This modern Chinese textbook offers three main features. It contains a graded selection of Chinese writings on international relations by some of the most important modern Chinese writers, representing a wide range of viewpoints. Secondly, all new words and phrases encountered in the lessons are defined in Chinese, so that the reader becomes accustomed to the use of dictionaries written in the Chinese language. Lastly, a series of questions is appended to each lesson, which is intended to lead the students to use their knowledge of Chinese to discuss the main points presented in the lessons. The lessons present several prose styles of differing complexity; in each group of lessons the student progresses from the easiest to the most difficult level of modern historical writing. Each lesson has five parts: a short biography of the author, a precis of the lesson, the lesson itself, a glossary of unknown words and phrases, and questions about the lesson. The glossaries for the lessons assume that the student knows the approximately 1,200 single characters and 7,000 compounds introduced in the series of texts by John DeFrancis and published by the Yale University Press. (Author/NCR)