The setting was Peiping. The time was December, 1958. The actors were Communist representatives from Soviet Russia, the Chinese mainland and other satellite countries. The plot: the opening up of a third front.
The third front was to be opened in the world of sports. Huang Chung and Yung Kao-tang, the two chief Chinese Communist representatives to the conference, outlined to the conferees the following background:
China formed a national Olympic committee and joined the International Olympic Committee in 1922. Since then, China had taken part in the 1932,1936 and 1948 Olympic Games. In 1949, the Chinese Communists took over the mainland, but not international sports. In 1952, Peiping tried to send a team to the Helsinki Games but the membership problem was not settled.
The next year, the International Olympic Committee decided to retain the membership of the Chinese National Olympic Committee located in Taiwan and at the same time admit the Chinese Communist committee. This confusion also was found in some other international sports federations of which Free China was a member but into which Peiping was later granted entry.
The 1956 Olympic Games at Melbourne proved a crowning victory for Free China. When the delegation from Taipei was about to leave for Melbourne, Peiping announced its withdrawal from the games.
Then in 1958, the Chinese Communists withdrew from the International Olympic Committee and all other international sports federations, which list Free China as a member. Tung Shou-yi, Communist member in the IOC, also resigned after a bitter quarrel with IOC President Avery Brundage.
That was the background. And the Communists from all the world over were discussing in Peiping how to rectify the situation. Information later made available to the free world showed that the following decisions were made:
1. The Communist world was to try to get all international sports agencies expel the Republic of China and reinstate the Peiping committee.
2. Failing this, all Communist countries would make things very difficult for the Free Chinese. They would challenge the Free Chinese in each and every meeting. Soviet Russia was to lead the attack in the IOC, the basketball and most other sports federations. Hungary was assigned the leading role in the international football federation while all Communist delegates to such meetings would back up the assailants.
3. Failing this, all Communist teams would refuse to play in the same field with the Republic of China squads. The Peiping meeting decided that this would be the pattern not only for minor international tournaments but for the Olympic Games as well.
Accordingly, Russia and Bulgaria refused to play the Chinese basketball team at Santiago, Chile, last January. The penalty was heavy, Russia being declared the loser in spite of its undefeated record.
Also accordingly, the three Russian members of the IOC submitted a 57-page resolution to its Munich meeting last month calling for the ouster of the Chinese national Olympic committee and the re-admission of the Peiping committee. The Russians backed up their demand with the threat that all Communists would boycott future sports meets and meetings.
Faced with this threat, the IOC gave in. It decided to withdraw recognition of the Chinese Olympic Committee as representative of China and asked it to seek re-admission under the name of Taiwan. The IOC did not re-admit the Peiping committee outright but matters will come to a head in February 1960 when the IOC meets again at San Francisco.
Reports are having it that the Russians would at San Francisco formally sponsor the re-admission of the Peiping committee as representative of China. The Russians also would nominate at least one Chinese Communist as a lifetime member of the IOC. But he will not be Tung Shou-yi who after all is not a bona fide Communist.
The New Frontier Story
"Young men, go West!" the Chinese Communists have issued the call to all able-bodied young men on the mainland.
Since 1950, the Chinese Communists have been sending large numbers of residents in China Proper for resettlement into frontier provinces such as Tsinghai, Kansu, Sinkiang, Ninghsia, Sikang and Tibet.
In the big cities of Shanghai, Tientsin, Peiping and Nanking, the Communists told the millions of unemployed people, "If you want a job, come and let's move to the frontier." Where persuasion failed, coercion was used.
Most college and middle school graduates were forcibly assigned work in the frontier provinces. Year by year, these young men and women were separated from their parents and herded to remote, barren lands.
The Chinese Communists have not announced the number of these people sent to the frontier provinces but conservative estimates showed at least eight million had been migrated. It constituted one of the greatest forced migrations in China's history. For instance, the Kansu Jih Pao said on March 19 that over 100,000 people had been resettled in Hohsi Hsien, Kansu province, alone.
The tempo has been stepped up ever since the 1958 contend-and-bloom movement. Rightists or young men suspected of having that rightist tinge were packed and sent to the frontier in larger numbers. Forced labor awaited them.
Late last year, the Chinese Communist party issued a call to the mainland's young men and middle-aged people to go west. The campaign is still on. Nobody knows when it will stop.
For instance, the Tsinghai Jih Pao said on March 15: "The people of various nationalities in our province, with a feeling of excitement, are giving earnest greetings and a warm welcome to youths who have come from distant places. You, good sons and daughters, with an ambition to be everywhere, can go wherever the Party directs. All of you are far from your home villages but have, regardless hardships and difficulties, resolved to build up the fatherland's lovely Tsinghai, heroically and perseveringly, together with the local people of various nationalities."
The Communist newspaper said 1,000 young people of Honan province reached Tsinghai as early as 1956 and 7,000 came in 1958. Honan also sent 8,000 to Kansu last month. Honan is just one of the China Proper provinces. Its own population is small, not in a position to send out millions of young men.
The Sinkiang regional committee of the Young Communist League issued a notification on March 15, 1959 saying that all league members should join in the work of helping resettle the youths and middle-aged people from Hunan, Hupei, Anhwei and Kiangsu provinces. No mention was made about resettlers from the big cities and other provinces.
The mass migration campaign has a two-barreled purpose. On the one hand, the Communists are sending the surplus population from the more developing provinces and cities to the frontier to solve the unemployment and overpopulation problem. At the same time, the presence of large numbers of the Han people in the frontier provinces will help check the anti-Han movements among the indigenous populations.
This therefore makes it easier to explain why, while sending more and more people into Sinkiang, the Chinese Communists have taken thousands of Uigurs from Sinkiang and put them to work in factories in Tsingtao this year.
May Day and May 4 Celebrations
The Chinese Communists celebrated May Day with an apparent lack of originality. But three days later, they celebrated the May 4 Movement anniversary with too much originality by rewriting what actually happened four decades ago.
On May 1, the Communists chose to unfold their celebrations in the night for reasons best known to themselves. In Peiping, Chinese Communist party chiefs were on hand at the Tienanmen Square to witness what was billed as "a carnival of songs, dances and theatrical performances." The number of participants was estimated ambiguously at several hundred thousand.
The New China News Agency reported, "Demonstrations and parades followed mass rallies in all cities. By big charts and models, Chinese workers reported their new tremendous achievements in the first four months of this year following last year's big leap forward, and peasants pledged their confidence and determination to harvest still bigger crops to insure the achievement of this year's national targets."
Shanghai staged a 200,000-man parade. Tientsin had only half the number. Mukden mustered 130,000 workers for the occasion and Chungking claimed a demonstration of 110,000. Nothing was said about the real state of life of workers on the Chinese mainland today. As usual, the May Day was used only as another occasion for Communist cadres to engineer more pledges from workers to "over fulfill the work quota." Instead of being rewarded for a year of work, labor was asked to put in longer hours in state factories and people's communes.
But originality shone through in Communist celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the May 4 Movement. Forty years ago on May 4, students of China staged a demonstration protesting the signing of an agreement with Japan and brought into full play the cultural renaissance of China.
The May 4 Movement was entirely nationalistic. Most of its leaders have remained anti-Communist up to this day. In Taiwan today, Dr. Hu Shih, Dr. Lo Chia-lun, Lo Tun-wei and many others played the leading role during the movement.
But the Chinese Communists had the temerity to claim credit for the movement, which actually began two years before the birth of the Chinese Communist party. The Kuang Ming Jih Pao of Peiping said on April 12: "In the course of this movement, the role of the Chinese working class became manifest for the first time, and as a result, the May 4 Movement was turned into a thoroughly and uncompromisingly anti-imperialist and thoroughly and uncompromisingly anti-feudalistic revolutionary struggle ... In the course of this movement, the revolutionary intellectuals opened themselves to the influence of the October Revolution, entertained the rudimentary ideas of Marxism-Leninism and began to spread them among the mass of workers and guide the Chinese revolution with Marxism-Leninism. The May 4 Movement and the spread of the Marxist-Leninist ideology to China paved the way for the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, and it was formally inaugurated on July 1, 1921."
The Communists, claiming leadership of the movement, also launched a strong attack on Dr. Hu, saying he was a coward and traitor. They tried to identify the movement with the sponsor of the Communist party, Li Ta-chao.
Asking the question "Who Led the May 4 Movement?", Communist Kao I-han lamented on April 21: "The history of the May 4 Movement proved that Hu Shih and other rightist bourgeois intellectuals when joining the movement acted as a speaker of the bourgeoisie. Their political and ideological stand was identical with the fundamental interests of capitalists. They opposed Japan because they decided to replace Japanese imperialism with American imperialism. They opposed feudal culture because they decided to replace Chinese culture with the Western culture.
"Up to the present, some persons still do not understand the history clearly, thinking that both Hu Shih and Li Ta-chao were the leaders of the movement. This is a totally incorrect view contradictory to history. We should see that in the later part of the May 4 Movement the majority of the rightists had come to compromise 'with the enemy and stood on the side of the counter-revolutionaries.
"The genuine leaders of the May 4 Movement were only the Communist-minded revolutionary intellectuals. In cooperation with the masses of the workers and peasants, they stood in the foremost front of the revolutionary movement and believed that this revolutionary movement conformed to the law of social development and that the cause of the Chinese people's liberation would certainly succeed."
Footnote to this claim: Mao Tse-tung was a student of Li Ta-chao at that time. But he did not join in the movement, thus depriving the Communists of the chance to proclaim their "beloved leader" as the "genius organizer" of the May 4 Movement.
Mainland Tidbits
Look out for some new military adventures on the timetable of the world Communists. Peng Teh-huai, the Peiping "vice premier and minister of national defense," was about to conclude his series of military talks with Moscow and European satellite countries he visited during his current extensive tour. Yang Cheng-wu, Communist Peiping garrison commander, was back on the mainland from conferences in Indonesia.
Brainwashing for non-Communists was again on. Peiping said on May 12, "More than 160 leading members of democratic parties, industrialists, businessmen and non-party democrats began a 14-month course in the Socialist Academy here today." The first group of "trainees" spent two full years in the academy and have not been heard from ever since.
The Communists just completed their military sports meeting in Peiping. This was the warm up to their ambitious 10th anniversary national games to begin Oct. 1, the first mainland wide sports event ever held by the Peiping regime.
The Central People's Radio Station of Peiping again described the United States as a paper tiger in a May 18 broadcast. Without mentioning why the commentary was made, the Communist voice said that the military might of the United States was very weak and the "power of massive retaliation was bankrupt."
It said the United States was studying the question of surrender. "Localized warfare" is replacing general warfare as the central idea of American military thinking, it said. The American economy is no longer serving well the military expansion programs, the broadcast added.
This commentary was worn-out Communist propaganda. However, significance was attached to the fact that it came all of a sudden when war tension was at a low ebb.