GREAT BRITAIN: Tea & Toasts

Deep within Peking’s Forbidden City, beneath lacquered ceilings, Mao Tse-tung last week received the onetime Prime Minister of Great Britain, Clement Attlee, and the Labor Party delegation to Red China. It was the first significant audience Mao had granted Westerners since he conquered vast China in 1949.

Smiling, his broad peasant’s face edged with long black hair, Mao came forward to shake hands with each member of the Laborite delegation; he inquired courteously after their health, and concerned himself whether or not they were enjoying their visit. Amid the City’s glaze work and its splendid vases, cups of fragrant tea were served. Then Mao, flanked by the party’s chief theoretician, Liu Shao-chi, and by Premier Chou Enlai, began to speak. Before them in a hall where Chinese emperors once received their vassals, Clement Attlee and his Britons settled back into overstuffed chairs.

Four Demands. For three hours the talk ranged freely over Asian issues like the “regulation” of Formosa, the seating of Red China in the U.N., the future of Korea. Mao, now speaking vigorously, now pausing to take soft note of the British replies, felt free to lay down “what Socialism in Britain can do to facilitate peace in the East.”

Mao’s demands were fourfold and explosive: 1) America must withdraw the Seventh Fleet from the Formosa Strait; 2) America must cease arming Japan; 3) America must not be permitted to arm Western Germany; 4) Britain’s Labor Party must “arrange a more reasonable foreign policy along such lines.” Thus, after ten days of “bottoms-up” and rice-wine toasts to the Queen, Red China now showed the lotus-tour Laborites its hand: it hoped to enlist British Socialism —which got more popular votes than Churchill’s Conservatism in the 1951 general election—in its campaign to “unify” Asia. Privately, Chou En-lai suggested that Britain might join Red China’s long-sought chain of “Asia for the Asians” nonaggression pacts—indicating that Chinese Communism, not six years out of its rebel caves, aspired to break the Anglo-U.S. alliance.

How did the Laborites feel about Mao’s show of force? There was no reliable word, partly because most of the tourists had signed up for articles with British newspapers and presumably were saving their best answers. But if Attlee felt any discomfiture, it did not deter him from subsequent toasts to the desirability of Sino-British fellowship.

Ardent Desire. In Red China last week, the Laborites also visited three Russian-equipped iron and steel mills at Anshan and a coal mine at Tangshan, Manchuria. The young mine director told the Laborites that production was much higher than before the war because the workers were now the enthusiastic owners of the plant. Further research, however, disclosed that 1) the mine had been confiscated from a British company, and the Laborites were now inspecting stolen property; 2) the British had had almost as high a production rate as the Communists now claim. Nye Bevan went down the mine and said he was impressed. Only later was he told that a supervisor had been taken out and shot not three days before. Poor fellow had apparently instructed his men to dismantle a new Russian coal-cutting machine and put it back the wrong way round.

The tourists then flew on to Shanghai, Red China’s biggest city, which Attlee said reminded him of London. At a great civic banquet, Clem Attlee toasted “the stabilization of world peace,” and added, “Like you, we ardently desire to promote peace . . . The more you get to know people, the more you find things on which you agree.” He was heartily in favor of more East-West trade. More skeptical newsmen, however, taking a look around Shanghai (where the British once had several hundred million dollars invested), found the few remaining British businessmen desperately consenting to all kinds of confiscatory charges just to buy their way out of the country.

Two of the Attlee party’s attendant British newsmen cabled their first overall impressions of Red China. Wrote Rene MacColl of the Daily Express: “The most solemn experience I have had was the visit to Peking jail. On the surface, it looked more like a well-run factory than a prison. But when you stopped to watch the prisoners at their work, you realized that they were going about their tasks with a dedicated ferocity of purpose and speed . . . Nearly all of them were under sentence of death, and only by making good on output for two long, sickening years could they hope for commutation to life imprisonment.”

Wrote the Daily Telegraph’s John Ridley, who last visited Shanghai in 1946, three years before the Communists took over: “All gaiety and charm have disappeared . . . There is no laughter in the streets as there used to be, and strangers are not now greeted with smiles and shouts in the villages. Instead, drab, dull apathy has settled over everyone and horrible uniformity is the order of the day.”