Only a yesterday or two ago most of us were resigned to apparent permanence of the seamless web of a China policy first fashioned by a Democratic Administration in 1950 and then made holy by two Republican administrations. Condemned by the United Nations in 1951, and charged ever since with monstrous abuse of China's great traditions, the People's Republic of China has been Washington's justification for heavy commitments of U.S. resources to extensive diplomatic and economic strategies.

The decade of the sixties saw more than the normal quota of paradox and contradiction, and attitudes toward the economic development of the poor nations and the relationship between rich and poor nations were no exception. In. the realization that economic development was one of the world's critical problems, the United Nations titled the sixties the "decade of development" and set a goal of a five per cent annual increase in gross national product (G.N.P.) for the poor countries. This growth was to be achieved primarily by greater effort on their part, but was to be significantly aided by rich countries which would provide one per cent of their G.N.P. as assistance.

Many intellectuals sensed the dawning of a "new generation" in the activism, idealism, and moral pronouncements of the student movement of the 1960's. This movement seemed to be reaching fruition with the "revolutionary" tremors that the youth culture let loose on college campuses and throughout American society in the wake of Cambodia, Kent State, and Jackson State during the spring of 1970.

But less than six months later, the "sounds of silence" on the college campuses became deadening, and the savants of the "new society" expressed disillusionment and bewilderment.

Despite its creaking inefficiency and patent injustice, the American courts have twice proven their superiority to the myopia that reigns in the Justice Department. Although it can never restore to victims the brutal years lost in prison, the courts in New Haven and New York have managed to unravel two more of the Government's pet conspiracy indictments and released the victims. Let us hope that the labored victories won in the cases of Bobby Seale, Erica Huggins and the Panther Thirteen can be repeated in the case of the Government against Angela Davis if, as it seems, it is equally contrived.

Under a new title, The Intelligence Establishment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), Professor Harry Howe Ransom of Vanderbilt University has thoroughly revised and up-dated his original work, Central Intelligence and National Security, which first appeared in 1958. The result is a highly readable, well-informed survey of the intelligence community (including a new chapter on the British intelligence system), plus penetrating essays on the nature of intelligence, its relationship to national policy and decision-making, surveillance by Congress, and the related problems of administration and executive control.