Rubber Communist

(See Cover)

The tide of terror rolled on. Shanghai's Liberation Daily reported the execution of 208 "counter-revolutionaries," who were made to kneel in a suburban lot one afternoon while a firing squad finished them off from the rear. For the first time, as a new service to its readers, the Daily printed the names of the victims.

Peking's Mayor Peng Chen, chief organizer of the purges, called for more executions. The Chinese press diligently reported the antiphonal dialogue, almost liturgical in tone, between Peng and a conference of Communist deputies:

Peng: How shall we cope with this herd of beastly despots, traitors and special agents?

Answer: Kill them!

Peng: Another thing. We have already disposed of a number of cases, but there are some still in jail. What shall we do with them?

Answer: Kill them all!

Peng: Another thing. There are despots in the markets, among fishmongers, real-estate brokers, water carriers, and night soil scavengers. How shall we cope with these feudal remnants?

Answer: Execute them by firing squad!

So, week after week, went the official news out of China.

"You Mustn't Forget." From reports by foreign diplomats and Chinese refugees, from statements by Red deserters and prisoners of war in Korea, and, above all, from the insistent testimony of the Red press and radio, one fact was clear: Red China's masters are not only waging war against the U.S. in Korea; they are waging a relentless war on their own people. So far, the Korean war has cost China an estimated 500,000 casualties (including wounded); the Red bosses' terror has cost China's people three times that much.

China's wholesale murder, which had become a commonplace of policy, was directed discipline by the most efficient group of administrators China had ever known. Heading that group was a man so mild and affable in manner that many a Westerner who knew him in the past had suspected him of only playing at Communism. He is a professional political organizer named Chou Enlai. Once he had found it necessary to remind one of his American admirers: "You mustn't forget, you know, that I am a Communist."

Nowadays, neither the U.S. nor China get a chance to forget it. As Red China's Premier, Foreign Minister, member of the Politburo, member of the Government Council and member of the Council of State Administration, Chou (pronounced dzu) has a hand in almost everything that happens in China, from "bandit suppression" (i.e., fighting Nationalist guerrillas) to the price of rice. In the months ahead, Chou's organizational talents will be put to harder & harder tests. There are already signs of serious weakness in the structure he has helped to rear.

Distrust & Despair. It is important for the West to watch these signs in Communist China; it is equally important for the West not to overestimate them. For decades similar evidence has come out of Soviet Russia; yet through mass killings, violent social upheaval and economic crises the Soviet regime has kept its death grip on the country. China's Red masters may be in for plenty of trouble (and if the U.S. chooses, it can increase that trouble). But it is a fact that the Communists in China have under their control today one-fifth of the human race; they have succeeded in the staggering job of establishing an administration with some signs of efficiency on the ruins of economic chaos --a state of chaos which they themselves had deliberately fostered. They had also built up an army that has given an excellent account of itself in battle. With these qualifications in mind, the West can take comfort from Red China's difficulties.

Cabled TIME'S Hong Kong Bureau Chief Robert Neville last week: "Red China is in deep trouble. Early enthusiasm for the Red regime has now turned to sullen resentment, distrust and despair. The educated and the articulate seem to shrink away in shame and disgust from events over which they can have no control. If those Chinese who escape to Hong Kong are judges, a widespread disaffection has set in. Many people are certain that were it not for the secret police and the firing squad, hatred for the Peking government would soon spark into action."

Sincere Cooperation. "Travelers now report seeing Russians all over the country. There are apparently so many of them there that they can no longer do what they used to do--keep to compounds and out of sight. There are Russian colonies now as far south as Kunming and Canton, and there is apparently never a train running in all China on which Russians do not take up a large part of the first-class carriages. Russian consumer goods have begun to appear, and Russian gasoline of inferior quality has made its way as far south as Shanghai, where it has been selling for around $4 (U.S.) a gallon (one good reason why there are only about 500 privately owned cars left in the city).

"The Russian technicians who swarm all over China constitute its newest set of privileged taipans. Russian politicos are also much in evidence in Peking, where Chou's Foreign Ministry often plays second fiddle to the Soviet Embassy. While the Russian ambassador is ostensibly the highest Soviet official in China, he is actually outranked by another, more shadowy figure referred to only as the 'political representative,' who sits in on all meetings of the Chinese Politburo itself. From all-over evidence, the Russians could not be in more direct control if they moved the whole Chinese government to Moscow.

"Peking's alliance with Moscow was formally announced in February 1950 when Party Leader Mao and Premier Chou negotiated at the Kremlin a 30-year Sino-Soviet friendship pact in which the two nations promised 'in a spirit of sincere cooperation . . . to participate in all international actions aimed at insuring peace [and to] consult each other in regard to all important international problems.'

"Those at the helm in Peking have never thought of themselves as other than obedient members of Moscow's rigid party organization. The only methods they know are Russian methods. There is not one member of the Politburo who has had more than superficial brush-ups against Western liberal tradition. That any anti-Russian clique could form and operate in Peking today is simply unthinkable. As in Russia, so also in Red China the state consists of soldiers, policemen, prisons and concentration camps."

War's Burden. China's economy, in chaos when the Reds took over, is groaning under the burden of war. The Communists have avoided the inflationary pitfalls of printing money whenever it was needed. Instead they have followed the deflationary road simply by draining off, through merciless taxation and "voluntary" bond issues, whatever cash the public may have. Merchants who refuse to subscribe to the bond issue are invited to headquarters and kept in conference on the subject without food, water or bathroom privileges, for ten, twelve or 16 hours until they see the light. Peasants who find themselves freed of the old landlord's demands for rent are faced with infinitely greater government demand for taxes. If the peasant produces more food, it is taken away from him in enforced donations to the party. Result: a balanced budget, but one of the world's most depressed standards of living.

Spring floods have laid waste some 20,000,000 acres of China's arable land. Vast areas outside the flood districts lie unused and unplanted. Dissatisfied cotton farmers who refuse to sell their product at the government's low price last week forced Shanghai's cotton mills to close down completely for a period of 45 days. Communist cadres are being mobilized to reason with the recalcitrant cotton growers.

Two out of every three able men in Canton are unemployed. In other cities the problem is swelled by thousands of rural refugees, who have lost their means of support in the land reform. Whole classes of merchants and professionals like lawyers, brokers and jewelers are idle: their functions have simply vanished. In Shanghai, Tientsin, Hankow, Chungking, Foochow and Swatow, thousands of shops and factories have gone bankrupt. Shopping centers in almost every big city in China now seem lifeless and deserted.

That, last week, was China under the rule of a mob of Communist soldiers, politicians and intellectuals.

The Bosses. In Peking's high-walled, yellow-tiled "Forbidden City," Red China's masters live in as much secrecy as any of Old China's despots. Nobody on the outside is precisely sure just how the Red leaders currently stand in their hierarchy, but a rough directory is available.

Mao Tse-tung, indefatigable boss of Chinese Communism, is aging (59) and ailing (heart trouble), is obviously unable to wield as much personal power as he once had over the army and the party.

Chu Teh, 65, his oldest comrade-in-arms, is still nominally commander in chief of the Chinese Red army, but is apparently only a figurehead.

Li Lisan, chief of the Chinese Communist Party until the end of 1930 when he was replaced by Mao. Kept under wraps in Moscow for 15 years, he has now worked his way back, is head of all Chinese labor organizations. While Mao stood for organizing the peasant masses, Li stood for organizing the industrial worker; now that China needs industry, Li's importance is likely to increase.

Liu Shao-chi, party theoretician, is the man generally considered Premier Chou En-lai's rival for the No. 2 spot in the hierarchy. Sharp-faced Liu, a tireless writer, lecturer and polemicist, is believed to be the principal liaison officer between Moscow and Peking. A doctrinaire who apparently lives only for the party and the party line, is the chief author of the official Chinese party constitution promulgated in June 1945. His treatise "On the Education of a Communist" has become a definitive handbook for young & old party members. More & more, Liu is reported taking over aging and ailing Mao's party chores. Liu's orthodoxy is perhaps best typified by the fact that he always refers to Americans as "swine," while Premier Chou just calls them "imperialists."

Love In Jail. Perhaps more than any of his colleagues, Chou En-lai has shown an easy ability to weave and turn with the Moscow party line. His gift for bouncing back on those few occasions when he took the wrong turn has earned him a nickname among the Nationalists: Pu-tao-wong, the Chinese name for the weighted toy tumbler that always lands upright.

Chou's grandfather was a mandarin, i.e., a member of the potent imperial bureaucracy which was unseated by China's successful revolution of 1911. At 15, Chou entered a Western-style high school, went on to a year of college in Japan, and returned to China to enter Nankai University in Tientsin. There, like most young intellectuals of the day, 'he became immersed in China's revolutionary movement. He joined a radical group called "Awaken," delighted as much in endless arguments as in student riots. In 1919, he was tossed in Tientsin municipal jail for leading a student demonstration against the terms of the Versailles Treaty. In jail, so the story goes, Chou met and fell in love with another rioter, young Teng Yingchao, whom he later married.

At that time, Mao Tse-tung, working as a librarian at the University of Peking, was busy rounding up impecunious students to go to France on a "work and study" scheme conceived by a Peking professor to give Chinese students a chance to study abroad and at the same time ease France's tight manpower problem. After he got out of jail, young Chou En-lai jumped at the chance. Sweating it out with his fellow students in the coal mines of Lille and the Rhineland, he picked up little education but a great many ideas. In less than a year, he left the mines, went to work forthwith organizing fellow Chinese in France and Germany under the Communist banner.

By 1924, when the Communists were allied with Sun Yat-sen's nationalist Kuomintang, Chou became chief of the political department at the Nationalists' Whampoa Military Academy. He worked closely with a young Kuomintang stalwart named Chiang Kaishek. A year later, Chou became political commissar of Chiang's crack first Nationalist army.

One of Chou's special assignments: to organize an insurrection among Shanghai's workers. With other veteran Communists, he sneaked into the city, secured arms and training grounds, and succeeded in organizing some 600,000 workers into terrorist bands. When Chiang discovered that the Communists intended to seize power for themselves at the expense of the Nationalists, he swept into Shanghai without warning, disarmed Chou's workers and arrested the ringleaders. Chou, with his talent for landing right side up, managed to escape. The Nationalists put a price of $80,000 (Chinese) on his head. Chou continued to work in the underground, took refuge in expensive hotels, grew a beard, eventually contrived a trip or two to Moscow.

Suavity at Chungking. "You always struck me as being an effeminate type," one of his old schoolmasters said to Chou once. "How is it you could become a Communist?"

"Remember," Chou answered, "you gave me some advice once in school. On cold winter mornings, when I could not bring myself to get out of bed, you advised me to bounce right out, and soon I would feel warm for having had the dash of cold. I found in Communism the same experience. It was chilly at first, but much warmer now because of the chill."

Chou quickly warmed to Communism's climate. After a year in Moscow, he returned in 1929 to join forces with China's new Red boss, Li Lisan, an old friend of his Paris days. Chou strung along with his strategy of armed revolt by city workers, but when Moscow switched to Mao's strategy of organizing a peasant army, Chou managed to switch, too. Chou went to work teaching the new army the political tricks he had long ago taught the Nationalists in Whampoa.

In 1936, when the Communist power in China was at the lowest ebb, Chou's smooth talk and persuasive manner captured a fighting force of 150,000 men right out of the Nationalist fold. This was the army of the "Young Marshal" Chang Hsueh-liang, whom Chou converted thoroughly to the Communist cause. In a daring coup, the Young Marshal kidnaped Chiang Kaishek, hoping thereby to put a stop to the fighting. Chiang's eventual release, engineered with typical tact by Chou on orders from Moscow, resulted in one more marriage of convenience between the Nationalists and Communists in their common fight against Japan, gave the Communists a valuable breathing space in which to consolidate their forces.

During the next nine years, while the two parties alternately talked peace or made open war on each other, Chou spent much of his time in Chungking, China's wartime capital, smoothly persuading China's U.S. allies (particularly the newsmen at the Press Hostel) of the Communists' good intentions. In Washington last week, General Wedemeyer remembered Chou as a "charming individual." Chou lived in the poorest section of the city in a house with a dirt floor and rude peasant furniture. His manner was all modesty and humility. Later in Nanking, his blandishments worked well enough to convince General Marshall, who spoke of "friendship and personal esteem" for Chou, that "there is a definite liberal group among the Communists . . . who would put the interests of the Chinese people above ruthless measures to establish a Communist ideology."

Utopia in Reverse. Chou and his comrades are serving the interests of the Chinese people in their own fashion. They are trying with every tool in their revolutionary kit to destroy China's traditional society, replace it with a new structure that is horrifyingly like the utopia-in-reverse of George Orwell's 1984. Chief among traditions under all-out Red attack is China's revered institution, the family. China's Reds by their own admission have bent all their efforts to turn father against son, mother against daughter. Wives are being handsomely rewarded for informing against their husbands, and children are organized into "eavesdropping teams." Marriage, except for the purely functional reason of procreation, is officially discouraged everywhere and permitted only after long investigation of the couple's political reliability. The wedding rite, which once consisted of bowing before the elders of the family, is now usually accomplished by bowing three times to a picture of Mao Tse-tung. Newlywed party members are permitted to live together for one week only, thereafter sleep each at his own place of work. Divorce is now a matter of simply claiming "reactionary tendencies" in the spouse. Party members' children are usually taken from the mother at the age of six to eight weeks and boarded by the state. Young Chinese are taught to submit their lives completely to the party. Many quite seriously bring their love problems to group meetings for open discussion, and the group rules on whether a particular affair is advisable or not.

The Communists are striving to subject to their will all other Chinese institutions, the school, the temple, the farm. Peking maintains a steady war against Christian missionaries, who are being harassed and slowly driven out of the country. Wu Yao-tsung, former Shanghai Y.M.C.A. official, expressed Peking's attitude on religion: "God is truth, truth is found in Communism; therefore in joining Communism, a man is worshiping God."

Can They Go On? Other conquerors of China before the Communists have tried to break down the country's society and failed; in one important respect, the Communists have an easier task, for the China where they fought their way to power was already shaken up by half a century of radical transition--and by years of war. But will the Communists be able to continue imposing their will on the vast, long-suffering land?

The Reds last week were making frantic effort to whip up enthusiasm for the Korean "volunteer" action. They were trying hard to convince the Chinese people that the U.S. is their enemy. Mass meetings, parades, plays, street-corner posters and soap-box orators painted the U.S. in the blackest patterns. A Shanghai revue, playing to packed houses, depicted the brutal forces of U.S. imperialism descending on unarmed Korea and closed with a glimpse of John Foster Dulles plotting Japanese rearmament with Premier Yoshida. At railway stations there was rally after rally hailing soldiers on their way to fight the imperialists in Korea.

The government's call for more "volunteers" to fight in Korea had failed dismally. Rather than risk government "persuasion" to join the army, many young men, particularly in the south, had taken to the hills. Last week, Peking announced it was launching a six-month-long, nationwide drive for money to buy war materials. The "volunteers" in Korea, warned government spokesmen, were in desperate need of more tanks, more guns, more cars, more clothing, more drugs. In a carefully detailed directive, the vast Resist America and Aid Korea Committee outlined the contributions that would be expected over the next six months from all Chinese. Contributions in gold, jewelry, dollars or any other foreign currency were called for. "Wealthy individuals" were especially ordered to pay up; workers were urged to increase production.

All these signs pointed to the fact that the Korean war had proved an expensive venture for China. Last week, as General Marshall once again dropped in on Chou En-lai's side of the world to pay a surprise visit to the Korean front (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), rumors of cease-fire filled the air in Western capitals. They were given added impetus by a recent Chinese republication of a 1937 essay by Mao Tse-tung underlining the fact that a revolutionary leader must be able to switch policies at a moment's notice according to changing circumstances. Mao's lieutenant, the resilient Chou, had long since proved his ability to about-face. But if he and his comrades wanted a truce in Korea, they gave not the slightest indication of it. Peking last week sounded as warlike as ever. Cried the Red radio: "Those of us who are fighting for the preservation of our country from those insane and evil men . . . are by no means disheartened . . ."

If Red China's masters chose to hang on in Korea, they could undoubtedly do so. The price: more suffering for China's people.

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