THE BLACKS AND WHITES OF RED CHINA
Eddy, Sherwood
The Blacks and Whites Of Red China By SHERWOOD EDDY THE TRUTH about Red China is neither all black nor all white. Great strides have been made in rebuilding the national economy, abolishing some...
...they fled the Communists without battle in the last nine cities...
...I warned him that soldiers would not fight for officers they knew were robbing them or for a government they know countenanced such corruption...
...Premier Chou En-lai has asserted that "backward individual farming" must be changed to collective farming with the hope that one-half of all peasant households will be in agricultural producer cooperatives by the end of the first five-year plan in 1957...
...It is the movement from above downward, where the leaders initiate the great reform movements and impose harsh penalties upon all who oppose them, that is completely ruthless...
...I watched him at close range for twenty years—watched him fail at almost every point and then lose out completely, mostly through weaknesses of his own, but partly, too, because the Japanese invasion speeded his downfall...
...they constitute the foundation of the regime and they help to create favorable public opinion in the rest of the population...
...The dedicated leaders are called "cadres," who are Communist-trained leaders and organizers...
...They will lessen the pressure as soon as it becomes unbearable...
...The loyalty of these 40 millions is the basis on which wider acceptance is built...
...This program is mostly constructive, patriotic, and beneficial...
...Its aim was to achieve even greater centralization and state control, after which China would be deemed ready to move toward the objective of full socialism...
...I first went there in 1907...
...Whatever tales to the contrary he may tell Americans on Formosa, he knows he can never reconquer the mainland of China but can only persist in hit-and-run raids which have little more than brief nuisance value...
...It is the peasantry therefore that is most likely to break into the first effective revolt against the government's regimentation...
...The consitution contains a "bill of rights" greatly different from ours...
...Communist leadership gave a place to "patriotic" private business men and the private ownership of land on a basis of agrarian reform...
...On his recent journey to the Far East he conferred, as he has many times, with Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek...
...On my recent journey I could not enter China proper...
...On a number of occasions friends like myself produced proof of widespread corruption among governors, generals, and other officials...
...In working from below upwards, the first effort is to see that every member of the group is unselfishly living for and serving the country...
...According to Mao Tse-tung, the new order was to be "democracy for the people and dictatorship for the reactionaries," including the "feudal landlords" and "bureaucratic capitalists" for whom there was to be no mercy...
...But he would look at no such list, for he knew of no way of running an army or a government without carefully regulated graft...
...Those who do not want Communism for their own nation offer support and defend Mao for accomplishing the Chinese revolution...
...As in North Korea, the land was taken from the "rich" landlords and divided among the landless peasants, but the latter soon discovered that no man has title to his land as against the government...
...While the American Revolution was fought largely for political liberty, the struggle of the Chinese Communists was waged largely for economic justice...
...As Lenin adapted the Marxian theory to Russian conditions, Mao has adapted it to the utterly different conditions of China, where the revo-i lution was based not upon industrial workers, who hardly existed, but upon the Chinese peasantry who constitute the vast majority—some 85 per cent of the population...
...It is my judgment, based on long observation and the data provided me in Hongkong by almost everyone with whom I conferred, that Chiang Kai-shek has lost China irretrievably because he has lost the confidence of the Chinese people...
...On one occasion, I recall, I offered to provide Chiang with a list of all the regiments in China that were from six to sixteen months in arrears in their pay...
...When it is understood that the whole of China is now divided in groups averaging about fifteen each and that all China is being re-educated and reconditioned through these groups, the importance of these four loyal classes becomes evident...
...The government claims its goals have been exceeded in pig iron, steel, coal, and electric power production...
...After its victory in 1949 the Communist regime sought in the next three years to achieve military and political consolidation of all China, rebuild the shattered communications and transportation system, halt inflation and end the graft which had been the curse of China for a thousand years, though it reached its lowest depths under Chiang Kai-shek...
...Even the white man's religion often seems to Asians to proclaim a selfish salvation for the individual "by-and-by in the sky, utterly without social responsibility...
...They are more pliable, more adjustable, and more likely than the Russians to adapt their system to the realities of the situation...
...I saw the Chinese under the effete dynasty of the Manchus, under the New Republic of Sun Yet-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, under the old war lord Yuan Shih-kai, and now under the Red banner of Communism...
...His troops were often defeated...
...It is never hinted that some of these statements may be used against them in the future...
...Chinese intervention in the Korean hostilities greatly accelerated total centralization and total conformity...
...For the first time in China's history youth is trusted and given something significant to do...
...I had known Chiang Kai-shek I was his friend...
...regimes of both Red China and Formosa, neither of which they approve...
...The first and most important of these is the Communist Party, which will soon number ten million Chinese...
...Protestants, Catholics, Moslems, Buddhists, and the followers of other religions are under the protection of the government as long as they act in accordance with the laws...
...Steel production is still under two million tons and coal only some fifty million tons...
...China's rulers, however, are shrewd men who have their ears to the ground and the welfare of China at heart...
...I have written this article not to condone a communism I condemn and loathe...
...I feel that I know China...
...It is important to remember that the leaders of the Communist Party have been sacrificially laboring for more than twenty years for a single objective, for the achievement of which many thousands had already died...
...Communist victory in China came simultaneously with the emergence of much of Asia awakening from colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation by the white races...
...or if he will not or cannot learn, no penalty is too great if it eliminates the poison or cancer in the body politic...
...For twenty years he did little or nothing to stem the flow of graft which was corrupting every phase of Chinese life...
...When any of their statements, written or oral, are found to be unorthodox, they must be rewritten or restated, over and over again if necessary, until they are one hundred per cent acceptable...
...III As I looked over the border to the hills of Red China, I thought of the rich traditions of the Tang dynasty of more than a thousand years ago when Chinese civilization and culture were the most advanced in the world...
...The bamboo curtain is as tight a barrier as the iron curtain in Russia, and the people of China are more completely isolated than the people of Soviet Russia...
...Accompanying these affirmative results has been the imposition of a tight and total regimentation which cuts deeply and sometimes cruelly into every phase of life in this vast country...
...I have traveled there extensively, lived among her people, and studied her history for nearly half a century...
...Their songs, marches, parades, their short courses in Communist ideology, and their espousal of every government program have revealed and developed the hitherto unsuspected revolutionary dynamic in this energetic and influential group...
...Great strides have been made in rebuilding the national economy, abolishing some of the more flagrant inequalities of the past, and banishing the graft and corruption which riddled the China of Chiang Kai-shek...
...The leaders of China care supremely for public opinion in China but almost nothing for the understanding or misunderstanding of the rest of the world...
...purges, moreover, will always keep the Party small but powerful and influential...
...Red China is today seeking a revival of China's stature in the world...
...Most Chinese believe Americans actually used germ warfare in Korea...
...Americans loathe the "brain washing" and cruelty of the Chinese Communists, which seem to place them on a moral level with cannibalism...
...It is the government that fixes prices, levies the inevitably heavy taxes, and exerts relentless pressure on the peasantry...
...Here, in this fabulous crossroads of the Orient, I talked with countless refugees, government officials, traders, students, and teachers whose firsthand reports provided me with the materials on which some of these observations are based...
...It is the Party that determines the character of the whole regime...
...They know little of communist ideology, only of communist promises to achieve economic emancipation and cultural advancement...
...The Chinese Communists do not want to be subservient to Russia at any point, and Russia's Foreign Minister Molotov found it wise to say recently that not the Soviet Union alone but Russia and China together were now jointly leading the Communist world...
...When a group of fifteen first meets it is told that all are friends in this new "liberation movement...
...In Chairman Mao's words, "According to the principle of freedom of religion, the liberated areas of China allow the existence of all religions...
...The constitution of Red China guarantees that "citizens of the Chinese Peoples Republic enjoy the freedom of religion and belief...
...The Chinese Communists insist they seek no single dictator...
...Eddy is the author of 36 books on international, social, and religious questions, the most recent of which Include "A Portrait of Jesus," "God in History," and "Eighty Adventurous Years," his autobiography...
...The most spectacular innovation was the land reform movement which enabled the Communists to eliminate the formerly dominant landlord class and to organize the peasantry under Communist leadership...
...II These four strategic classes, numbering more than 40 million Chinese, represent only one in fifteen in proportion to the whole population of 600 million...
...Asian peoples vividly remember their exploitation by the white races...
...As Justice William O. Douglas observed in his North From Malaya, "To Asians, any nation that gets rid of her overloads is to be acclaimed . . . The fact that Mao Tse-tung is a Communist is less important to Asians than that he is Chinese...
...And it is well to understand that these defeats and retreats were not in any way caused by lack of American munitions and supplies...
...I knew only too well the grim and tragic background of present-day China...
...The "Big Five" who dominate China are exceedingly able men and they would seem to excel their counterparts in the Soviet Union...
...The second important class is composed of approximately ten million persons in the armed forces, the reserve, and the police...
...The army, which is hard working and severely disciplined, is the best paid and the best educated group in all China and has all the privileges of the best culture, entertainment, and recreation the country affords...
...Whatever we persist in thinking, Red China is so sure of her future that she feels she can afford to wait...
...But I saw and heard much from Hongkong, which is the only bridgehead that stands between what most of the Chinese of that city regard as the totalitarian SHERWOOD EDDY, for many years sectary of the Y.M.C.A...
...It is my considered judgment that there is no more likelihood that the government of Red China will be overthrown than there is that the government of Britain, the United States, or Canada will fall soon...
...The Chinese are not as doctrinaire or as merciless as the men in the Kremlin...
...With these preliminary aims accomplished, the new regime shrewdly organized, not a Communist China, nor a series of scattered "republics" as did the Russian Reds, but used the coalition approach to organize the new "People's Republic of China," adopting a "common program" on a "united front" basis, stressing "new democratic" rather than Communist objectives...
...This was a bolder and more colossal task than was ever undertaken by Soviet Russia...
...No penalty or punishment for the wayward is too great if it enables the deviating individual to learn the error of his way...
...For twenty bitter years he stubbornly refused to provide land for the landless, as demanded by Sun Yat-sen...
...Anyone who insists that Red China is all good or all bad is, in my judgment, the victim of his own wishful thinking or of exaggerated or hysterical reports from only one side...
...As in Russia, quality is emphasized more than quantity...
...The original notion that the new regime had plenty of time for the slow reeducation of its people was abandoned when entrance into the war in Korea emphasized the immediate need for industrialization and collection of taxes to finance the war and rearmament...
...in Asia, knew and worked with most of the leaders of China for nearly half a century...
...All are asked to write out fully and frankly their personal histories...
...They know nothing of the mental and physical torture used to wring false confessions from captured American soldiers...
...The third class consists of several million organized workers with their trade union leaders and their highly organized cooperatives...
...But he refused to embark on major reforms, and he refused to trust one of the most hopeful reform elements in all China—the rising generation of students who would soon take over major posts in the government and the army...
...Such is the dedication to the absoluteness of the "truth" of the regime's ideology...
...His troops knew that Chiang sided with the rich landlords robbing the peasants, with the rich merchants robbing poverty-stricken workers, and with the rich generals robbing their ragged troops...
...I have sought only to give a realistic report of what I learned on the last of my many journeys to the Far East...
...Confucian, classic China would be aghast at the new dynamic revolutionary drive of youth...
...The program included two processes—one that was relatively democratic, which worked from below upward and was mostly patriotic, unselfish, and beneficial, and the other that was totalitarian and worked from above downward and was completely ruthless in imprisoning or shooting all enemies or suspected enemies of the regime...
...Elections were held for "people's congresses" culminating in the National People's Congress...
...with no passionate concern for justice for the poor or the oppressed, and with nothing for the colored peoples of Asia and Africa save segregation as the lengthened shadow of slavery...
...A five-year plan was introduced in 1953...
...The fourth important class consists of more than ten million young Chinese in the highly organized and privileged youth movement...
...Americans are shocked at communism...
...The least loyal group in China is the peasantry...
...If I read her intentions accurately, she does not intend to jeopardize that future by the unnecessary use of force in her foreign policy...
...The new state claimed to be "a people's democratic dictatorship...
...It hopes in time to lead at least Asia, possibly much of the rest of the world...
...The Peoples Congress claims that "ours is a collective head of state...
...Asians are shocked at the white man's long record of imperialism, selfishness, and exploitation...
...They alone have arms...
...There are four classes absolutely loyal to the government in Red China...
...It might be helpful to have a quick look at the major outline of developments since Chiang and the remnants of his forces fled to Formosa in the face of Communist conquest...
...The greatest American Christian I met in Hongkong told me he believed that communism had been permitted by God as a judgment upon this selfish-individual-salvation type of Christianity which represented so complete a denial of all that Jesus lived and taught...
...Every privilege that can be devised is provided for this class in an effort to keep it loyal, and every incentive is invoked for increased production, especially for heavy industry in this land which must rapidly industrialize under great pressure...
...A bishop of the Anglican communion told me that the Anglo-Saxon banks had managed long ago to suck into themselves the wealth of the world, a little of which backward Asia so desperately needs right now if she is to industrialize and achieve a relatively decent standard of living...
...This is also the almost unanimous judgment of the people of Hongkong who have relatives in China...
...In practice, however, China attacks without mercy the "counter-revolutionary clique in the Roman Catholic Church" on any trumped up charges, mostly because that church was long prominent in the landlord class of China...
...It includes such economic rights as the right to work, rest, and social security...
...Opponents of the regime are soon revealed and dealt with from above...
...At first the leaders had hoped to use only moral suasion, but the swift "suppression of counterrevolutionaries" was thought to require the liquidation of an entire class considered hostile to the new order, through execution, imprisonment, labor camps, or the destruction of the social and economic positions of vast numbers of people...
...The Communists then proceeded to the vast task of indoctrinating and inoculating the entire population with their Marxian system, forming "mass organizations" among students, teachers, women, youth, labor, business men, professional workers, writers, and others...
...This Congress unanimously adopted the new "Constitution of the People's Republic of China" as "a people's democratic state led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants...
...Its "peak levels," however, remain extremely low...
...And what of the Red regime in China...
Vol. 20 • April 1956 • No. 4
