Breakfast with Mao : memoirs of a foreign correspondent / Alan Winnington.

Includes name index.

"Alan Winnington suffered a stroke while at the final stage of completing his memoirs ; he never recovered and died 26 November 1983. The publishers are grateful to Ursula, his widow, and to Ted Brake for their assistance in finalizing the texts." -- publisher's note.

Foreword / by Neal Ascherson --

1. Studious purgatory -- 2. The threepenny manifesto -- 3. Banners in Piccadilly -- 4. Professional communist -- 5. En route to China -- 6. Arriving at nothing -- 7. With the Chinese Red Army -- 8. Beijing changes hands -- 9. War and massacre in Korea -- 10. Chinese strategy and American firepower -- 11. The inn with the wooden door -- 12. Germ warfare -- 13. The British prisoners -- 14. Ideological reform and old Beijing -- 15. One hundred flowers -- 16. The great leap forward -- 17. Nuclear bombs and paper tigers -- 18. Back in Tibet -- 19. Comrade Ah Lan becomes a non-person.

"Breakfast with Mao, is by any standards, an extraordinary autobiography. As a foreign correspondent, Alan Winnington was a witness to some of the moments which have shaped the twentieth century ; in a few of them, he was the only European witness. He covered the closing stages of the Chinese Revolution and entered Beijing with the People's Liberation Army in 1949. Later he was one of the two Western newsman to report on the Korean War from the Northern side. Accused of treason and deprived of his British passport for his reporting from Korea, Winnington returned to work in China. Unlike most foreigners in Beijing, Winnington and his family lived among the ordinary Chinese rather than in a special hostel, and he provides a marvelously evocative portrait of the ancient city before its destruction. He travelled within China, and also to Tibet, which he visited just after the Chinese occupation in 1953, and again four years later when he recorded with horror the suppression of the unique culture." -- back cover.