Chinese Puzzle
MANY people who want to know the truth about China find it difficult to steer a course between the official hand-outs of the New China News Agency and the questionable reports of refugees in Hongkong. Mr. Basil Davidson, who visited China last year as a member of an officially invited delegation, has attempted to fill the gap in our knowledge with a sympathetic but non-Communist account of what he saw and heard. If the picture tends to be rather idyllic, 12eginning with a host of little girls presenting bouquets of brilliant flovsrers to the travellers as their plane reached Peking and ending with the fluttering of doves over the Gate of Heavenly Peace, that is inevitable in any officially-sponsored tour.
Mr. Davidson does try, however, to be objective, and I believe his account of the positive achievements of the new Government can be accepted. Through personal interviews and official figures he describes the results of land reform, the new workers' housing estates in the cities, the public health campaigns, the growth of industrialisa- tion, the popularisation of education and the arts. He rightly stresses the greatness of the changes in China which are in scale with the size of the country, and he depicts the enthusiasm, self-confidence and sense of liberation which have come to many. He is right in saying that "no matter what may happen to the Chinese Revolution, China, literally enough, can never be the same again."
Doubts arise, however, not about the accuracy of his reporting, but as to whether any visitor, however well-intentioned, can penetrate to the strains and stresses below the surface. It is not only that the people he interviewed were naturally favourable to the new regime, but the whole aim of the system with its methods of indoctrination, of thought-changing, of criticism and self-criticism, is to achieve uniformity and stamp out heretical opinions. Mr. Davidson expresses surprise when he hears a Chinese Anglican bishop say that he did not find Marxist opinion inimical to the teaching of Christianity. It would have been surprising if the bishop had said anything else, for those who have expressed a contrary view are not in a position to meet any visitors.
Was there a reign of terror, as reports of correspondents outside China suggested ? He concludes that any violence used was the necessary but brief cruelty of a revolutionary change or the justifiable suppression of armed counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs, yet the Communists' own accounts of the mass arrests, mass trials and public executions in 1951, of the hunting down and torture of landlords, of the bitter and relentless persecution of business men in the anti- corruption campaign, are bad enough. No one suggests there is a continuous reign of terror, but that from time to time the heat is turned on different sections of the community.
The emphasis of the book is on the change from agriculture to Industry with the consequent benefits it will bring to the workers, but the whole foundation of Marxism-Leninism is ignored, along with the dominant role of the Communist Party in moulding the people to its wishes. Liu Shao-Ch'i is quoted, but only on the lofty moral aims of the Communists, not on the necessary ideological basis which Is the foundation of everything else. Whilst the author admits that Intellectual remoulding has been unpleasant for a few, he accepts it
as the inevitable process of adjustment to the new regime. Yet is it merely a sign of backward bourgeois ideology to object to having one's brains washed, or is there such a thing as intellectual integrity? Do even workers and peasants voluntarily double their production in order to become labour heroes, or spend their evenings studying Marxism, or overthrow their accustomed ways of life without strong pressure being applied, which is still pressure even if it is hidden?
Such a statement as "a movement to reform the Churches began in 1950 and received the blessing of the new Government," is a totally inadequate description of the struggle which went on in the Church and of the Government pressure exercised at every point.
Mr. Davidson sees in the great social changes which are taking place the dawn of a new and happy era for China, and many of them are very good indeed, but others se also the same shackles which bind all those who live under a Communist regime. ,
I Left my Roots in China takes us back to the old, unreformed China. Mr. Bernard Llewellyn was a member of the Friends Ambulance Unit, that gay and gallant band of men who travelled incessantly over the roads of wartime China in charcoal-burning lorries, or worked under incredible conditions in the military hospitals. His vivid sketches of life on the Burma Road, of Chinese scenes and people, are wholly delightful and the illustrations enhance the charm of the book. The bad old China is there, the ragged, ill-fed, disease. racked soldiers, the pitiful hordes of refugees fleeing from the enemy or from famine, the destitute huddled together on the city pavements, the filthy flea-infested inns, but the grace of Chinese life is also there, the itinerant story tellers, the laughing joking crowds, the philosophic contentment and enjoyment of leisure. Mr. Lewellyn tells his story with great sympathy and understanding of the Chinese people, and there are many who, with him, "love China in a way they cannot explain; who have discovered, even amid the chaos of war years, a contentment and a happiness there which they have not found anywhere else." Such a book as this feminds us that whilst there was cruelty, disease and corruption in pre-liberation China there was also charm and dignity and a vast appreciation of life.
[The writer of this review was a Methodist missionary in China from 1931 - 1950, teaching at the Chung Hua University both before and after the occupation of the region of Wuchang by the Communists.]
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