A Terribly Normal Country

LOVE AND HATE IN CHINA by Hans Koningsberger. 150 pages. McGraw-Hili. $3.95.

Hans Koningsberger is plainly dis satisfied with much that has been writ ten about Red China. He scorns "sta tistics" served up by China-watchers. He wants no part of journalistic "prej udice" or "travelogues." In this slim account, he professes to add his own new dimension -- "a novelist's descrip tion of the moods and atmosphere" inside the world's most secretive closed society.

A New Yorker who writes English fiction and who travels on his native Dutch passport, Koningsberger waited four years for a visa, then last summer made one of those brief tours, with stops in Peking, Shanghai, Nanking, Hangchow and Canton, that Peking now conducts for non-Americans.

He does not speak Chinese and he is averse to bureaucratic interpreters; so Koningsberger had to rely heavily on his literary intuition and imagination. He had never visited pre-Communist China and did not go to Taiwan, but he is sure that China under Chiang Kai-shek was an abominable place where, as he says, millions continually starved or drowned. The "love and hate" of his title deal less with the people of Red China than with his own divinations.

"Being in China," he observes, "is full of manic-depressive experiences for a foreigner: alternating boredom and annoyance with love and admiration." As it turned out, little annoyed him, and almost everything stirred his admiration.

No Dissent. Koningsberger found the people looking well fed and clothed. Shops seemed well stocked; there was no "atmosphere of scarcity," despite contradictory evidence of rationed rice and cloth. No "blue ants slaving away" --except for the familiar "drag coolies" hauling inhuman loads of coal and pig iron. No beggars anywhere, no flies even on manure heaps. The countryside appeared to be the immemorial land of the peasant--few motor highways, trucks or tractors but plenty of human feet treadling water wheels. Soldiers with guns nowhere to be seen. In short, "the daily comings and goings of the people look terribly normal."

"Of course," concedes Koningsberger, "people are not free to talk." Nor do "voices of dissent" have a chance. Yes, there is brainwashing, but a nurse and a doctor told him that brainwashing makes an intellectual "happier afterward." Officials can be truculent and exasperatingly self-righteous about their government's policies, but this is "only the wrapping of China."

Order & Morality. Peel away the wrapping and what lies underneath? A "new morality" and a "new class." The new morality means that "everyone works for the commonwealth rather than for himself." The new class is the Communist Party "elite," who have power but "nothing else." They are "incorruptible" and have given China honest rule at last. Above all, "the program of the Chinese Government is clearly imposed upon its people, not by force, but by forceful persuasion." Less intuitive China-watchers might wonder why this is so clear, recalling (as Koningsberger does not) the 10 million Chinese who were forcefully persuaded into liquidation by the new class in the 1950s.

Coming out at Hong Kong, Koningsberger felt really depressed. He was back in a place with more freedom and more food, true, but also with beggars, pickpockets, litter and Coca-Cola hawkers. Behind the Bamboo Curtain he had left order and morality.

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