Two Chinas
IN Two CHINAS. MEMOIRS OF A DIPLOMAT. By K. M. Panikkar. (Allen and Unwin, 12s. 6d.) THESE two books are by writers as different from each other in background, training, experience and personality as any two people could be. Sirdar Panikkar is an Indian, a scholar of repu- tation in the fields of history and philology, a practised politician and former Prime Minister of Bikaner State, who was sent to China by Pandit Nehru, first as Ambassador to the Nationalist Government of Chiang and later to the People's Republic of Mao. In spite of his wide knowledge of the West (and perhaps partly because of it), he was, in China, an Asian looking at Asians. Claude Roy is a Frenchman, a well-known writer, poet and critic, observing with a quick eye for detail and reporting with elegance and wit. An enduring interest in politics has bowled him along from early royalist sympathies and association with the slightly farcical Camelots du Roi to his present position well out on the Left.
Neither writer is dull or disciplined enough to have written an objective book, and the lively personalities of the two authors exuberantly invade their reporting, with clear gain to their readers. It is in any event a mistake to think that 'the truth about China' can be distilled from a single account, but Panikkar and Roy between them lay bare a good deal of the disconcertingly incon- sistent traits that make up contemporary China.
It must be said that the poet's book is a lot more poetic than the diplomat's is diplomatic. Panikkar, in fact, permits himself a number of indiscretions, though in view of his profession we must assume that most of them are calculated. His contrasting pictures of Nanking and Peking are very well done, as is also the account of his 'tour in the interior,' which included both the caves of Yenan and Tunhuang with their respective collections of Communist and Buddhist relics. Of great interest to the his- torian is the chapter on Korea, and especially the story of his midnight summons to the Foreign Ministry on October 2, 1950. to receive Chou En-lai's warning that China would intervene in North Korea if the 38th Parallel were crossed. Later on Panikkar was also closely concerned with the efforts to break the dead- lock in the Panmunjom armistice talks on the prisoners-of-war issue. The importance of India's work as mediator between .East and West, is clearly brought out, and in this respect the book might well have been given the title, 'Success of a Mission.'
Sirdar Panikkar sums up the conclusions to which his experience in China under two regimes brought him as follows ; He puts first New China's 'undoubted aspect as the culminating event of Asian resurgence,' a basic fact which he thinks Europeans have tended to overlook because of the 'controversy aroused by the communist character of the revolution'; second, the new govern- ment in China appears to him as 'the fulfilment of a hundred years of evolution—the movement towards a strong central government which the great mandarins of the later Manchu period had themselves initiated.' Peking's successful centralisation 'has converted what was an inchoate mass into a united nation Capable of organising and bringing into use the immense resotIrces of China. By this process China has become a Great Power'; and third, he was deeply impressed by 'China's desire to maintain the Continuity of her life and culture, while destroying ruthlessly what the leaders of new thought describe as febdal and reactionary excrescence. The Chinese have shown no desire to be anything other than Chinese.'
Is China, then, a model for India? Only in part, for full of admiration for the achievements of New China as he is, Panikkar is yet forced to add that 'the means employed to achieve these very desirable ends are in many cases of a kind which revolts the free mind. Compared to the State, the individual has lost all value, and this is the strange thing in China which adds a tinge of sorrow even when one appreciates and admires what the revolution has done for China and Asia generally.'
Qualifications of this sort are notably absent from Roy's vigorous, rollicking, highly coloured, readable and informative description of the Chinese scene. Allowance made for this, he is an admirable guide, in love with all he sees, and eagerly and successfully communicating his affection, in a very personal way, to his reader.
The material for Into China, 'a long book of over 400 pages, comes from an amazing variety of sources :.pages from his travel diary, conversations and interviews, excursions into ancient and modern history, opera and theatre parties, statistical reports, and simple wanderings about with eyes and ears alert to register new sights and sounds; and all this has been thrown together to make a very meaty, sometimes infuriatingly one-sided, but always readable book. Almost everything is covered, from land reform, national minorities and the status of women, to the Long March, Maoism, the Chinese language and modern poetry and painting (thoughoddly enough hardly any mention is made of industry or industrialisation). Roy somewhere quotes Victor Hugo's remark: 'I mingle small . things with great, at random, as they occur, and the result is a picture.' Apart from the fact that Roy's selection of facts is hardly 'random,' this is an apt description of the book. 'The result is a picture,' lively, and in many ways a good likeness, but with the warts not painted in.
O. B. VAN DER SPRENKEL
Previous page
