Essay: WHAT THE U.S. KNOWS ABOUT RED CHINA

EXCEPT for flies, beggars and Americans, Communist China is not a Forbidden Land in the way in which that celebrated term applied to Tibet. In an age of satellite eyes-in-the-sky, it is certainly not Terra Incognita; its huge land mass, slightly bigger than all 50 U.S. states, lies naked before the orbiting cameras. The figurative curtain that it has drawn around itself is not of iron but, more appropriately for the Orient, of pliable bamboo. Yet of all the earth’s too many closed societies, that of Red China ranks as the most ominously secretive. This secretiveness, paranoiac in its intensity, is the more worrisome to the world because militant Red China is the global troublemaker with the greatest revolutionary threat.

Red China has brawled with its most powerful neighbors, India and Russia. It has urged on, by word and deed, the war in Viet Nam, has openly supported insurgency in neighboring Thailand and has exported subversion as far away as Africa. Its disciplined, indoctrinated population, which constitutes a quarter of the human race, is told ceaselessly that the U.S. is “the world’s chief enemy.” To read the intentions of this sullen giant and to formulate its policy toward it, the U.S. obviously and vitally needs to heed the ancient dictum: “Know thine enemy.” Knowledge is the basis of policy—but just how much does the U.S. know, and how much can it find out, about a nation of such implacable hostility and resolute secrecy?

Sophisticated Snooping

There are two answers, one expectable, the other surprising. The first is that the U.S. knows not nearly enough, because secrecy inevitably covers with impenetrable shrouds certain facts about China. The second—and surprising—answer is that the U.S. knows more about Red China than does any other nation, with the possible exception of the Soviet Union. Says an expert who has been studying China for more than 20 years: “We know a lot more about some things in China than the Chinese themselves.” The practice of “Sinology”* is enjoying a boom in the U.S.: there are now ten major academic centers and 50 lesser centers for China studies, and some $50 million in private grants has recently been made for such studies.

China-watching has become the indispensable underpinning for the evolution of U.S. policy. To get the material they need to form realistic analyses, both Government and academic experts tap numerous and diverse sources, covert and overt. The U.S. maintains its largest consulate in Hong Kong, where a corps of translators collects and analyzes an endless stream of Chinese periodicals, some smuggled out from remote provinces. The compulsive outpourings of Radio Peking and other internal radio stations are monitored by a string of sophisticated snooping devices on China’s perimeter. Drone planes, high-flying U-2s and satellite cameras record roads, railways, steel mills, oil wells, nuclear plants, missile ranges and troop movements. U.S. Government analysts early spotted China’s gaseous diffusion plant at Lanchow, the plutonium reactor at Paotow, and the atom-bomb test site at Lop Nor in the Taklamakan wastes of Sinkiang. They have predicted well in advance the timing of all three Chinese atomic explosions.

China-watchers also pick up clues from the non-American tourists and businessmen (about 10,000 a year) who are now permitted to go on strictly conducted tours arranged by the Red Chinese tourist agency Luxingshe. Though they carefully emphasize the more attractive aspects of Chinese life, the tours nonetheless reveal a good deal of its quality and detail. The accompanying color pictures, taken on one such tour, show smiling children in their best dress, model schools, other civic projects and an air of brisk, bright uplift —but they also make clear the ceaseless indoctrination, the careful regimentation and the firm discipline that pervade life in Red China.

The volume of information about Red China has become so huge, in fact, that one of the major problems of both Government and academic Sinologists is how to handle, summarize and evaluate it all. Herewith, based on the best knowledge, deductions and estimates of more than 30 China experts interviewed by ten TIME correspondents in the U.S. and Asia, are the capsulated highlights of what the U.S. knows about Red China:

∙ THE REGIME. Seventeen years after its victory over Chiang Kaishek, the Communist regime is solidly entrenched on the mainland. The chance of an internal revolution that would overthrow the Chinese Communists, says Professor Robert Scalapino of the University of California, “seems remote, barring global war or some other major and unforeseeable crisis.” Other China experts agree. The Communists have unified the provinces, centralized all authority and imposed a totalitarian administration that has steadily tightened its grip on all phases of government and life. Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s chilling philosophy is that “all political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The gun that ensures his control is held by the Chinese Communist Party apparatus, whose 19 million members make up the largest of all national Communist parties. At its apex perch Mao and his top comrades in a seven-member Politburo Standing Committee; beneath them are a twelve-member Politburo, then 94 Central Committeemen. From there the party descends into tens of thousands of local branches whose vigilance reaches into every city block and every village hut. This pervasive network controls all facets of existence, pulls young and old into the web of ideological influence and ensures that no “foreign” political concept can take root.

∙ THE MILITARY. Red China’s armed forces of 2,700,000 men—roughly equal to the U.S.’s 2,935,562 and Russia’s more than 3,000,000—is formidable, but not a modern force by American or Russian standards. The infantry, 1.8 million men divided into 35 field armies (110 divisions), is well trained and adequately armed with light weapons, but it is woefully deficient in transportation, maintenance, service, communications and medical branches. In addition, there are a million security police and a militia of upwards of 20 million, most of them armed with makeshift or hand-me-down weapons. The army could probably defend China well in any homeland war against an invader, but its deficiencies allow it little ability to move far beyond China’s borders. The Chinese air force is second rate, consisting of about 175,000 men and 2,500 aircraft. Most of the jets (1,900) are obsolete for combat against the best U.S. and Russian craft. The country’s navy is negligible by big-power standards: 140,000 men, 30 to 50 diesel-powered Russian submarines, one missile-launching sub, a few destroyers and a flock of motorized junks. Despite three test explosions, nuclear capacity is still elementary. About 1,300 engineers and 500 scientists are working on the bomb, and estimates are that there will be ten to 20 bombs by the end of 1967. But there will be no ICBM until at least 1970, and, unless there is a real forced draft effort, no serious ability to get a bomb on target with that missile until about 1985.

∙ THE ECONOMY. It is still quite a mess, but improving. China’s gross national product is estimated at $70 billion (compared with Japan’s $71 billion, Britain’s $86 billion, the U.S.’s $714 billion). After a rapid expansion in the first decade of Red rule (the G.N.P. reached $85 billion in 1959), the economy was badly set back by the failure of the Great Leap Forward (backyard steel furnaces, instant communization), a monument to statist mismanagement. University of Michigan Professor Alexander Eckstein believes that the mismanagement of the Leap “cost the Chinese economy roughly a decade of growth.” The economy has been improving for the last two or three years, but it is now approaching only its 1957 levels. (By contrast, little Taiwan’s per-capita production is almost three times as large as Red China’s.) Another indicator of the economy’s state is the number of motor vehicles in Red China; the country’s pitiful total of 236,600 compares with 5,782,085 for Japan, 4,391,000 for the Soviet Union, 830,063 for New Zealand. As for any comparison with the U.S., there are nearly three times as many cars and trucks in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (706,653), as in all of Red China. Mainland China remains largely an underdeveloped country, still at subsistence level. Its economy is still basically agricultural, and its agriculture is still largely primitive. Just to keep up with an annual increase of 15 million people in population, the regime needs to increase food production by 2% to 3% a year—a mark it has not yet attained. Concentration of food production has forced a cutback in the rate of new plant construction, and the removal of Russian aid and the high cost of nuclear development have also hurt the economy.

∙ LIVING CONDITIONS. No one is starving any more, and the average Chinese is better off than he was even five years ago. The standard of living is still low, but the people appear healthy and adequately fed and clothed. There are equal if slim rations for all: about 2,000 calories a day of food, two dresses or an equivalent two yards of cotton cloth a year, one bar of washing soap a month. An equitable rationing system of such basics as rice has been introduced. Wage levels and food prices are both low. Chinese earnings range from $8 a month for an apprentice to $24 for a skilled industrial worker, $80 for an engineer, $100 for a party big shot. A pound of pork costs 20¢, a pound of sugar 28¢, a pound of rice 5¢. Housing costs only $1.20 a room per month, but the accommodations are spartan. Flies, beggars and pickpockets have mostly disappeared—but so has something else. “There is no magic and no fascination,” wrote Lorenz Stucki of Neue Zürcher Zeitung, after a recent visit to Red China. “Life has become an abysmal bore.”

∙ MORALE. The temper of the country is generally stoic; there are no signs of popular restiveness, but no signs either of a really contented people. The Chinese are proud that they have achieved unity and become a force on a world scale, after a rankling century of humiliation by foreigners. Now that the country has settled down internally, the party’s big problem is to retain revolutionary momentum. This it seeks to do with regular campaigns of “rectification,” which Mao defines as “one of the methods of evolving social contradictions in our country” but which is really a fancy word for purge. Though experts disagree about its extent, there is definitely dissidence and some underground opposition to the regime. In 1961 the army was ruthlessly purged of “corrosive and disintegrating influences.” Peking is now cracking down hard on the country’s 5,000,000 or so intellectuals, some of whom seem to be bothered by the deification of Mao and his thought, the implacable brainwashing and the minute surveillance and shepherding of individuals. The government continues the dreaded practice of shipping urbanites to the country or remote provinces as ideological discipline.

∙ THE LEADERSHIP. Mao Tse-tung is in his 73rd year, and his health seems ever more precarious. The Politburo averages 66 years of age, the Central Committee more than 60. Says Columbia University Professor A. Doak Barnett, a leading China expert: “This means that one can say, with actuarial certainty, that before very long virtually the entire top-leadership group will disappear during a relatively brief period, with results that will be felt at every level of the country.” The leadership’s ideas are also aging. Practically all of the top men are first-stage revolutionaries who made the Long March, the retreat from Chiang Kai-shek’s armies for 6,000 miles from east China to the barren northwest in 1934-35. They are afflicted with the “Yenan complex”—a belief in absolute, rigid adherence to the methods by which they survived and ultimately attained power. There are some among the Chinese leadership who clearly have doubts about the present course of Chinese policy, which is leading to a growing isolation of China; most of them are among the “new generation” that is faced with the day-to-day problems of running the country. Mao and his men are out of touch with and unsympathetic to the younger generation of the party, and Mao has already groomed as his heirs-apparent men who will be dutiful preachers of the Maoist gospel. Among them are Party Doctrinal Elder Liu Shao-chi, Teng Hsiao-ping, the party’s powerful secretary-general, and Lin Piao, the Defense Minister (see THE WORLD). Eventually, though, the younger generation is bound to rise to leadership, and the China experts hope—but it is only a hope—that they will be more concerned with internal development and less intractable than the present leadership.

A Certainty of Change

As much as the U.S. knows about Red China, the experts are the first to recognize that there is a great deal that it does not—and should—know. Almost nothing is known, for example, about the exact process of decision making among Mao and his colleagues. Who are the Red Chinese hawks and who are the doves? Is there a show of hands in critical disputes, or does Mao decide by fiat? The hardest information to get is on the party’s cadre organization, and only a minimum of biographical material is available on the leadership. The U.S. would like more information on agriculture and more reliable figures on the economy. It is particularly wary about a precise population count; the experts estimate the present population at 750 million, but concede that it could be as low as 650 million or as high as 800 million.

China-watching will become increasingly important as the old leaders fade back and the new ones come onstage. Says M.I.T. Professor Lucian Pye: “Though Chinese Communism is here to stay, it is certainly going to change greatly.” There are plenty of important clues for the China-watchers to keep their eye out for. They will watch for signs that the younger technocrats in the Chinese government are making any headway against the insistence on doctrinal purity, as the technocrats have done in Russia. Will the successors of Mao, involved with their own problems, retreat in the face of American power in Viet Nam, seek a compromise with the Russians, adopt a less inflammatory international stance, be less adamant about Taiwan?

Though no one is certain that a new generation of Chinese leaders would be any more moderate than the Maoists, the U.S. is already directing its policy more at the future generation than at the present regime. Well before the Fulbright hearings, the Administration had been constantly reviewing its China policy. Though the term “containment without isolation” is now in vogue, the U.S. has actually been pursuing such a policy for some time. If China is isolated, she has herself to blame. While opposing China’s designs on Southeast Asia by arms, the U.S. has made several overtures—and been rebuffed. It offered, for example, to exchange newsmen and scholars. It still keeps up diplomatic contacts with the Red Chinese in Warsaw.

If all of this has done no good so far, most Sinologists feel strongly that it is well worth the effort. Columbia’s Barnett describes it as a process of “slowly involving Communist China in more patterns of international intercourse.” Says Harvard’s John Lindbeck: “One of our obligations as world citizens is to help the Chinese to become more sophisticated.” Another Sinologist in his own right, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, speaks eloquently of a latent force that may be at work deep in the body of China as a modifying influence—”the pragmatic genius of the Chinese people.” These are the people whom Americans have known and befriended for more than a century, in missionary, educational and trade relations and as allies in a great war. Therefore, says Rusk, the U.S. does not assume that there is anything “eternal” about the “state of hostility” between the U.S. and Red China. “We must continue to explore and analyze all available information on Communist China and keep our own policies up to date.” In other words, neither China-containing nor China-watching can be relaxed.

*A term that properly applies to the study of traditional Chinese scholarship, but is popularly used today to embrace all studies of China.