Tourism for Ugly Imperialists

Every Friday morning, Pakistan International Airlines flight 750, a Boeing 720 jet, takes off from Dacca in East Pakistan and heads for Shanghai--the only major flight by a non-Communist airline into Red China. PIA has been making the run for three months, charging $428 for economy class round trip, and so profitable has it turned out to be that the airline is adding a second weekly flight. The Chinese Communists are using the Pakistani planes to open the door, at least a tantalizing crack, to Western business and tourist dollars.

Kits promoting the tourist pleasures of Forbidden China have been sent to thousands of travel agents. Chinese consulates now grant tourist visas in a startlingly quick three days. The result has been an increasing flow of travelers and fellow travelers from almost everywhere except the U.S. (neither Washington nor Peking will permit Americans to enter).

Kindergarten Quacks. Those who do get in are allowed to see only the carefully polished edges of China. For $30 a day, not including transportation, they are chaperoned by official guides over a neatly policed route that takes in six cities, including Peking, and a few selected communes, schools and factories for those who are interested. The visits can be deceiving: one kindergarten class began a quacking song for the benefit of a French tourist. As he recalls it, " 'How charming,' I thought, 'a song about ducks.' But then I learned they were singing something that sounded like quan quoat quai, which means, more or less, 'Ugly imperialists, go home!' "

The London Daily Mail's Angus Macpherson, who went in on the first PIA flight, described the New China as "a land of spacious loveliness cultivated down to the last inch, crisscrossed with power lines." To tourists, the most vivid first impression is cleanliness--the result of a Communist Party drive to shame, cajole and organize the people into cleanup squads that left everything shining.

Bare Subsistence. Kitchens may be clean, but they are also bare. The people still subsist on cabbage and rice, although good harvests have ended the near famine of the early '60s. Sugar and wheat are still rationed, but ice cream and cakes are plentiful and cheap, and the stalls at the central markets are banked high with ornamental heaps of vegetables, meat, tiny eggs and fish. "China has not forgotten how to eat," one tourist was told by his guide. Nor has it forgotten how to cook--for those who can pay for it. The once-great cuisine of Peking has slipped, but French TV Commentator Maurice Werther, who traveled 10,000 miles during six weeks in China, would still give even tourist-hotel tables a two-star rating in Michelin.

China's big city hotels are fair and, for tourists with hard currency, inexpensive (about $6 for a single room with bath). Most of the time the plumbing works, the hot water is hot. But in winter, hotels in South China are poorly heated, and those in the north are so overheated that guests have to keep their windows wide open. In the summer, only Canton's Yangcheng Hotel has air conditioning--and it is turned on only between 5 and 10 p.m. Other hotels usually supply electric fans, but cut off all power every night. Still, the service is excellent, and so scrupulously honest that most travelers never bother to lock their hotel room doors. In fact, it becomes almost impossible to get rid of anything. One Briton tried to lose a hotel towel he had borrowed in Karachi, but it kept reappearing, wet and reproachful, at his every departure from every Chinese hotel. Finally, he claims, he had to carry it back to Karachi.

Rooftop Exercise. Despite China's many wonders, Western visitors find the atmosphere depressing. The cleanup squads wiped out not only dirt but the birds, thereby turning China into a vast songless plain beyond the worst dream of the late Rachel Carson. News from the outside world is silenced, too, and one lonely visitor said he felt as if he were on a ship at sea without a radio.

In the streets the Chinese are uniformly clad and often regimented; even the children usually march in ranks of three or four. Early every morning, Radio Peking broadcasts 15 minutes of calisthenics, and Chinese rush to parks, public squares or their own rooftops to follow the exercises. The physical culture cult is so strong that one traveler reports watching a woman doctor shadowbox down a crowded street without arousing even an inquiring glance.

Night life is virtually nonexistent. There is dancing until 11 p.m. at Peking's International Club, where a white-gloved bandleader leads the reeds through Red Sails in the Sunset and other period pieces. Otherwise, there is only a handful of dreary hotel bars, their offerings all home brews, including several poisonous brands of "whisky." The Communists claim, with apparent truth, to have "re-educated" all prostitutes into other callings--to the extreme discomfort of hot-blooded Cuban delegations. A distressed Frenchman reports that once-bawdy Shanghai has been "almost pasteurized," its palatial Grand Monde brothel remodeled into an all-purpose amusement center in which ten operas are performed, simultaneously, in ten separate theaters.

"I often wondered how there could be a population problem," says French TV-man Werther. "One can see a boy and a girl walking side by side, but rarely arm in arm and never hand in hand." Some tourists can't even tell the boys from the girls: both sexes wear mannish haircuts and high-necked coveralls. One Pakistani visitor reports that bosoms are being "ruthlessly suppressed" to de-emphasize sex. Complains Werther: "I saw a woman's leg only twice. Nothing but pants."

Current Attractions. Propaganda, now directed almost as much against Russia as the West, is a constant nagging companion. Pamphlets in every major language are strategically placed in every hotel; from glass boxes on the streets stare the pictures and life stories of the latest Communist Heroes and Model Workers, and giant wall posters admonish the masses to "Meet Production Quotas Ahead of Schedule." Moviegoers see almost nothing but Chinese films, heavily propagandized. And China's ancient, superbly gaudy folk opera has been turned into the hardest of all Communist Party sells. Sample playbills during one recent Peking opera week:

People's Theater: Busybody Li, the story of an overeager woman on a commune.

People's Art Theater: After the Bumper Harvest.

Labor Theater: Sentry Under the Neon Lights, the story of how the "Good Eight Company" stood firm against the temptations of big city life in evil, immoral old Shanghai.

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