By A. Doak Barnett
Columbia University, New York 1967, 446 pages, US$12
Reviewed by Geraldine Fitch
Professor Barnett's latest is a scholarly addition to the Studies of the East Asian Institute of Columbia University. It is a detailed analysis of the Chinese Communist government, revealing that two hierarchies - the Party and the government - extend from the highest level to the lowest, with the Party definitely dominating.
To set forth the structure and functions of Party and government from top to bottom, he analyzes in detail: a Ministry, a County, and a Commune and Brigade. This analysis constitutes the three main parts of the book. A brief Part IV presents some "Generalizations and Hypotheses". The Appendix, Glossary and Index add 115 pages more. Obviously, this volume was not meant for popular reading. But for students of mainland China or of Communism and how it operates, it is invaluable source material. One might add, to the credit of Columbia Press, that few books these days are without typographical errors. This is one.
In a 12-page Preface, the author gives his sources: Peiping's official releases and publications (voluminous in quantity); interviews with visitors to mainland China, mostly non-American (some well-qualified, many hampered by barriers and restrictions to their observations); emigres, a most important source not fully utilized over past years. Since "the greatest number (of emigres or refugees) in Hongkong were ordinary farmers and workers", perhaps the author would have done well to interview more of the business and intellectual people who resettled in Taiwan.
Prof. Barnett and Prof. Ezra Vogel - who collaborated with him on Part II - found 20 ex-cadres (functionaries of various grades) in Hongkong, and interviewed them intensively, concentrating on three with whom Barnett spent three hours a day over a period of months. One of these former cadres knew Ministry M in which he had been employed, one knew the County organization and the third was familiar with the Commune and its subdivision, the Brigade.
Several important hierarchies extend from Peiping to the distant and local level, but the one with "undisputed primacy" and "ultimate authority" is the Communist Party. The government bureaucracy is distinctly secondary, though it perforce carries "the major load of administration", implementing Party decisions. This becomes evident on every level. In theory, the Central Committee, elected by the Party Congress, is the ultimate power between Congress sessions, but in practice the Politburo and the Standing Committee, together with the Party secretariat, run the Party organization, and the Party in turn directs all other organizational hierarchies, including the government bureaucracy.
Under the top-level bodies are important subsidiary agencies which operate in one broad functional field. The departments include Propaganda, Agricultural and Forestry Political Affairs, Industry and Communications Political Affairs, Finance and Trade Political Affairs, International Liaison and Education. The two committees are the Women's Work Committee and Military Affairs Committee. Each ministry, each province, each county, each commune, each brigade has a similar structure, all interrelated, so that a flow of decisions and instructions makes its way down through the system, and a counterflow of reports is forever moving upward, until one would wonder how anyone has time to get his work done. All government employees, at every level, Party and non-Party cadres alike, gather in small groups one evening a week for study or indoctrination. There are 24 grades of rank in urban agencies and 26 in rural areas; one's salary is based on his grade or rank. New recruits usually come from the Young Communist League, many of whom are already activists and eager to join, either from idealism or because of the prestige, power and advancement offered.
County X, with half a million population, in a coastal area of South China, formed in 1950 by the merger of two counties, an agricultural area with some fishing, was chosen for analysis. It had one sizable town, the county seat of 60,000 people. The county had 13 districts and 83 administrative villages. When the communes were established, the districts became communes and the villages became brigades. So the new structure was similar to the old. The idea that ordinary peasants were eager for Communism is revealed as erroneous by the fact that only 1 or 2% of the county population were Party members.
The book shows clearly that the population is subjected to unrelenting exhortations and instruction. Conformity is secured in a number of ways, chiefly by enormous political pressures under considerable tension and fear of punishment, not alone for criticism but for possible misrepresentation to the authorities of something said in private. Punishments include "reform through labor", "labor re-education", transfer "downwards", probation and/or expulsion from the Party, which would ruin one's career.
Fairly frequent, mainland-wide "rectification" campaigns, pushed with frenetic effort by everyone to the neglect of one's daily work, have these aims: correcting bureaucratic weaknesses; expulsion or punishment of undesirable elements; tightening up on discipline; redefining standards of performance; stimulating all cadres, members or non-members of the Party, to work harder and more effectively. Sometimes the aim is to clean out counterrevolutionaries: former landlords, capitalists or those with bourgeois ideas.
The communes as originally organized were not workable and a step-by-step retreat was begun. They were part of the Great Leap Forward with its backyard steel furnaces, the deep plowing and close planting in agriculture, the mess halls to enable women as well as men to work and the elimination of any vestiges of private property. The peasants were soon disillusioned and dragged their feet. Some natural disasters in 1959-61 increased the communization fiasco. The whole country was on the brink of starvation. As a result economic incentives (pay according to work done), cultivation of private plots cultivated (not owned), and the product used as more food for the family or as a cash crop; no more mess halls, and a slackening of the forced labor improved the food situation at large. But life under Communism is not inviting.
HONG KONG
By Richard Hughes
Frederick A. Praeger, New York 1968, 171 pages, US$4.95
Reviewed by Geraldine Fitch
"Hong Kong did not exist, so it was necessary to invent it." This twist to a familiar aphorism is the author's opening statement in writing of "Hong Kong Yesterday". He continues:
"Though involuntary, the process of invention was logical enough, but everyone involved willingly or reluctantly, was denounced and punished. On the British side (the winners), Trade Supt. Capt. Charles Elliot, R.N., was sacked for bad judgment with good intentions, and ended up in exile as governor of St. Helena ... On the Chinese side (the losers) the honest man personally responsible, High Commissioner Lin Tze-hsu (and the dishonest High Comm. Kishen) were sacked for bad judgment with bad intentions, and banished respectively to Siberia and Tibet."
The charm of the author's style and the diligence of his research are evidenced in this further quotation:
"Kishen and Elliot, in later years, remembered each other with compassion and respect. 'Poor devil," Elliot in St. Helena said of Kishen, 'I suppose the Emperor beheaded him.' 'Elliot was an honest man,' said Kishen in Lhasa, 'I hear that Queen Victoria beheaded him.''' Fortunately, neither report was true.
Britain's Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston wrote Elliot: " ... You have obtained the cession of Hong Kong with hardly a House on it. Now it seems obvious that Hong Kong will not be a Mart of Trade any more than is Macao."
At the same time, the Chinese Emperor, the Imperial Dragon, wrote (as he confiscated Kishen's wealth from opium):
"After Kishen arrived in Canton, he willingly succumbed to the wiles of the rebel Barbarians . .. Hong Kong is an important place. How could he said Kishen allow the rebels to occupy it officially? ... Let him be deprived of his post and imprisoned."
That is the early history of Hong Kong in a nutshell. A lot of information is packed into this slender volume by Richard Hughes, Far Eastern correspondent for London's Sunday Times. He credits writer Han Su-yin directly, and one Tom Wu indirectly, for his subtitle: "Borrowed Place - Borrowed Time". But while Author Hughes writes of Hong Kong (1) Today, (2) Yesterday and (3) Tomorrow, he makes no such rash prophecies as Author Han in "China and the Year 2001". Han anticipates a nation of glorious Red Guards, a "land of 700 million Mao Tse-tungs" (perhaps 1.2 billion by that time). Hughes wrote a year or so later and knew the Red Guards as the young vandals and hooligans that they had become.
Whether Red Guard fanaticism is "devotion and idolatry" for Chairman Mao (as Hughes thinks) or the heady red power of juvenile delinquents terrorizing the populace by "the thoughts of Mao", the reader may not agree that their shenanigans prove that Mao's "influence and appeal" are not diminishing. Surely a better thermometer by which to judge the rise or fall of Mao's power is the split in Party and army ranks, the near civil war of last year and the loss of control over a number of important provinces.
But the author does not claim to be a prophet. His research on Hong Kong of yesterday is homework well-done. The history of Britain's opium trade with China has surely never been better told. The same is true of his account of heroin as related to crime in Hong Kong today as well as his report on Communist threats to government and people in 1967, when both refused to be intimidated. Chinese comprise 98% of Hong Kong's population of four million. Two-thirds of them have come from the mainland since the Communist takeover and are therefore either anti-Communist or non-Communist. What the new generation will be, the author thinks, depends largely on the Hong Kong government and its challenge to youth. He is deeply concerned about this.
Hong Kong's Chinese "tend to be friendly, interested in trade, and peaceful - except when a minority become politically demented". And Hughes points out the loss of face sustained by Peiping when efforts to humiliate the Establishment in Hong Kong by agitating the populace, as had been done successfully in Macao, failed so dismally. This does not mean that Peiping will not try again. Hughes does not think Peiping will try to take over Hong Kong, thus killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, but will surely try again with greater subtlety and more preparation to regain "face" and show its power. Hong Kong is "a vulnerable but durable colony, with a sturdy, old-fashioned free-trade philosophy".
Thanks to Jardine and Matheson, and those who came after these pioneers, the opium trade flourished despite the fact that Capt. Elliot and Commissioner Lin were both opposed to it. Hughes quotes a priceless letter that Lin wrote the youthful Queen Victoria, as "honorable chieftainess" of her dominion, asking how she could seek profit from something the people of her "honorable Barbarian country" were not allowed to use. He ended by admonishing her not to procrastinate, but "earnestly reflect and earnestly obey". Hughes compares the eloquence of this early mandarin with the "dull bluster and repetitive invective" of today's Communists. He adds: "Their arrogance is the same. But Marxist dialectic blunts all wit and sours all style." He quotes one of Gladstone's eloquent speeches against the opium trade, warning against a war that would permanently disgrace Britain.
The bonus in a book about Hong Kong is the author's analysis of Macao, Singapore and Shanghai for purposes of comparison. The weakness is that the author has accepted old myths about Shanghai ("suicidal autocracy", "battalions of deformed beggars", "hundreds of frozen corpses swept up each morning in winter"). And having pictured Shanghai Chinese as disliking "foreign devils" more than those of Hong Kong, he fails to note that the Chinese held off the Japanese at Shanghai for three months, whereas the Japanese took Kowloon and the New Territories in three days and Hong Kong island in two weeks. And he fails to mention that the West gave up extraterritorial rights in China during World War II.
This is an informative and interesting book, fortified in its judgments about Chinese Communism by the author's many interviews with refugees from Red China.