Chapter 13 Chapter 2 Mao's Inside Story of China

From April to August 1971, three well-trained "New York Times" reporters visited China successively.In fact, the communist-revolution in China that they report seems to have been a good thing that successfully liberated the long-oppressed Chinese people, and has no particular malice against us. Over the past 20 years, our suspicion and hostility towards China have gradually weakened.Judging from these reports, it seems that in those years we were still wasting investment in foolproof defense, in fact, our technology was enough to afford effective defense. In August, James Rolston wrote in Shanghai: "The Chinese attitude and pursuit of life make one wonder why Washington is so worried about China as an aggressive and expansionist country. They pay more attention to Internal things...until we tried to 'surround' China, they locked their doors and satiated themselves. They had enough land, resources, and population." In 1944, Harrison Foreman, an army reporter, was allowed to visit Yan'an, and he was very pleased Happy to feel that Mao and his colleagues have a great future. Twenty-eight years later, The New York Times' coverage of Red China confirmed that view.To cater for diehards who still haven't kept up with the Times' foreign policy changes, the cover says "Red China" in red letters, but also mentions the People's Republic (in small print).On the back cover is Scotty Reston and Zhou Enlai sitting side by side, discussing policies.In the New York Times on August 9, their conversation took up 26 pages and provided much information, while the 20 hours of conversation between Kissinger and Zhou a month earlier did not report anything.In fact, the intellectuals who were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution were only a small part of Chinese society.

Dilman Durden had reported on China for 15 years before Mao came to power.Seymour Topping learned about China during and after the Second World War. His wife Audrey donated a lot of news cables and photos. She is the daughter of Canadian diplomat Chester Ronin and is very famous. Talent, she was in China from 1946 to 1948, and came to China for the second time in 1966.Given Reston's previous conversations with many leaders of countries other than China, it is impossible to find a better person to make an assessment. Like the sinologist Rip van Winkle, Dayton made a comparative study of old and new China.He found that in New China there was no sign of reverence for ancestors or religious precepts, no women using cosmetics, no old literature or dramas, no ornate weddings or funerals, "even the way of life and moral conduct of the people seemed to have changed . . . Seems more forthright and less formal."Durden reiterated that his team of international journalists "does not have contact with the people, but is taken by translators to places for foreigners to visit".On the other hand, in May, Audrey Toppin and her father went to the hometown of his mission—Fancheng, 175 kilometers northwest of Wuhan, Hubei.They found that the population there had risen from 40,000 to 189,000, there were more than 200 large and small factories, 38 middle schools, and 13,000 students. It was indeed New China.

The general impression these very experienced observers had of China was that the country was young, self-confident, well-organized, and diligently devoted to solving social problems of material production, sanitation, literacy, and technological improvement.The old city is dilapidated, and the new industrial area on the outskirts of the city is very crude, but more livable.The countryside was the focus of development, and Maoism was transforming peasants into politically dynamic and responsible city dwellers.Transportation is still limited to rail, cars and bicycles.Public health care uses the combination of traditional Chinese and Western medicine to develop in rural areas, eliminate diseases and slow down population growth.The economic effort was to decentralize industrial areas and to keep as much as possible the distribution of production of consumer goods at the level of the communes.In the former bazaars, rural communes and production teams were established.They practice regional self-sufficiency as part of China's overall self-sufficiency.What else is Mr. Dulles worried about?

In Beijing, Reston was often reminded of "the scene of American life on the frontier a century ago ... the country is working to fill up the many cooperative warehouses ... reminding us of our simple farming life before".This is very attractive, but it does not bring any enlightenment to the future of China and the United States. Our two civilizations will obviously continue to exist side by side: one that celebrates civil liberties and one that emphasizes self-sacrifice; one that blames the police state and one that rejects individualism.Neither Mao Zedong's teachings nor the reporters of the US News Service will relegate rice-rice China and motorized America to the egalitarian new world.Americans will continue to believe in expansion - whether we call it a belief that changed the world in this generation, or free enterprise that put a man on the moon - while the Chinese invented ancestor worship, bureaucracy and imperial examinations long ago , will continue to invest faith in social organizations.Direct observations and before-and-after comparisons of these different cultures enable the New York Times reporters to assess China's realities far ahead of the US government. Thirty-five years ago, Nixon purged a group of American diplomats stationed in China, such as John Carter Vincent, Edmund O. Crabbe, John Barton Davis, John Stewart Shaves, etc., if they Remaining unremoved may provide the White House with useful insights that do not stem from the European study.

After entering the academic world, Mr. Kraber published two important works on modern Chinese history, one of which was "China and Russia: The Big Game" (Columbia University Press, New York, 1971), which put the current Sino-Soviet relations in the context of In the long and complicated background between the two empires.Mr. Davis' memoirs are included in The Tail of the Dragon (Norton, New York, 1972).Mr. Xie Weisi published an instructive monograph "Some Problems in the History of US-China Relations" (University of California Press, Berkeley, China Studies Center, ed., 1971), analyzing what he saw and heard for the first time in Yan'an.At that time, Mao and Zhou proposed to develop a cooperative relationship with the United States. In January 1945, they even asked to meet with Roosevelt to discuss the details of anti-Japanese military cooperation.We can be thankful to have these works that provide the historical truth of the time, but it is even more fortunate that one of the authors was able to join our group and visit Beijing in the week after February 21, 1972.If we had asked these officials in 1965, not a single one of them would have accepted the idea that Asians could be bombed to the negotiating table.

While Dayton and Toppin made a before-and-after comparison, the German journalist Klaus Mahant gave the American public a comprehensive and detailed introduction and compared it with Sino-Soviet relations.Mahant is familiar with four cultures, his parents are German; he was born in Moscow and lived in Russia in the early 1930s; he went to Berkeley and Honolulu in the late 1930s and married an American wife; He compiles a magazine in Shanghai.He first learned about China in 1929 and 1936. In 1957, he went to China again. In 1971, with the help of his old friend Prince Sihanouk, he traveled to 14 provinces in one month, the year before the breakthrough in ping-pong diplomacy.

As a special opportunity visitor from West Germany, Mahant traveled 3,000 miles and met hardly a single Westerner.He not only visited Guangzhou, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing and Beijing, but also went to Xi'an, Yan'an and Dazhai in Shanxi Province and some model units.He touched on sensitive issues, such as the reward system; his reporting was richer and more thorough than that of New York Times reporters, who were limited to a few hundred words.If American journalists dwarfed the State Department, Klaus Mahant left them far behind.This is mainly because he is very familiar with the Soviet system, which helps him to have a deep understanding of China.He was particularly well versed in the ideological sphere of debate between the two communist countries, and it was easier for him to understand China than between the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong's China.

Mahant spent 24 hours in the famous Dazhai brigade in Shanxi.He learned that on this 53-acre land, there lived 83 families, 420 people, 150 laborers, 100 livestock, 150 pigs, and 400 sheep.There were 4.5 million visitors to the national "Agricultural Learning from Dazhai" day, a slogan coined by villagers trying to rebuild their homes on their own after the 1963 floods. In 1971, people in Dazhai even built a pair of electric cableways to transport loess to build terraced fields. Jin Hante pointed out that the secret of Dazhai is just "work, work, and work"—not for money, but only for "admiration for Chairman Mao and society. socialist motherland".Farmers deposit their money in the bank without knowing the interest rate.Strong male laborers get 10 work points a day; weaker female laborers get 7 work points a day.These people do not have daily wages, but only record work points every day, but the salary standard must be discussed and determined at the annual villagers' assembly, which mainly depends on people's "political awareness". (What was revealed after Mao’s death told us that Dazhai was a false model, not what it was claimed to be. For example, some of the labor was done by soldiers. The model village carefully shaped by Mao is now hated by people.)

Mahant also visited the "May 7th" cadre school in northeast Beijing, where urban cadres and intellectuals engaged in manual labor in order to better "get close to the masses."There are 1,255 male and female cadres and cultural workers.According to a brief introduction, these people transformed the barren land, dug wells, built houses, built brick factories, metal products factories, and canning factories. People worked hard and ineffectively under the teachings of Chairman Mao and the improvement of "revolutionary consciousness", and cleaned toilets. , to transport feces.Only when one thinks of the privileges granted to Chinese literati by the ruling class in ancient times, can one understand how much these people were hit in the "Cultural Revolution".

Mahant feels that Russia and China cannot be compared. One is a country of industrialization and expert management, and the other is an agricultural and anti-expert country.He saw the Soviet Union as a society that focused on individual merit and consumption, while China was a society that focused on egalitarianism and production.The centralized rule and bureaucracy of the Soviet Union contrasted with the decentralization and self-consciousness of China.But while the Soviet Union became less and less talkative and gradually opened up to the outside world, China in 1971 remained insular, committed to the self-help of activists and Mao's efforts to counter the constant revolution that the new privileges fostered.Mahant doubts that selfless people armed with Mao ideas can be created soon. He worries that "Chinese people's ideas may be easily controlled and used." (He found the cult of Mao omnipresent, which, of course, has now been broken.) How would less experienced American leaders treat Mao's China?China specially invited foreign guests to China to see the achievements of the revolution, which led to the publication of a large number of books.Shirley MacLaine wrote "I Look at China".The first half of the book, "From Here to There", details her experience in Hollywood and television with the McGovern movement and those evil individualists, sexual perverts and philistine businessmen, which Mao's revolution must avoid at all costs ugly phenomenon. At the end of 1971, at the invitation of Chinese Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua (he is a sociologist interested in human practice), McClain led a group of 12 women to visit China. In April 1973, the delegation arrived in China.They were as different as they were from Noah's Ark: a 200-pound woman from Mississippi with huge breasts and dark skin, a Wallace from Texas, a New Mexico native, Lessing, a 12-year-old schoolgirl, a no-nonsense Republican, several college students, a photographer. "They were all women's rights activists, each with their own separate personalities and careers."

These Americans were unprepared for the travel itinerary in China, exhausted and subjected to a huge culture shock, China "coming to them".They are in Shanghai, but their thoughts are still in the United States.As their leader said: "I talked to people about religion, death, marriage, money and happiness, and I always tried to understand their new society." In the end, they brought back a lot of information, and no doubt their Chinese masters still believed in Mao Zedong. Thought: "It is reasonable to rebel." Shirley MacLaine believes that the achievements of the Chinese revolution cannot be simply attributed to the dictatorship of the proletariat. "There are other factors at work, and people are connected to each other in a way that I have never seen before."She believes that this is the result of self-criticism that does not allow for the expression of individual creativity. "Perhaps in the new society, the artistic expression of individualism is not needed for honest people to exchange opinions".She compared China to "the American ethos of violence, crime and bribery .A year later, McClain said: "China makes you believe that anything is possible." Portions of this article are excerpted from The New York Times Coverage of Red China by William Durden, James Rolston, Seymour Toppin, and Audrey Toppin (edited by Frank Singer, New York, Four Corners Publishing House, 1972) and Klaus Mahant's "The Return of China" (New York, Dutton Press, 1972), published in the New York Review of Books, February 24, 1972; in part From a review of Here and There by Shirley MacLaine (Norton, New York, 1972), published in The New York Review of Books, May 1, 1975.