No Bluebottles A wireless in your car provides, sometimes, unexpected
pleasures. " One of our group,'-' I heard Mr. Basil Davidson say, " counted_ only twenty-two house-flies in the Peking food market. There were no bluebottles at all." He was involved in a Home Service discussion about China with a Mr. Kennard. Mr. Kennard, who sounded a reasonable chap though apt to pull his punches, had spent twelve years in China, from 1939 to 1951, as against Mr. Davidson's one month in 1952. Mr. Kennard, who did not seem to have been a member of a group (surely the B.B.C. ought, in this sort of context, to tell us what their speakers were doing in the countries they talk about ?), countered with-some figures about mass-executions which he had witnessed—of human beings, not of insects—by the Chinese Communist authorities. Mr. Davidson, starry-eyed, skated away from them; Mao Tse-tung's regime—a dictatorship indeed, but a dictatorship of the vast majority over a small minority—was in his view conferring unprecedented benefits upon China. To suggest that Mr. Davidson was talking non- sense would be unfair; but this, I said to myself when he mentioned the bluebottles, was where I came in. Twenty years ago, after the Japanese had taken Manchuria, bear-led groups of well-intentioned persons used to discern, and attribute to a beneficial change of regime, just such improvements in munici- pal hygiene. It. was almost exactly comparable to the con- temporaneous discovery that Mussolini had made the Italian train services punctual. But in those days there were two differences. First, tl:e bear-led were in every respect of a lower calibre than I believe Mr. Davidson to be; second, it was still possible for independent observers to gain admittance to the territory on which they were reporting.
Previous page
