RED CHINA: Unstable Achievement

Mao Tse-tung stood high on the Gate of Heavenly Peace, beamed down as half a million persons paraded before him in celebration of the eighth anniversary of the Communist conquest of China. There were the well-drilled children of the Young Pioneers, paratroopers, government workers with flowers in hand. Overhead roared Soviet-made jet bombers and Chinese-made jet fighters. Also on hand were goodwill delegations from Burma and Cambodia, Bulgaria’s Premier Anton Yugov, and Hungary’s Premier Janos Kadar.

Kadar’s presence was an unnecessary reminder that Red China had its own problem of unrest. Last week there was little talk of “liberating” Formosa. Instead, speaker after speaker bragged of the triumph over internal enemies. Attacks on the Red regime “have been smashed by the people in all parts of the country.” crowed Defense Minister Marshal Peng Teh-huai.

The brags were inadvertent admissions of the depth of the unrest. Only a week earlier, Dr. Hu Shih, modern China’s most eminent philosopher and most respected scholar, speaking for Nationalist China at the U.N. for the first time since 1945, documented some of the details of last summer’s student revolt that the regime had tried hard to suppress. It began, said Dr. Hu Shih, with a meeting of 8,000 students at Peking University, where 19 student leaders openly attacked the Communists’ suppression of freedom, spread when the leaders launched a periodical calling on students all over the country to the fight. Hu Shih quoted one of the student leaders: “The call is for the mobilization of an army of one million youths to fight Communism, to oppose the so-called revolution, and to overthrow the real enemies of the people.”

Through the years, Chinese students have often led the way for their elders, sounded the bell that called China to reform and revolt. And this time, said Hu, “the response was almost unanimous from all student bodies in every part of China —from Mukden to Canton, from Shanghai and Nanking in the east to Chungking and Chengtu in the west.”

Moving swiftly, the Communists arrested scores of leaders, broke up demonstrations, suppressed news of those riots that defied control (e.g., in Hanyang). “Those popular manifestations are clear and unmistakable evidences,” said Hu, “to prove that the Chinese Communist regime . . . is as unstable and as shaky as was the Hungarian regime of Rakosi and Gero.”

The world must not be misled by the apparent acquiescence of China’s captive intellectuals, said Hu. “In the old days,” he said, “so long as a man remained silent, he would not be molested.” But today men are forced to speak and write praise of the Red regime. Under Communist rule, said Hu Shih, there is not even the “freedom of silence.”