Asiatic Education

JOURNEY FROM THE EAST -- Mark J. Gayn-- Knopf ($3.75).

One of Mark Gayn's earliest memories is of a file of Chinese soldiers marching past his father's house in Manchuria. Civilians marching with them carried long poles from which swung a row of decapitated heads. Gayn also remembers (when he was seven) huddling with his mother on the floor while Chinese bandits' bullets whistled through the windows.

Author Gayn's father was a Russian lumberman. Most of Gayn's childhood was spent at sawmill settlements, mostly on the Manchuria-Mongolia border. Some of his closest acquaintances were the Chinese bandits who sold Father Gayn "protective security" -- and went after him with a gun if he failed to pay up. Some times Father Gayn's sawmills were run by Russian convicts ("I knocked the hats off some fellows," explained one convict, "and the police found heads inside the hats").

Mark Gayn was born in 1909 at Barim, Manchuria. Most of the incidents he records in this personal history were part &; parcel of modern China's terrible 30 years' struggle to become a united nation.

No Time to Laugh. Gayn's mother was a thwarted opera singer from Siberia. His playmates were Russians, Chinese and Germans. When Gayn was 14 he went to a Soviet school in Vladivostok, where his training included work in machine shops and factories. "We are too busy to laugh," shouted a Communist orator. In 1929, after a short stay in a Shanghai academy, Gayn's parents sent him to the U.S.

After four years at California's Pomona College and a spell with the Columbia School of Journalism, Mark Gaynre turned to Shanghai as foreign correspond ent for the Washington Post. On the side he worked for the famed Japanese news agency, Domei. "Rich, aggressive, news-wise and Empire-conscious," the agency inspired Gayn with "an almost pathologi cal curiosity about Japan." When Japan had begun its war with China, Domei did its best to keep Mark Gayn, nattered him, tolerated his anti-Japanese tirades in the Washington Post, even had him vaccinated for cholera and smallpox by the per sonal physician of the commander-in-chief of Nippon's Third Fleet. When Gayn finally walked out and became city editor of the anti-Japanese China Press, he received a brusque phone call from the Japanese naval attache, who informed him that he was officially "disvaccinated."

Window on a Nightmare. From 1937 to 1941, Editor Gayn's window in Shang hai's International Settlement looked out on some of the most terrible nightmares of the contemporary world -- the Japanese attacks. "In the months and years which followed the rape of Nanking, ten million Chinese had been killed, fifty million driven west, more than a hundred put in subjection under puppet regimes. . . . For endless miles [Shanghai's] sidewalks be came the bedroom of a million refugees." A "baby patrol" went the rounds each morning, piling up mounds of dead children "like stacks of firewood."

Pious Paradox. Author Gayn devotes most of the latter part of Journey from the East to the new China and its new leaders. He believes that Chiang is the only man under whom China can achieve unity.

Until 1926, Chiang, was a revolutionary. Thereafter he fought the Communists as vigorously as he fought the Japs. A pious advocate of Confucian virtues, Warlord Chiang was also responsible, Gayn claims, for ten years of military bloodshed. Today, Author Gayn believes, Chiang is at once "a ruthless and intolerant man ... a pious Christian ... a canny politician ... a national unifier of the caliber of Bismarck and a petty and jealous political boss . . . consumed by a passion for power."

Chiang's supreme test, says Author Gayn, will come when Japan is defeated and stripped of her empire -- an undertaking that may not be concluded until 1948 or 1949. Then Chiang will rule "New China" -- a nation that confidently sees herself as the future "mistress of Asia." But neither Japan's defeat nor a vast in crement of territory will solve China's domestic problems. Four out of five Chi nese depend upon the soil they till. Of China's 360,000,000 farmers, 200,000,000 do not own the land they cultivate; only one-fourth are able to make ends meet.

Wealthy absentee landlords -- often in ca hoots with local warlords and bandits --have reduced China's millions to a primitive struggle for a daily bowl of rice. The measure of Chiang's greatness, says Gayn, of his rise in stature from warlord to national leader, will be his readiness to take up the struggle against his old confreres -- the political bosses and the land lords. "If [he] succeeds he will truly be come one of the world's great figures."

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