THE DRAGON AND THE DOVE

...And, ever since the declaration of the Republic in 1912, he had been sinking under the weight of an appalling series of disasters which, combined with corruption, scarcity, and inflation on a scale unimaginable to anyone who did not experience these things, made Twentieth Century China less secure than Europe in the Dark Ages...

...They include actors, artists, missionaries, trade unionists, sinologists, Conservative M.P.'s, Labor M.P.'s, Quakers, and Buddhists...

...To expect the "New Democracy" to produce a similar type of civilization from roots so entirely different is to expect Senator McCarthy to take to reading the Tao-Te-King and to the cultivation of roses...

...Not that the new China is ashamed of its old civilization...

...The Dove is the new motif in porcelain and public parks...

...The only way Communism can be held in check in Asia is by better ideas, not by better bombs...

...His successor is the Communist Peace Dove...

...It is doubtful whether any other Communist government has ever achieved the psychological ascendancy over its people to be found on the mainland of China...

...It gives pleasure...

...It has fallen to my lot to talk to representatives of many species of traveler and to act as a listening post for their sinologues...

...People can travel anywhere on excellent trains where they are served with tea and excruciating loudspeaker-music...

...This vast and cooing flock hatched by Marxism—enough to cure some travelers of ornithology and pacifism forever—might well be taken as the perfect symbol of China's transformation...

...The Chinese are a transformed people," one ex-mission-nary, no lover of Communism, told me...

...Peking is kept a good deal cleaner than London or New York...

...Here in Britain, as more and more reports from the new China are published, the gulf between America and Britain on this issue gets wider and wider...

...The Peace Dove is, perhaps, an even more ambiguous symbol than the Dragon—and he is certainly less Chinese...

...Tomorrow, the note says, the Committee will be glad to send a corps of volunteers to help with the cleaning, and it is to avoid this public indignity that the host has invoked the aid of the guests...

...But the Dragon has been supplanted...

...Standardized cleanliness has taken the place of picturesque neglect...

...Some, like Pastor Wang in Peking and many Catholics in Shanghai and elsewhere, have held out...

...Certainly Tito's Yugoslavia, the only other country where the revolution was similarly broadly-based (at least to start with), commands nothing like the same fervor and support...

...The methods by which all this has been achieved are the next cause for astonishment...

...Sooner or later, whether they liked or disliked what they saw, the travelers confess to having been astonished...

...To anyone with experience behind the Iron Curtain, the vitality of this small group is as remarkable as their apparent sense of identity with the regime, for which, to put it mildly, one would not have expected them to have much ideological affinity...

...There have been grisly purges, and there are some who ascribe what has happened to terror...

...It was the Japanese conquerors who cleared cattle out of some of Peking's most beautiful temples...

...The success of this venture and the consequent upsurge of vitality and energy in the Christian community are evidently astounding...

...It has managed—by thus promoting causes which were in themselves wholly good—to draw on the enthusiastic support of the majority of honest, decent Chinese, whether workers or intellectuals...

...Now all "historic monuments" have been ruthlessly restored...

...It has concentrated on the eradication of social abuses: "corruption," "inflation," and the achievement of a new social ethic...

...Clearly such a government can be unseated from outside only by an all-out global and atomic war...

...We have begun to accept Communist China as a normal part of the world scene—and one towards which we feel a good deal less hostile than we do to certain other Communist countries whose Communism has been foisted on them by force of Russian arms...

...Methodists hold evangelical services to which casual passers-by are invited from the sidewalks...

...It has done this in such a way that the people imagine they themselves are raising the dust...

...They speak of it with evangelical fervor...

...It will never be treated with more than apathy and contempt...

...And unless we take a long clear look at the astounding results of the first six years of Communist China's existence, we will disastrously underestimate what Communism can achieve—and our own responses to Asian needs will be weak and inadequate...

...Many varieties of secular activity (unthinkable in other Communist countries) such as YMCAs, YWCAs, discussion circles, and choirs flourish...

...As part of their contribution to the atmosphere of Boy Scout fervor, the Christians have undertaken the Three Self Movement—the movement for Self Propagation, Self Administration, and Self Support...

...If one travels via Prague or Moscow the comparison is striking...

...It is in such harmless simplicities that the wisdom of Confucius survives...

...Today the average Chinese eats fish and meat regularly, has a pocket-size home, a boiler-suit on his back, and sensible shoes on his feet...

...designs are copied from mass produced pattern books...

...Its leaders are intelligent and flexible and in six years they have succeeded in unleashing and controlling an immense upsurge of vitality and power among a quarter of the world's population...

...China has achieved a social revolution which in six years has radically altered the lives of 600 million people and has irrevocably cut their links with the past...

...The very fact that the Chinese leaders sometimes quote from the Sage (Chou En-lai trots him out regularly for the benefit of foreign delegations) is an indication, perhaps, of how little they fear his competition...

...He has his shoes cleaned by a boot-black and proffers a modest tip, only to find a crowd materializing out of nowhere that starts to re-educate him and his unfortunate shoe-cleaner...

...To the average Chinese citizen the successful effort that the new government has made to ensure these rudimentary necessities seems little short of miraculous...

...Terror produces a cowed and listless population...

...The Czechs and Russians give the impression of being people to whom things happen—the Chinese of making things happen themselves...

...Nothing could better illustrate the shrewdness of these tactics than the government's relationship with the six million Chinese Christians...

...What will they be expected to accept tomorrow should the social and economic revolution go less smoothly...

...But, even so, each of these buildings had an atmosphere peculiarly its own...

...The color of the roof-tiles, the placing of entrances, and other features corresponded to an elaborate language of architectural metaphors...

...You put inside box...

...Those who believe this to be the right solution are free to work for it—but they should be under no illusion as to what they are doing...

...Corruption, lawlessness, begging, dishonesty, prostitution, spitting, bargaining, tipping, and drug-taking have to all intents and purposes disappeared...

...Cricket sing for you...

...This was the background that produced the splendors of Chinese art...

...Or the old gentleman catching a train for a Sunday outing, a bird cage in one hand and in the other an ounce of choice tea which he is taking to one of the villages where the water is soft enough for his fastidious taste...

...There is no mistaking that...

...In spite of their boilersuits, the Chinese do not impress the traveler as being either cowed or listless...

...So tangible has been the increase in material benefits and social efficiency brought about by such training that the majority of Chinese have come to accept it as an inevitable break with a "bad and decadent" past...

...It has now become generally accepted among us that unless there is some change in the American attitude toward China during this year's session of the United Nations' General Assembly, the issue may sheer up alarmingly from beneath the placid waters of the Anglo-American alliance...

...Unlike other Communist governments it has not concentrated its propaganda efforts primarily on "ideological" conversion...

...Woman has become the exact equal of man—and looks it...

...Their reports are confusing and their judgments contradictory...

...During the afternoon the local "Street Committee" passed by on a tour of inspection (no houses in the New China are locked), leaving a note that the rooms did not reach the required standard of cleanliness...

...He warded off the attacks of demons...

...But there are certain conclusions forced on me which I would like to share with friends on the other side of the Atlantic who cannot get first-hand news of China without risking the loss of their passports...

...But can this be the whole story...

...It will be interesting to see whether the new drive to liquidate capitalism and peasant small-holdings muddies the waters to any great extent and forces the government to put on the ideological screws more sharply than has been necessary up to the present...

...This is the basic and completely astounding fact which each traveler admits with varying degrees of reluctance or enthusiasm...

...He'll outlive Marx...

...Christian cooperation has been won at a price, of course: the price of support for the achievements and objects of the new regime...

...And how Old China hands would greet the first reports of the revolution with a tolerant and superior shrug and some such words as, "The mass of the people will remain as indifferent to Communism as they have to every other dynasty with which they have been inflicted...

...ly aristocratic concept of living and it depended on those two privileges of the aristocrat, learning and leisure...

...But such complete power, however well disguised or intelligently handled, is a frightening thing to contemplate...

...He is the author of "Minds in Movement," a study of relations between Asia and the West, "Tito Lifts the Curtain," and "India's Walking Saint: The Story of Vinoba Bhave...

...Life, to the classical Chinese, was a work of art based on a strict and conventional set of principles...

...The model of personal conduct was the "Princely Man" who completely submerged his individuality to a code of etiquette derived from feudalism and the Confucian Analects...

...Everywhere Christians, openly known, take leading parts in their Street Committees and local government...

...On the new six-story blocks rising rapidly in all the major cities the traditional green-tiled, curling roofs look as uncomfortable as carnival hats worn at a Rotarian Thanksgiving-There are, of course, odd survivals from the China of the past: The cricket-box seller who persuades his customers, "You catch cricket...

...But such figures are scarcely typical...

...He was merely part of the manure heap with which the roses were fertilized...

...The Dragon was a kindly fellow...

...The West must prove that it can match the dynamic generated by China's flexible application of Marxism and that it has a policy of cooperation with the underdeveloped nations which is as likely to deliver the goods as the short cuts of totalitarianism...

...The psychological gulf separating China from her Communist neighbors seems to be immense...

...The most perfect expression of this code lay in the concept of Fa-Tzu, "planned adjustment," incorrectly translated as "face...

...But since no pressure has been brought on them to embrace atheism and accept Marxist doctrines as long as they give this support, and since the social ethics of the new regime (like anti-corruption and anti-gambling) are broadly what Chinese Christians have always stood for (and despaired of ever achieving by themselves), the dangers of paying this price have not been immediately apparent...

...Already Chinese Christians and others ideologically non-Marxist appear to have completely accepted official versions of the Korean War, American "spying" and American "germ warfare," as well as re-writes of all recent history—from which it would appear that, for one thing, Lenin, and not American generosity, was responsible for founding the Union Medical College and other leading institutions...

...The ubiquitous "Street Committee" and "Mutual Criticism Group" are the weapons by which this "voluntary" transformation has been achieved...

...The government has achieved this transformation by a startlingly simple technique...

...It was a supremeHAUAM TENNYSON, great-grandson of the poet, is a British writer and lecturer whose reflections on Asia are broadcast frequently by the BBC...

...In the old days decay and dilapidation were everywhere...

...Attendance at the annual National Christian Conference has risen six-fold since 1953...

...Over and over the traveler will encounter examples of these phenomena in action...

...He knows that he has much else to be thankful for, and he knows whom he has to thank...

...To sum up, China's Communist government has a wide measure of popular support, at any rate for the moment...

...In the view of many of us on this side of the Atlantic, for America not to recognize the new China, to turn a blind eye to her achievements, is a disaster precisely because it shows how hopelessly out of touch the West is with Asian realities...

...Through this they have freed themselves from the taint of being a "foreign cult" and, cut off as they are from the sources of missionary aid which were once the mainstay of their congregations, they have put themselves on their own feet both financially and organizationally...

...To some it may seem fantastic that anyone could prefer the hygienic tedium of the new Democracy to the glories that have so manifestly departed- Yet the average coolie or peasant never smelled the roses of his classical inheritance...

...He can hardly be blamed for not worrying that the art of caligraphy or ceramics is dying out...

...Government to the Chinese is something that should be conspicuous by its absence...

...You take box inside coat...

...Or he hears his host arguing with a pedi-cab driver, telling him that unless he charges the correct fare he will be reported to his "group...

...Again, he may go out to dinner and find his host and fellow guests busily cleaning the house- The reason...

...At one stage there was talk among the more naive enthusiasts for the new China of a mysterious "marriage" between dialectical materialism and the ancient wisdom, since this alone, it was felt, could explain the success of the revolution in so changing the psychology of its people...

...The ancient guardian of every Chinese temple and the most common motif in Chinese silks and porcelain was the Dragon...

...Garish coats of red and gold paint are everywhere...

...But the China of Confucius is gone...

...Songs have been composed in its honor...

...Cricket is warm...

...Far from it— and this perhaps is where some of the confusion has arisen when it comes to interpreting what has happened...

...But the concepts guiding the new society are as alien as they could possibly be to those which determined the old...

...I remember how, three years ago, it was common to hear: "Oh, Confucius has lasted for two and a half milen-nia...