For the past year a mammoth road show, designed to extol and illustrate the glories of life in the Soviet Union, has been touring the great cities of Red China. With more than 11,000 individual displays, the Exhibition on Economic and Cultural Achievements of the Soviet Union has impressed capacity crowds in Peking and Shanghai with the wonder of such purported commonplaces of Russian life as nylon stockings, sable stoles, wristwatches, farm machinery, tractors, trucks, and ladies’ high-heeled slippers.
Last month, after the Russian fair moved on to a specially built $2,000,000 pavilion in Canton, the Red propagandists decided to go after more skeptical game —the free Chinese in nearby Hong Kong and Macao.
Spies Welcome. Red newspapers in Hong Kong burgeoned with glowing advertisements promising “preferential treatments” in the form of cheap transportation, lodging and meals, and an almost complete relaxation of border restrictions to any Hong Kong or Macao Chinese who wanted to see the show.
“All are welcome,” promised the governor of Kwantung Province. “Even those who have been spies are not excluded, so long as they don’t carry out their activities this time.” By last week, as the fair drew to a close, some 20,000 had jumped at the offer.
Many of the sightseers who left the security of British and Portuguese territory to see the show were local Communists or employees of banks and other businesses under Communist control; many were merchants of supposedly neutral persuasion who were perfectly willing to see something good in Communism provided there was money in it. By far the greatest number were ex-Cantonese who seized the chance to see their home and perhaps their relatives once again.
All of them had been promised plenty of free time to do what they liked in the Communist city, but after arriving and being herded in small, carefully chaperoned groups through hour after hour of exhibits and lectures, few found more than an hour or two in their four-day visit to look up old friends. And when they got to their old neighborhoods, they were surrounded by neighborhood reception committees and could only cry “How are you?” to their families in public.
A handful got to see their families alone.
In such cases, the families had been cross-questioned in advance by Communist officials. One family told a visitor: “When you go back, please say something good about the exhibition or don’t say anything.”
Never Go Back. Whether from genuine persuasion or from fear, some followed the injunction. One who had entertained some doubt as to whether Russian women habitually wore sable returned thoroughly persuaded. “The plain facts were before us,” he said. “There is such a country in the world, and the lives of its people are happy.” But others were less convinced. One former Cantonese girl, returning with a set of printed postcards given her by a friend, was grilled for an hour at the border by agitated Communist officials demanding to know where she had hidden her camera and negatives to take such pictures. “As soon as I got back into Hong Kong,” she said later, “I wiped the sweat off my brow, looked back at the Communist flag and spat. I’ll never go back into that world again unless that flag is torn down.”
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