Slanted Reports

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30947, 31 December 1965, Page 4

Slanted Reports

A Curtain of Ignorance. China; How America is deceived. By Felix Greene. Jonathan Cape. 359 pp.

On a subject such as Communist China on which writers tend to take sides and to join in controversial clashes, it is extremely easy to discover any number of contradictory statements. Writer A condemns the Chinese leaders for their policies while Writer B praises them for the same policies, simply because his own sympathies and approach are different or because he hopes to appeal to a quite different audience. Felix Greene, well known as the author of “The Wall Has Two Sides” which presented the Chinese in a very favourable light, has now written an indictment of American journalists, professors and other writers. He holds that they are misleading the American people through their articles and books because since the days of Joseph McCarthy, they feel an inexorable pressure to conform to the American pattern i of thinking on this subject.

Greene stuns up his own thesis by claiming that “the American people today are less informed and more misinformed about China than the people of any other Western nation.” He has done an immense amount of reading on the subject and he certainly presents a large number of cases to show that what American writers, almost invariably without any personal experience of China since the Communist Revolution, have said has been flatly denied by French, English or other writers.

Beginning with “the birth of a legend,” he explains that Chiang Kai-shek won a reputation as an heroic leader under whom the Chinese were fighting against fantastic odds in the Sino-Japanese War but that the facts reputable American writers and soldiers in China, encountered showed this legend was false. But American politicians and pressmen not only preserved the legend but also developed a new myth concerning the Chinese Communists. Eventually, the China Lobby, that partnership between agents of the Chiang Kai-shek Government and Americans who believed that Chiang should be given full support by the American Government, went into business seriously with paid lobbyists, public relations experts, and interested businessmen. The Chiang government and its supporters paid large sums to promote a favourable image of Chiang’s regime and to disseminate their propaganda against the mainland Communists, but they were always able to recoup themselves by the simple expedient of drawing on American funds, some of which were made available in response to the propaganda. Greene goes on to illustrate the various ways in which the American reading public has been misled: first, there was the myth that Russia had taken over China which was seriously advanced by many American writers but which is now demonstrated to be patently false; next, there were “the starving Chinese” although in fact a better distribution of food had been secured than ever before, albeit rationing was firmly enforced; some writers Claimed that the Chinese had become a nation of 650 million slaves. To refute this last view, Greene calls in “Professor Keith Buchanan, of the University of Wellington, New Zealand, who was in China in 1958 when the communes were in their first stages of development.” Now, Professor Buchanan is almost as well known for his attitude to China as Greene himself and there is almost complete identity between the views of these two men. Possibly, the reader will conclude that the one adds little to what the other has already said. Mr Greene reserves his sharpest barbs for an attack on Mr Joseph Alsop, a well known columnist in many American newspapers. Mr Alsop apparently has never been inside Communist China and concentrates on presenting a truly grisly picture of the conditions there. Mr Greene rather enjoys dispos-

ing of this propagandist on the other side of the fence from himself.

Quite clearly, Mr Greene has his own particular bias and he is too concerned with painting an idealised picture of China under Mao but, at the same time, he has good reason for telling the Americans “a policy of almost total non-communication with a country comprising a quarter of the human race is a process of self-isolation that in the end can harm noone so badly as ourselves." China is too important irrespective of our hopes or fears, our prejudices or biases—to be treated as merely a subject for propagandising. We must all try to leant the truth about this great country: “A Curtain of Ignorance” gives fair warning about ways in which reports have been slanted in America.