COMMUNISM: CHINESE FLAVOR
Communism: Chinese Flavor by WILLIAM WORTHY ANOTION I felt in my bones within 24 hours of reaching Peking was confirmed for me weeks later by an English-speaking Chinese who referred to the...
...Only persons with fanatical devotion to Chiang can follow Mr...
...Once or twice in China while pursuing personal affairs and not my trade, I had occasion to see that the Chinese and Soviet bureaucracies, despite the many differences I have cited, are birds of a feather on matters of simple, spontaneous untruthfulness...
...too self-confident and practical to impose obnoxious censorship on foreign newsmen...
...Worthy has traveled extensively in Europe, Africa, and Asia for the Afro-American News and the Columbia Broadcasting System...
...The nationwide immunization program instituted by the Communists after 1949 has been a substantial down payment on their "time for a change" revolutionary promises...
...Although Draconian laws and zealous Communist police effectively eliminated begging simultaneously with an improved economy, no statutory penalty or police-state measures could have reduced the age-old contagious diseases to the vanishing point...
...One Sunday in Peking, en route to tape-record a church service, I had no difficulty buying an adapter plug for a Norwegian-made recorder...
...Conceivably, the forthcoming prospect of progressively stringent belt-tightening could lead conclusion-jumping Americans to count on the early collapse of the Chinese Communist regime...
...The statement on volume is relative, not intended to deny or minimze shortages of some items and rationing of others...
...I am pt forgetting Peking's own early fommer statement that 15 million persons, presumably in rural areas gut off by floods and other natural Disasters, face famine conditions this yea...
...Often the government doesn't inform us that a policy has changed...
...The response was equally swift and surprising: "We have no Swiss francs...
...But the abject confessions of bold critics who "went too far" this spring and early summer indicates that the non-conformists are not betting their lives on the government's permanent abstention from terror...
...The wags here have been busy coining gags about the unexpected flourishing of ideological "weeds" ever since last February when Chairman Mao Tse-tung encouraged popular criticism and conceded that "contradictions" could and did exist between the people engaged in physical labor on the one hand and pencil-pushing Communist Party and government careerists on the other...
...The Chinese were not so ungentlemanly as to throw these indefensible policies in my face, but in discussing American forces on Formosa and the offshore islands, Chou En-lai did ask me pointedly how far Long Island was from the New York coastline...
...Robertson's reasoning or grasp the supposed "facts" on which it is based...
...Like the Russians who survived Stalin's mad whims and like Negroes walking on eggs amidst the pathological subtleties of a Jim Crow nation, the Chinese since 1919 have learned to pick their way through the shifting sands of orthodoxy and hearsay...
...you may have rubles," I was told...
...I have tried, before audiences all over the country, to put in perspective the recent Peking-datelined stories on extensive internal unrest by recalling several surprising phenomena I observed in China...
...But during my six-weeks visit I saw only one person with a hand out for money—a woman with a child in Shanghai...
...Worthy's unauthorized journey to the forbidden land...
...It takes only a short time to observe that the Chinese are running their own show and that Peking has no intention of jeopardizing its stature in Asia and her own internal development by permitting the kind of inept Kremlin dictation that made inevitable the desperate explosion in Hungary...
...His assistant secretary for the Far East, Walter Robertson, has made it clear he wants to keep American newsmen out of China in order to hasten the passing of the Red regime and speed the glorious day when Chiang Kai-shek will return to the mainland...
...Secretary of State' John Foster Dulles in his San Francisco speech in June spoke optimistically of Communism's "passing phase" in China...
...Whenever Peking sees fit to speak of the Soviet Union as "the center of socialism" and to urge on Tito and the satellites the need for the Communist bloc to hang together, Pravda and Izvestia eagerly seize upon this welcome verbal support...
...In subsequent travels it was always more of the same throughout Southeast Asia...
...In addition to the Soviet yardstick of long queues, sleaziness, and inflated prices, I had in the back of my mind still another yardstick— my previously existing acquaintance with starvation-level Asian living standards...
...Two years ago in Moscow I spent the first six weeks tirelessly challenging the veracity of lower-rung, steelheaded officials who baldly told me that Radio Moscow had no facilities for newscasts to the Columbia Broadcasting System in New York...
...In equally backward China I would scarcely have been bowled over had I encountered beggars and epidemics and desperately ill persons lining the always crowded streets...
...But in Moscow just two years ago Marguerite Higgins had to become an ox in the parlor and cast aspersions on "socialist construction" and "Soviet man" before someone scurried around and located a simple, triple-pronged, screw-in light plug...
...American policy toward China is so vitriolic that they feel constrained to defend the Chinese on racial grounds...
...In a secret speech that leaked to the outside world, Mao Tse-tung told the Party faithful that liquidations and methods of terror are a thing of the past...
...He implied that, as of now, Peking is not expecting Khrushchev and Bulganin to "share their last crust of bread" by adding to the total of $2.5 billion which has been loaned to China since 1949...
...A comparable lie told me by the Bank of China was equally obvious and inept...
...In my first flush of gratification at Chinese flexibility one Indian cautioned me that everything in Mao's domain, no less than everything in Khrushchev's, was tied to ideology and that nothing would make sense if I forgot that basic fact...
...customs officials would have confiscated everything on my arrival home...
...All over China the unobtrusive, stick-to-themselves Russian diplomats and technical experts know their place and stay in it...
...Presumably they were gambling on lenient treatment, if caught, because of the year-old internal relaxation and liberalization...
...Because they're Asian," was the Fitzpatrick in The St...
...Since a cordial understanding between us had been one fruit of long days and busy nights together, I was sorry that the relationship floundered on a lie that for a Westerner was pointless but for the Communist system was characteristic, normal, and standard operating procedure...
...In Peking and Shanghai shops, by contrast, I would have readily bought a number of attractive gifts were it not that U.S...
...One disillusioned woman, an original supporter of the Communists, told me of her dismay and sorrow when her fellow Chinese, educated and illiterate alike, rallied behind the government during the Korean War...
...Displaying typical Communist versatility in converting liabilities into programmatic advantage, the Chinese government cynically and brilliantly scared the people, through the "germ warfare" fiction, into accepting and trusting the strangers armed with hypodermic syringes...
...and far too civilized and sensitive to strut and preen on the world propaganda stage with ludicrous chauvinistic mishmash...
...I was told by one person in a position to know that the average Chinese has no opinion pro or con "our Russian brothers" for the simple reason that he rarely sees or has any association with any of them...
...I was asking why the Indian Embassy staff, as well as other Asian diplomats accredited to China, are friendly to the point of fawning on the Chinese leaders and why, as non-Communists, they have little to say that is critical of Peking's political crimes...
...Still another Asian attache provided full and accurate information on the Hungarian revolution to a troubled Chinese intellectual who knocked on his door, at great risk, in the middle of the night...
...Urbane, sophisticated, and charming, Chou had waited for an hour while his anxious subordinates tracked me down at the cable office for the hastily called interview...
...The controlled press, she recalled, avidly publicized General MacArthur's invasion threats and his racist dissertations on the Chinese "hordes...
...It is noteworthy in this connection, however, that any assessment of current China must in-elude the observation that enormous gains have been made and are be-ing made in the economic life of that nation despite the great dislocations resulting from widespread socialization of industry (98.7 per cent of 1956 production came from state owned enterprises, cooperatives, or' joint state-private industry) and collectivization of agriculture (92 per cent of peasant households are on collective farms...
...Nothing in China remotely reminded me of the satellite subservience I observed in Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1955 and in Hungary en route home from Peking...
...The Peking government is of course almost wholly dependent on Soviet aid...
...Chairman Mao and his Party machine have had only eight years— three of them war years when the regime felt its very existence threatened externally—to embroider their doctrines into the ancient fabric of Chinese life and traditions...
...One great advantage I enjoyed in venturing onto the Dulles-embargoed mainland was the fact that I had spent five months in Russia in 1955 before, during, and right after the "spirit of Geneva...
...From that moment on, the evidence piled up that this system was indeed WlttlAM WORTHY, JR., one of the three American newsmen to penetrate into Communist China, is presently engaged in a legal battle with the State Department for renewal of his passport, which the Department refused to renew in reprisal for Mr...
...Since I had only 41 days to spend in China it was a time-saver to be able to spot the telltale totalitarian hallmarks as soon as I crossed the border at Hong Kong...
...Ohou's patience was an index of the importance he attached to an American newsman reporting his government's views...
...Yen, "ask if I can have it in Swiss francs...
...The modesty of the Chinese leaders, as well as their hard work, long hours, and incorruptibility—this combination of qualities has made a profound impression on fellow Asians who have seen this new government at work...
...Pitifully inadequate medical teams moved quietly over the countryside, following the armies and administrators that established effective centralized government and following the cadres of propagandists who employed visual aids...
...Unlike the different Communist currencies, British pounds, I knew, would be negotiable wherever I stopped en route home...
...For five months I saw in largely bare Russian stores literally nothing I cared to carry home to relatives and friends—especially with their out-of-line price tags...
...Mao's slogan, "let a hundred flowers bloom, let diverse schools of thought contend," was never meant to be a license to question Marxism-Leninism-Maoism...
...With respect and admiration, an Indian diplomat remarked to me that Mao, Chou, and their colleagues have no bank accounts in Peking or in Geneva...
...In 1952 my introduction to the Far East was the rude shock of stepping off a ship at Bombay and being immediately besieged by uncounted beggars, young and old, whose open sores and pitiful physical condition attested to their genuine need of alms...
...As a consequence, the acid humor of a current Polish witticism applies with somewhat less force to Peking than to the Kremlin, but of course it does apply to some degree: "Communism is a system which takes from the Stone Age its technical level, from slavery its organization, from feudalism its hierarchy, from capitalism its exploitation, and from socialism its name...
...If the bank officer had simply said, for example, that it was contrary to policy to issue me pounds or francs, I would have had nothing more to say...
...I'm only doing my duty," one of them replied ever so sweetly when I gave him perfunctory thanks...
...2) The ¦PPP$» adequately fed appear-W&tM just about everyone I saw in BgSe urban centers I visited...
...citizens of the Communist paradise rarely do...
...The frantic search all over Peking had confirmed my hunch that I was not being "tailed" continuously, if at all...
...Three days before my departure homeward, a cabled remittance of money from New York via Hong Kong left me with more Chinese currency than I was going to need...
...About the same time several Britishers in Peking told me they spotted for the first time about a dozen beggars-—possibly professionals back in business on the side street of the capital...
...If this inference from Li's budget speech is correct and if Moscow, worried by China's role in the "socialist" constellation, plans to M^fH shift for himself, it is likely the China's self-admitted economic woes will worsen under the less ambitioui Second Five-Year Plan that goes intl effect in 1958...
...I could not let them get away with this would-be deception, even though I felt sorry for the Intourist man caught squarely in the middle...
...3) The absence of ragged and homeless men, women, and children wherever I went...
...Some of the palpable differences between Moscow-style "socialism" and the more flexible Peking brand were symbolized for me when I was whisked into the State Council compound one Sunday evening with greater dispatch than cars are cleared for entry at either the White House or Kremlin...
...Three features seemingly inherent in the functioning of Communist regimes— severe rigidity, wooden mentality, and glaring privileges for the elite— are less pronounced in the new China...
...But officialdom promptly screwed the lid back on when students, intellectuals, and other dissenters declined to confine their criticism to operations of the bureaucracy, but broadened their attack to challenge the Communist system itself...
...Communism—but with an unmistakable Chinese national flavor...
...3jwlera epidemics periodically break £tit even in India's metropolitan communities, despite herioc public health measures by the Nehru government...
...Five minutes later, after a huddled conversation among the officials, I was pocketing the non-existent francs...
...Tell them I frankly don't believe them," I instructed Mr...
...Although the people's midsummer night's dream of open, unbridled dissent was brief and transient, I came away from forbidden China with the conviction that the Chinese people still have somewhat more play in their straitjackets than do their Communist comrades in the Soviet Union...
...Nevertheless, the job was done, in the face of a staggering shortage of doctors...
...The suspicion grows, however, that the support is wholly verbal and that Mao is actually undercutting the Kremlin's hegemony in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany...
...In fairness to the non-Communist Asian diplomats in Peking I should report that some of them, in private, ridicule the "thought-remodeling" programs and find them repulsive...
...The attache risked being declared persona non grata since it is taken for granted in Peking that servants must eavesdrop and report to the police on all conversations overheard and on all visitors seen entering the household...
...He Is lecturing widely throughout the country this year in addition to studying history and literature a» a Nieman Fellow at Harvard...
...But, given their conditioned conspiratorial reflexes, Communists everywhere often do things the hard way...
...In Calcutta, where I once became deathly p after chancing a glass of "pasteurised" milk, one Indian still dies every pour and a half from smallpox...
...too intelligent and familiar with other cultures to copy the insular Russians in institutionalized suspiciousness of foreigners as foreigners...
...We have no British pounds...
...A New York Times dispatch out of Warsaw reports that Chou En-lai recently advised the voluble and emotional Poles to pipe down publicly on their "national Communist" line, pay proper homage to Moscow, but quietly do what they wished...
...Without having consciously harbored preconceptions, I realized after entering China that I had expected to find the same shoddy quality and the same acute shortages of the commonest consumer items so familiar in the braggart mother country that had been "building socialism" for 40 long years...
...Louis Post-Dispatch It May Fall Down—Sometime immediate retort...
...What astonished me were: 1) The volume, variety, reasonable prices, and fairly good quality of consumer goods, coupled with a currency remarkably stable ever since the Communists whipped the runaway inflation so notorious under Chiang Kai-shek...
...It may have been an effort at blackmail when, in June, the Chinese minister of finance, Li Hsin-nien, released for the first time the not very impressive figures on dwindling Soviet loans to China...
...Yen, who, incidentally, accompanied me only when requested and by no means inhibited my freedom of movement, I asked the Bank officials across the counter if I could have roughly $40 in British pounds...
...I readily recall my first rudderless days in Moscow when, with no frame of reference or prior experience on Communist homeground, I found myself immersed in the strange Soviet social norms...
...It's inconceivable that the Bank of China has no Swiss francs on hand...
...Under those unfamiliar circumstances, despite considerable earlier travels in Europe and Asia, it took time to get the "feel" of a system so carefully shrouded in secrecy and sorcery...
...In citing the many advantages that would accompany American recognition of China the Indians say that normalization of relations would constrain the Chiang Kai-shek evangelists in the Pentagon, State Department, and Central Intelligence Agency to curtail our highly provocative air force flights along the China coast and our agent-dropping, arms-parachuting operations over the mainland...
...Now that "small strikes" are being tolerated and peasants have quit collective farms without being jailed, lone wolves have begun pressing a little more boldly for greater elbow room...
...90 per cent of Red China's land is worked collectively...
...You'll have to take that up with the Bank of China," he advised me., Along Legation Street, in our side-by-side pedicabs returning to my hotel, conversation lagged...
...He wouldn't commit himself...
...Not even in the most regimented society are the basic urges and requirements of human nature ever totally suppressed...
...Despite his stock propaganda responses, meticulously translated with Chou occasionally correcting his interpreter's English, the prime minister convinced me that he is out to "sell" a regime too basically sensible to borrow from Moscow a hopelessly rigid, buck-passing bureaucracy...
...But though an economic ward and military dependent of the Soviet Union, China has been busy exerting spiritual blackmail and subtle political pressure on the hard-pressed Russians, especially since the upheaval in Hungary when Moscow desperately needed a good word from almost anyone...
...When I finally buttonholed Khrushchev and got him to flash go-ahead signals down the chain of command, the same "no facilities" men didn't even bother to blush as they shifted gears and pledged full cooperation...
...There, at the simple and unpretentious prime minister's residence where Chou En-lai lives with his childless wife, Chou devoted half an hour to answering, in Chinese, eight pre-submitted questions and to wondering out loud if the Eisenhower Doctrine destroyed the President's reputation as a man of peace...
...Through my Peking In-tourist interpreter, Mr...
...Everyone I met who knows first hand the two major Communist powers has found China more pleasant, more gracious, and more human...
...Had it not been bank closing time on the eve of the three-day Chinese New Year holiday, I would immediately have been suspicious...
...In retrospect, at least to a foreigner, just the educational program leading up to the mass inoculations itself seems impossible of achievement, given a superstitious and illiterate country bleeding and disrupted after decades of occupation, civil war, and moral breakdown...
...Outside the bank I asked my embarrassed interpreter: "Why did they tell me such a blatant lie...
...too prudent to ignore the value of domestic safety valves and too carefully attuned to world opinion to bridle automatically at critical comments by visitors like myself...
...If these phenomena indicate anything, they bespeak a certain minimum stability and a not-to-be-dis-counted efficiency in a government that in 1949 inherited nearly complete chaos...
...Well," I told Mr...
...What this woman said fitted in with an answer to a question I put to a perceptive Westerner stationed in Peking...
...Communism: Chinese Flavor by WILLIAM WORTHY ANOTION I felt in my bones within 24 hours of reaching Peking was confirmed for me weeks later by an English-speaking Chinese who referred to the extensive internal hamboo-curtain grapevine...
...We just sense when it's safe to do something," one Chinese told me...
...We understand," he remarked, "that we're freer than the Russians...
Vol. 21 • September 1957 • No. 9
