Chinese underground
To Kerpel There was nothing remarkable looking about the clothing shop. Up a couple of steps to the glass front doors and then into an unadorned room with two counters, crowded with customers, and shelves piled high with blue and green working clothes. °or guide stepped over to the plaster wall and pushed aside a paper calendar. He pressed the concealed button behind it. With a hum of machinery a six-foot-square sectionof the tiled floor behind one of the counters rolled back into itself, revealing a flight of cOncrete steps and neon lighting. Putting on 9ur jackets against the chill, we descended into the Peking nuclear shelter tunnel
sYstem.
The tunnel was 280 metres long, followed the line of the street above, and had ninety entrances similarly situated in shops and houses. The floor was bare earth but the Walls and roof were brick-lined. The lighting Was conventional and power lines for telePhones and the public address system ran along the wall. There were side passages, with solid concrete benches. Other passages contained small non-partitioned latrines With no elaborate flush system. There were ventilation grilles, supposedly fil tered against radiation and gas, but only small air pumps O n view.
The tunnels were on average just over six feet high and an armspan wide. There were Sharp corners and bulkhead sealing doors every so often 'to minimise shock waves'. After ten minutes' walk the tunnel opened Into a large assembly room with tables and chairs, and an illuminated board closely re
sembling a map of the London underground, which in fact illustrated the whole local tunnel system.
When challenged that the tunnels were not capable of sheltering an entire city population, the explanation was given. that the main purpose was as an evacuation route. In Peking the pedestrian tunnels led to the subway system, and also to larger underground roads where lorries would take the population to safety in the surrounding countryside. In some cases people could walk for three hours through a tunnel to the country (suggesting an underground length of nine miles). In other cases some tunnels were up to twenty kilometres. The larger shelters were equipped with underground hospitals, and the current level of sophistication represented stage two of shelter development. The next stage was to build underground factories. The Peking tunnel was one of three shelter systems we visited. In Shanghai the tunnel entrance was at street surface level via a conventional shelter entrance. Unlike the basic brick shelters this tunnel, built in 1972-74, was concreted, but only seven metres below the surface and calculated to survive a nuclear blast at the city centre ten kilometres away. Here we were given the only costings we ever received for the shelter programme. While labour is voluntary, the concrete requires funding, and the Shanghai budget for shelter construction was given as ten to twenty million yuan per year, £3-£6 million for one city alone. The fact is that China's basic preparation for defence, a physical and psychological preparedness, has been enormous.
Chinese tanks and their new airframe which will take British Rolls-Royce engines are all derived from Soviet designs, a legacy from the reviled Sino-Soviet aid period. Now the aim is to be self-reliant. It is difficult to gauge the depth of appreciation among Chinese soldiers of the types of weapons they face. Questions about • whether the Chinese will make efforts to mechanise their infantry-based army are met with politically correct rather than militarily correct answers ('Men are more important than equipment'), for the Chinese see the two as being indivisible. They maintain that they could contain any Soviet armoured threat but are unspecific about whether they have antitank guided weapons. They have little to say when asked how their infantry would face up to tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield. They content themselves with generalisations about having an early warning system when questioned on how much warning of an attack they would have in order to get people into shelters. The prospect of a submarine-launched attack on a coastal city which would allow little warning is met with silence and then a reiteration that 'we have a warning system'. Military training for young people is compulsory, although being selected for membership of the People's Liberation Army is a great honour. Most basic military training is obtained in the militia and at one's workplace. During a visit to a Canton hospital we saw one squad of female students performing bayonet practice, while another squad assembled and trained on light anti-aircraft guns. In Sian we saw a large group of Little Red Guards, both male and female, who were carrying realistic heavy wood model rifles and camouflage equipment.
There can be little doubt that China has a very effective defensive and resistance capability. Her next step, presumably, will be to develop a deterrent capability which would dissuade any enemy from forcing her to use her well-established survival preparations. What will concern the West is whether China will, at some future time, shift onto an offensive footing. At all levels, from the Foreign Minister 'down, we were assured that China has no designs on other territories.
How much this patient attitude has to do with the Chinese perspective, and how much to the fact that China does not yet feel ready to intervene as does the US and the USSR is difficult to judge. At face value, the Chinese reject totally the idea that superpowers must get embroiled in third world areas. But then because the Chinese do not want to be regarded as a superpower they adamantly refuse to see themselves as one.
Tony Kerpel, National Chairman of the Young Conservatives 1975-76, recently led a delegation of eleven Young Conservatives to China, where they were guests of the People's Institute for Foreign Affairs and toured the country for two weeks.
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