Red China: Hard Look from India

During the first ten years after the Chinese Communists won control of the mainland in 1949, the Peiping regime was host to quite a number of Indian visitors. Some were Indian Reds, of course, but many were non-Communist journalists, scholars, and what not. Because all intelligent Indians were keenly interested in hearing how things were going in China under applied Marxism, nearly all the returning Indian pilgrims broke into print; and, in their reports, there was almost never a trace of disapproval of what they had seen. It was all wonderful, as indeed it was; but no visitor had the courage to say, as some have since admitted, that the experience was as wonderful as a tour of a madhouse. To have reported anything like that would have been to run afoul of the Nehru government’s incessant public praise of the sweet and lovely relations that existed and would always exist between India and Red China.

Then, in the middle of 1959, Professor Sripati Chandra-sekhar, one of India’s most esteemed pundits in the economic field, came home from a winter in Red China and blew off steam. He wrote for many publications at home and abroad, including several in this country. The essence of what he had to say to all was that, while he had gone to Red China fully prepared to be “impressed,” he had come away “stifled, sad and disillusioned.” About specific situations such as that in Mao Tse-tung’s model commune in Honan, he was more severe. The conditions under which China’s rural masses are now condemned to live he found simply “hellish.”

RG

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Rodney Gilbert

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During the first ten years after the Chinese Communists won control of the mainland in 1949, the Peiping regime was host to quite a number of Indian visitors. Some were Indian Reds, of course, but many were non-Communist journalists, scholars, and what not. Because all intelligent Indians were keenly interested in hearing how things were going in China under applied Marxism, nearly all the returning Indian pilgrims broke into print; and, in their reports, there was almost never a trace of disapproval of what they had seen. It was all wonderful, as indeed it was; but no visitor had the courage to say, as some have since admitted, that the experience was as wonderful as a tour of a madhouse. To have reported anything like that would have been to run afoul of the Nehru government’s incessant public praise of the sweet and lovely relations that existed and would always exist between India and Red China.

Then, in the middle of 1959, Professor Sripati Chandra-sekhar, one of India’s most esteemed pundits in the economic field, came home from a winter in Red China and blew off steam. He wrote for many publications at home and abroad, including several in this country. The essence of what he had to say to all was that, while he had gone to Red China fully prepared to be “impressed,” he had come away “stifled, sad and disillusioned.” About specific situations such as that in Mao Tse-tung’s model commune in Honan, he was more severe. The conditions under which China’s rural masses are now condemned to live he found simply “hellish.”