Red China: The Mysterious Visitor

“All that men are willing to die for, beyond self-interest, tends more or less obscurely to justify that fate by giving it a foundation in dignity: Christianity for the slave, the nation for the citizen, Communism for the worker.”

So broods a character in André Malraux’s Man’s Fate, undoubtedly reflecting the author’s own vision in the 1920s when he spent two years in Canton as propaganda commissar for the Kuomintang, which was then an alliance that included the Communists. Last week, for the first time in 40 years, Malraux was back in China as guest of the Red leaders who achieved the revolution Malraux worked for as a young man. Too individualistic ever to join the party, Malraux’s own disillusion with Communism came with the Nazi-Soviet pact, and he has since embraced a narrower creed: Gaullism.

Jumped Ship. Yet Malraux’s return to his old haunts was almost as devious and shrouded in mystery as any of his assignments as a revolutionary courier. Ostensibly, he left his post as France’s Minister of Cultural Affairs on doctor’s orders to take a long, relaxing sea voyage. He boarded the steamer Le Cambodge, and his destination was Japan. But, at Singapore, he left the ship, caught a plane to Hong Kong. Next thing anyone knew, he was in Canton, asking to see the Whampoa Military Academy, where he had an office in 1925-26.

From Canton, Malraux went on to Peking and spent four days browsing in antique shops and visiting the Imperial Palace and the Temple of Heaven. There was also a three-hour chat with China’s Foreign Minister Chen Yi; Malraux blandly called it a tour d’horizon that included cultural relations between the two countries. Next, the visitor was off to see the Lung-men Grottoes near Loyang, the archaeological finds at Sian, and finally, the cave-riddled mountains of Yenan where Mao Tse-tung set up his headquarters after the 6,000-mile Long March.

Red Ladder. On his return to Peking, Malraux had a long talk with Premier Chou Enlai, followed by a banquet at which Malraux and Chen Yi tossed flowers at each other. Of Red China and France, Malraux said, “It’s true that our social systems are different. It is also true that both of us have had to battle against a powerful aggressor who, weapons in hand, came to fight in a place where he shouldn’t have been.” Malraux may have meant Japan’s invasion of China, but Peking was free to interpret his words as meaning the U.S. in Korea.

After the banquet came a three-hour visit with Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung and President Liu Shao-chi. Malraux suddenly produced a letter for Mao from Charles de Gaulle. In Paris no one would say whether the letter was in Malraux’s pocket when he left, or had reached him in Peking after he had advised the French embassy that things were going well.

Malraux did not clarify matters very much when he finally surfaced in Hong Kong last week. Shrugging away questions about his mission, he allowed that France hoped to sponsor a Chinese art exhibition in Paris. Wasn’t there more to his trip than that? Well, he had conferred with Mao Tse-tung on “the most important problems of our time, and it was obvious that Chairman Mao had as complete mastery of the situation as ever in his entire life.”