Star in the East
The Other Side of the River. By Edgar Snow. (Gollancz, £3 3s.) IF you are not a Communist, there are two ways of looking at things when on a visit to a Com- munist country. You can accept gratefully and passively all that you are told. You record the endless and dishonest statistics that pour out like a river of sickly treacle. You murmur the appropriate sycophantic equivalents: 'How nice,' when the streets are clean; or 'How fascinating,' when a machine tool actually works in some factory. Alternatively, you can make an attempt to find out what is happening in the country beyond the façade of propaganda.
This latter course is not the easy one. It requires determination. The traveller must have the courage and sharpness of mind to pick arguments at every turn, thereby forcing the Communist regime's spokesmen constantly to justify themselves. And the traveller is usually rewarded richly, by learning a great deal that is not in the conventional sales talk handbook.
Mr. Edgar Snow had a unique opportunity when he revisited China for four months in 1960. He was given most unusual facilities to
go to different parts of the country. He saw almost anyone in the hierarchy that he asked to see—from Mao Tse-tung downwards. He had lengthly conversations with Chou En-lai. Alas: he took the easy and passive course of saying 'How nice,' and 'How fascinating.' The result is nearly 800 pages of soapy, tasteless travelogue. Mr. Snow starts by recording his arrival in Peking, the city that he knew years ago when
he wrote his vital, interesting earlier book Red Star Over China. Of course, he was fascinated by its cleanliness. He was touched by the recep-
tion committee at the airport which included such a well-known servant of the regime as Rewi Alley (What a bore that man is, as he hangs
around the Peking Hotel selling you the virtues of the Revolution as if he were peddling matches!) and Dr. Chi Ch'ao-ting, who was once adviser to H. H. Kung and who is now a notorious lackey of Communism.
Mr. Snow then goes on to extol the virtues of the regime, with scarcely a critical or penetrat- ing political observation about a highly political situation. The extraordinary blunders of the 'Great Leap Forward' and the difficulties of the Communes policy appear to pass by Mr. Snow. The hard, hard struggle between population and production is not faced in the practical way that even does justice to the regime. The disillusion-, ment caused by the denunciations of 'Rightists,' following the so-called 'Hundred Flowers Period,' has escaped Mr. Snow, for all his knowledge of China and the Chinese language.
It might be argued that people would not talk to him freely. All I can say is that on the many visits to China that 1 have made, since the revolution which changed the government of a fifth of mankind, I have managed to establish much closer human contacts with the intelli- gentsia than ever Mr. Snow did.
What, then, is the explanation for Mr. Snow's failure? The truth is that Mr. Snow is still in love with 'China.' He cannot bring himself to question the policies of men who were his heroes nearly thirty years ago. He prefers to go along quietly, doing nothing to embarrass these same men who today compose one of the most cruel and ruthless governments in the world and whose whole philosophy is dedicated to the Com- munist drive for world domination.
These thoughts may disturb the synthetic liberal twilight in which Mr. Snow surrounds himself. If they do, he should ponder. There were other writers, in another generation, who used to be gulled by Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. Of course, they did not see Mussolini's Fascist thugs at work. Naturally, they were not invited to tea at Hitler's concen- tration camps. They praised the trains that ran on time and the absence of the unemployed. The streets were so very clean. Above all, they chose to evade the political implications of what was going on and to ask no awkward questions. Indeed, the only significance of Mr. Snow's book is that others have written the same sort of book before. And they have been more readable and less tendentious and pompous in the process.
DAVID REDMONC.
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