ABSTRACT
The pilgrimage to China is the final example of the apparently endless search for superior social systems on the part of Western intellectuals. The new truth about China was bound to be different from the old one. The absence of alienation, sense of participation and wholeness were the key characteristics of the setting in which Chinese people could "grow and develop into a well-rounded complete person." For many of them the social order of China symbolized less a new mode of industrialization than an excursion into a pastoral past where sturdy rural values merged with and prefigured the humane essence of Marxism. The Chinese were going to develop without the chaos and disruption that had previously accompanied modernization throughout the rest of the world, capitalist or socialist. Felix Greene reported that "China is today an intensely, almost compulsively moral' society.
