China: Stories from the Inside

A Filipino reporter met a Chinese refugee in Taipei recently and said, “I am just on my way back from a visit to your city and all my impressions were good. Yet you say that things are bad there. How do you account for this?” The refugee, a strapping young athlete and graduate student from the north of China, replied, “If I were able to accompany you there and return again safely to freedom, I could show you where to gc to look behind the facade. I was born there and lived all my life there. You were only a visitor. Only two kilometers from where you were, you would see the real situation.” The journalist and the refugee are eur major live sources of information on conditions of life in the vast China mainland. But their accounts, far from complementing each other, more frequently seem to refer to two different countries—a China and an alter-China. There is a happy, proud China confidently building a new future; there is a desperate, oppressed China, without hope of any change to the better; there is a Chinese people fiercely anti-white, anti-Western, and especially anti-American; there is a Chinese people devoid of racism and even, in non-urban areas, ignorant of the concept of race, a people that secretly prays for an American invasion; there is a Chinese student population that is fanatically Communist and deifies Mao; there is a Chinese student population that is disillusioned with Communism and expresses its utter contempt for Mao by renaming him “Mao-Tudz” or merely ‘“Tudz” (a word literally meaning “rabbit” in Mandarin). For a certain breed of journalist the China mainland today has become the rich preserve of utopian fantasy. The same people who unreservedly accept the published accounts of such journalists grow severely skeptical at the very men tion of the refugee as an alternate scurce of information. Inevitably, they raise two objections: 1) the refugee is biased against the regime, therefore, he cannot give an objective picture of conditions under it; and 2) the refugee tells you what you want to hear.

The fact that Objection One has already been historically disproved— it was the Soviet refugee, not the Western journalist-visitor to the Soviet Union in the Thirties, who gave us an accurate record of life under Stalin—makes it no less hardy. However, let us deal with it as though it were put fairly. Although the number of registered refugees from the Chinese Communist mainland has exceeded two million, it must be held clearly in mind that, with the possible exception of the mass exodus into Hong Kong in 1961 largely because of famine and fear of famine, we have to do not with mass phenomena, but with millions of individual persons who have reached secret, personal decisions. Here are a very few of these persons: A bright farmer’s son from Amoy discovered in his last year of high school that only politically “reliable” students of “correct” class background, regardless of their grades, would be allowed to continue their education in the university and that earlier promises of academic reward for excellence in one’s studies were false. The farmer’s son did not fit into the acceptable category. His future and his illusions about Communism vanished together. Eventually he was “sent down” to work in a commune. He escaped in August 1966. A middle-ranking young Communist official from Yunan Province, of peasant origin, was so single-mindedly devoted to the Party and idealistic at the outset of his career that he was entrusted with investigations into the reliability of other Communists. When he was twenty-four a young wife was selected for him by the Party. It was explained to him that a Communist of his position must have a politically conscious wife, therefore a Party member. She was, however, assigned to a different place ot work and they were able to spend only about two weeks in a year together. “Sometimes, we would contrive ways of meeting.’ Once, at a Communist division meeting, she criticized the Three-Red-Flags Movement as too extreme. As a result, she was denounced as a rightist and so badly humiliated that she hanged herself. It was the third year of their marriage. He was grieved by her death, but it did not alter his politieal conviction. Shortly afterward, however, in 1960, he witnesssed a re-_ volt of starving peasants from three communes in Yunan Province, which was quelled by troops from other provinces. Of an original 10,000 who forced officials to open up food warehouses, 3,000 held out against. the troops. About 700 were killed, 1,000 arrested, of whom seven were executed and the rest sent to labor reformation camps in Sinkiang. After this the young official experienced a progressive dissolution of all belief. He began to make plans for escape.

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Maria London

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A Filipino reporter met a Chinese refugee in Taipei recently and said, “I am just on my way back from a visit to your city and all my impressions were good. Yet you say that things are bad there. How do you account for this?” The refugee, a strapping young athlete and graduate student from the north of China, replied, “If I were able to accompany you there and return again safely to freedom, I could show you where to gc to look behind the facade. I was born there and lived all my life there. You were only a visitor. Only two kilometers from where you were, you would see the real situation.” The journalist and the refugee are eur major live sources of information on conditions of life in the vast China mainland. But their accounts, far from complementing each other, more frequently seem to refer to two different countries—a China and an alter-China. There is a happy, proud China confidently building a new future; there is a desperate, oppressed China, without hope of any change to the better; there is a Chinese people fiercely anti-white, anti-Western, and especially anti-American; there is a Chinese people devoid of racism and even, in non-urban areas, ignorant of the concept of race, a people that secretly prays for an American invasion; there is a Chinese student population that is fanatically Communist and deifies Mao; there is a Chinese student population that is disillusioned with Communism and expresses its utter contempt for Mao by renaming him “Mao-Tudz” or merely ‘“Tudz” (a word literally meaning “rabbit” in Mandarin). For a certain breed of journalist the China mainland today has become the rich preserve of utopian fantasy. The same people who unreservedly accept the published accounts of such journalists grow severely skeptical at the very men tion of the refugee as an alternate scurce of information. Inevitably, they raise two objections: 1) the refugee is biased against the regime, therefore, he cannot give an objective picture of conditions under it; and 2) the refugee tells you what you want to hear.

The fact that Objection One has already been historically disproved— it was the Soviet refugee, not the Western journalist-visitor to the Soviet Union in the Thirties, who gave us an accurate record of life under Stalin—makes it no less hardy. However, let us deal with it as though it were put fairly. Although the number of registered refugees from the Chinese Communist mainland has exceeded two million, it must be held clearly in mind that, with the possible exception of the mass exodus into Hong Kong in 1961 largely because of famine and fear of famine, we have to do not with mass phenomena, but with millions of individual persons who have reached secret, personal decisions. Here are a very few of these persons: A bright farmer’s son from Amoy discovered in his last year of high school that only politically “reliable” students of “correct” class background, regardless of their grades, would be allowed to continue their education in the university and that earlier promises of academic reward for excellence in one’s studies were false. The farmer’s son did not fit into the acceptable category. His future and his illusions about Communism vanished together. Eventually he was “sent down” to work in a commune. He escaped in August 1966. A middle-ranking young Communist official from Yunan Province, of peasant origin, was so single-mindedly devoted to the Party and idealistic at the outset of his career that he was entrusted with investigations into the reliability of other Communists. When he was twenty-four a young wife was selected for him by the Party. It was explained to him that a Communist of his position must have a politically conscious wife, therefore a Party member. She was, however, assigned to a different place ot work and they were able to spend only about two weeks in a year together. “Sometimes, we would contrive ways of meeting.’ Once, at a Communist division meeting, she criticized the Three-Red-Flags Movement as too extreme. As a result, she was denounced as a rightist and so badly humiliated that she hanged herself. It was the third year of their marriage. He was grieved by her death, but it did not alter his politieal conviction. Shortly afterward, however, in 1960, he witnesssed a re-_ volt of starving peasants from three communes in Yunan Province, which was quelled by troops from other provinces. Of an original 10,000 who forced officials to open up food warehouses, 3,000 held out against. the troops. About 700 were killed, 1,000 arrested, of whom seven were executed and the rest sent to labor reformation camps in Sinkiang. After this the young official experienced a progressive dissolution of all belief. He began to make plans for escape.