The Chinese in Malaya, as the author has observed at first hand, are probably more prosperous than any other Chinese have ever been anywhere in the world. Under capitalism today the Chinese communities in Malaya have achieved a degree of wealth, health, and education which Communist China will be remarkable to have achieved if it survives and succeeds for the next hundred years. Does this not give the lie to the great Communist myth concerning Asia--the myth accepted by many Western politicians, intellectuals, and newspaper men--that the struggle between Communism and anti-Communism is a struggle for living standards? that the issue is an issue of "who will provide the best livelihood"? On the pro-Communist side in Malaya, Chinese who are not religious and who are known for their practicality and secularism, struggle for the chance to go forth and suffer, to serve in an army with bad medical service and no pensions, to face an almost certain death in the jungle, to lose life and property (which they could keep on the British side) in order to gain that other kind of life--life with honor and purpose, on the Communist side. The British meanwhile progress, no doubt. In many respects the British administrations in Singapore and Malaya are more enlightened than some of the local governments in the United States. But whatever the reason, they do not seem to belong to the Chinese who live there or even to the Malays. They are governments for the people, and not (so far as the local people seem to judge) governments _of_ the people. Is it reasonable to ask in the mid-1950s that decent British officers and civil servants convert themselves into apocalyptic fanatics of a weird composite Asian nationalism? Can the British make revolution in Malaya when they are rather fatigued with their own Labor revolution at home? Can we Americans, who have made nothing, absolutely nothing, out of the heroism and romance and tradition that might have been reconstituted as the ancient kingdom of Ryukyu (Okinawa), be in a position to chide the British for not doing that which we ourselves do not undertake? The Communist magic is strong, bad magic. In North Korea it created officers in an unreasonably short time, developed fanatics while we were trying to develop gentlemen, and came close to defeating us in the perilous weeks of the Pusan perimeter. In China soldiers of whom many Americans despaired when they fought on the Nationalist side became desperate assault infantry under Communist training. The timid and quarrelsome Annamites who had given the French so little trouble before Communism organized them, fought like leopards once they read Marx, Lenin, Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi-minh.