21 million traveled September 29, a record, on the first day of just-ended Golden Week. Tourism revenue hit $46.9 billion in the three days leading up to the mid-autumn festival and National Day, up 125% YoY, while tickets to some popular tourist destinations sold out due to increased demand. Read article →

Luxury conglomerate LVMH, is making “an unprecedented investment” in the 128,000-square meter complex which will feature 1,000 luxury brands including LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE. The complex, expected to pull in 16 million visitors a year by 2030, will include accommodation, dining and entertainment. Read article →

In the surreal world of 24/7 influencers shilling products in never-ending livestreams, many influencers are not human. In a major step forward in deepfake commercialization, AI avatars cost $1,000 to generate but work days, nights, and weekends to sell products, performances, and even political agendas. Avatar hosts can outperform some human hosts, whose skills can vary. 20% of human streamers contribute to 80% of total sales, but a “virtual livestream host can replace the rest — six or seven streamers that contribute less and have lower ROI rates.” Read article →

The unit value of the goods that Europe bought from China rose 30%, while the value of goods it sold to China rose only 18% from 2020-2022. Even if trade volumes had stayed constant, this terms-of-trade shock would have made the deficit deteriorate significantly. ("Terms of trade" is the ratio between the index of export prices and the index of import prices. If the export prices increase more than the import prices, a country has a positive terms of trade, as for the same amount of exports, it can purchase more imports). Read article → 

China accounts for 85% of PV cell manufacturing and assembles 74% of those cells into modules. China has 80% of polysilicon production and 96% of converting polysilicon into wafers. Last year the US and EU added 54GW of solar power capacity combined—and in July alone China manufactured 47GW worth of solar cells. Many end up abroad, but most stay in China—the country made up 46% of global solar capacity additions in 2022 with its push for widespread rooftop solar drastically boosting installations in response to their energy shortages. Last year, solar delivered 4.8% of Chinese electricity, more than its share of the US power grid or the world average. Read article →

Astronauts lit a candle during a live lecture broadcast from Tiangong space station to demonstrate how flames burn in microgravity. On Earth, they produce flames shaped through buoyancy-driven convection, with hot air rising and cold air descending. That combustion convection current is weak in the microgravity environment of low Earth orbit, so flames diffuse in all directions, resulting in spherical fireballs. (The International Space Station, from which China is barred, cannot accommodate naked flames).Read article →

Scenic spots all over China are crowded, especially Dunhuang in Gansu. The “Singing Sand Mountains & Crescent Moon Spring” area features 40 km of mountains, sand dunes, and a crescent-shaped lake. People joke about the ‘camel jams’ due to so many tourists doing camel rides in the scenic area, causing enormous lines of camels throughout the desert. But also some less famous places that were surprisingly crowded, such as Nanchang, which led to the joke that practically every place has "a 100 million visitors" this week. Booming domestic tourism. Read article →

Visitors to China can now upload e-yuan to a digital wallet using Mastercard or Visa. Foreign nationals can download the updated digital yuan wallet for iOS devices from the App Store or Google Play, create a personal wallet, preload it with digital yuan using their international credit card and use the CBDC to make payments. Read article →

To any sane person living in China, reading 95% of western reporting about China can shake one's belief in all western news reporting on everything. The chasm between the peaceful, sunny, happy life of folks in China and the nightmarish hellscape MSM in the west portrays China is wide. Reality: People in China own their own homes (largely with no loan), even and especially in the countryside. Food and everyday items are affordable. Coffee shops, entertainment venues and sunny parks full of laughing families are part of each and every neigborhood. I've been to about two thirds of all Chinese provinces. Life is good everywhere. Sorry. Not Sorry. I moved from America for a better life. And China has not disappointed. I literally broke my back a couple years ago. I needed weeks of daily therapy and treatment. Cost: a couple hundred American. If that had happened in the state, I would be in debt for life. China is everything America promised me as a child. Here, I can own a home, afford to go out, afford to go to the hospital if needs be. I have time for trips to the park. I can afford new clothes when I want them. And most importantly, I have no fear of crime, anywhere, at anytime. I am so sick of reading bad takes on China. I so desparately want my American brothers and sisters to understand one simple thing: society can be better. We need to start learning from China and other nations that are doing it better. Jason Smith. Read article →

90% of China's ten biggest irrigation projects were built during the Great Leap, when research in high grain yields started and produced Yuan Long-Ping’s hybrid rice in 1973, helping  to feed 900 million people. During that decade, the Chinese Academy of Sciences produced the world’s first fully synthesized crystalline bovine insulin, Tung Dizhou cloned two different fishes (a goldfish and a Rhodeus sinensis), 30 years before Scotland’s Dolly the Sheep. In 1967, “Struggling to deal with a malaria-ridden army, Ho Chi Minh asked Mao … to look for a cure for malaria and Project 523 began its search in 1967.”  Mao advised the hundreds of researchers to look  in China’s “great storehouse of Chinese traditional medicine.” Tu Yuyu headed the research and discovered an ancient dynasty’s herb that produced artemisinin. The rest is history. Millions of lives in Asia and Africa in particular were saved. “Mao’s prompting,” said The Hindu, “led to Tu’s discovery.” Tu was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for physiology.  Read more →

China gifted Sri Lanka with a $72 million hospital. The 500-bed National Nephrology Hospital has 150 dialysis machines, 8 operating theaters, two 20-bed ICUs, a 20 bed 'High Dependency Unit,' a complete laboratory, and a 200-seat auditorium. Read more →

152 countries signed BRI agreements with China. In Africa, China has built 6,000 km. of railways, 10,000 km of highways, 20+ ports, 80 major infrastructure developments and 80% of telecommunications facilities. China added 1,300 new airline routes with BRI countries. More than 80 countries have seen new bank branches opened or financial cooperation established. China’s average annual outward foreign investment remains at $150 billion, with more and more of China’s capital flowing to BRI countries. BRI adds 1.2%-3.4% of participants' GDP. Each year, 400,000 students from BRI countries study in China, while China has established Confucius Institutes, Luban Workshops, and Cultural Centres in more than 100 countries. Read more →

“Edgar Snow was the first correspondent to penetrate into the heart of Communist China and to return to tell the tale. His book, planned and executed with meticulous care, is the most superb piece of reporting that I have ever read. It is the authentic, inside story of the Chinese Communists and of their relation to the Sino-Japanese War. The Communists and the war are more intimately connected than most people suppose.”
—The Atlantic

“He was the first foreign journalist to risk this trek to the forbidden Communist state in China’s West in the second half of the 1930s, when it was under heavy blockade by the Nationalist government. Snow invested a lot of time and energy in bringing an untold story out into the world…There is also much that is troubling about the book, especially Snow’s unquestioning, even adulatory, response to Mao’s story about the Communist past and present.”
—Julia Lovell, Five Books

“A journalistic scoop in 1937, this book has since become a historical classic. Snow’s sympathetic portrayal of the Chinese communists is somewhat naive, however, and it exposed him to widespread criticism during the McCarthy years.”
—Foreign Affairs

About the author

Edgar Snow (1905-1972) is by far best remembered for Red Star Over China. However, his earlier life was also one of some adventure and excitement. From Kansas City, he attended the University of Missouri and looked set for a career in Manhattan in advertising — until the Wall Street Crash. The Depression set him off for China in the hope of more opportunity — he was to stay 13 years, know just about everyone, Chinese or foreign, who was anyone, and marry Helen Foster, another American journalist working in China.

He spent time in the famine districts of northwest China, traveled the Burma Road, and explored Manchuria. Living in Shanghai initially, the couple moved to Beijing, where Snow taught journalism at Yenching University and started several left-wing magazines. In this way, they became acquainted with leftist students who eased Snow’s path to Yan’an.

After World War Two, Snow continued to write about China and Asia, invariably from a leftist perspective. In the 1950s, he encountered some trouble from Senator Joseph McCarthy and eventually moved to Switzerland. He returned to China in 1960 and 1964 to interview Máo Zédōng 毛泽东 and Zhōu Ēnlái 周恩来. In 1970, he stood next to Mao during the National Day parade in Beijing, during which Mao told Snow that he would welcome Nixon to China. Snow never saw that trip, dying the day Nixon arrived in China.

In 150 words

Edgar Snow made his way through Nationalist lines to Shanxi Province in June 1936, encountering a band of communists newly emerged, exhausted and decimated, after their 6,000-mile Long March. Snow found them developing the distinctive brand of communism that was to govern China during the Maoist era. Many of the men Snow interviewed in 1936 were the first-generation leaders of Communist China, and in particular he is credited with introducing Mao Zedong to a Western audience. Indeed, the best-known section of the book is Mao’s autobiography as related to Snow, which remains lauded in the P.R.C.

Takeaways:

Communists, over whose heads hung the sentence of death, did not identify themselves as such in polite — or impolite — society. Even in the foreign concessions, Nanking kept a well-paid espionage system at work. It included, for example, such vigilantes as C Patrick Givens, former chief Red-chaser in the British police force of Shanghai’s International Settlement.

Do the Reds really imagine that China can defeat Japan’s mighty war-machine? I believe they do. What is the peculiar shape of logic on which they base their assumptions of triumph? It was one of dozens of questions I put to Mao Tse-tung. And his answer, which follows, is a stimulating if perhaps prophetic thing indeed, even though the orthodox military mind may find it technically fallacious.

At last, after two weeks of hacking and walking over the hills and plains of Kansu and Ninghsia, I came to Yu Wang Pao, a big walled town in southern Ninghsia, which was then the headquarters of the First Front Red Army — and of its commander-in-chief Peng Teh-huai.

Great benefits have undoubtedly accrued to the Chinese Reds from sharing the collective experience of the Russian Revolution, and from the leadership of the Comintern. But it is also true that the Comintern may be held responsible for serious reverses suffered by the Chinese Communists in the anguish of their growth.

Why this book should be on your bookshelf:

The debate around Snow and Red Star Over China has been a long and divisive one among Sinologists, China Watchers, and the Chinese Communist Paty. The CCP still lionizes Snow, most Western scholars think Red Star well worth close reading, and some think he was a patsy for Mao’s propaganda. There’s no doubt that Snow’s visit to Yan’an was closely stage-managed by the Party and that he saw nothing of the intense factional in-fighting taking place within the senior ranks that would work itself out, sometimes in deadly ways, over the next 20 to 30 years. Still, there is no denying Snow’s skills as a writer (and the largely unacknowledged input of Helen Foster-Snow as his editor throughout the project), his vivid recreations of the scene at Yan’an, his depictions of the genuineness of many Party members in wanting to improve the situation in China, and the extreme circumstances — the Long March, suppression by the Nationalists, war with Japan — that have formed the CCP worldview that lingers still today in terms of a tendency to isolationism, inability to seriously criticize itself, and continual factional disputes and purging.

What most people now take from Red Star Over China is the autobiography of Mao, his life as told to Snow. Snow, of course, could only ask questions based on his ultimately limited knowledge of the Party. The same applies to his ability to judge any answers or claims made by Mao. It’s hard not to see an element of performance in Snow, donning the cap with the five-pointed red star for photos, etc. Snow was to be among the first of many foreign journos to play at revolutionary in Yan’an.

The photos included in Red Star Over China are also interesting. Any selection of images to accompany such a book must also be read as part of the argument of the text. They are important in that these early photos of Mao are really among the only ones we have from that time — more came later, but Snow captured a rawer Mao. Mao’s image has been subject to much manipulation, change, and various uses, so these early images are important.

The entire book was a massive coup for Snow. But what story does it tell of Mao at Yan’an? Perhaps not entirely the one Mao told Snow or that Snow understood Mao telling him. Biography, history, reportage are all famously tricky areas. But it’s also important to remember that the Nationalists clamped down on any publicity or reporting about Mao, Zhū Dé 朱德, and the communists, making Red Star Over China’s impact even greater.

Today, Red Star Over China is read differently in China, Japan, Europe, and the U.S., given prevailing attitudes to China, communism, socialism, and Snow himself. He is venerated in China, though perhaps now in the West a little forgotten, except of course by students of China who invariably find their way to him early on in their reading. That’s not a bad thing — Red Star Over China can at times be a gripping read, inspiring to would-be journalists perhaps. But it is also an abject lesson in the pitfalls of access in China, and a reminder to try to understand when you’re seeing the wider picture and when you’re being fed a line.

Finally, and perhaps most remarkably, it is important to remember that Mao spent a lot of time with Snow. They talked for hours. The chances of that sort of relationship being built between a foreign journalist and a senior leader of the CCP today is, quite frankly, unimaginable. Read more

1. Talent at the Top: Only the brightest, most idealistic people are are admitted to politics–a policy unchanged in 2200 years.
2. Data in the Middle: policies are implemented, tracked, and optimized based on terabytes of data. The PRC is the world's largest consumer of public surveys.
3. Democracy at the Bottom: ordinary people, all unpaid amateurs, assemble twice a year to check the stats and sign off on new legislation. Policies need a minimum of 66% support to become law. That's why 95% of Chinese say the country is on the right track.

For decades, Western media have been narrating the same story about China being this brutal “dictatorship” whose people are killed at the hands of the criminal communist regime, giving the Tiananmen Square massacre as a prime example of the brutality of the Chinese government, wherein supposedly scores of students were killed at the hands of the People’s Liberation Army. However, a new book emerged proving that these claims are false and have no foundation to them except for Washington’s aspirations to tarnish the image of the Chinese Communist Party.

Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order, a new book by A. B. Abrams, highlights that there never were any killings in the infamous Tiananmen Square back in 1989 as had been spread by Western propaganda for decades, and it was revealed that the entire affair was but a mere attempt at showing China as the villain in the geopolitical arena. The book underlines that no killings, let alone a massacre as is proclaimed, took place in Tiananmen Square.

How did the U.S. succeed in manipulating the mainstream narrative and have millions upon millions of people believe that China initiated a mass murder of its own people—young college students—crushing them with tanks and shooting them down with machine guns? The answer is simple: the manipulation of public perception through the press. This could be done using media out of context and providing an incomplete version of the truth.

For example, the most infamous piece of media “documenting” the crime to ever exist is a video showing a tank marching onto a person alleged to have been a student, and right as the tank gets close enough to the young man and stops, the video is cut, with there being some text accompanying the video hinting or proclaiming that the tank went on to run over the protester. However, that could not be further from the truth. In reality, other protesters rushed to the scene and accompanied him from there as the tank was standing in place waiting for him to comply and get out of its way.

The book argues that all the acts committed by the United States were in a bid to “justify wars of conquest and exploitation” and generate multi-billion-dollar profits for the notorious military-industrial complex, as reported by CovertAction Magazine.

Abrams highlighted that the Tiananmen Square protests initially took place not as a push for Westernization or the downfall of the Chinese government. Instead, their primary focus was on reinforcing the principles of China’s 1949 Communist Revolution and addressing the issue of corrupt officials who had deviated from Maoist principles.

This movement encompassed not only students but also a significant number of workers, who exhibited a stronger anti-CCP stance. Their collective objective aimed at the establishment of a socialist democracy within the framework of the movement.

The book cited a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing that WikiLeaks published in 2016. The leak included reports on the eyewitness account of a Chilean diplomat and his wife who were present when the PLA made it to Tiananmen Square to disperse the protesters. The pair made it in and out of the square numerous times without any harassment and observed no mass firing of weapons into the crowds. They never saw any use of lethal force, to begin with.

Moreover, the book cited former Washington Post Beijing Bureau chief Jay Mathews who, in 1998, admitted that “all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully.”

It also cited Reuters  correspondent Graham Earnshaw, who spent the night of June 3-4 at the center of Tiananmen Square and reported that most of the students left the square peacefully with the remainder of them being persuaded to do the same.

As is customary, the main source the Western media used to claim that a massacre took place was an anonymous student from Qinghua University making claims to the Hong Kong press, who then made it to the British media.

Still, BBC‘s Beijing correspondent James Miles said there was no massacre.

Western reporting had conveyed the wrong impression and protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations.

The narrative was also completely spun out of proportion, with the perpetrators being painted as the victims of a crime that was never committed in the first place. The book underlined that those who did die in Beijing during the events lost their lives in street battles between the PLA and insurgents far from the square. Reports from the U.S. Department of State underlined that the unarmed PLA officers were attacked with petrol bombs, burning many alive.

Uyghurs, another ‘crime’ China committed

The hoax built around Tiananmen Square was a blueprint for U.S. media campaigns aimed at showing the Chinese government in a bad light, as Washington went on to accuse Beijing of perpetrating a genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province.

The book stressed that the claims about the so-called Uyghur genocide relied on nothing but hardline extremist U.S.-funded anti-China groups. Namely, they were funded by the CIA-affiliated National Endowment for Democracy, which was tasked with carrying out what the notorious spy agency had done alone under the covers for decades.

Amid the claims of Beijing genociding the Uyghurs, the Uyghur population in Xinjiang saw an increase of 25% between 2010 and 2018 instead of the population experiencing a contraction. Even facilities the West claimed to have been “concentration camps” in which Uyghurs were killed en masse and “brainwashed” or “indoctrinated” appeared to have been a logistics park, a regular detention center, and elementary and middle schools.

Xinjiang looks good, safe, and secure, and all the people I spoke with seemed happy about it, former London Metropolitan Police Officer Jerry Grey, who spent a lot of time traveling in Xinjiang, said.

“Uyghurs in China have been growing faster than the majority Han Chinese in part because they weren’t subject to the one-child policy, they have 20,000 mosques built […] Uyghur children can get into top universities easier than Han Chinese, and have halal foods prepared for them in canteens and they have a prayer area on campus,” Daniel Dumbrill, a Canadian businessman and Chinese political analyst said.

“Portraying an adversary as committing particularly egregious crimes, especially when one intends to initiate military action or other hostile measures against the adversary, has consistently provided an effective means of moving public and international opinion and justifying [US imperial] actions,” Abrams said in his book.

Yugoslavia

The book also shed light on the U.S. propaganda focused in the 1990s on Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, a socialist who sought to keep Yugoslavia together, accusing him of genocide in Kosovo and elsewhere.

Milosevic, a socialist, aimed to maintain the unity of Yugoslavia and prevent its fragmentation. This effort was driven by his desire to counteract Western nations’ potential expansion of influence and the establishment of U.S. military bases in a strategically vital area.

Interestingly, the most severe instances of ethnic cleansing during the war were actually executed by the Croats through Operation Storm, a plan devised by the CIA.

The Clinton administration additionally provided support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which sought to establish an ethnically homogeneous Albanian state. This endeavor involved targeting Serbs and other minority groups.

Financing from the drug trade played a significant role in sustaining the KLA, leading the State Department to label it a “terrorist organization”. The NATO North Atlantic Council identified the KLA as the primary instigator of violence in Kosovo.

The narrative of genocide and the Serbs running concentration camps once again heavily relied on the testimony of an individual who openly admitted to not witnessing any killings—propagandist reporter Roy Gutman. This account was eventually discredited when a British journalist visited an alleged death camp, discovering that the inmates had voluntarily sought refuge from the nearby conflict in surrounding villages.

Yugoslavia was a highly successful state that united numerous contemporary Baltic nations under the banner of communism, and it met its demise when the United States and NATO waged a war against it, killing hundreds of civilians in the notorious bombing campaign it launched on the country in order to “sow democracy” there.

Syria

The same man who was one of the main reasons behind the collapse of Yugoslavia was almost able to do the same with Syria. Gutman played a major role in another similar war launched over a decade later against Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.

The propaganda effort pushed by Gutman was similar to the one he peddled earlier, with it including the mass murder of people at the hands of the government without any evidence backing up these claims.

Western media and regimes falsely accused Al-Assad of carrying out attacks with chemical weapons against his own people while the attacks were likely carried out by U.S.-backed terrorists.

Back in November, the Grayzone website published a series of leaks that expose how senior officials of the OPCW censored this explosive finding in the Syrian city of Douma.

In its investigation, the website stated that “in the early days of the OPCW’s investigation of an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria, expert toxicologists ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of death for more than 40 civilians reported at the scene.”

The Korean War: Another ‘atrocity’

The Korean War, a war peddled by the United States that wound up splitting one people into two, was presented to the public as a “humanitarian intervention” aimed at rescuing the local population from communist forces. To establish this narrative, the Pentagon sponsored a propaganda film, titled The Crime of Korea narrated by Humphrey Bogart. This film falsely attributed atrocities committed by the South Korean government, with U.S. support, to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

This narrative gained traction within the U.S. media and significantly bolstered the perception of the war as “morally justified”. An influential Timemagazine column titled “Barbarity” furthered this perspective by describing a communist massacre in Taejon, which subsequent investigations revealed was actually perpetrated by South Korean troops allied with the U.S.

Charles E. Potter, Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Korean Atrocities and appointed by Senator Joseph McCarthy, notorious for McCarthyism, which was responsible for the persecution of anyone even thought to be affiliated with any leftist organization or held any left-wing beliefs, emphasized the inhumane acts committed by U.S. adversaries. He recounted gruesome incidents, such as a “Red Chinese” nurse using garden shears to sever a GI’s toes without anesthesia and American POWs being subjected to torture with bamboo spears and confinement in small iron cages until death, with maggots infesting their eye sockets.

However, the accounts presented by Potter contradicted the testimonies of American and British POWs, who indicated that their treatment by captors was generally decent, although they had to attend lectures on communism.

Meanwhile, U.S.-run POW camps subjected DPRK and Chinese prisoners to severe brutality. These inmates were massacred for singing revolutionary songs and subjected to violent coercion to renounce repatriation to their homelands. This strategy aimed to score Cold War propaganda points by portraying defection to the West as a desire born out of the perceived superiority of its political-economic system.

The campaign of propaganda against the DPRK extended well into the 21st century, with increasingly extravagant made-up tales to portray the country in a negative light. Many of these stories were propagated by DPRK defectors, some of whom were influenced or incentivized by South Korea and possibly the CIA.

Shin Dong-hyuk, a defector, collaborated with Washington Postcorrespondent Blaine Harden to write a highly successful book Escape From Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. However, this account was later revealed to be a fabrication.

Yeonmi Park, another defector, who charges a speaking fee of $12,500 on Western media outlets, even made the ludicrous claim that her friend’s mother was executed for watching a Hollywood movie.

Lee Soon-ok, yet another defector, testified before a House committee in 2004 that she had witnessed Christians being tortured and burned to death in DPRK political prisons. However, the head of the North Korean Defectors’ Association, Chang In-suk, contradicted this, asserting that Lee was never a political prisoner.

Abrams noted that fabricated reports about DPRK state executions of prominent figures often coincided with the surprising reappearance of these supposedly deceased individuals on camera.

In a CNN report from May 2015, it was alleged that DPRK leader Kim Jong Un had ordered the poisoning and killing of his aunt, Kim Kyong Hui. However, Mrs. Kim appeared in public in January 2020, highlighting the inaccuracy of the claim.

Abrams suggested that these false defector testimonies and biased media coverage were embraced in the West due to the “self-gratification” they provided, seemingly affirming the notion of Western superiority over the least Westernized state. Additionally, they often served as justifications for hostile policies, including economic sanctions, against the DPRK.

The book talks about the demonization of the Russian and Vietnamese governments, as well as that of Libya and Iraq in a bid to validate the Gulf War, while also revisiting numerous cases of U.S. propaganda aimed at subverting its foes while giving impetus to itself and its beliefs in a bid to uphold the unipolar system that it has been trying so hard to keep propped up—to no avail. The recounting of the countless crimes committed by the United States comes as no surprise to many as the latter has done so for decades, and continues to do so, exploiting its hold on the media to give itself the moral high ground over its geopolitical enemies. Monthly Review. Amazon.

The ISC (Needham) Report

The Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of Facts Concerning Bacteriological Warfare in Korea and China (the ISC report), published at the height of the Korean War, validated claims by North Korea and China that the US had launched bacteriological warfare (biological warfare, BW) attacks against both troops and civilian targets in those two countries over a period of several months in 1952.
   

The most vilified document of the 20th Century.

The report’s release in September, 1952, brought a withering international attack. It was roundly denounced by American and British politicians of the highest rank, ridiculed by four star generals, accused of fraud by celebrated pundits, misquoted by notable scientists, and scorned by a compliant Western press. Charges were made against the quality and truthfulness of its science. Its “unstated” political agenda was denounced. The ethics of interviewing captured US pilots was excoriated and its authors were publicly flayed as communist dupes. The report was red baited in the US halls of Congress and deemed unpatriotic to read, and therefore went unread and deliberately forgotten over the years, which has been the fate of Korean War history in general. In subsequent decades, volumes placed in American university library collections were quietly and permanently removed from circulation.
   
When the rare copy came up for auction, it was discretely purchased and disappeared from public view. This critical 67 year old truth commission document from the Korean War was slipping towards oblivion. For these very reasons, historians and truth seekers should exalt the wondrous rebirth of the ISC Report from near extinction with the publication of this new electronic edition. We welcome the sunshine that re-publication brings to a shadowy and suppressed chapter of American Cold War history. (from the introduction by Thomas Powell) 800 pages.  $9.99.