers on bringing this remarkable work in its original form to a new twenty-first century readership.