Leaning to One Side

The express from Shanghai clanked to a stop in Peiping's Chien Men station. Waiting on the platform was a solid array of Communist bigwigs--Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Commander in Chief Chu Teh, foreign affairs expert, Chou Enlai, a score of lesser party bosses and assorted "democratic personages." From the train into this welcoming group stepped dignified little Madame Sun Yatsen.

Her arrival in China's Communist capital was the big act in an intensive Communist drive to win friends for Soviet Russia. She is chairman of the new Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, now getting top play in China's Communist press.

Madame Sun, who is an elder sister of Madame Chiang Kaishek, "withdrew" from politics in 1927 as a gesture of solidarity with the Communists in their break with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. She spent two years in Moscow, then returned to Nationalist China. She remained frankly hostile to the Chiang Kai-shek regime, dabbled in welfare work, gathered a circle of international left-wingers around her. When the Communists took over Shanghai, she fell in with their plans for Sino-Soviet friendship.

"We must lean to one side," Mao Tse-tung proclaimed last July. The Sino-Soviet Friendship Association was the apparatus the Communists set up to get Chinese to lean--toward the U.S.S.R., of course. Association branches have mushroomed in every sizable Communist-held city. Shanghai's got under way last week. On a public platform adorned with huge posters of Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh, Shanghai's Communist leaders echoed the word: "We want to lean to one side."

In North China, the Sino-Soviet Friendship Associations were way ahead. Dairen's association claimed a membership of more than 200,000. This month in Dairen is "Sino-Soviet Friendship Month." A campaign is under way to have citizens "publicize, learn from and support Soviet Russia!" Peiping recently staged a gigantic Soviet exhibition "to introduce systematically the great socialist construction of the U.S.S.R." Madame Sun's presence and her exhortation for Chinese and Russians to march ahead as "comrades-in-arms" topped the propaganda campaign. For her labors, the Red press hailed her as "the Exalted Widow."

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