The Dilemma of a Chinese Patriot
By Eric Chou
Longmans, London, 1963.
vii + 215 pp. 25 shillings net
Reviewed by Durham S. F. Chen
Of all the books written by ex-Communists or ex-Communist sympathizers that have come to this reviewer's knowledge, this is the least convincing. It sounds hollow and without conviction. True, there are descriptions of Communist brutalities and failures, but they are of the stereotyped sort and add nothing new to what is already commonly known. On the other hand, when the author sings the praises of the Peiping regime, he waxes eloquent. An example of this kind is provided by the passage in which he gives expression to his "patriotism" and his admiration for the Chinese Communists on seeing the then uncompleted Wu-Han bridge. Let the author speak for himself:
"With the construction work in its final phase, the bridge would be open to rail and car traffic within a few weeks. Standing on the uncompleted bridge among cranes, trailers and all kinds of building machinery, I really felt excited since it was a great task undertaken by Chinese engineers and workers. A sense of national pride glowed in my heart and I could not but admire the Chinese Communists for this vivid achievement of theirs, even though they had almost ruined me in the last few years. My admiration was shared by an Australian gentleman who, accompanied by two young Chinese interpreters, looked around with unhidden interest." (P. 183.)
Mr. Chou describes himself as a Chinese patriot, as evidenced by the subtitle of his book. On several occasions he takes up this theme of patriotism, which he thinks cannot be reconciled with freedom in the case of a Chinese like himself. When he had returned to Hongkong after four and a half years of brainwashing and thought remolding in Communist prisons, he admitted that he "was still wavering between patriotism and freedom, which are never in conflict with anyone living under the Western democracies. But a Chinese can be patriotic only when he is determined to give up freedom; and, if he wants freedom, he cannot be patriotic since his country is under Communist domination. Fanatics though the Communists are, yet they mean to do the Chinese people good in their own way." (P. 201.)
This opposition of patriotism to freedom is incomprehensible to those of us who are accustomed to thinking of patriotism as the old-fashioned love of one's country, and not, as Mr. Chou does, as love of any regime, however tyrannical it may be, that is in control of the country for the time being. According to Mr. Chou's queer way of thinking, no despot can ever be overthrown and anyone who tries to do it is no patriot.
Now that Mr. Chou has broken away from the Chinese Communists and written a book with the subtitle of "The Dilemma of a Chinese Patriot," it may be wondered whether he still maintains his thesis of an irreconcilable conflict between patriotism and freedom. If he does, he cannot arrogate to himself the proud title of "a Chinese patriot." But since he has no hesitation in regarding himself as such, and in the meantime is enjoying freedom in England, he must have given up his original ideas on this rather intriguing question. It is a pity that he does not say so explicitly in his book.
The author has also failed to make another point clear. Unlike most other defectors from the Communist camp who have written books to recount their sad experiences under Communist regimes, Mr. Chou does not state whether he was ever a member of the Chinese Communist Party, or merely a Communist sympathizer. He leaves the impression in the mind of his reader that he was only a sympathizer with the Communist cause, although he was called "Comrade Chou" on several occasions by his Communist interrogators after he had been thoroughly brainwashed and was about to be reassigned to Hongkong as a member of the International United Front Work there.
The major portion of the book is devoted to the confessions that the author was forced by his Communist captors to make during his long imprisonment. But he assures his readers that he concocted the whole story in order to satisfy his captors, who would not set him free unless he confessed all the horrible crimes he was supposed to have committed. In this, he must have succeeded remarkably well, for the Communists apparently believed every word of what he had said and written in his confessions. In other words, he succeeded in fooling the Reds with an elaborate fiction. As matter of fact, he takes much pride in being able to tell barefaced lies, a phrase which he uses again and again throughout the, book, without being detected by his brainwashers. This is how he describes his state of mind after one of those lengthy sessions:
"When I was left alone in my cell I could not help feeling satisfied with my skillful pretence. In fact, I used to be a good actor in my high school days and was picked to play the main role in both Chinese and English plays. I had never imagined that my acting technique would be useful again after an interval of over twenty years." (P. 54.)
Besides serving as another expose of the Communist technique of brainwashing or thought remolding, A Man Must Choose is interesting and revealing in other ways. It shows how the Russian advisors on the Chinese mainland and the Communist agents in Hongkong lived. Once when the author paid a visit to the Peking Department Store, which he describes as "the biggest of its kind and run by the Ministry of Commerce," he was "shocked" to find that a "self-winding Rolex would cost the customer 1,000 JMP dollars (more than £150) while a Leica cost 3,000 dollars." He writes:
"Needless to say, these articles were far beyond the purchasing power of the ordinary people whose monthly income was less than eighty (JMP) dollars on an average. The riddle was soon solved when some Russian customers came up. Out of their pockets they produced decks of new JMP notes, buying watches and cameras to satisfy their shopping spree. To them money seemed to mean nothing, in China they really lived like proletarian princes and princesses." (P.168.)
The author has also given us an excellent description of the "double life" of Communist agents in Hongkong. "They talked like Marxists and yet acted and lived like capitalists," he writes. "Banquets were given in the most extravagant way, while expensive presents were constantly bought with office funds. Whenever they got together the topics of their conversation were women, drinks, horse races and all sorts of frivolous things—absolutely nothing to do with socialist reconstruction." The author says that he happened to be included in one of these dinner parties and "saw them play mah-jongg and poker for very high stakes." (P. 203.)
When the author went back to Hongkong to rejoin the staff of the Ta Kung Pao, with which he had been associated for a number of years before his imprisonment early in 1953 on a trip back to the mainland, he found things there "extremely disgusting." Here is an example of the personal influence that still counts for so much even among the Communists. "To compensate for the low pay of most staff members," he recalls, "their wives were also employed, though these women could do nothing more than gossip during office hours. One of my lady assistants was a typical example. Without knowing sufficient English or Chinese, she was made a translator simply because her husband happened to be one of the associate managing editors. In the office she gossiped, complained and joked, doing everything imaginable except translation work. Still, she enjoyed an increase in less than three months, while other poor souls were refused one for years though they worked hard and proved to be very competent." (P. 204.)
ESCAPE FROM RED CHINA.
By Robert Loh
as told to Humphrey Evans
Coward-McCann, Inc., New York.
378 p.p. US$5.75
Reviewed by Geraldine Fitch.
After eight years under the Chinese Communists, Robert Loh says: "Anyone who has lived in Red China hates the regime." Succinctly, this is the thesis of his book as told to Far East expert Humphrey Evans. It is repeated even more specifically near the end of Escape From Red China when he says "living in Communist China is hell."
This is so different from Edgar Snow's book, The Other Side of the River, which credits Mao Tse-tung with winning the support of the masses, that those who read both books will have to decide which gives the true picture. Snow, long-time friend of Mao, Chou En-lai and other Communist leaders, spent five months in China, visiting 14 provinces and interviewing many people at all levels of life. His 766 pages are filled with impressions and Communist statistics to the effect that, despite present failures and mistakes, the system is working well, the communes are the "key to China's future," and everything will be fine in a few more years. In half as many pages, Robert Loh gives an eyewitness account of life under the Chinese Communists as a businessman who tried to cooperate and was nearly destroyed. He exposes the ruthless methods by which the Communists first liquidated ex-Nationalists, then terrorized the intellectuals, then put the pressure in turn on industrialists, small shopkeepers, factory workers in the cities, and finally subjugated the millions of peasants.
Reaching his decision to seek escape one night in Shanghai, when everyone about him "moved at the same tired pace, had the same worried look, and wore similar drab clothes," he says, "The one really startling aspect of Communist China is the fact that a small group of men has been able to achieve complete control over 650 million unwilling people."
This is the beginning of his story. He ends it on the same note. In between is the best expose yet written of how the Chinese Communists, by the continuous process of applying the stimulus of fear—constantly, everywhere, to everyone—have accomplished this incredible thing.
This is not the story of a former Nationalist who would not conform. Loh was of a younger generation who felt that Sun Yat-sen's revolution had failed, that his country was weak and disunited. He had gone to America at a time when most Chinese students were critical of the Nationalists and confused about Communism and its promises of a "new democracy". He returned to teach in Shanghai University (Baptist), where he found his old friend Dr. Yui serving as president.
Soon the pressure was started by a "reform group" - with no mention of Communism. Dr. Yui was labeled "a lackey of the imperialists", and later was demoted to teacher of sixth rank (the lowest) in another college. Loh was subjected to daily questioning for 13 days about a man he had seen only once. The door of Dr. Tan's classroom, next to Loh's, was sealed with a large red paper X. This poor professor, who believed China would prosper under the Reds, once had held a minor post under the Nationalists. He was never heard of again. Many former Nationalists were executed, openly or secretly; many were sent to "labor-reform" camps and died slowly.
To avoid this fate, Loh became a "national capitalist" as manager of three flour mills belonging to wealthy friends of his family. He came under the Thought Reform Campaign, in which everyone had to write his life history from the age of eight. The cadres in charge would single out one or two in each group for special harassment in order to terrorize the others. Locked in their rooms, to write one "confession" after another, they would be driven to desperation (sometimes suicide) by loudspeakers on a truck outside pouring out invective, threats, and abuse.
Even as late as the "Three-anti" and "Five-anti" movements, Robert Loh thought the regime was fighting wrong attitudes among the intellectuals and corruption among businessmen. He did not realize. they were attacking the intellectuals themselves (and then the other classes) to bring them into complete subjugation. After generations of mill employee respect for the executives, he walked in one day to find the workers afraid to speak to him. He was locked in his office to "confess" his crimes against them, although he had been with the mills so brief a time. Only as the bookkeeper finally gave him clues about his expected confession—crimes finally totaling more than a hundred, not one of which would have stood up in any free country—did he see how every industrialist was fined so heavily that the state was able to confiscate his enterprise. At most, 5% of profits was allowed "until 1963" to show the generosity of the regime to "reformed" capitalists.
Loh saw all 165,000 private enterprises subjected to pressures until they capitulated and became joint state-private enterprise, called "voluntary" cooperation with the state. When it came to the workers themselves, if they refused to knuckle under, they were put on a so-called "Honor Roll" and sent off to work in desolate border regions where they suffered the slow death of "labor reform."
When the Communists betrayed the working class and the peasants of the rural areas, Loh saw that they were not serving the people, but were "intent on making the people serve them, and their objective was nothing more (nor less) than political power" over all classes of society.
Deliberately working for favor with the Communists but evading membership in the Party and hating himself for his deception, Loh reached a point of usefulness to the regime and was sent on a mission to Moscow. Shocked by the slovenly disorder in Russia, as well as the extravagance and high living of party officials, shocked also by the new class of extravagant youth (sons of officials who had unearned wealth and privilege, he nevertheless helped write a favorable report on the trip and lectured on the "high living standard" and "agricultural success" of socialism in Russia at seminars back in China. As an ex-capitalist lecturing Communists, he was asked to expand his lecture and give it to the party leaders.
The campaign against small shopkeepers began, and everything was taken from them, even to pots and pans "and the baby's crib." A new wave of suicides ensued. The authorities acted quickly to check this, lest the truth get to other countries, disproving the idea that "capitalists and workers were delighted with socialism." Thousands were taken from their families and sent to distant "socialist reconstruction", similar to the "Honor Roll".
Too bad that Edgar Snow was too late in Red China to see the worst of the terrorism that brought all classes into subjugation, and too early for the worst shortages of food and resulting malnutrition. Actually he admits many failures (without compassion for the sufferers), but always finds mitigating circumstances in droughts or flood, or necessity of great leaps, and predicts only good for the future.
Robert Loh, on the other hand, lived through the period of betraying one class after another, saw the methods by which "voluntary" contributions to "Resist America, Aid Korea" and other movements were exacted, learned the ruthless nature of Communists and their struggle for political power, and witnessed the depths of bitterness revealed by the "hundred flowers" campaign, when Mao's promise of "no retaliation" was broken.
The author's chance to escape came when—after extremely cautious maneuvering—he succeeded in getting a permit for "two weeks only" in Hongkong to take over his share of his deceased father's estate. His chance to return to America was made possible by ARCI (Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals)—the organization in which this reviewer's husband played no small part.