An Enlightening And Provocative Book About China

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29798, 14 April 1962, Page 3

An Enlightening And Provocative Book About China

(Reviewed by

K.J.)

Wall Has Two Sides. Al portrait of China today.! By Felix Greene. than Cape. 416 pp. There are two usual ap-l proaches by authors to Communist countries: many start from the assumption that everything to do with communism is evil. others are de•ermined to see only what is g d. Felix Greene, author of The Wall Has Two Sides.” aims that he sought merely . understand the country. He approached China appre- . ens.vely. found himself aught up in the enthusiasm and excitement of a country achieving great things, and has written one of the most iisctnatmg and important books to te written about China for many years. Hence, for ail its faults, the main mportance of this book is that it :s written from a viewpoint with which we are no longer familiar. Greene, cousin of Graham Greene and Hugh Carleton Greene- —director of the BBC., is an Englishman resident in the United States, a first-class reporter who can nardly be called a fellowtraveller. His bias is less for or aga.nst any particular deology. but rather against gnorance. for be believes that the Western world and the United States in particular, is grotesquely ignorant of what £ happening ;n China today. in.s view may have caused ne a.itnor to adopt an un-

duly sympathetic view of what is taking place, but as he states in his postscript, “I do not believe that you can fake a whole country and I think in all significant respects this book presents a fair and honest account of what is going on in China today. If this is so. or if only half the facts that I have presented are true, then it becomes clear that the American people have been most seriously misinformed.” This is. therefore, as the title suggests, the other side of the story. That does not mean that we are merely presented with a welter of statistics. Greene is far too good a reporter for that. He remarks, for example, that “when a Chinese worker or peasant says he is freer today than he has ever been in his life, he means it. And he sounds as if he means it. Perhaps he doesn't mean it in our way, for he has never known the particular forms of political and social freedom wb’ch have been the products of our own historical past and which are the fruit of our own relative physical security. A Chinese uses the word ’freedom’ in a very personal, down to earth, non-theoretical sense. He is not talking about abstractions but experience. He means that he is free at last to eat and not to starve: he is free of the landlord and money-lender . . .”

Greene here discovers and underlines of the differences

between Eastern and Western form of democracy—"freedom from” as opposed to “freedom to.” “Freedom to” is of little importance to the bulk of people unless they are safeguarded from want, starvation and disease and it is this freedom which the Chinese revolution has brought and is bringing, according to Greene. Even so, he denies that this freedom is achieved mainly by imposition. He places great stress on the spirit of enthusiasm and individual participation. although he suspects that indivualism as such has never meant quite the same to the Chinese as it means to us, attributing this to a much stronger sense of “togetherness” or "sense of belonging’’ Ln the Chinese make-up.

Thus, all important decisions. he claims, are endlessly discussed. People are reformed by public discussion and surprisingly, he believes that the development of communes the products of enthusiasm and discussion amongst the masses which took Mao by surprise and not the results of some centrally imposed dogma. One might well raise an eyebrow here, for throughout the world there is hardly anything more obstructive than the massive wall of folk-inertia amongst peasant populations—even in the Soviet Union. Yet in the communes that Greene visted, both good and bad. he reports enthusiasm and willing mass participation.

If one accepts the viewpoint offered. Chinese achievement is staggering. It is claimed that 160 new hospitals averaging 350 beds each were built between 1349 and 1957, (one hospital every 3J days). Another 160 were built by 1950 together with thousands of smaller hospitals. clinics and maternity homes. Those visited by the author both as a reporter and as a patient were up-to-date and efficient. ■Similarly, 91 million primaryschool and 13J million sec-ondary-school children were enrolled in 1930. "It is probable.” reports Greene, “that no country in the world is devoting so high a proportion of its national revenue to education as China.” Such is the enthusiasm of the students that "they were not allowing themselves long enough for sports and recreation and this, in the view cf the school authorities, will hamper all-round development and would in the long run lessen intellectual achievement as well.”

Explaining such enthusiasm, so alien to our way of life. Greene states, "for an adult to learn to read, is, as one Chinese said to me, T likq a blind man being granted sight.’ . The government .of China, by providing the organisation and leadership to make this expansion of education possible, has, in this respect alone, won the allegiance of tens of millions of I people in China.” Occasionally it is difficult to tell whether Greene is merely accepting certain figures out of politeness or whether he really believes them. Your reviewer, for example, was sceptical of the account of an urban commune started by twelve women in 1958 which, with loans not exceeding £6O, had an expected turn-over of £IJ million in 1960. Similarly in a country in which university professors and steelmill managers receive 300 yuan a year, or less, this reader simply refuses to believe that the Writers’ Association of Shanghai rents its building from the old capitalist-owner for 1600 yuan a month. One may also doubt the way in which the Kuomintang is referred to only in terms of the most damning contrast, though his description of the Chinese case against America is devastating. "We watch the creeping degradation of American life and listen to her sermons. The nation with the highest crime rate in the world talks to us about “respect for law;” the nation with one of the highest rates of drunkenness tells us to be sober; the nation with the highest divorce rate preaches to the world about “sanctity of the' home;” the nation that has the largest navy the world has ever seen and has piled up the equivalent of 32 tons of high explosives for every man, woman and child on earth, tells us not to be "warlike” ... a nation that spends more on drink than education. more on advertising than health, must indeed ask itself: What has gone wrong?" Hence, “The Wall has Two Sides,” though primarily a “portra" of China.” is also an implied criticism of the United States. Indeed, this may well provide the key to this interesting and very important study. It is in a sense, in the same tradition as Sir Thomas More's "Utopia.” True. Utopia is no longer imaginary, but unbelievably large and very real, the techniques of description, however, have much in com-1 mon. Even Utopia had its flaws and these are not com-! pletely overlooked in the case] of China, but consciously or unconsciously the achieve, ments and virtues of China are over-emphasised, largely to shock us out of our ignorance and complacency. Whatever else its effect, "The Wall has Two Sides” does leave us with a healthy respect for our profound ignorance. Thus if this book does nothing else but convince us that it is high time we stopped thinking of communism in terms of sputniks grafted on to 1920 Bolshevism. or more particularly of China as a gigantic slavestate. it will have achieved a substantial part of its purpose. Enlightening and provocative. it is a book which should be read by everyone.