Inside Red China: Peking

by JAMES CAMERON

AT ELEVEN every morning the train leaves kowloon station for the next world. For two dollars it trails you along from the edge of Hong Kong — all that congested prosperity petering out so quickly among the green hillocks and paddies of the mainland — until it comes to the little bridge, and there it stops. From then on, you walk.

It is not much of a bridge, over a trifling river, but exactly across its middle runs the Iron Curtain. Like a bagman changing trains you cross the tracks, turn away from the English signs and the English words, the polite expressionless official faces, and walk over into China.

The frontier control was ridiculous, almost casual — one waits three years for a visa, and then nobody seems to bother. Clearly someone knows all about it, and manifestly no one but a lunatic would embark on a proposition of this kind without his passport watertight. . . . The passport; never had it seemed more valuable and vulnerable; one fingered it like a talisman.

But nobody wrangled or peered; the soldier at the barrier merely nodded — he was guarding the gate of the biggest and most controversial country on the face of the earth, and he merely nodded. In a moment I was in the other station among the Chinese soldiers and the Chinese people and the Picasso doves and the portraits of Chairman Mao, and the old life was on the other side.

In the frontier sheds people were going through the most tremendous customs examination I ever saw — the inspectors unfolding undervests, probing into teapots, shaking out shoes; yet when they came to me they merely asked if I carried a camera or a weapon, and barely glanced at my bag. It seemed a curious case of inverted privilege, and — perhaps unwisely and certainly impertinently — I mentioned this. The officer smiled and said, with a vagueness by no means reflected in his eyes, “You are not a frontier person. Please proceed.”

There were two hours to wait for the train to Canton, so they offered me lunch — four simple dishes; the chopsticks were decorated with the inescapable dove. They changed me some money — I gave them a handful of Hong Kong dollars and they returned with a stack of rather ragged notes nine inches thick: the J.M.P., the People’s Money which henceforth one must call yuan, which rated at some sixty-nine thousand to the pound, and which forevermore padded one’s pockets with vast disintegrating wads, to be counted in pennies.

To the end of my stay in China one simple point baffled me — I was able to analyze certain Marxist deviations; I was able to accept if not approve certain variants on the general ethical code; I was able to appreciate occasional aberrations of foreign attitude and policy; but I was never able to understand why, with a firm and viable currency stabilized at a rate that made it impossible to buy anything for less than five hundred yuan, it was then necessary to make use of a currency involving such perverse and astronomical quantities of paper. Even, ultimately, to the Minister of Finance did I put the point: If you knocked the last two zeros off all your units, would it affect the economics of public expenditure? He said, “I shouldn’t think so.” So I said, following up my point with a rapier logic, “Then why don’t you?” To which he replied, scoring the final point, “Why should we?”

Copyright 1955, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

This was a station — and also, it seemed, a recreation hall, and a library, and a cafeteria. A group of soldiers were playing Chinese pool, which looks in a way like billiards played with draughtsmen on a card table, and calls for loud and repeated cries of “Ha!” at every stroke. The man selling little cakes and bottles of gaseous minerals wore a gauze mask. I put this down as a very desirable hygienic reform, until I found out later that it was a purely personal and Chinese whim that had somehow spread irresistibly over the nation. Everywhere there were people masked like surgeons; the things were sold in the markets, by peddlers in the street; rickshaw drivers wore them and so, not infrequently, did politicians; even the policemen would direct the traffic masked as though they were about to perform a difficult appendectomy. Someone had told them long ago that the masks prevented colds and kept away the endless dust that drifts for months over North China; many more took it up at the time of the germwarfare story, still most faithfully and implicitly believed by those who recall it.

The bookstall was crammed, with benches around for those who simply wanted to read, sitting there among the poster reproductions of earnest young people doing worthy and admirable things: driving tractors, killing flies, joining the army. On the platform were rows of cots in which women passengers had deposited their solemn, enchanting, self-possessed, black-eyed babies. A few people looked up in surprise as I passed, but only momentarily; throughout China the curious thing was the absence of any expressed or impolite curiosity; the scrupulous courtesy of the Chinese forbade them embarrassing the st ranger; one passed through avenues of averted eyes.

By the time the train arrived the patient passengers had already formed themselves into neat lines, without any prompting from anyone, opposite the proper doors. The crowds filtered in with complete decorum.

I found myself beside a young man who by chance spoke English, who was by chance going to Canton, who by chance knew both my name and my mission, and who by chance was in a position to stand by me until the end of the ride. He was more than amiable; in the end I was sorry to lose him, but somehow he was always replaced.

Inside the coach, a small sort of hell broke loose, based as usual on the loudspeaker. In most forms of human behavior the Chinese have a delicate and scrupulous sense of gentleness and sensitivity, but they have one disastrous characteristic: they appear to be wholly invulnerable to noise. The machine, at our ears, roared and screamed and quacked; sometimes it was a sort of demented bagpipes from Mongolia and sometimes it was a Slavonic march — usually, in fact, since Communism requires military music and the old Chinese, most reasonably, composed nothing especially martial. However, no variation made the slightest difference to the passengers, who chatted in an animated way throughout if and frequently broke into separate songs of their own whenever the impulse came, producing a chaotic mélange of sound to which in the end I became, by some providential dispensation, almost immune.

Dusk fell over this enormous country and we still rocked along. Every now and again the teaman would come along with his fragrant green tea. At one halt we loaded a pile of brand-new English bicycles. At the next, great wicker baskets came aboard crammed with live ducklings, protesting and shrilling. I asked my chance-met cicerone where we were — he didn’t know; he never did.

Then, as we came crawling into the dim lights of Canton at last, the teaman came round to be paid — something like threepence for about forty glasses of tea. He produced the receipt — you get a receipt for everything in China; even a box of matches goes on the record. And a peculiar receipt it was, with a printed message on the back.

I asked my friend what aspect of democracy those characters advertised, but he laughed and said, “No — on train receipts, always get printed riddles.”

He read me one, some fearfully intricate Oriental merry-thought about how to light a candle in a dark room so that no one can see it. I couldn’t get it at all, and I asked for the answer, but he shrugged again. “Give riddles,” he said, “not give answers. Answers got to find.”

As we ground into Canton station, the first stop on my way to Peking — as the loudspeakers roared and the brakes howled and the ducklings squealed and everyone began shouting at once, as the new Government man appeared with superlative timing precisely at my exact window — I began to feel the man was right: Answers got to find.

2

IN PEKING I lived in an establishment rather grandly called the Press Club, a three-storied building of extreme newness in a side street off the Hata Men road. Newness, however, did not imply opulence. It would have taken more than the few days it had been in existence to have mellowed the austere lineaments of the Press Club, which at first sight had aspects suggestive of a railway-station waiting room, the municipal offices of some English provincial town, and a rather up-to-date monastery, combining the less convivial characteristics of all three. It was not a place where one would linger in some splendid leather easy chair beside the fire, with whisky and soda to hand and a copy of the Times on one’s knee. The chairs were, in fact, built of some unresilient material resembling concrete and covered with green serge; in place of a fire were radiators capable only of outrageous extremes, now casting a glacial chill, now burning like a furnace.

The beds were excellent, the best in China. It does not occur to the energetic builders of new China to build bathrooms into their latest hotels, but we soon fell back into the habit of marching up and down corridors to communal ablutions reminiscent of an army mess. Moreover, the Chinese had not forgotten that a Press Club would be used by the press; they had established a branch of the Foreign Office information section downstairs, which worked admirably, and a telegraph and cable office which — once one grew adjusted to the formality of identifying oneself by documents five times a day to the young woman operative who greeted one most cordially by name — worked with an efficiency that can only be called superb.

There was, as I may have occasion to mention again, no censorship.

In these circumstances I lived for some time in the most welcome and excellent good companionship of my two friends — fellow space-travelers in this mysterious world, fellow Western guinea pigs in this Chinese experiment in professional coexistence — Zig, the Frenchman, and Bill, from Canada. I could scarcely have been better served for colleagues. But for the presence of each other, none of us would have done any work at all.

From time to time we would be joined by other drifting groups from overseas — a handful of Indonesians, a large and compact body of Japanese, monuments of zeal and industry; they would appear abruptly round corners in unexpected places — the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, the Ministry of Agriculture, a nursery; they wore their caps back to front in a rather dashing way and carried small expensive cameras with which they unremittingly photographed each other. There were some Indians, who took profuse notes about everything in enormous exercise-books. There was, for all too brief a time, an extremely pretty girl photographer from some Communist magazine in Paris; she was immovably escorted by a handsome, somber welterweight whose suspicions, one felt, went deeper than politics. Sooner or later they would disappear, all of them — they were always guests or delegates, and however much closer rapport that gave them with their hosts, we maintained a perverse sense of privilege in that we were not.

3

LIFE was both eased and complicated by the conscientious help of our Chinese colleagues. The senior members of the group, either from the Government or the All-China Journalists’ Federation (a distinction perhaps academic), were courteous, helpful, efficient, and in at least one or two cases genuinely friendly. But these experts were served at a lower level by a bureau most misleadingly called “Information,” which was staffed by a little group of young men who constituted one of the most serious hazards of the trip. On some principle hard to determine, it had been decided that they could speak English. It was, moreover, apparent that they did in fact know how to — it was just that they could never actually do it. It led to situations of desperate frustration.

At given intervals the phone would ring. “Is — that — Mister — Kamalloh?” With a sinking heart one would recognize the Information, the one who would require to know if one was going to such-and-such a place that day, and who would now proceed to put the question. “I — must — inform — you. The — program — for — the — day — shall — be — as — follows,” This could take up to several minutes, but there was no way of interrupting it, nor could the formula of the phrases be interfered with. The slightest interjection would throw the poor young man completely out of his stride; it would then be necessary for him to begin again. “I — must — inform — you. The — program —” until the introductory bars had come to their predestined conclusion. “There — will — be — a — demonstration — of — glass — polishing (or shuttle shifting, or tube blowing, or whatever it. chanced to be) — at — fifteen — thirty. If — interested — will — gather — in — lobby —” and so on. It was harrowing; one felt as great a sympathy for Information as for oneself. Sometimes it would entail a disappointment: “We aren’t going to the People’s Court after all?” But Information would say, “Yes, yes!” Many were the fatiguing misunderstandings until one caught on to the meaning of the Oriental positive-negative, which is: “Yes — you’re right, we aren’t going.”

Information, too, was responsible for the provision of passes and accreditation cards, entailing the production of untold numbers of photographs and the signature of multitudes of forms. Here again everything was done to ease the effort for us; Information himself would fill in the forms. Since he then had to ask us the questions and translate the answers, this made the process not more than eight times longer than it might otherwise have been. To leave the city in any direction even to visit the nearby Western Hills or the Ming Tombs — required a permit, the permit itself requiring, for some unfathomable reason, the repeated registration of the fact that my telephone number, during the daylight hours, was London Central 5000.

But there was so much to see, to absorb, in this superb city, that very soon the administrative mazes did not matter. To walk around the streets was a perpetual pleasure — a visual delight, in its curious way a social delight; after the blank clinging stares of India, the persistent curiosity of Siam, the edgy resentful glances of Indonesia, there was something uncommonly civilized about the casual acceptance of Peking. If they were interested they looked, if they were not they didn’t; and when you caught an eye it usually smiled. I lived not far from the Tung Tan — the Eastern Market; there was endless diversion in its crowded alleys, its stalls of junk and charm and sensible clothes, with the little stick of incense smoldering on the counters. Nothing was very dear, nothing was noticeably cheap; for almost everything that could be considered a necessity prices were roughly, by our exchange, on a par with those of the outer fringes of London.

There were also the street vendors. They, at least, were full of charm. In their established intervals the peddlers would pass up and down the street — the noodle man with his piercing rattle: krrrraaa! krrraaa! and his wailing call: “Chieh Mien!"; the man with the sesame cakes, crying “Chao Ping!” and tip-tip-topping on a minute bamboo drum; the vegetable dealer with his swinging gongs, his baskets of cabbage and lotus root, beans and sweet potatoes. They did not look very Communist. They were not very Communist. “Why should they be?" the officials used to tell me. “There is plenty of time, plenty of time.”

4

IT WAS in the new tradition to arrive in Peking and exclaim, “But it is clean!” And then to say, “But it is true — the flies have gone!” And the stark facts of the case were that this was indeed so; the place was clean — in a scrupulous and selfconscious and almost unreal way; North China was swept and brushed and dusted; people were forever scurrying about the streets picking up odds and ends, tidying things up. To throw away a cigarette end in public became a feat of considerable embarrassment; someone was always sure to whip it into a container, drawing one’s attention reproachfully to one’s casual, doubtless Western, disregard of decency. There were times when I went around for days with my pockets gradually filling with match ends. Similarly, then, and as part of the same mystique, the flies had disappeared — I offer this as the considered observation of one who not only knows a fly when he sees one but who has frequently spent the greater part of the year in more recognizable Asian circumstances, very much more than outnumbered by flies.

(Yet some weeks later, in Hunan Province, I moved impulsively off the road and came upon a memorable sight: a little walled town of such insignificance, or remoteness, that the whole contemporary stream of history seemed to have swirled around it, leaving it untouched. There they were still wearing the long gown; there the classical apothecaries still maintained their intricate stores — and furthermore the place was infested, swarming, vibrating with the densest multitude of flies I ever saw in my life, which is no trifling assessment. I marked that little town down as the last outpost of the persecuted flies of China — the Refugee Center; headquarters of the Free Fly Movement; a sort of biological Formosa.)

In some sort of way this anti-fly campaign was characteristic of the new impulse toward the absolute, observable in all contexts: cleanliness as with sexual virtue (as I made some effort to determine later) as with honesty — it appeared, for example, that a hotel room-boy who lifted a cigarette or a pair of socks would find himself in the People’s Court within a day. The consequence of this was that it became almost impossible ever to throw anything away. . . . It might have been a trap, or perhaps their standards of values differed. I was pursued over three provinces with a packet of old razor blades left in a guesthouse bathroom. When I left the country, to rid myself of a worn-out pair of shoes I had to make special representations to the management. . . .

All this would seem to have given life in Peking an inhibited, not to say somber quality. Strangely, that was not quite the case. It was true to say that there was not, in all the city — outside of Shanghai, I am prepared to say, in all of China — one single bar. It is true that the new Peking experiments in social life, called “dancings,”were grim, halfhearted, and flinty proceedings by the possibly more licentious Western standards; they were as poor and unnecessary an imitation of the less admirable aspects of European culture as, for example, a Western copy of the Peking opera would have been. I could not help feeling that this reflected credit on them, rather than otherwise, though it made for personal tedium in one’s more abandoned moods. But the prevailing atmosphere in the streets of Peking was of relaxation and amusement; essentially it seemed to me that the Chinese were a merry people, and the easiest thing to do, in a country where so many things were not easy, was to tempt them to a smile.

Sometimes, to be sure, it went a little too far; on sponsored visits to public places the more zealous bystanders tended not only to greet the Westerner but actually to applaud him, under the doubtless understandable impression that everyone with a long nose — known as a Kao pi tze — permitted to roam around Peking these days must be an Elder Brother — that is to say, a Russian. The practice became extremely tedious after a while, since while there can be few more gratifying experiences than to be applauded by groups of strangers, there can equally be few more irritating reflections than to realize that it is being done under the impression that one is someone else.

The really odd thing, however, was that even when I emphatically denied any Elder Brother claims and insisted, in the bizarre and corrupted phrase I had learned to make effective, “Niet Tovarich — Ying-Kuo,” it seemed to make no difference at all, they still beamed. Without any doubt the contemporary Chinese could not get it into their heads that a European could be in China without being an official guest or a delegate, ipso facto on the Party line, and therefore worth a few minutes’ clapping of anyone’s time. It is also one of the curious modifications of Chinese courtesy that anyone who is applauded must applaud back. For public figures, appearing on platforms to storms of clapping, this no doubt solves a very awkward problem — no need for the deprecating gesture, the modest smile, the affected astonishment: important people in Peking appear in public applauding themselves like billy-ho, with evident relish.

The basic principle of driving a car through Peking was easy to learn, though hard to endure: the chauffeur steered a course exactly down the middle of the street, with his foot on the accelerator and his finger on the horn. No other controls were required, except a watchful hand on the steering wheel to ensure that the vehicle did not deviate any farther than was absolutely imperative toward the correct, or right-hand, side of the thoroughfare.

When two cars approached each other, traveling in opposite directions, this gave rise to a very nice point of detail. Since they were both occupying the precise center of the highway, which is the honorable position and not lightly to be surrendered, the passengers in both cars were subjected to several moments of electric suspense, while both cars surged toward each other’s radiators with increasingly furious shrieks of the horn. When they were within a few feet of each other there would be a simultaneous, almost imperceptible swerve; nobody actually retreated to his legal side of the road, but disaster was avoided. There have been occasions when the thing has been so close that both door handles have been torn off, but nobody is then worried by mian tseh — there is no loss of face.

Policemen in Communist countries are notoriously brutal, callous, sinister, and overbearing. There are doubtless many such in Peking. They did not allow those to direct the traffic. Only once or twice was I ever in a car that was involved in a difference of opinion with the police — passing a tramcar on the wrong side, or some violation of the traffic rules so flagrant that it could not be overlooked. The policeman would then approach the car, and the dialogue would follow roughly this course: —

“It seemed to me that you were impetuous, Comrade.”

“It is possible, Comrade.”

“Perhaps I should not have mentioned this?”

“No, by all means, Comrade; you have your duty to do.”

“It causes no offense if I suggest you were driving in a disgracefully careless way?”

“In the circumstances, no, Comrade. I freely offer you the right to say this.”

“Very well; I have said it. I shall return to my post?”

“Certainly, Comrade. Let us both return to work.”

Face is a wonderful thing. Among many irrelevant musings the question occurred to me many times: How is the disastrous effect of losing face equated with the equally serious modern Marxist necessity of self-criticism? That self-criticism is a very real factor in the day-to-day life of China was evident: one observed it in action after every railway journey, among the train crew; one saw hints of it after every day’s work with me, among the guides and counselors. How did a man retain face if, being lazy, he was compelled publicly to acknowledge the fact; if he had been that day a little short on honesty, he had to admit it?

5

IN A long gray shed in an even longer and grayer street of Peking was a man who, it seemed, had the keys to all knowledge at the ends of his hands. They lay there before him in vast banks and rows, small square leaden things half a centimeter across; there were many thousands of them and the man — a shaven head, a blue cotton suit, a pair of silver spectacles mended with insulating tape — had merely to choose the right ones, and there he had the incontrovertible gospels of Marx, the eloquent certainties of Confucius, and the beguiling flippancies of Sun Yat-sen at his command. He could be said to have been composing pictures or demonstrating the indefatigable urge of man to complicate life in symbols. He was, in fact, setting type.

His vis-à-vis in Europe, painting thus, has before him a keyboard of arbitrary and familiar shapes: the letter A and the letter B, and their two dozen alphabetical associates. The blue man in Peking had before him no such rationalization, but perhaps fifty thousand small and intricate drawings, each one imprisoning an idea. His choice did not lie at the end of ten fingers, but at the end of four thousand years of invention so intricate that, to reproduce last night’s speech from Chou En-lai, he must rush around the room selecting characters with a practically inconceivable effort of memory. It was for all the world as though some inhabitant of the Louvre should tap-tap his message through the selection of canvases, at the rate of twenty-five a minute.

This was the office of the Jen Min Jih Pao, the People’s Daily. Hitherto I had known nothing of this famous newspaper except as the source of occasional very acid comments on the behavior of the capitalist world in general, and Mr. John Foster Dulles in particular, which would shoot out of Peking Radio at moments of international stress like small and accurately aimed drops of vinegar. I had asked if I might call on the editor and see something of his office, partly because I have an enduring interest in newspapers that many years in journalism have not altogether managed to undermine, and parity because of the illusion, still flowering after many setbacks, that local writers welcome impromptu calls from their foreign counterparts.

However, any idea I might have entertained of a comradely reunion among Peking’s equivalent of the Fleet Street tosspots was very smartly dispelled when I received a rather stiff communication from the board, informing me that if I submitted a list of questions, an appointment to receive the answers would in due course be made. This was scarcely as warm as I had hoped, but it was something. So I ran up a list of questions of purely professional interest and in due course presented myself rather pessimistically at the office.

To one accustomed to the somewhat less formal occasions of El Vino’s, or the Crillon Bar, or even the Mucky Duck, this fraternal encounter struck me as being supernal urally decorous. We all sat in a prim row on pink sateen chairs sipping scented tea and inquiring after each other’s health (a lengthy and irksome process through interpreters); at last the senior host said, “We shall answer your questions as follows: Number one . . .”Most of the information was of a strictly technical and ephemeral interest. Having delivered his replies the editorial executive (if such indeed he was) looked at his watch and said, “You may add to your questions if you wish.”

Now the People’s Daily, which is the organ of the Communist Party of China and by far the most important national publication, was of course 100 per cent unintelligible to me, but I had it fairly thoroughly translated on days when I felt especially robust. I formed the impression that, like so many journals considered ideologically reliable, it was excruciatingly dull. It had a way of presenting subjects, themselves intrinsically prosy and recondite, in a fashion that skillfully concealed any lurking germ of interest; the process of disinfecting the printed word of any hint of drama or urgency was carried out with consummate skill. It dealt at great length with matters involving production and the exceeding of norms; its ideal was a story in which the statistics outnumbered the narrative by 80 per cent. When it got its hands on a subject that fulfilled every critical standard of somberness and lack of novelty it would harp on it for days. Since the highest qualification for literary success appeared to be a sound grasp of the half-dozen indispensable political clichés, it was sometimes extremely difficult to distinguish the current issue from that of a month ago. Finally, seldom was reference made to anything that had happened elsewhere than in China — or if so, in the most minimal and disparaging terms, and always five days late.

It occurred to me to ask them, then, why a paper of world importance such as theirs considered it unnecessary to print international news. The question was received with indignation. They sent for the files and pointed out a succession of items with foreign datelines. “Bulgarian Minister Pays Tribute to Chairman Mao,” the headline would run, and below it would be printed that tribute, verbatim. “Romanian President Sends Good Will Message to Chinese Republic.” “Czechoslovak Delegate Offers Greetings to Peking Workers" — and there they would be, the message and the greetings, unabridged, in identical terms.

“How can you say that we do not print foreign news?” demanded the official. “We have items like that almost every day.”

Certainly they had correspondents abroad, he said. Where? Why, in other countries. Which countries? Other countries. Such as? Well — Moscow. Anywhere else? Certainly. Where? In Prague. No, that was all. They considered Moscow and Prague ample coverage for the world scene. There was also Hsinhua, the Chinese News Agency. It also had correspondents — in Prague and Moscow. And now, said the official pleasantly, if there are no more questions . . .

The People's Daily prints in Peking, flics mats to Mukden and Chungking, and prints there too. Its circulation was 800,000 — 200,000 in Peking; 200,000 in a city of 3,000,000 people; one person in fifteen read the People's Daily.

And that, I said to myself, is the sort of false logic into which one must not tumble. On almost every street is a board, covered against the weather, in which the four pages of that day’s paper were displayed. I never once passed such a board that was not being earnestly studied by anything up to a dozen people. They would stand there, patiently waiting their turn to browse through the monthly report of the Ministry of Textiles, the appreciative musings of the Albanian Cultural Delegate, to read once again of the satanic machinations of the traitorous Chiang Kai-shek clique. They were there day after day. The circulation of the People's Daily is not large; its readership is immense.

The People’s Daily does for China what Pravda does for the Soviet Union: no one ever hears of anything else. China has in fact 177 newspapers and many periodicals. (Two newspapers, one in Shanghai and one in Tientsin, are still under private management.) The bookstalls and newspaper shops are fuller than any I ever saw anywhere else in the world. Those who do not buy stand about and read. There is, in Peking, a children’s bookshop with very small counters and low stools and a profusion of juvenile literature that is, page for page, rather better and more effective than that for adults. Everything has a highly educative flavor, with moral undertones — the hero is the boy who keeps the streets clean, who swats flies, who grows up to exceed his norm, who becomes first a Pioneer and then a Democratic Leaguer, who understands the facts. There were some slightly bloodthirsty picture books from the Korean War. Shelves of books were in “strip” form. It was novel, and salutary, to see in these the traditional American strip-technique, as it were, reversed — the Baddies here were not sinister Orientals but sinister Occidentals with unmistakably Caucasian long noses and the well-known dangerous round eyes.

To satisfy a personal curiosity I made an analysis of what is available to read in Peking. There are, besides the People's Daily, three other dailies — Peh Kin Jih Pao (the Peking Daily) which looks after the local city news, within the usual framework of norms and statements; Knang Ming Jih Pao (the Bright Daily), a cultural and educational review; Kang Jen Jih Pao (the Daily Worker), circulating largely among the factories. One thing they all had in common: a striking reliance upon readers’ letters, almost entirely full of complaints. When I once remarked that newspaper readers the world over appear to become articulate only when infuriated, I was told that this was intensively encouraged, as a means of keeping officialdom in touch with the people. Citizens were urged to write letters denouncing this or that example of bureaucratic inefficiency or discourtesy, this or that neglect of duty. The paper would then dispatch a spare minion from the reporters’ room to investigate the allegation and, if necessary, reinforce the private grumble with an editorial broadside. In this respect, as in others, the newspapers obviously regarded their function only as an extension of the Administration. Desirable as one felt this needling of the functionaries to be, it left a dubious forecast of the informer.

The specialist periodicals were endless, and with a truly accomplished method of handling the most unconnected and disparate subjects in precisely the same way. The Current Affairs Magazine led with an ample story on “Why the Chinese Constitution is good, and how those of the capitalist states are hypocritical.”The Women's Magazine, on the other hand, dealt in detail with “How the Chinese Constitution is beneficial to women, and the subject place of women in the capitalist economy.”

World Culture analyzed the reasons why Formosa must be liberated; Women of New China indicated that you cannot copyright a good idea, and explained why the liberation of Formosa was desirable. Some radical irrelevancies turned up in Science Pictorial: an article on the dehydration of vegetables, instructions on the growing of chrysanthemums, a speculative article on spaceships, and a thoughtful argument for the liberation of Formosa. There was Films for the Masses, with one abrupt surprise, a review of “a progressive Italian film” — it was The Bicycle Thief; the article was subtitled “Reflections on the struggles and sufferings of the Italian people.”

Not much, one felt, was left to chance.

But there were imponderables, too.

In the journal China Youth, which is the organ of the Democratic Youth League, appeared a piece of counsel entitled “The Bourgeois Youth.” It contained advice to the right-minded revolutionary youth from bourgeois families who wondered if they were behaving inconsistently in continuing to live with their well-to-do parents. Its message was direct and fatherly, terrifying.

These puzzled young men were told that their bourgeois background need not necessarily be a handicap so long as they complied with “the revolutionary obligation of re-educating their families and acting on behalf of the State as a corrective influence.” They need not be afraid to take money from their parents as long as it was spent for their living and education, and not for ostentation. . . . “It cannot be denied that birth in such surroundings influences one’s ideological outlook.” But it need not be fatal. “When you discover any act involving tax evasion, speculation, or manipulation, you must not keep quiet; you must take steps to expose these wrong acts, and help the People’s Government to apply the necessary criticism.” At the same time the bourgeois youth should strive to educate their families to make their commercial enterprises successful for the benefit of the community, and to take their due share of profit in accordance with the law. . . .

One saw in imagination this doomed family, this grim, well-to-do home, shadowed by the curse of bourgeoisie, by the right-thinking youth who remains in a patriotic ecstasy among the speculating, fiddling parents, waiting to re-educate, to act as “a corrective influence"; this dreadful Bourgeois Youth with the final sanction of denunciation behind his back.

I do not know what China Youth does to the bourgeois enemy, but by God it frightened me.

(To be concluded)