CHINA: The Lotus Eaters

Well fortified with edible portions of the lotus plant, symbol of indolence and forgetfulness, former Prime Minister Clement Attlee and his roving band of British Laborites last week craned their tourist rubbernecks at Red China. The entertainment provided at Peking was at least as lavish as that shown the British in Moscow. One night there was a ten-course dinner for 400 at The House of Magnanimity (a former imperial palace), where the menu featured melon prepared in the shape of the shaven head of one of Buddha’s disciples. On another occasion, a reception for 600, 23 toasts of mutual friendship and admiration were drunk in red and yellow wine—and they were kanpei (bottoms up) toasts. It was all very heady stuff.

By day, Attlee & Co. were graciously guided along Peking’s streets, past glowering portraits of Mao Tse-tung, Malenkov. Stalin and Molotov, through the famed Gate of Heavenly Peace into the old Forbidden City. They visited a model jail, well stocked with some 3,600 political prisoners, where they were told by a jailer that corporal punishment was forbidden, and “It is not permitted even to scold a prisoner.”

The seven British newsmen who had followed the Socialists out from England got few chances to share in these festivities. They seized the opportunity to look around at Peking’s wonders: the omnipresent soldiers, fully armed with submachine guns and even hand grenades (“In case of an invasion from Formosa,” said one Chinese official); the naked children, their bellies round with starvation, sitting apathetically in the city’s gutters. Meanwhile, well out of the newsmen’s hearing, Attlee and his fellow travelers talked long and earnestly with Premier Chou En-lai and his henchmen of the possibility of expanding East-West trade. At the end of the talks, a Chinese trade official, Lu Shuchang, told newsmen gratefully that British ships were already helping to bring steel, heavy machinery and other strategic materials from Western Europe to Red China. In London, British officials resorted to an Americanism to deny the assertion: “Baloney!”

After five days in Peking, the British pilgrims flew on to Manchuria. As they departed, Peking was aglow with the kind words they left behind. Said Clem Attlee: “We sympathized with the Chinese people in their long struggle . . . against the forces of reaction and wish well to the New China.” Said Aneurin Bevan: “Our presence is sufficient to show our support for the Chinese People’s Revolution.”

“What kind of confidence,” asked London’s conservative Daily Sketch, “can Britain have in such naive tourists who wander happily into the spider’s web and expect to tie a bow around his neck?”