The title of Ian Baruma's article about the life and work of Pierre Ryckmans in The New York Review of Books is "The Man Who Got it Right". That pretty well says it all: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/simon-leys-man-who-got-it-right/
My indebtedness to Pierre Ryckmans/Simon Leys comes at the end of this article I wrote about China's 1979 Democracy Wall for Quadrant magazine in 2012: http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2012/4/democracy-wall-beijing-1979/
