当年，他们第一次来中国

    林克坦承：“1973年过后，我了解到了很多东西，这才知道我在六十年代末从表面判断毛泽东的‘社会主义’犯了多大的错误。”他后来成为普林斯顿大学（Princeton）东亚研究教授。“我错得不能再错。令我有点困惑的是，我在上世纪六十年代认识的其他一些左派友人有时似乎不愿面对这个明显的事实。”

    《我的第一次中国之行》起源于香港《信报财经新闻》（Hong Kong Economic Journal）网站上的一个每周系列专题。刘建民在致谢时写到，这个专题的两位撰稿人司徒华和罗伯特•斯卡拉皮诺已经去世，他们的文章没有收录在书中。据我所知，第三位撰稿人理查德•鲍姆在刘建民完成编写之后、该书出版之前也已经去世。刘建民在收集这些回忆文章方面做出了出色的工作，并且恰逢其时。（财富中文网）

    译者：千牛絮

    "In the years since 1973 I have learned much, much more about how wrong I was in the late 1960s to take Mao Zedong's 'socialism' at face value," confesses Link, who later became a professor of East Asian studies at Princeton. "I could not have been more mistaken. I am a bit puzzled that others among my leftist friends from the 1960s sometimes seem reluctant to face this obvious fact."

    My First Trip to China originated in a weekly series on the website of the Hong Kong Economic Journal. As Liu notes in his acknowledgements, two contributors to that series whose essays were not included in the book -- Szeto Wah and Robert Scalapino -- have since died, A third that I know of, Richard Baum, died after Liu finished writing and before the book appeared. Liu has performed a great service in collecting these memories, and he's done it none too soon.