The Voice of Red China

The paper is a colossal bore. Turgid editorials crawl on, column after column; leaden propaganda handouts in the form of "news" stories weigh down the front page. But in Communist China, nearly everyone who is anyone reads the People's Daily of Peking--and for good reason. As the official organ of both party and government. the eight-page daily (circ. 700,000) is handbook and scripture to right-thinking Chinese Reds.

Last week People's Daily celebrated the tenth anniversary of its birth in 1948 in Yenan, whence the Communist leaders had launched their grab for all China. Today the paper employs 500 card-carrying newsmen, has just moved into a gleaming new Peking building equipped with eight gleaming new presses from East Germany, and can claim some of the most devoted readers in the world. Issues are posted at city intersections, read aloud down on the farm, devoured top to bottom and right to left by jailed counter-revolutionaries taking the cure, and spelled out by Asiatic nomads who will walk many a mile for the camel that brings in their copies.

Tract & Polemic. People's Daily, largest and most widely circulated journal ever published in China, is edited by shy, chain-smoking Wu Leng-hsi. who reportedly lost an eye fighting during the civil war. Wu is also director of the government's Hsinhua News Agency ("the ear and mouth of the Party. Government and People"), which is closely allied to People's Daily, has 31 bureaus in China and 23 overseas, e.g.. Geneva. London, Paris, but not the U.S.

Since both People's Daily and Hsinhua (also known as the New China News Agency) are directly responsible to the party's propaganda department. Editor Wu gives his readers their three cents' worth of tract and polemic. Major party decisions are announced in customarily unsigned editorials, e.g., last month's blast at "deviationist" Yugoslavia. On occasion, People's Daily even carries punditry under the most imposing bylines in the nation: Premier Chou En-lai and Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

To ease the ennui of story after story on agriculture reform and steel production, People's Daily offers no sports page, no comics, no Peking Tom gossipists. Instead, the paper prints letters from readers complaining about such matters as the size of bicycles ("I am 4 ft. 10 in. tall, and I've been waiting for a suitably sized bicycle for years"), and leaky fountain pens exported to Russia ("The consequences could be bad''). Occasionally, someone will attack a minor partyman. Item: an 'official named Kuo Pei-cheng was accused of keeping a 14-year-old girl up until midnight "so that he could help her with her own private five-year plan."

Fact & Fancy. And then there are always the Americans to brighten things up. Nearly every issue carries a feature called "So This is Life in the 'Free World.' " a mishmash of fact and fancy headed by a caricature of two gangsters armed with a truncheon and a revolver. Samples: P: "Hear how gambling [illegal in China] flourishes in the Kingdom of the Dollar: The governor of Nevada says that gam bling is just a lawful business in his state. It's the main source of state revenue." P:"American tradition: the American wife of a foreign prince bought a Negress from Africa as a maidservant for her club in the Austrian Alps. She said she considered the price--$200--as fair, and added: 'I'm a native of Georgia, where it's a tradition to have Negro slaves. That's why I bought the girl.' "

People's Daily leaves local news to Red China's 170-odd provincial dailies, but the government has recently taken the precaution of nationalizing every one of them to ensure proper interpretation. In his own shop, Editor Wu is busy purging newsmen who were incautious enough to take up Chairman Mao's invitation a year ago to criticize the government. Since Christmas, at least 13 People's Daily staffers have been sacked for straying off their Marx. The official charge: "Seeking the so-called freedom of bourgeois correspondents to find out whatever they could."

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