Seeing China Three Ways
Kirkpatrick, Jeane J.
Seeing China Three Ways The Long March. By Simone de Beauvoir. World. 513 pp. $7.50 Terrifiante Asie; Chine Rouge: An VII. By Pierre and Renee Gosset. Julliard, Paris. 278 pp. No Dogs in China....
...In fact, Kinmond and the Gossets are notable more for their wariness than their gullibility...
...All came to "see with their own eyes," and all have been accorded the status of "objective and reliable reporter" by one or more influential periodicals...
...He approached his trip with a skepticism matched only by his enthusiasm...
...She is moved to comment on the happy lot of Chinese convicts as compared with that of the inmates of the model prison in Chicago...
...Kinmond reports that "for most of China's 653 million inhabitants, life is a dreary affair...
...By William Kinmond...
...She knows it is because "the leaders lead the masses" where the masses "have a mind to go...
...When the Gossets saw them, the Chinese were neither grim nor happy, but had about them an air of "grave contentment...
...The Gossets and Simone de Beauvoir also had feelings about how the people felt about Mao, and feelings about Mao himself...
...None has any substantial knowledge of Chinese civilization...
...When the Gossets report that "each [industrial] worker is profoundly convinced that in the factory where he works, the goods and machines belong to him," or when Kinmond tells us the Communist leadership has "restored the self-respect of the Chinese," they have abandoned reporting in favor of writing fiction...
...This most ordinary of prisons was located "in the depths of a kind of park" where un-uniformed prisoners ate good food, read the latest newspapers "in well lit rooms," and did constructive work in a shop surrounded by a "big garden planted with sunflowers...
...They heard praise for collective farms, enthusiasm for quotas and gratitude for the wise, just leadership of Comrade Mao...
...The influx into China in 1957 must have been phenomenal, for we have the word of the Gossets and Miss de Beauvoir that, as of their visits in 1956, "cats and dogs were no longer seen in China," having been liquidated as "germ carriers...
...The children Miss de Beauvoir saw in Peking were "properly, carefully dressed...
...Kinmond, a staff reporter for the Toronto Globe and Mail, clearly has no sympathy—latent or actual—with Communism in China or elsewhere...
...The three authors brought sharp differences in perspective and commitment to their China tours...
...Read from this perspective, even Miss de Beauvoir's book is an interesting source of information about the Chinese Communist Government, and especially the operation of its Ministry of Propaganda...
...Moving from comments on what was immediately perceptible to phenomena whose reporting invited more generalization, evaluation and projection, the reporting in all three books becomes more reckless and less reliable...
...Everywhere, from everyone, they heard that "before the liberation" everything was worse than everything is now...
...The Gossets are exceedingly skeptical about the wave of "volunteer-ism" which swept China in the wake of the revolution, but they are unable to account for it except as a result of the endless "explanations" to which cadres subject the people...
...211 pp...
...From Peking Miss de Beauvoir reports "filth, offal and beggars" in 1949—when she was not there—and "since the liberation" four-story dwellings for workers, streets "antiseptically spic and span...
...The Gossets, on the other hand, saw Russians almost nowhere, because "as a matter of policy" Russians are "invisible, gray phantoms," "the least ostentatious of men, the most self-effacing...
...The political amateur in a totalitarian state is in a uniquely difficult situation...
...It is therefore with some surprise that a reader discovers that these reporters do not agree on so non-complex, non-controversial a subject as cats...
...Since her leap from desperate philosophy to desperate politics, Miss de Beauvoir has worked indefatigably to save the universe from the bourgeoisie...
...Kinmond and the Gossets saw slave laborers in Lanchow, miserable men, working under heavy guard...
...The children Kinmond saw in Peking all had noses which "seemed always to need wiping...
...Miss de Beauvoir "did not personally see any labor camps," but she saw someone who had, and was assured the prisoners were well treated...
...Each book is intrinsically interesting as a possible source of fresh information on the Chinese mainland...
...Writer by vocation, communisant by avocation, she has written a long book on the basis of a short trip—a hook less interesting as a travelogue than as a quasi-official source book on the Red regime...
...None had traveled in China previously...
...Making due allowances for the varieties of human perceptions, one might still expect a high degree of agreement among these observers about what things "looked like...
...The Gossets, peripatetic reporters for Realites, are veterans of the quick tour...
...To the Gossets the streets of Peking looked "gray and dull...
...4.95 Reviewed by Jeane Kirkpatrick William Kinmond, Pierre and Renee Gosset, and Simone de Beau-voir each spent approximately six weeks touring Red China in 1956 or 1957...
...without any disagreeable odor" and so, presumably, without chickens...
...In Peking, author Kinmond saw cats "by the thousands," "sleek, fat cats," "almost the size of dogs," cats that "made nights hideous" and "sleep impossible" with their yowling outside his hotel...
...The purpose of his report is to record what he sees and hears, and since everyone with whom he talks sounds like an animated political poster, his report almost inevitably will sound something like an official press release...
...Each has written an account of what he or she saw, heard, read, felt and ate during a package tour of the Chinese People's Republic...
...From Peking Kinmond reports, among other things, "rickety wood-wire fences, one-story dingy brick dwellings" and people who "continue to raise their chickens in their home...
...It is notoriously difficult to make judgments about the attitudes of subjects in a totalitarian state, but Kinmond, the Gossets, and Miss de Beauvoir all feel that they have understood the dominant mood of the Chinese people...
...The almost total unanimity about what these reporters heard in China contrasts sharply with the differences in what they saw...
...In every eye she found "new hope...
...Kinmond saw Russians everywhere, Russians who at least on occasion were "astonishingly rude" and overbearing...
...Nelson...
...They agree that the Chinese have friendly, "familial" sentiments toward the Communist dictator who, according to the Gossets, combines the qualities of "Gandhi and Nehru," "Lenin and Stalin," and who, according to Miss de Beauvoir, shares with all the Chinese leaders a face which is "plainly and wholly human," a "serene modesty" and an "inimitable naturalness...
...Simone de Beauvoir, of course, sees the world through rosier glasses...
...Juxtaposed, they provide a fascinating study of the vagaries of eyesight as a tool for social observation...
...Kinmond accounts for the intellectuals' capitulation to orthodoxy by their exposure to "persistent nagging and persuasion"—a description hardly adequate to cover the public trials, executions, forced labor and thought-reform through which the Communist leaders demonstrate the penalties for non-conformity...
...None of the authors save Miss de Beauvoir feels he has a very clear notion about how this fearful unanimity is achieved...
...They talked with satisfied workers, satisfied peasants, satisfied students, satisfied Christians, and satisfied capitalists...
...That this type of error is made by writers hostile to Communism should not surprise us: Propaganda for Communism inspired by the travels of honest, innocent democrats would fill a sizeable library...
...And she did visit a prison, though not a model one like that she had seen in Chicago...
...The least scratch [was] painted with mercurochrome or covered with a bandage...
...Bourgeois French journalists writing for a bourgeois French audience, they have a strong taste for freedom, no taste for Communism, and little taste for the "crude" anti-Communism of America or Chiang Kai-shek...
...This is only the beginning...
...None has any special knowledge of politics or political institutions—Communist or otherwise...
...Simone de Beauvoir saw serious but happy determination everywhere, and a "freshness of soul" which "now and then gives human life the luster of a well-washed sky...
...Such reports are not without value, but they impose a peculiarly heavy burden on the reader, who must bear in mind at every moment that he is not reading a report on "what life is like in Communist China," but on "what a non-Communist visitor sees and hears in China" or, as in the case of Miss de Beauvoir, "what a sophisticated sympathizer tells us of what she saw in China...
...Despite their diverse backgrounds, expectations and biases, the authors of these three books share several important characteristics...
...It would take an exhaustive survey in a free environment to establish the existence of many of the attitudes which, with careless abandon, all our authors attribute to the Chinese people...
...He saw a "grim soberness" on people's faces, but felt that underneath this "thin veneer" the Chinese retained their "inherent gaiety...
...She was especially impressed by the absence of "fluttering old newspapers [sic] or leaking garbage cans as in Chicago alleyways...
...Miss de Beauvoir appears to have seen few Russians, though she saw evidence of their good works on every hand...
...And so forth...
Vol. 41 • September 1958 • No. 31
