Merchants & the New Order

Sound trucks twisted through business and mercantile districts in Communist China's biggest cities last week, stopped before shops and blared: "Hey, proprietor! Evidence of all your misdeeds is now in our hands. Confess!" Huge banners flapped over city streets: "Sternly punish corruption culprits." Panicky merchants, traders, bankers, businessmen cowered before Red inquisitors, fidgeted in police stations or waited for the police to come. Throughout most of the country, commerce limped toward a standstill.

The uneasy and unreal era of truce between China's merchants and its Communist government was at an end.

One More Enemy. The attack began quietly enough as a campaign against waste in the lower levels of Communist bureaucracy. But gradually it burgeoned into "The Five Anti Campaign"--against bribery, tax evasion, cheating in contracts, stealing of state property and "theft of state economic secrets." The fire of the party was shifted from Red bureaucrats to private businessmen.

"We have discovered that our party has been corroded by bourgeois ideology and influence," cried Chinese Politburocrat Kao Kang. "One more enemy remains," declared Yey Chien-ying, big party boss in South China, "and that is bourgeois class thought." In every city, the Reds turned with a vengeance on the business community. Almost any normal act fell under the Five Anti Campaign definition of crimes--buying lunch for a government official, an increase in prices, normal attempts to get government contracts, the gift of a Parker 51 to a government agent.

The Red capital of Peking took the lead. Mayor Peng Chen held a public trial of half a dozen "corruption culprits" from the business community and had them executed. Shop assistants were encouraged to spy on their employers; special post-office boxes were opened to receive written accusations. In the campaign's early stages, Mayor Peng announced that some 32,000 Peking trading houses were guilty of at least one of the Five Antis, and that 80% of the government's dishonest civil servants had been tempted by "depraved merchants."

200,000 Letters. In Shanghai, which always does things on a big scale, the Communists divided the city into 20 districts, subdivided them into street and trading units and hit business places with waves of special police, revenue agents and information spies. Soon they had 200,000 letters of accusations. By last week, almost every Shanghai businessman was in trouble with the authorities; about 30,000 merchants had been investigated, fined or imprisoned. Fifteen Communist officials were dismissed; Li Yu, secretary general of the Shanghai party and once governor of Shantung province, was kicked out and ordered to undergo "profound self-reflection."

After the first few exemplary executions, the Communists apparently were satisfied to wring public "confessions" out of the accused, and punish them with huge fines--enough in many cases to drive them out of business. In their propaganda broadcasts, the Chinese Reds insisted that they were not eliminating private capital, just placing it "under control." Daily, scared shopkeepers, traders and bankers crowded into confession meetings. "I have had a proletarian ideology," confessed one Shanghai banker last week. "But I still behave like a capitalist."

Echoes of all this reached free Hong Kong last week in Communist newspapers and broadcasts boasting of the deeds, and was made vivid by Chinese businessmen who managed to escape from the mainland. They told harrowing tales of suicides among businessmen, and of anxious families waiting for the return of fathers or husbands, while loudspeakers in the streets brayed their names as lawbreakers. In trade-conscious Hong Kong, where until recently many British and Chinese merchants still thought it possible to do business with the Communists, disillusionment was complete.

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