The Great Dissembler
(See Cover)
With rhetorical sarcasm, the U.S. Secretary of State asked at Berlin: "Who is this Chou En-lai?"
There have been many and varied answers, some old, some recent, some true, some wrong, some regretted. From an old U.S. China hand: "A sort of Chinese Talleyrand." From a fellow-traveling Indian diplomat: "A second Nehru!" From a onetime kingpin in the Chinese Communist movement: "A Chinese Molotov." Chiang Kai-shek is reported to have called him "a reasonable Communist." General George Marshall once spoke of him with "friendship and esteem" and thought him a man of his word.
Bitterly anti-Communist Journalist
Freda Utley once wrote: "Chou is hard to resist . . . witty, charming and tactful." From a Chinese newspaperman in Tokyo: "I should say he is the most impressive public figure I have ever met." From K. C. Wu, the now exiled governor of Formosa: "He has killed people with his own hands." From a U.S. officer who, like many others, once trusted Chou: "I left thinking he was a friend ... If I saw him today I think I would kill him." And from Chou En-lai himself: "You must't forget that I am a Communist."
Mimeograph Message. One of the master dissemblers of the age, Chou En-lai sat, urbane and self-possessed, among the powers at Geneva this week to make war with talk of peace. A dark blue tunic encased his widening but still trim, erect body. The grace of his carriage, the slim, expressive hands and the dark-browed handsomeness of his face belied the man's age (55) and the ugliness he had helped impose on mankind. Chou
En-lai-Premier and Foreign Minister of the Chinese People's Republic, member of the Politburo and Central Committee, veteran of the long intrigue and the Long March, trusted confidant of the Kremlin-spoke at Geneva as one of the masters of a seventh of the world's land surface, a fourth of its people.
The voice was shrill and hostile-far from the bland, candid tones which had once beguiled Chinese and unwary Westerners alike into misreading the nature and underestimating the strength of the Communists. The message he uttered came straight from the Kremlin's Mimeograph room (see above). But for the first time, as Chou took pains to point out, Red China was sitting with the big powers.
However the U.S. tried to minimize its significance, the presence of Chou En-lai (pronounced roughly Joe 'N. Lie) at Geneva symbolized a hard reality. Communist China was determined enough to demand a major role in world affairs, strong enough to get it. In the brief span of four years, Mao Tse-tung and his coterie of Communists had found the means to stalemate the military forces of the world's greatest power on the battlefields of Korea. They had, after rushing to aggression's service in North Korea, replaced Russia as North Korea's occupier. They had been able to arm and direct, with little or no cost in Chinese blood, a war in Indo-China that might well lead to the capture of all Southeast Asia by Communism. They had cowed the once great French nation into a yearning for dishonorable surrender; they had spurned the outstretched hand of once mighty Britain; they had ordered the U.S. to get out of Asia and the Pacific. At Geneva they now poke rudely at the chest of the West and hope to find there the faint heart of a new Munich. They now demand a voice in the affairs of the Europe that, a generation ago, was sure that it ordered the affairs of China as surely as it ordered about its ricksha boys.
Much of what the Communists have wrought in China was begun before them by the revolution of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kaishek; the Communists simply stole the revolution by deceit and mutiny while the country struggled against Japan. That power could not have been won without the carefully measured direction, aid and comfort of Communist Russia. The Communist rise in China might have been forestalled by wiser, firmer policies of China's Western friends. But what was relevant to the rest of the world last week was that China's Communists had been able to assemble the raw materials of power and put them to work. The main elements of that power: CJ United and dedicated leadership. Mao's hierarchy is welded together by more than 30 years' association. It has never had a purge comparable to Russia's."Never forget," said Chou En-lai to an American ten years ago, "that we Communists, like anyone else, will have our disagreements or irritations or schisms. But anyone who tries to convince himself that we will permit these things to split or divide us permanently will be making a terrible mistake."
P: Control of the people. Never has centralized authority been more fierce, continuous or complete in China. Historically, in China, government control has stopped "at the edge of the village." But by meticulous use of murder, terror, force, and persuasion, the Reds have extended their military, economic and ideological hegemony down to the lowliest coolie; they have even, in fact, reached beyond -to his ancestors. The hallowed burial mounds near every farm village are being leveled, under a recent decree, to make land for more planting. P: A huge, battle-tested army. The number of Chinese in uniform is now estimated to be as high as 10,000,000, some 4,000,000 of them in the regular army and air force, the rest in the militia and armed police. Korea proved the best of them to be tough and resourceful fighters. CJ Large resources. There are vast quantities of undeveloped coal, timber, tin and iron ore. The first Five-Year Plan was too ambitious; already they have pulled back on it, but this failure does not obscure significant gains. The Reds claim to have increased industrial output by some 65% in twelve months. They are exporting coal, offering to sell some light goods, approaching self-sufficiency in cotton, rearing factories and shipyards, and building a network of railroads. P:The alliance with Russia. Russian military, technical and political advisers cluster by the thousands (estimates range from 20,000 to 100,000 in all) in Chinese cities, military bases and industrial centers. The big Chinese army gets its trucks, its artillery, its war planes-just about everything but its bodies-from Russia. The partnership throws the weight of Soviet Russia's own huge military power behind Red China. Within the limits of Moscow's assent, Peking may take risks greater than those based only on its own military strength. Red China's antagonists must consider at every juncture the possibility of conflict, not just with Red China, but with the Soviet Union as well.
"His Eyes Were Colder." Of the handful of brilliant, strong and pitiless men who long ago plotted and inexorably erected this structure of Red power in China, none has labored longer or more effectively than Chou Enlai. His grandfather was a mandarin-one of the powerful caste of scholar-bureaucrats of imperial days-and Chou was born into comparative wealth and culture. He attended a Western-style school where one of his classmates was K. C. Wu. Chou, Wu recalls, was one of the brightest boys and an accomplished actor; because he had clean-cut features and smooth skin, he invariably played female roles. By the time Wu next saw him, some 23 years later, Chou had changed. "His eyes were far colder; they had become the eyes of a man who could kill."
After an undergraduate year in Japan, Chou studied at Nankai University in Tientsin and there got caught up, as did so many young Chinese intellectuals, in the revolutionary movement. He joined a radical group called "The Awaken Society." Arrested in 1919 as a leader of a demonstration against the Versailles Treaty, Chou met in jail-and later married-another rioter named Teng Yingchao. She is now a bustling, bristling woman in her null who sits on the Central Committee, runs the Communists' massive All China Democratic Women's Federation.
Soon after Chou's brief spell in jail, he learned that a University of Peking librarian named Mao Tse-tung was recruiting students for a "work and study" program in France. He hastened to sign up. It turned out to be more work than study. Overworked in the sweaty coal mines of Lille (he also had a job in the Renault plant), Chou abandoned the pick for the hammer & sickle. In 1921. when the Chinese Communist Party was formed, 22-year-old Chou En-lai helped set up branches in France and Germany among Chinese abroad. In 1923 he made his first trip to Moscow to make his obeisances at Comintern headquarters; next year he was back home, enlisted in the cause and imaginatively obedient to its dictates.
Price on the Head. The Communists achieved an alliance with Sun Yat-sen's unsuspecting Kuomintang. Chou Enlai, then only 26, was made secretary and chief of the political department of the Whampoa Military Academy. China's West Point. There for the first time Chou came face to face with the man who was to be World Communism's bitterest and most consistent antagonist. Chiang Kaishek, soldier and Sun Yat-sen's most trusted subordinate commander, was then commandant of Whampoa. Not long after they met Chou became political commissar of Chiang's elite First Army. Chou was later detached to slip into Shanghai and organize an insurrection to prepare for Chiang's capture of the city from the Communists who had seized it.
With other Communists, Chou organized 600,000 workers into terrorist bands, trained a special sharpshooters' squad of 300 Mauser riflemen-not to take over for the Kuomintang but to reinforce the Communists. When Chiang learned of the plot, his First Army pounced on the city, battled the Communist insurrectionists in the streets (many were killed) and arrested the ringleaders. Chou was sentenced to death but escaped minutes before he was to face the firing squad. Subsequently he was adorned with two prized underground distinctions-a price of $80,000 on his head and a black beard on his chin.
This handsome, kindly-looking fellow also proved in other ways that he had the stuff of which top Communists are made. In 1932 one Ku Hsun-chang broke from the Communists and went to the police to inform on some 30 Red underground organizations, including an assassination team he said was commanded by Chou Enlai. While Ku was giving information to the authorities in Hankow, a band of men entered his household in Shanghai. One servant who had gone on an errand returned, and, she later testified, saw Chou En-lai-once a frequent visitor to the house-standing on the balcony laughing with other men. Loud opera music and the popping of firecrackers sounded from inside the house. The servant, scared, ran away. When Ku returned home from Hankow, he found his entire family and his servants-30 persons in all-sprawled through the bloody house. All were dead. Chou En-lai was never put on trial, but reliable K. C. Wu says flatly that Chou plotted and supervised the revenge. "Chou and his men killed the family right down to the babies," says Wu.
This is a side of slick Chou En-lai that the world has never been permitted to see. His more familiar talent-the ability to bob, weave and pirouette-was developed in party intrigues. He sided or seemed to side with one faction (e.g., Li Lisan, once the party boss) only to wind up in the end, unhurt and at the elbow of the ultimate winner, Mao Tse-tung, sometime librarian at Peking University. With his Whampoa training, Chou shared command of Mao's peasant armies with Chu Teh, the wily soldier whom Chou had the wisdom to recruit into the party in Germany in 1922. With his administrative deftness, Chou helped Mao lay the steely wires of discipline and organization across China's 3,500,000 square miles.
He helped plot the fabulous Long March, in which 30,000 Communists trekked 6,000 miles in 368 days to the northwest to escape Chiang's armies. One writer described him in those days: "His chin veiled by a black beard, Chou would ride a bristle-maned Mongolian pony out through the stone arches of Yenan. His only badge of rank as he cantered through the yellow hills were the caps of two fountain pens peeping out of the breast pocket of his shirt."
Most of all, he served the cause with mental agility and glib tongue. In 1936, when Chiang was close to exterminating Communism as a serious threat to the Nationalist government, Chou En-lai bewitched the "Young Marshal" Chang Hsuch-liang over to the Communist cause, infiltrated his 150,000-man army and talked Chang into such a state of mutiny that he kidnaped Chiang. On Moscow's orders (the kidnaping did not fit the Kremlin's long-range plans for China), Chou reversed himself, glibly negotiated Chiang's release, leaving the Young Marshal high and dry and his army in the Red ranks. Chou's ransom price for Chiang's release was betrothal with the Communists. It was the fatal marriage for the Nationalists.
A Guy Named Joe. Through the next nine years the accomplished actor with the smooth face and charming manner gave his greatest performance. Living in Chungking's poor district, exuding modesty, humility and the shine of honesty, he worked as liaison man between the Communists, the Nationalists and the Westerners in Chiang's wartime capital of Chungking. Suavely he persuaded Western diplomats, newsmen and soldiers of the Communists' good intentions and sincere desire to defeat Japan. The Marshall mission saw in him the signs of what General
Marshall once called "a definite liberal group among the Communists . . . who would put the interests of the Chinese people above ruthless measures to establish a Communist ideology."
The gentlemanly manner, the ability-rare among Chinese Communists-to talk familiarly of London, Paris and Berlin, the working knowledge of French and English did much to impress his hearers; so did his sheen of seeming selflessness in contrast to the opportunism around him in Chungking. And among his hearers were some only too ready to believe in Mao's "agrarian reformers." When the occasion demanded, Chou could break into tears-and did at least twice during negotiations with George Marshall. Once Marshall asked him if he had ever gone to Moscow. "No," replied Chou, lying but looking him straight in the eyes. One U.S. officer says that subsequent checkups proved that 90% of Chou's military reports to Marshall were false. "It's hard to describe him exactly," another U.S. officer said last week. "Maybe this will help. You pronounce his name like Joe, and-well, that's the kind of guy he seemed to me, like a guy named Joe. I thought for a while we could split him away. Then all of a sudden I knew I was wrong. He wouldn't agree that Monday was Monday unless it would help him."
Three Behind a Dictator. The convulsion of history that delivered China into Communism peeled the greasepaint of humility and decency from Chou. Chiang was left on the beaches of Formosa, his army beaten, his corruption-ridden government discredited. The Communists rode high. Now it was Chou who was
China's spokesman to the ouside world, its chief propagandist. As such, it was he who spread its monstrous lie about germ warfare and the confessions tortured from U.S. airmen. It is his job to deal with the Russians in that difficult and delicate re lationship that is somewhere between servitude and partnership. He is, like Molotov, a bigger figure abroad than at home; like Molotov, he is presumably in line for the succession but is apt to be passed over. He lacks stature as a theorist; above all, he lacks the essential grip on the party bureaucracy. He seems to lack the itch to be No. i, and to be content to be one of the Big Four (see box).
Whatever his precise rank, Chou En-lai stood before the world last week as the face and the voice of a giant determined to shut the U.S. and Western democracy out of Asia, hungry to consume that half of the world, ambitious to build itself from poverty to power, whatever the cost in blood or sweat. That the giant was formidable and growing more so every day, few would deny. But here again was a job for the great dissembler. Once he had persuaded others that Chinese Communism was small, meek and harmless. Now Chou En-lai's job was in great part to make the giant seem bigger and more formidable than it is or can be for some time to come.
Strength & Weakness. After five years in power the Reds have achieved control over the Chinese people, but they have won neither their allegiance nor understanding. Item: "The production sentiment of the peasants lacks stability," said a recent Communist cadre report, "and their understanding of the new production relations is obscure." Item: of the 20,440 Chinese captured by the U.N. in Korea, a devastating 14,209 refused to go home. The first wave of enthusiasm among China's landless millions, among many intellectuals and young Chinese, has waned severely. Land reform became not a matter of justice, but a brutal stamping out of landlords and recalcitrants, a mass injustice in which all had to participate and to share the complicity. Even inside the party there is loyalty trouble. Item: ". . . It is of paramount necessity," warned Party Dogmatist Liu Shao-chi last February, "that at this crucial stage all comrades . . . must wage unrelenting struggle against those who deliberately undermine party unity, stand up against the party, persist in refusing to correct their errors . . ."
Unable to command enthusiasm, the Communist compel obedience. The hapless Chinese cannot speak his resentment publicly or before his child, who has been taught to spy on him, or in front of a friend, who may be an informer. He can display his disapproval only by sullen compliance or by loafing on the job. The opposition is real but unorganized: a silent resistance that shows up not in guerrilla successes but in production failures.
More basic to the question of whether Chinese Communism lives or dies, or explodes some day into counterrevolution, or transforms itself into something else, are two special areas of weakness.
The first weakness lies within Peking's greatest present strength-the relationship to Soviet Russia. It is a long-range weakness. The short-term advantages of the alliance are so great for each side, the results already so efficacious that it would be futile to base current strategy or hopes as the British have notably done-on a Titoist divorce between Peking and Moscow. But it may not always be so. In Russia's help to China there is calculated restraint; Moscow has a vested interest in keeping Red China dependent on Russia, but Red China's leaders have talked em phatically and often of their plans to make Red China capable of supplying itself and all of Asia. Red China has complained that it needs more from Russia than Russia is giving (money credits are only $60 million to $100 million a year), and Peking's People's Daily warned recently that Moscow will not be able "to supply us with too much more." There is ample evidence that Peking badly needs and wants from non-Communist coun tries material that is not provided by Russia.
Even with generous help, and freedom to grow as mighty as it pleased, Peking would need a decade and perhaps longer to erect an industrial base equal to the demands of equipping its own armed forces with Chinese-made tanks, artillery and aircraft. Is it in Russia's plans to let Red China do that? China cannot be one of the powers of the thermonuclear age without thermonuclear weapons. Will Russia let Red China build them? The possibilities of cleavage may not happen in Mao's generation, for what binds two sets of international gangsters together is a mutual advantage greater than the friction which might drive them apart. The possibilities of split are there. The difficulty is that those who talk most about exploiting the frictions (e.g., Britain's Bevanites) believe that the way to separate China and Russia is to woo China. The likelier method is to increase the strain on both nations.
The second weakness lies in the combi nation of Communism, nature and man in China. In a ferocious gamble, the three have been brought into deliberate conflict. Mao & Co. are men in a hurry, ambitious to "build a mighty industry like Russia's" (said Mao in 1953) faster than Russia did it, by imitating the Russian pattern and, if possible, avoiding Russia's mistakes. The first Five-Year Plan is Chinese Communism's big push. In ,its first year the successes that Communist propagandists claim are due chiefly to reaching top capacity in factories already built by their predecessors and by the Japanese in Manchuria. Now the conflict is really getting under way.
There must be workers to build the plants and man the machines, and in a nation 80% peasant, they must come largely from the farms. So the farms must be made to produce more food with fewer farmers. To do that, tools, machines and fertilizers are required, but the men to make them cannot really be spared from the farms until tools and fertilizers are made available. Everything that is produced beyond the barest subsistence level must, for years, be sold abroad to raise capital for more factories, more machines, more canals and railroads.
That vicious circle almost tore Soviet Russia apart in 1929, at the beginning of Stalin's first Five-Year Plan. China, beginning in the 19505 what Russia began in 1929, starts with far less than Russia then had (it is about where Russia was in 1890). Russia's struggle to collectivize, apart from the monumental brutality of it, actually reduced food output (a result that has been repeated in every East European satellite). Before Russia collectivized, it had a normal surplus of some 10 million tons of grain a year. The surplus was used up; even so, more than 5,000,000 Russians starved to death. Only last year Russia's Nikita Khrushchev confessed that 35 years of Communist dogma have produced great failures and that farm production is lower than in Czarist 1913. Yet in the face of that confessed failure, Peking has chosen to gamble on the old system for China.
Bitter Struggle. China has no food surplus to live on during this inevitable drop in farm output. Nature was kind to the Communists during Mao's first three years in power. There were bumper harvests. But last year the Chinese mainland was beset by floods, drought, pests, wind and hail. In the cities there was rationing, and in isolated areas people starved. Peasants roamed into cities-20.000 into Mukden and Anshan in one month-to get jobs and food. In Peking, guards had to drive away 5,000 peasants. Chou En-lai himself unhappily gave the lie at home to the Communists' efforts to pretend to the outside world that the hunger had not come: "People in famine areas should be called upon ... to collect such substitute food as wild herbs for using as food during the period of shortage . . ."
U.S. specialists estimate that a 1954 harvest 10% lower than 1953's would spread famine through most of China. New grabs of territory, e.g., the rice bowl of Indo-China, might alleviate but would not solve the problem, for it is one of distribution as well as supply.
Red China's leaders are already tightening controls, increasing rationing measures and trying to prepare against the pressures of starvation. Not bothered with any sense of horror at the prospect of millions dying, they nevertheless must worry about the damage famine would wreak on the precious industrialization program and the problems of internal control it would raise.
Red newspapers, radios and orators are constantly exhorting the people: "Cultivate the style of bitter struggle." To the peasants they have directed warnings that baldly confess the dangers of starvation and their plans for dealing with it. "If the peasants do not carry out large-scale production," said People's Daily last November, "they will be unable to meet the needs of the nation . . . and will also cause difficulties for national industrial construction ... If the peasants do not unite to carry out large-scale production . . . there will surely be many poverty-stricken peasants." In short, if there is not enough to go around, the peasants themselves will be the first to starve.
Sounds & Postures. In the Red capital of Peking last month, when the party observed the first anniversary of Joseph Stalin's death, the orators showed that they were not blind to the problems and weaknesses before them. "The peace policy was a very important part of Stalin's life work," explained Vice Premier Chen Yun. "The Soviet Union secured 20 years of peace from 1921 to 1941, and it was an indispensable external condition for the completion of Socialist construction . . ."
For all their bellicose sounds and their ferocious posturing, China's Reds now want and need that "indispensable external condition." But external peace, to the Communists' way of thinking, is not won by good fellowship and accommodation. Nor is it a quiet state of live-and-let-live equilibrium. It is a state of constant agitation and movement, of keeping the pressure on, of feinting to suggest menace where no real menace exists and masking menace just when it is about to prevail. It is a state of yielding an inch only when it is satisfied it will gain a mile.
In all these delicate arts, Chou En-lai excels. He has tyranny's advantages in that he has no popular opinion in his own nation to answer to and thus can pretend a monolithic support that does not exist. At Geneva he confronted a West whose purposes are suddenly cloudy, whose unity is cracked and whose will power is sapped. The dissembler could afford his mocking smile.
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