Dragon with Convulsions

In Hong Kong, the keyhole which gives the West an occasional peek inside Communist China, British businessmen have long felt that the Chinese Reds were here to stay. They scoffed at Americans who argued otherwise. Last week Hong Kong's respected weekly Far Eastern Economic Review, organ of influential British Far Eastern traders, sharply reversed itself.

In a remarkable lead editorial, the Review suggested that the Red regime of Mao Tse-tung may be racing toward a disaster "frightening in its immensity. The present domestic policy [of the Red government] involves a continuous series of convulsions which are shaking the economic machine to pieces . . . Propaganda of deceit and hatred is now so deafening that it is forcing the people to think for themselves in a curious reversal of cause & effect. The policy is suicidal ... It sacrifices technical and capital aid from the free world, it bars the way to reconstruction ... it keeps the nation down to a peasant economy." The Review insisted that "China must herself battle through the ordeal while the rest of the world can do little more than look on"; nonetheless, it intimated, the time is approaching when the Reds' "whole system and basic policy can be challenged."

Almost daily, new evidence of Red China's convulsions reach the British Crown territory. With their violent "five-antis" campaign against private business, the Chinese Reds have brought merchandising and much of industry close to a standstill. There is not enough cotton to go around. Shanghai, one of the world's largest ports, now scarcely ever sees an ocean-going ship; its wharves are empty, its dockyards without work now that trade with the West has been shut off. China's main source of revenue long has been taxation of foreign trade; now there is none to tax. Agriculturally, the Reds are also having trouble; last week Peking called for "anti-drought teams." District officials have been ordered to get spring planting completed ahead of time. Half a dozen small famine areas have been reported in the south. The Communist bureaucracy itself has been riddled by purges and dismissals of many hundreds, if not thousands, who refused to follow party directives.

In Washington and London, China experts thought Hong Kong was going too far in talking of a possible breakup of the Chinese Communist regime. But Red China, they believed, is plainly heading into critical stress & strain.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.