Communist "Democracy" in China
Communist "Democracy" in China The Completely Totalitarian Dictatorship in China Is in Yenan, Not Chungking By Lin Yulang THE Chinese Communist regime heft been able to mobilise manpower and...
...The official rate is 20 Chinese dollars to one dollar of American money...
...Five of us live in one room which is a sort of warehouse filled with trunks and boxes with pots and pans scattered all over the place...
...Consequently, the people are terrorized...
...by a separate army...
...ii history, the fashion is to talk of economic causes of sll human events...
...Indifferent and unsympathetic to the Kuomintang as many Chinese are...
...It would make for clarity if people would speak of these models, or speak of "Communism" snd "democracy*' aa contra-distinguishing terms...
...He is peenlisrly well equipped to judge of events and trenda in China, for he ia both Oriental and Occidental...
...it terrorize* the population that dares, to dissent or refuses to co-operate...
...It is true that many Chinese youths are so-called leftists, and they are strong even in Chungking...
...On the solution of this problem, Dr...
...in psychology, they believe that Sigmund Freud represents the most advanced interpretation...
...jast published by The John Day Company (I2.7S...
...The Kuomintang, ss the ruling party, haa formally and solemnly made public its pledge to the nation that convocation of the National As sembly will mean the termination of party tutelage, and the restoration of sovereignty to the nation...
...or General Chu Teh were a West Point graduate, either of them could bsv* fallen so hard for Marxism as the newest gospel of Western, "science...
...Fifth, it owed allegiance to the Comintern to its last day...
...Those who want to knew more of what i» happening in China are urged to read the entire book...
...That is, it ia no more genuinely communist than present-day Soviet Russia is communist...
...It is then pp to the Communists to choose between secession and unity, and on that choice depends China's progress, rapid or slow, toward national unity...
...The government haa wisely snd definitely decided that the Communist issue is a political one and will be settled by political means...
...The Chines* instinct for compromise is strong...
...The American republic bad to face the issue of secession and unity in I860...
...This is due to almost two decades of influence of Russian thought...
...The party rules over everything, and party agents penetrate snd control every military and civil organisation...
...Fourth, it ia a totalitarian dictatorship, and its methods and "techniques are definitely copied from the Russian model...
...Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, as Laader of the Kuomintang and President of the Republic, has unequivocslly declsred to the world that China will be a democracy in the full sense of the term...
...He belongs neither to the Koumintang nor to the Communist Psrty...
...They have learned about the Chinese Communist regime, not by reading Red Star Over Ckm*, but through a hundred lives snd a thousand deaths...
...I doubt that if Mas Tse-tunjc were a Harvard Ph.D...
...The first move has to be made by the government, and the choice offered to the Communists...
...Second, it is Marxist in ideology...
...it carries out "purges," "liquidations," in a drastic and unscrupulous manner...
...only intellectual life ia reduced to a minimum, and many of us suffer from undernourishment and overwork...
...On this fundamental aim there is no ground for difference...
...it is inimical to religion and family and all bourgeois institutions...
...the difference between the Kuomintang snd the Chinese Communist party lies in the method of carrying out the social revolution, whether by gradual reforms or by methods of violence and a proletarian dictatorship...
...In Chungking, people of all classes can, criticize the government freely in public places...
...Quoted by Edgar Snow, Battle for Asia, p. 224, italics mine...
...I should like to hear the foreign correspondents returning from Yenan report that they have been able to find one farmer who did not "praise" the regime as a regime of perfection...
...Anything that is edible has to be covered...
...It has the-following characteristics: Firtt, it is not row «mi u nu* in the Leninist sense of the word...
...the People's Political Council expressed it as a hope that "the Chinese Communist party and the Eighteenth Army Corps, realizing the enormous sacrifices of our srmy snd people in the past six years and the difficult tasks facing us in national reconstruction hereafter, will live up to their pledge, observe strict discipline, and not indulge again in actions hindering national unity and affecting the war...
...They have again changed their strategy now, breaking the United Front and actively attacking Chungking, and they will change their tactics again after they have decided to join the fold...
...After the enforcement of Constitutional Government, our Party should hand over the government to the people...
...The government will after the war, 1 am quite certain, declare the ''promised constitution and then demand the abolition of the secessionist army...
...Perhsps they may be able even to make and enforce such reversals, as totalitarian leaders are able to do, while keeping their Marxian philosophy underground, as a gesture of condescension toward the backward Anglo-Saxon democrats who do not know thst "scientific Marxism Leninism" is the last woni of Western social philosophy and Lunscharaky the last word in literary criticism...
...Lin Yutsng hits hsrd st totalitarianism, he hit* at sappreaaion of free speech in Chungking aa well aa in Yenan...
...These people sre progressive und "revolutionary" a all youths sre, snd incidentally they all acept Marxiai materialism and economic determinism as a philosophy even if they do not go all out for a communist ruk over China...
...a pound of peanuts $260...
...In science they still believe in nineteenth-century mechanistk physics...
...The Chinese Communists have mada about as many sudden chameleon-like changes in the peat seven years aa the American Communists, just ss embarassing to themselves aa to American Communiats, including the Chinese Communist defense of Stalin's recognition of Japan's "Manchukuo" frontiers...
...There will be struggles ahead as in the history of all republics...
...they care even less for a Red regime over China...
...Pricea have gone up to astronomical figures: an egg costs $20 and |2...
...and "My People, Between Tears and Laughter...
...It calls any critics "Trotskyites" and sends them to colonies uninhabited, primitive regions, the Chinese equivalent of Russian Siberia...
...Thia concern, which should be renamed the Richard J. Walah Co., ia one of the few American publishing firma which haa reel integrity...
...Political democracy is a matter of slow growth, and Americans should not expect too much from the declaration of a paper constitution, as if democracy Could be conferred upon a people overnight...
...The Kuomintang t'.E.C...
...The final test of a regime is whether the people dare to talk against the regime, and that is a pretty good test of what we mean by "democracy...
...Finally, 1 Irl characterised by the greatest regimentation of tb» people's Uvea and ideas and suppression of individual liberty that they have known in the four thousand years ef Chins's history...
...They feel that they cannot plan, the future is so uncertain...
...LIN YUTANG is anther ef "The importance ef Living...
...He has returned from an extensive trip in China to write a new book, "The Vigil of a Nation...
...Plenum that, when constitutional rule is inaugurated in thia country with the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, the Kuomintang will retire to a position of equality with any other party in China...
...We must realise how deeply Confucian influences hsve been imbedded in our art, literature,, socio) sciences and moral* We mutt wake great efforts to uproot Confucian ideas out of tveru nook and corner Of our life and thoughts...
...China is now standing at the crossroads, fully determined to imitate the West, but hesitating as a nation to choose between the Russian and the Anglo-Saxon model...
...Sharply critical of abuses ef power by the Kuoaflntang, he rejects the easy demsgoguery of the Communists and their supporters who oeTer totalitarianism under the guise ef democracy, civil war under the'goise ef national unity...
...It ii singular to note that not one English- or American-educated Chinese writer can be counted among tht Communists, or even among the leftists in Chins...
...The Chinese Communist perty and Communist literature are for a complete uprooting of the social structure of China's past, and of all tradition...
...If the answer Is secession, the government will then hsve to n%ke the choice between having a nation, one and indivisible, or tolerating in a modern state a separate administration backed nr...
...Sun Fo says: There can be only two solutions to the Communist problem in China...
...Instead of being supported by their families they are on their own...
...It is something of a relief to be back in the academic grind to whieh I have been accustomed for almost twenty years, instead of galivanting around in American cities...
...It talks and thinks in communist symbols snd Msrxist cliches...
...No matter what the Chinese Communists have done, all will be forgiven when they are willing to unite with the rest of the nation...
...Of course life has become' much more difficult here...
...This article conaiata of excerpta from hia book, copyright by the John Day to...
...and finally replaces the landlord and employer with the state as the master...
...Let me conclude by quoting his own worda on this point...
...While they thui fall generally twenty years behind Western thought, they are about ten years behind Soviet Russia in their reorientation toward nationalism and capitalist-democratic institutions, Confucian humanism is mentioned only to be poohpoohed aa feudalism in ideas...
...Lastly, it must be noted that, in the eyes of the Chinese people as a whole, the character of the Red regime in China is far different from what it appears to Americans...
...The trend of the majority of writers has certainly been toward the left in the last twenty years...
...But for the average Chinese people, their conception of the Red regime is not based, on books by Americas' travelers who depend upon Communist youth as interpreters but on personal stories from their friends ans relatives who have lived, under it in the last eighties years...
...It has the same check and countercheck spy system, it hss the same "purges" snd "liquidations" earried out by the same refined and to ua tortuous technique...
...In Chins this opposition to bourgeois institutions takes the form of a sharp anti-Confucianism...
...Communist "Democracy" in China The Completely Totalitarian Dictatorship in China Is in Yenan, Not Chungking By Lin Yulang THE Chinese Communist regime heft been able to mobilise manpower and resources more thoroughly than the Chungking government, because its eontroi of the people's lives is more rigid...
...There is a wealth of fleas which stick to the body for warmth...
...After the enforcement of Constitutional Government, our Party should be on equal legal footing with other ordinary parties snd the common citizen*, snd should enjoy equsl privileges and rights, fulfill equal obligations, and receive equal treatment from the state under the principles of freedom of assembly, orgsnizatlon, speech and publication in accordance with law...
...Life in china is maro PrOFESSOR ?. L. CHIN writes to an American friend from Humming, China: "1 have been back here for two months...
...It holds the same "small group" conferences st night, even obtains "confessions" snd self-condemnations (as in the case of Weng Shin-wei*) which are alarmingly similar to confessions of the Soviet trials...
...it believes in the necessity of class struggle and social revolution...
...It has no freedom of speech, no freedom of belief...
...My Country sad My People...
...Still here are a few beautiful and comparatively well-dressed young ladies, The younger generation is prematurely learned in the way* of the world...
...I believe this is a sound and clearsighted policy, and no,other policy is possible for settling the dispute short , of civil war...
...Those who are possessed by a single purpose are lucky...
...87-89...
...Still we manage to keep alive...
...The ChMse Communists, in establishing their own separate regime, did so out of a sincere conviction, and their aim is to improve the lot of the primary producer...
...Outside of a few hotheads in the Kuomintang or the Army, opposition to s militsry solution of the problem is well-nigh universal...
...in literature, they think Upton Sinclair the most important contemporary American author...
...The degeneration of the peasantry under Communist rule in occupied areas is, from all reports, a clear and certain fact...
...If they lack perapeetivi in social philosophy snd maturity in general outlook they cannot be blamed for it, for in China, the intra duction of anything new is apt to be thought of st tht last word in Western science, which is what they believi of Marxian materialistic dialectic today...
...That is to say, its whole intellectual outlook is based on materialistic dialectic...
...They have heard of not, one, but several, social philosophies...
...their academic background is better rounded out, and their critical sense is better developed...
...But many of the so-called leftists are so partly because it is the fashion and partly because if they are to avoid concerted attacks by the leftists they have to join them...
...communist writers indulge in foreign-looking terms...
...They have heard of the Red regime and reif» of terror in Kiangsi, Anhwei, Fukien, Hunan, end m hair-raising massacres of Liuyeng,*LiHng, and Cheng-sha before the war ind of the present regime in tka occupied territories...
...These books wen this Chinese scholar, who knows the West as well aa he knows the East, wide popularity and authority...
...They are somewhat anemic, for the disease they cause lasts only about iw> weeks of high fever/ "Rats are also plentiful...
...Frankly, if there were two major parties in the United States, and the second party were not Republican or Democrat, with more or less the aame faiths and ideals, but a powerful American Communist party, and if the state of the Union were still in flux and uncertainty, Americans would be howling less impatiently for China to grant constitutional liberties to the Communist party backed by a Communist army...
...in plenary session has repeatedly resolved, in 1942 and again in 1943, to bring about a satisfactory termination of the deadlock by political and peaceful means...
...In any modern democracy, such political differences should be settled by democratic means...
...it enforces complete party discipline, the party dominates everything, and party members have exalted privileges...
...He is truly international in spirit, a civilised citizen of the world...
...He unmistsksbly ststed in his opening speech before the Eleventh C.E.C...
...Therefore, third, it is anti nationalist in idem...
...The Chinese Communist party is a party with about the same aims ss those of a labor party in a western democracy, plus the ideology, the methods, the organisation, and the paraphernalia of a totalitarian dictatorship...
...The.writers over thirty today in CMni read nothing but Communist literature in their schoe days in the nineteen-twenties...
...But as late aa 1943, Chen Pal-ta, in his Critique of Chitp Kai-fhtk's Book: "China's Destiny," still proudly flaunted hi* banner: "We Marxists usually despise those who try to conceal their political opinions...
...army and in civil administrations...
...The truly totalitarian regime and really thorough one-party dictatorship in China is in Yenan, sad not in Chungking...
...More importan than that, they are for the left, not because they >i really secret Communist party members, but heraus of their dissatisfaction with the failures of the ? nomin tang rule...
...Women are generally haggard and have to work too hard, worry too much...
...Lin Yutang is unafraid of the truth...
...a sack of rice $10,000...
...Certainly by "democracy" we mean something different from this...
...I wish the Communists would stick to their label, of which they should not be ashamed...
...Even clothing may be gnawed...
...Their knowledge of the West is necessarily limited by the translations available to them...
...But however they may change in strategy, they will find it hard to reverse their Marxist ideology or take the sickle from their flag and the portraits of Stalin and Lenin from their halls of worship.' Ideas Indoctrinated into the minds of their members for two decade* cannot be condemned all of a sudden by their Iesdera without some sense of ridicule...
...6/d., pp...
...President Chiang Kai-shek's message before the Eleventh Plenary Session, September IS, 1943, declared that there were "no other demands on the Chinese Communists, except the hope that they will forsake their military separatist occupation and cease their past activities in attacking the National Army and sabotaging the war...
...In the United States, where democracy is well rooted, one can hardly appreciate the Communist menace in China, which as a nation is in the process of trsnsformation...
...Sun Yat-sen sums up the Communist position well when she ssys, "Confucisn teachings are feudalists- and autocratic from beginning to end...
...a rickshaw ride from the center of the city $120...
...Yet there is a graver question...
...it rules by regimentation snd by terror, by secret sgents and local commisssrs in the...
...People educated in the United States or England, especially England, easily fall in with the conservstive-evolutionary point of view because they have greater respect for tradition and cultural values...
...the Chinese nation has to fsce the ssm* problem now...
...But in Communist sreas, the peasants si) "praise" the regime and have nothing to say against it...
...ita editor* do not think first ef popularity and profit, but of truth and aerviee...
...Their impression is, on the who*, that of something incomprehensibly foreign to them,» regime characterized' by bloody massacres, wholesale executions, commissars ruling over magistrates aw spies penetrating into the households of the country-aide, breaking up of the family, wives turning'sgaind their husbands, sons against fathers, brothers agsinrt brothers, and a fifteen-year-old boy reporting on tk* hiding-place of hia seventy-year-old grandmother eat vlres led out and butchered in the streets...
...China needs underatanding...
...it goes through the farce of packed popular elections...
Vol. 28 • January 1945 • No. 4
