China in Convulsion

...In May, 1965, when the American expeditionary force in Vietnam still consisted of only 80,000 men, I had a private conversation in Peking with a very highly placed Chinese official who told me: 'This is only the beginning...

...And in reporting these conversations, he has substantiated what has already become clear, that no threat of nuclear retaliation or any other punishment will stay the Chinese should they feel that the existence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam is threatened...

...On the contrary, he favored a small elite among the workers, and the Communist Party served to isolate the masses from politics rather than involve them in it...

...Though disillusioned by his years in the Soviet Union, he has remained remarkably devoid of that tragic bitterness which has characterized so many men of similar experience...

...After the war, Karol left Russia and has since resided in Paris as a writer, chiefly on Soviet affairs...

...And it is very likely that the new generation will be molded more by this aspect of Maoism than by Stalinist principles...

...The book's subtitle, The Other Communism, reveals Karol's major thesis...

...Of particular interest to Americans is Karol's report of the Chinese attitude toward the war in Vietnam...

...Arrogance cost us dearly in the Korean War...

...Born in Poland in 1924, he was living in what became the Soviet zone when his country was divided between Germany and Russia in 1939...

...It is no wonder, then, according to Karol, that the Chinese Communist Party, which was modeled on that of the Soviet Union and attained its greatest growth and stability during the period 1949-1957 when the Chinese were attempting to emulate the Soviet Union, should now be in trouble...

...He feels that the prevailing spirit of the Great Cultural Revolution is a militant equalitarianism which totally rejects the new class society of the Soviet Union...

...Having chosen a different road to socialism from the Russian one, the Chinese will thus arrive at a different form of socialism...

...Karol concludes that "we are witnessing, therefore, a convulsion which runs the risk of doing considerable damage and which is the product of a singular haste to do away with human inequality...

...It could cost us infinitely more in the next...

...Karol maintains that under Stalin, "it cannot be said he ever relied on either mass movements or the revolutionary spirit...

...My high official did not want this war...

...Undeniably the Maoists, like all other Communists, have been conditioned by thirty long years of Stalinism...

...However, optimism—perhaps overly idealistic—is the general tenor of Karol's work...

...He explained to me that China must prepare herself for the worst and face the heaviest sacrifices...

...Karol's unique background and deep personal experience with the vissici-tudes of revolutionary societies, especially the Soviet Union, have well prepared him for this task...

...The Party bureaucracy has come to represent one of the major contradictions in the society—an elitist group charged with the mobilization of the masses to attain egalitarian goals...

...He spent the next seven years in the Soviet Union, where he completed his secondary schooling, studied political science (Marxism-Leninism) at the University of Rostov, and served for a while in the Red Army...

...after Stalin, but more democracy...

...The Americans are going to bring in hundreds of thousands of troops, they are going to bomb Hanoi, they are going to try to invade North Vietnam, then they are going to bomb China, which is as close to Vietnam as lips to teeth...

...Reviewed by W. Allyn Rickett K. S. Karol deserves to be congratulated on what is certainly one of the most important books on China to be published in recent years...

...Everywhere on his trip Karol met the same kind of conviction...

...Like many of his countrymen he also experienced Soviet jails and camps...

...China has suffered so much from privilege that she seems to prefer to impoverish herself—momentarily, one hopes—in an all-out and Utopian bid for equality rather than allow social differences to be re-created within her society...

...It is his belief that the Chinese revolution is fundamentally different from that of the Soviet Union both in its economic base and ideology...

...Perhaps the greatest immediate danger facing the world today is that Washington in its arrogance of power will misjudge the recent events in China as a sign of weakness and underestimate the determination and capability of the Chinese...

...This is not only because of his conscientious reporting of what he saw and heard on his extended trip throughout China, covering some 15,000 miles during four months of the winter and spring of 1965, but more particularly because of his penetrating analysis of the Great Cultural Revolution...

...On the day that China catches up with her economic backwardness and is less threatened from outside, she will have to resolve the problems which face a developed society: The Chinese masses, as a result of the habits they are being made to assimilate today, will demand not more consumer goods, as happened in the U.S.S.R...

...Thus his book has a ring of sound judgment as well as wide knowledge...

...But their egalitarian economic policy gives a very special flavor to their experience, as well as to the education they provide...

...It imposed on them ways of thought, a language, methods of analysis and interpretation which they try to pass on to each new generation...

...It has become a brake, just as the Soviet Communist Party had, on the economic and social development of the country without even guaranteeing doctrinal orthodoxy or the continuity of the quest for the Communist objective...

...But in China "which favors political incentives, which calls for the voluntary participation of the workers, and which inculcates in them an egalitarian spirit, the population will sooner or later try to free itself from the rigid paternalism of the Party...

...China in Convulsion China: the other communism, by K. S. Karol, with photographs by Marc Ribaud...