Communism In China FREEDOM LOST, HOPE GAINED

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28415, 23 October 1957, Page 12

Communism In China FREEDOM LOST, HOPE GAINED

IBy a Special Correspondent of “The Times"]

“In the old days you were left to die, but now you are taken to 'hospital.” The words remain in Imy memory, less perhaps for themselves than for the man who said them. He was not a smart young product of the regime. He was an elderly man who lived in one of the remote regions of China’s west. He had worked for years in the Chinese Post Office and had something about him of the simple kindliness and humanity of a country postman. He seemed to embody the Confucian virtues in a Marxist society. What he had against the new regime were the restrictions. Many people complained about them, he said. It was impossible to travel from one place to another without permission from somebody—not necessarily the police, but the organisation one worked for. Of course, as the only all-embracing organisation in China is the State, it came to the same thing. He did not seem to resent the street and residential committees, those ultimate tentacles of the Communist regime, whose interference in the life of the individual would not be tolerated in-Europe for one minute. “They help us,” he said simply. Truth in Factories We talked about Marxism and the new philosophy. “I am old,” he said. “Sixty-five. I study politics, but I don’t have to. All the young ones have to study, several hours a week.” “What is the philosophy of the new regime?” I asked. “They tell you what is true,” was his curious reply, but clearly sincere. “And how do they know what is true?” “Real things are true,” he replied. Fingering his blue cotton boiler suit, he said: “These clothes are true; the house I live in is true.” Pointing outside the window to where a new building was rising amid a meshwork of bamboo scaffolding: “That factory is true. That is what they tell us.”

It was pure materialism: 1 had never heard it so openly, so naively, expressed. I heard it again later from a younger man. This was the philosophy. I knew it was one from which Christian Europe would shrink in horror. It could only be believed in a country like China, whose poverty in material things had been so extreme, so absolute, in the past that often in peasant families there was only one suit of clothes to go round, which the members of the family had to wear in turn. It was easy to see howcommunism suited the backward countries. It gave them much more than it took away. “Factories before Freedom” might well be China’s slogan today. For the majority of the population the factories took priority. Who loses under communism? Is it the workers? China at present is little more than a vast labour camp. There is no question of the free choice of a job. You go where you are sent. The Shanghai authorities told me that hundreds of thousands had been sent from the city to Sinkiang, in the far north-west. “Sent” was the word they used. They did not even pretend that they had been volunteers. Asked whether their families had gone with them, the authorities became evasive. “Some families went,” they replied shiftily; clearly it was not many. “For how long were they sent?” “Permanently.” War-time Conditions

This is the keynote in China today. In spite of the relative relaxation since the last year, it is a war-time atmosphere. The Communists are taking the whole nation through the Long March of 1934. Their ruthlessness is formidable. In one city after another I heard how they had cleared the ancestral tombland in order to build the factories “Move your dead elsewhere,” they told the people. The people did so. and. if the authorities could be believed, had been proud to do it for the country. The ViceMinister for Water Conservancj’ casually remarked that in preparation for the construction of the first great dam on the Yellow River, at the Sanmen Gorge in Honan province, 800,000 persons were being shifted to other parts of China, and “nine cities” would be submerged. Another example: “How do you prevent the peasants flocking into the city?” 1 asked the Vice-Mayor of Shanghai. “Simple,” he replied, “we limit the food supply to the existing population.”

What is the secret of China’s dynamic economy? How can China, even with Russian aid (every penny of which, incidentally, is repaid) build and equip her. new factories, finance her vast schemes for controlling the rivers, overcome the constant natural disasters, increase thr wages of the industrial workers, pay the former capitalist large taxfree incomes, invite and pay the expenses of numerous foreign visitors and delegations? How is it done? By a system which is not far from slavery—long hours for low wages. The Chinese workers get no holidays. They work eight hours a day, six days a week, from one end of the year to the other. The Chinese can do things which no Western country can contemplate. In addition to this there is the unpaid toil of millions of forced labourers. Glimpse into Abyss Occasionally one gets a glimpse into the abyss. Your correspondent, who was usually handed on from one Intourist organisation to another all round China like a registered parcel labelled “with care,” arrived somewhat unexpectedly in Harbin, in north Manchuria. In the immense square in front of the station thousands upon thousands of people, most of them carrying all their belongings with them, were waiting for the trains. My interpreter and I were surrounded by one group who were clearly workers. They were raggedly dressed. Their faces wore a hard. | bitter look, as of the disinherited—an unforgettable look. There was in it none of the joy of the proletariat which has come into its own. They did not speak; an official stepped forward hurriedly and spoke for them. He told the interpreter that they were workers travelling to Kansu in the far west to work on the Lan-chow-Paotow railway. My inter-

(Concluded)

prefer, clearly very uneasy, hustled me quickly away. “The supreme advantage of the Communists is that they are the first Chinese Government to have tackled the real problems of China in all its history.” was said to me by, of all people, one of the dispossessed British businessmen of Shanghai. How often in Hongkong and elsewhere one hears from Englishmen such phrases as

“At least China has a Government which gets something done.” or “If I were Chinese, I should be a Communist.” The second great advantage possessed by the Communist regime lies in the corruption and ineptitude of the unfortunate Kuomintang which preceded it, restoration of whose dissolute regime even the most ardent barkers after the “good old days in Shanghai” do not today advocate for China. Two Million Killed How can one sum it up, strike a balance-sheet of good and evil? The Communists have killed millions to install their power in China. (Nobody will ever know how many, but there is good reason to believe that the American figure of 15 to 20 million killed is based on unreliable Chinese Nationalist sources, and that the British figure of two million or less is nearer the truth.) Having installed their power, they have extinguished freedom. Art. and possibly science too, are languishing in the Marxist straitjacket. We look with horror at the iron grasp in which Peking holds every human being, at the suppresion of human rights. This is a European viewpoint, and a legitimate one. But can one view China solely through European eyes?

The Chinese peasant, that most unfortunate being who for thousands of years has been dominated by everybody and everything—even by his own rivers—sees things differently. The Communists took away freedom; but in return they offered hope. Hope is a great compensator. Moreover, it is something this mass of humanity has never had. Such a regime would be lethal to the West. But the West is not China. To the outside world Chinese communism, being both more adroit and more quickly successful than Russian, is thereby a far greater ideological menace. If China, by seeming to lay aside terror, can present communism as being as mild as a dove and as reasonable as arithmetic, it wilt vastly increase its attractiveness to other Asian countries, already deeply impressed by the - speed of Chinese industralisation and by Peking’s physical control over its immense territories. Among the Protean shapes of communism, this is the most attractive, and perhaps, the most deceptive.