New Despotism
ONE of the Professors of History at Yale University has been so much impressed by the historic importance of the actions of the Chinese Communist Government that he has devoted himself to writing their history while they are still new and warm and terrify- ing. Mr. Walker's book is the most comprehensive study of the Peking Government yet published. It summarises what happened in each of the succeeding years since the Communist Government was set up in 1949, and analyses, fully but lucidly, the structure of the Chinese Communist State. It describes in detail the govern- ment's policy in the different categories—agrarian, foreign, economic, cultural. Mr. Walker has used industriously a great mass of material from Chinese newspapers and from the foreign press. He gives his references, though unobstrusively, and it will be hard to question his facts.
Chinese Communism, as presented by Mr. Walker, is more alarming than Russian because it is more totalitarian. It not only exacts obedience; it requires that an always growing part of the population should be Communist activists. They must be the authors of their servitude, and not simply the victims. The indoctrination camps and the ritual of brain-washing are China's contribution to Communism. Something of the kind has existed in Russia, but not in the same form as in China. In the Russian camps the requirement is hard labour, not doctrinal conversion. Mr. Walker's conclusions may be much the same as those of other writers, but he can express his consternation more vividly. He is convinced that Chinese Communism, born of violence, will con- tinue violent through and through, and will never get violence out of its system.
The Chinese Communist State is an omen because it is the revival, in a reformed and efficient shape, of the old authoritarian system which was the traditional form of government in much of Asia. Under the old system, political activity was, a government monopoly. The old system was destroyed in country after country by the impact of the West. But in China the Western principles of freedom, though at one time sincerely adopted by much of the intelligentsia, did not produce a workable system of government. China has turned back to authority—but authority has been made very much more oppressive by Communism and by the inventions made in the West. Through them, Asian despotism has become despotic in a way never dreamed of by Timur or 'Genghis Khan.
GUY WINT
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