Soft on China*
BY GEORGE STAFFORD GALE 0 NE of the major curiosities of Coronation year, and there were many, was the warmth of the reception afforded to the navigating antics of the Russian cruiser Sverdlovsk. Had the People's Republic of China sent a tank-landing junk it might well have outbid in popularity the Queen of Tonga. Now it seems to me to be a toss-up which of the three states, Fascist Germany, Communist Russia and Communist China, is the worst, and I mean the worst (the most evil, or the most inhumane, according to whether you follow Christ or Cambridge). It also seems to me that the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany are better states than these. Yet nowadays in England there is, I fancy, just about as much active, vocal dislike of America and Americans as there is of Russia and Russians: and the Federal Republic of Germany and its inhabitants probably attract a good deal more active and vocal dislike than do the people and their republic of China. Of course it is very true that the noisy people in England, the do-gooders and the good-haters, the lunatic Left, the anti-Fascists who cannot or will not see that Communism to all intents and purposes is Fascist, are the people who most dislike America and least dislike Russia.•I should imagine that there are as many people in England who hate America as there are who hate Russia. and this is odd. It is odd, but it does not matter much, because there are not many in either camp. The English are em- barrassed at strong emotions; but they wallow in milder, ambiguous, muddy ones. They rather feel inclined to look for the best in Russia and the worst in America: the Sverd- lovsk and Senator McCarthy. And when they think about China, tears almost start to their eyes. Not quite, of course, because the English don't cry, and also because they don't think about China (any more than about anything else) except i
* This is the last of a series of four articles dealing with China today.
when they have to. Yet here we have it: the English attitude towards China, so far as it exists, is preponderantly sym- pathetic. And this is very odd (by which I mean that I think it should not be half so sympathetic).
Very few Englishmen objected when Britain recognised the Peking regime. The United Kingdom has lost assets in China a good deal greater than those it lost in Persia, and with hardly a whimper. The British Embassy in Peking once had attached to it barracks which housed British troops and which helped to keep the Chinese Empire as a second-class state. Now the British Embassy is a second-class mission, and barely a squeak. No one in England seems greatly concerned about the British businessmen held hostage in Shanghai. No one here would be greatly worried if Peking conquered Formosa, provided it did not mean another world war. Even if Hong Kong went, I fancy this country would experience nothing much stronger than momentary pique. Chiang Kai-shek is despised and disliked; Mao Tse-tung is admired; Chou En-lai may even have earned a sneaking regard. I don't know whether the present Chinese Government has by now more heads to its credit than Hitler's or Stalin's, but I am pretty sure that another million Chinese could be murdered by their people's courts and scarcely an Englishman would turn a hair. 'China is not so bad as Russia,' they say. They say this, those who have been to both China and Russia, and they also say it (the omnipotent they whom we take our opinions from) who have never strayed beyond tethering distance from the village pump.
Why are we so soft about the Communist dictatorship of China? To begin with, we are pretty soft about Communism. Except for a few brave trade union leaders, who get a lot of dirt thrown at them for their trouble (by people who should know better), hardly anyone nowadays outside the leader- writing recesses of some newspapers is nasty about Com- munism. It is regarded as Socialism gone rather wrong instead of as Socialism gone right, and gone bad, too. That is to say, it is regarded as an accidental error made by people with the best of intentions instead of an incidental crime made by people with the worst of intentions. Naturally we take our experience of Communism from the English Communists, and neglect to observe that there is scarcely one English Communist of note who would survive a fortnight if ever a Communist putsch took place here. Also, we observe the preposterous antics of these English political Communists : rightly, we fail to take these people seriously, and wrongly, we fail to take Communism seriously. We see the industrial Communists acting more or less like good trade unionists ought or at any rate may : rightly, we tolerate their methods, and wrongly, we attribute their successes to their Communism instead of to their American-style power-politics.
We are soft about Communism. We are also fairly soft about dictatorship these days. We take Spain and Portugal and the South American dictatorships very much as a matter of course. Spain, twenty years ago, drew Oxford men into the fight. Now I am pretty sure that Oxford complains as much as anywhere else in this liberty-loving island that France has no stable government. The Labour Party is constantly attacked (and infinitely distresses itself) because its platform is not monolithic. True, we have not yet acquired the taste for the garnishings of dictatorship, but we are eating the substantial meal without suffering any great pangs of indigestion.
And we are especially soft about China. That is to say, when we consider 'Chinese Communism' we think it is Chinese first and Communist afterwards. There is a good deal of evidence to show that the Chinese interpretation of Com- munism differs from the orthodox Marxist-Leninist-(possibly) Stalinist line. I am not disputing this at all. I am suggesting merely that when we think of a Chinese, we think of a man with yellow skin and slanting eyes who happens to be a Communist instead of a Communist who happens to have yellow skin and slanting eyes. There is nothing much the matter with this, except when it determines political policies and diplomatic attitudes. Doubtless the great majority of the 600,000,000 Chinese are Chinese first and Communists a good deal afterwards (and this is true of any state : the tribal characteristic is always far stronger than the ideological). But the point is that the leaders of the state are Communists first : politically speaking, there is far more in common, as far as practical diplomacy goes, between Mao and whoever is boss in Russia than between Mao and Chiang. This is so obvious that it might not have been worth stating were it not for the tremendous pervasion of sympathies towards China. We admire (with reason enough) the achievements of the Com- munist regime, but these achievements themselves are grounds for toughening rather than softening our feelings. It is entirely appropriate that most British commentators on China have a tone in common of which one adjective would be 'academic' and the other 'apologetic.'
Of all the various Communist campaigns that have been inflicted on the West, that of peaceful co-existence has been by far the most successful. There is not space here to elaborate the arguments against this concept. I can only assert that its purpose is the weakening of tension, and that the weakening of tension is the worst possible thing that could happen to the West. Only a handful of men in Moscow and Peking twist the screw that weakens or strengthens that ten- sion as far as the Communist countries are concerned. In the West it is a matter of public opinion and to a large extent outside the control of politicians (who can have little to expect beyond electoral defeat 'from trying to turn the screw).
In the past few months we have seen a most marvellous reduction of international tension. Let me not be churlish. The Russians and the Chinese have been most generous. There was that party in the villa outside Moscow: that must have cost a few roubles. Then there was Mr. Malik's train fare to Blackpool to switch on the lights (or did Blackpool's highly efficient publicity director pay expenses on this trip?). The Chinese just now have a batch or two of MPs treading the well-beaten tracks from Peking to Mukden. That costs yuan. And they have come to some sort of terms about a few Americans held in Chinn Malik gets his name writ large in Blackpool rock. Any date he likes to name Chou could have a reception at Lancaster House, dinner with the Queen, and a sight-seeing trip around the Cambridge colleges.
It's marvellous, it really is. We're all peacefully co-existing like mad, because we all have bigger and better hydrogen bombs. Because we have these beautiful big bombs, and because they stand us a drink, somehow or other the Chinese and the Russians become much nicer people. So we don't really need big and expensive armies any more, do we? Let's go on a tourist trip instead. I do not think that so far the soft- ness of the English towards China has led to any irretrievable diplomatic errors. But it may well do so. British policy in the Far East is already estranged from American. The Chinese authorities have made no secret of their determination to isolate America from her allies on the Formosan question. That remains the overwhelming purpose of free trips to Peking. There are pros and cons to the diplomatic policy to be followed over Formosa, but with these sentiment should have no part, for sentiment has no useful function whatsoever in dealings with dictatorships. Unfortunately it is sentiments of various kinds which have determined and still I think deter- mine our attitude towards China and make us soft. It is here, in this question of political atmosphere, that the analogy between the present uneasy peace and that uneasy peace of the Thirties is most appropriate. We could have done with a bit more tension then and a bit less sympathy towards Germany. If the hydrogen bomb increases tension, so much the 'better. If. as it seems to be doing, it seduces us into apathy, then it is much more likely to be dropped.
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