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The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left: The Revolutions of 1989. Edited by Daniel Chirot. [Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1991. 245 pp. Hard cover $30.00, paperback $14.95.]

The end of communism in Europe has posed difficult tests for those working in the field of comparative communism. What is one to do with the proceedings of a conference held in April 1990? One certainly does not send to a publisher in 1991 chapters that discuss changes in the German Democratic Republic and how they affect east-west relations. It is true that the collapse of the Soviet Union probably came too late to be incorporated, but as a result, the faulty analysis of Sino-Soviet relations, inter-Korean relations, Vietnam and South-east Asia, and the nature of United States military deployments, are all the more glaring. If one skips all reference to Europe and speculations on policy relevance in Asia, there is not much left to be read. The misspelling of Chinese names is especially annoying to readers of this journal. The failure to see the underlying continuation of Chinese economic reform and to suggest that China's response to the death of communism in Europe might be to speed up its own reforms, suggests there is little here for the China specialist. Only two chapters survive relatively unscathed. Robert Sutter's essay on the American perspective on the implications for China has the virtue of pointing out the dilemmas in Chinese policy without dismissing China as a less relevant state in the post-Cold War world. Harold Hinton's chapter on the implications for Taiwan survives in large part because he sees relatively little impact and concentrates on the complex bilateral relationship between China and Taiwan. One regrets that more contributors did not have the courage of Hinton's conviction that East Asian communism and politics were very different from their European comrades. Either the book should not have been published or the editors should have demanded major revisions from their contributors.