NO CHINESE city lies closer to us than Canton. Since 1949 China watchers in neighboring Hong Kong, Professor Vogel among them, have analyzed, catalogued and dissected every morsel of information and every willing refugee from Canton they could get their hands on.

But Vogel did them all one better. In 1966 he helped bring back to the United States one slim, suave Cantonese-who happened to be a China watcher's dream. This was Edward Chung-man Ch'an, a living, breathing former member of the Chinese Communist Party who had worked in the Canton area from 1950 until his escape in 1962.

Vogel and Ch'an settled down to work in a corner of the East Asian Research Center on Cambridge St. By plowing through Canton newspapers with Ch'an and picking his memory, Vogel gradually put together this history of Communism in Canton since 1949.

Vogel's story of Canton rattles along like a rollercoaster ride, with some dizzying ups and downs. The Cantonese greeted the liberation in 1949 with hope and enthusiasm, then struggled up through years of land reform and collectivization in the early 1950's. After the Great Leap Forward in the late fifties forced a heartbreaking drop in production and morale, the Cantonese began a slower, more cynical climb toward economic and political security that came to a halt again during the wild street fighting of the Cultural Revolution.

It is no accident that this one city's story parallels the story for all China since 1949. Above all else the Communists brought a unified, nation-wide program to the once broken up Middle Kingdom. Canton Under Communism in this way becomes one of the clearest, best written histories of Communist China to date. Unhappily for all but the most bleary-eyed Sinophiles, Vogel some-times buries the story in detail-the footnotes run for almost 40 pages in the back of the book. But blessed with a sociologist's concern for human suffering, he throws out lucid summaries along the way that make struggling, through all of it less necessary.

The details do help capture the ironic twists of Canton's fight against waves of outside agitators sent from, the north by Peking to enforce, national policies. This makes enlightening reading for Americans, who have often misunderstood the on-again, off-again struggle between local and central power in China. American General Joseph Stillwell, for instance, was furious when Chiang Kai-shek ignored his advice to reorganize the Chinese Army in 1942. "With the U. S. on his side and backing him," Stillwell wrote in his diary, "the stupid little ass fails to grasp the big opportunity of his life."

CHIANG wisely saw all the boobytraps in Stillwell's "opportunity," He ruled, like Chinese emperors in the past, within a web of local understandings and power balances that bound him as tightly as it bound his local commanders. A reorganization of the army would have toppled the delicate balances and sent Chiang tumbling down with them.

The Communists, while energetically pushing Chiang into the sea, exacerbated and then inherited all his problems in controlling the locals. As guerrillas, the Communists had spent their lives ripping bits of China away from central government control. But after winning in 1949 the new Peking leadership had to rein in all their local comrades-some of whom, like the Cantonese, had been isolated for years fighting deep behind Nationalist and Japanese lines.

Cracking the whip over the heads of the Cantonese was particularly difficult. They lived 1500 miles south of Peking over a mountain range. Like American southerners, they had an old tradition of rebellion. They spoke southern Chinese dialects unintelligible to the men ruling in Peking.

But Mao Tse-tung and the rest of the Peking leadership were determined to bring them to heel, and in a fascinating chapter Vogel recounts how northerners and southerners chose up sides over one issue-land reform. The Cantonese preferred to go slow and easy. Some of the top Cantonese Communists had friends or relatives who were landlords. Taking their land was embarrassing and awkward.

Peking would tolerate no such footdragging and sent down a troubslehooter-a mercurial, disarmingly frank Party veteran named T'ao Chu. In the next 15 years this little man would etch his name across the face of South-east China.

T'ao was a Hunanese like Mao and had served as a top commissar in Lin Piao's Fourth Field Army. But he knew the dangers of simply slapping the Cantonese in line with his impressive credentials. Rising to speak during one of his first appearances in the city, T'ao modestly confessed he had just arrived and had little experience in Cantonese affairs. But, he said, seizing on his own introduction, experience wouldn't solve Canton's problems. It was class standpoint that had to be improved. He urged-here was the clincher-that all the lower level cadres criticize those superiors who had protected landlords.

T'ao proceeded to slice away the local leaders' power bases. He leveled one charge after another at the assistants and proteges of top Cantoneses leaders, then gently coaxed their bosses to publish self-criticism and accept higher party posts outside the Canton area. Though T'ao waited months after taking command before promoting himself to the area's top party position, he soon had trusted deputies in all the sensitive local posts and governed Canton unchallenged.

This wasn't simply a victory for sleight-of-hand politics, Vogel argues. The Cantonese, like all Chinese, hungered for material progress and a sense of national purpose-dreams that had fueled the revolution. As a veteran of that revolution, T'ao convinced the Cantonese he dreamed those same dreams, and on that basis they accepted him.

T'AO'S STAR, after burning brightly for 15 years, finally burst like a supernova in the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution. As events began to heat up in mid 1966, Lin Piao called T'ao to Peking. There, as Lin's trusted comrade from the Fourth Field Army, T'ao became the number four man in China.

But Red Guards were beginning to engulf the country. Vogel tells how T'ao frantically telephoned his deputies in Canton, urging them to save their necks by organizing compliant, home grown Red Guards. Leftists in Peking, getting wind of this, sent swarms of Red Guards from the north into Canton. In a matter of weeks they smashed T'ao's organization, just as, 15 years before, he and his men from the north had pushed out the local Cantonese leaders.

With T'ao purged and his well-oiled machine in Canton torn apart, the Cantonese in 1968 seemed forced to start all over again, as they had in 1949, to build a party apparatus, increase production, and figure out how their city, along with all the other torn, bloodied parts of China, might fit back into one whole. They faced this long haul, Vogel says, "with less optimism. less idealism, and less willingness to sacrifice," yet with "more wisdom and experience."

Despite the turmoil, Vogel insists, in 20 years the Communists have welded a tightly disciplined, centralized approach to national problems that guides the thinking of local leaders throughout the country. This great improvement over Chiang Kai-shek's warlord juggling lets the Chinese approach their goals more surefootedly in 1970 than in 1949.

Slow-footed army officers now control most of the provinces and are pushing ex-Red Guards out to the farms to work off their frustrations. China remains a tense nation, but Vogel predicts events will move along paths laid down in the 1950's. The coming generation of Cantonese, he says, will slip back into the centralized system, almost as smoothly as the Pearl River slides past the Canton docks and into the South China Sea.