Inside Red China

...The student population has multiplied many times over, but "the head of a good Chinese citizen today functions like a sort of radio receiving set," faithfully picking up words and thoughts broadcast from Peking...

...Material balance sheet," he sums up, "remarkable—spiritual balance sheet, terrifying...

...The Communists did this, as they did everything else, by setting neighbor to spy upon neighbor...

...A World History of Our Own Times" Robert Guillain is a French journalist who worked in China in 1937 and 1938 and did not return until 1955, when he accepted the invitation Chou En-lai extended to foreign journalists at the Bandung Conference to come and see Red China for themselves...

...During six years of Communist rule, China's birth rate has risen from 35 to 37 per thousand...

...To Guillain, one of the present regime's "most exemplary good deeds" has been to change China from "a country of thieves" into "one of the most honest countries in the world...

...Its working-class population is up from 120,000 to 350,000...

...The material lot of the industrial worker has improved...

...for this decisive period Russia wants China at her side, thus to be allied with the greatest mass of revolutionary forces and popular energy to be won over by Marxism...

...and Guillain found himself wondering if a real change of heart had occurred or whether honesty had become "a kind of by-product of the police state...

...she needed all the weight of Russia behind her...

...The conversations he reports with the Chinese he met, always under the eyes of his Communist guide, give a terrifying picture of instilled hatred...

...He disagrees with those who have predicted that China would modify Communism to suit its own flexibility...

...Here are some of the facts and conclusions, as reported by Guillain, from which the Dulles Doctrine on Red China would quarantine the American public: "The subject is rarely mentioned in Peking, yet the fact which dominates all others and the figure which haunts the visitor is the Chinese population...

...Help from Russia accounts for most of this progress, and that help did not begin to arrive in large amounts until the Korean War...

...This book is the account of a supervised, 20,000-mile tour that took the author from the coastal cities through industrial Manchuria and the western plains...

...Harbin, which had three hospitals in 1949, now has nine...

...If he sees any way out for China, and the world, he offers no road map to a better future...

...Guillain pronounces the sternest kind of moral judgment on Red China's Communist rulers...

...The smiling Chinese whom Guillain used to know and love has disappeared...

...And the Russians knew that the less conspicuous they made themselves, the more their weight would count...

...Because he has presented a factual report and drawn logical conclusions, it all adds up to a devastating indictment of the State Department's refusal to permit American correspondents to do the same...

...Its 33 primary schools have increased to 134...

...at the present rate, it will reach the billion mark in 1980...

...It came not because the Soviet leaders hoped to make China another satellite but because "once Communism had seized power in Peking, it would have been the most terrible catastrophe for the Moscow International to see it overthrown by interior difficulties or by attack from the outside...

...Nor is that the ceiling...

...Guillain sees no prospect of a Chinese revolt against Russia until the year 2000: "The real problem which will occupy the attention of the world until the end of the century will be the relations between the Russian and American colossi...

...And China can nourish twice its present population of 600 million by irrigating its empty lands...

...The game will be played out during this interval...

...The material achievements of the Communists belie those who scoff at the regime's future prospects...

...The risk for Moscow would have been not to help China and thus to open the doors to a return of the West...

...its death rate has dropped from 25 to 17...

...Chinese flexibility has reacted in the opposite way: It is the pliant Chinese who has bent to Communism, and not Communism which has become softened by contact with the Chinese...

...And if his facts and conclusions come to most American readers with a deadening shock, much of the blame belongs to the State Department, which cannot yet prevent Guillain's report from reaching the American public but can still prevent our own journalists from attempting to render a comparable service...

...Can it be that the truth about Red China has now become so grim that our policy-makers do not want us to know the facts...

...The Chinese peasant lives as miserable an existence as ever, and, under the collective farm system, things will get worse before they get better...

...The very fragility of China made this alliance an urgent necessity...