Reporters Jeremy James, Jeanne La Chard, Denis Tuohy, Desmond Wilcox, Harold Williamson

This week: Mission to Yenan - the chance that was lost?

In the summer of 1944 an American military and diplomatic team - nicknamed the Dixie Mission - flew to Yenan in northern China. Its brief: to make contact with Mao Tse-Tung's communist guerrilla forces and to secure their help in the war against the Japanese. However, although the mission was warmly welcomed by Mao and his colleagues, Washington continued to commit itself to Chiang Kai-Shek's weak Nationalist Government.

Man Alive, on the eve of President Nixon's journey to Peking, shows a unique film record of the Yenan encounter, obtained from US government source, together with the comments of four former State Department officials who were members of the Dixie Mission. Two of them, Ray Ludden and John Service, have flown to England to take part in the programme, still convinced that their assessment in 1944 was correct: that there need never have been a break between America and China nor, probably, a Korean War or a Vietnam War.