FORTY YEARS OF CHINA watching preceded Barbara Tuchman's six week visit to China in the summer of 1972. Behind her were two Pulitzer Prizes, the most recent for Stillwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945. Her authority as a pre-communist China expert lend weight to her insight into the tenacious Chinese riddle and she agreed to record her observations and impressions for the Associated Press and Harper's magazine. Notes From China consists of these and another previously published essay, the speculative "It Mao Had Come to Washington in 1945."

Tuchman's "notes" cover nine topics ranging freely from keeping the revolution red to keeping the countryside green. The essays flow smoothly from one to another, together they form a cohesive work, filled with perceptive observations. But as a collection, they assume a greater purpose. She gropes for that single flash of insight that would make sense of the rhetoric and the horror stories that filter through Hong Kong to Sunday supplements of American newspapers, that frighten many Americans and bewilder the rest. That flash of insight is absent.

Part of this failure lies in the journalistic origins of her pieces. Writing for a deadline and a broad audience that understands Mao no more than acupuncture, it is difficult to capture anything other than the interesting details.

But most of the problems stem from China itself. She wastes few words reducing the rhetoric to human terms, stripping away the publicity releases to reveal the Chinese people. But at this point, she encounters the same obstacles that limit other China-watchers. The enigma of China does not lie in the Marxism-Leninism--western innovations--but in the Chinese themselves, across the cultural gap.

Tuchman finds herself approaching this gap with a few bridges, and little confidence in those she has. At points Notes From China is about the dilemma of a journalist reporting on China, not the country itself. Ultimately, she discovers that while she has at long last been admitted to China, she is still studying it from a considerable distance.

THE MOST IMMEDIATE barrier is her ignorance of the language, a problem which she equates with being deaf. All statements came to her through a government-provided interpreter, and even her English-speaking contacts chose to speak Chinese, perhaps out of consideration for the note-taking government observers.

Tuchman was also disturbed by the inflexibility of her itinerary, but was reassured when she was allowed to wander alone in Yenan, and upon entering a schoolhouse, discovered that the conditions and friendliness were no different than in scheduled schools.

But fluency in the language and relaxation of travel restrictions would not alter the situation greatly. Tuchman finds herself listening with American ears, seeing through American eyes, and even smelling with an American nose. In concluding a description of harsh rural reality, she suddenly moves from the size of garden plots to a description of a "privy"--just one more victim of the American Bathroom Syndrome. She defines deficiencies in terms of American excesses. She even goes so far as to judge the inflections of Chinese music, a dangerous task when crossing cultural lines.

Most awkward for the old China hand are those situations which defy explanation, those statements that simply do not make sense. Tuchman encountered several. Officials denied facts of history, made senseless decisions, and gave seemingly absurd rationales. Tuchman mused, "One never knows...whether it is ignorance, or befuddled Marxist orthodoxy, or some kind of reverse oriental version of reality." She was standing at the edge of a yawning cultural gap.

The greatest difference between Chinese today and the rest of the world is that the Chinese take their revolution seriously. Astonished, Tuchman reports the lengths to which Mao has gone in creating perpetual revolution and the degree to which the people actually live it. Tempered by her concern for an uninformed and misinformed public, she is otherwise enthusiastic about the psychic and material benefits that the Chinese have begun to enjoy since the years of Stilwell.

STILL SHE RESISTS fully accepting the accompanying verbiage. After one passage of rhetoric, she adds incredulously: "That is the way they talk," She claims to be confused over how the people can learn from The People. Irreverently explaining that she could not otherwise keep them straight, she abbreviates recurring slogans. Marxism-Leninism and Mao Tse-Tung Thought is reduced to ML&M. Struggle, Criticism and Transformation becomes SCAT. Expedient, but something was obviously lost in translation.

She effectively debunks much of the propaganda credited with China's progress. Fertilizer, after all, has done more to raise food production than ML&M, and Tuchman notes that not even Mao has thought of a Thought that has been able to stop spitting in the streets. Perhaps because the ideology is so pervasive, she enjoys poking fun at it and pointing out the inconsistencies. In short, she fails to take the revolution seriously.

The only conclusion Tuchman draws, and the lesson to be learned from her efforts, is that the Chinese are different. They have different needs, different goals, and a different perspective on the world. Hopefully, different ways of life need not be inimical.

Responsible writers, such as Barbara Tuchman, will provide the definition of the gap, for just as their bewilderment is serious, their interest is sincere. Only when they can study China intimately can it be explained to the other bewildered, interested Americans.