THE BLUE ANTS - 600 Million Chinese Under the Red Flag
By Robert Guillain
Translated by Mervyn Savill, Secker and Warburg,
London, 1957. 257 pp.
BLUE ANTS was written by a French journalist and doctor of law, Robert Guillain, who visited China for two months and a half in 1955, after an absence of six years. He is a keen and discriminating observer and an honest reporter.
As a Frenchman, Guillain loves liberty - a yardstick which serves him well in measuring tyranny. But unfortunately he assumes that 1949, the year China was falling apart, was typical. By using that period of disintegration as the norm, he arrives at many erroneous conclusions, such as the following: "The Chinese had never known liberty", "they knew only chaos and corruption", "China had been unable to make good use of Western teaching", "they are compensated for the loss of liberty by the industrial progress of their country", and their 'patriotism "softens the blow or prevents them being aware" of their servitude.
To my way of thinking, his biggest mistake is his main conclusion: "I believe the peace of the world will be less precarious when China is recognized by the great powers, admitted into the United Nations, and allowed to take her place once more in international trade." This is to confuse the regime with the people. Anything that helps the Communist tyrants hurts the people. Recognizing Russia did not put us in contact with the people.
In spite of having been in China before, he is completely unaware that the National Government was the best in China's long history, that in the decade between its establishment in Nanking and the Japanese invasion of China it was making currency and judicial reforms; progress in education, in public health, in cultural and social affairs, in labor and cooperatives, in dam building and dike repair, in aviation and building of highways, in public works, and in international relations. Of the president of China he has heard only slander. General Wedemeyer said from what he had heard before he went to China he was not prepared to like or trust Chiang, but after nearly two years of intimate daily contact, he had "the highest regard and admiration" for him, and for the "really remarkable progress made from 1927-37."
Nevertheless, Robert Guillain is an able and honest observer. What he has seen is well reported, presenting a devastating picture of China Sovietized, and the people degraded to ants ever busy on their predetermined tasks.
On returning to China, Guillain was at first enchanted - it was so clean. But before leaving it, he felt so stifled he wanted to run for his train, in a frenzy to breathe free air again. So one of his main observations is: "Communism has made the air unbreathable for anyone who intends to remain a man and not become a robot."
His most vivid impression is of everyone in blue cotton boiler-suits (blue ants), all commissar-style, girls in trousers looking like boys with their short hair. Gambling, prostitution, graft (he thinks) are gone. No scraps of paper on the streets, no fruit peel or cigarette butts. But he finds it an uncomfortable, enforced cleanliness.
For several years he had seen the propaganda pictures from Peiping, giving the impression that the whole Chinese nation was perpetually singing and dancing. He saw the new factories and the new housing projects, but far too few; he came upon "an ocean of ancient hovels" for the urban influx has been greater than the ability of "the active ant-hill-China of today to keep up with, even with Big Brother Russia's help." He saw great tracks of land still without roads, and saw cavalcades of men trekking narrow paths (as for centuries) with heavy loads slung from shoulder-poles. He saw (as I have heard from refugees) slave-laborers "in groups of eight, harnessed like beasts of burden, bending almost to the ground as they pulled enormous loads."
He missed Chinese laughter and humor "stronger than adversity among the Chinese in the old days." He found everyone repeating the official answers to his questions, like a tape-recording. In his 2½ months in many parts of China, he was never left alone to talk to a single person without an interpreter or a witness. He could never visit a home of his own choice, nor a factory, or farm unless it was planned in advance. Could he talk with Catholics without a witness? No. Interview a former landlord? No. Visit one of the reform-through-labor camps? No reply.
Delegations have special food, fine hotel suites, are feted and pampered. Most of such visitors are seeing China for the first time; they would be shocked and probably furious to be told they have been given a false picture of China. (This explains many of the glowing reports one hears.) Guillain paid his own way; had been there before.
The author's second main observation was that "Communism on the credit side of the balance sheet can boast of astounding material successes." However, he feels that although there was an improvement in the standard of living for millions of Chinese after the "liberation" of 1949, yet now everyone has been reduced to the same level of poverty and has remained at that level ever since. When a Chinese worker has labored to the limit of his ability for long hours, he has still completed only half of what is demanded of him each day. He has yet to fulfill his ideological quota, attend endless meetings, discussion groups, or do required "voluntary" tasks.
Guillain makes the shrewd observation that brainwashing does not adequately describe what the Communists do to the minds of men. It is one of two surgical operations; the second is to fill their empty brains with prefabricated thought. In a very good appraisal of their loss of liberty, he cries out: "What have they done to them? What in God's name have they done to the Chinese to reduce them to this state?"
The French journalist has opportunity to see some of the newest and biggest factories in Manchuria - Russian designed, Russian-equipped, run by Russian technicians (thousands of them). He sees the new railroads being built from Lanchow in the Northwest across the Gobi Desert to connect with a Russian line; from Lanchow to Paotow on the border of Mongolia; and from Lanchow to Chengtu and Chungking. They are being built by the slave labor of "criminals and reactionaries" (without distinction between the two.)
He gives full credit to the Chinese for their prodigious industrial effort, and to the Russians who make it possible. But it is a gigantic achievement only in the propaganda. It is not a Chinese Ruhr; it is smaller than Japan's industrial advance; and he adds "Hongkong has done a fabulous job of modernization and expansion." (Guillain is expected in Free China in August, and may then see the industrial and agricultural progress of ten million Chinese without coercion; the achievement of free men.)
Unfortunately, after such keen observations, after saying "China and the Chinese people deserve better than this", he comes up with strange conclusions. He contradicts the foregoing statement by saying the "country let itself collapse into disorder." On one page he speaks of the Chinese as "this people so long passive, so little inclined to mutual aid", and on the next says, "The Communist system was able to transform their great enthusiasm for the public good into an immense submission." At one point he says: "The Communist system is intolerant in its very essence...it is the pliant Chinese who must bend the knee; Communism will not be the one to yield." (This does not sound like winning over the people.) Yet on the next page we read: "Is it not easy to persuade the multitude to proclaim the excellence of a method which oppresses it, when it can see the efficiency of the method?" From all Guillain has said about the human degradation involved, the brainwashing and prefabricated thought, it has not been easy to make them conform; they are not willingly submissive even today.
The author's yardstick of liberty for tyranny is sound. His yardstick of 1949 as the norm for measuring Red China's achievements is a weak reed. That was China after 18 years of war - China in economic chaos, sky-rocketing inflation, war-weary, and deserted by her best friend, America. Fortunately, some of us remember a China with the laughter and humor, the wit and quips (which Guillain happily 'recalls), but also China implementing its Constitution, making agricultural surveys and starting agricultural experimental stations; teaching the 1000-character system to more people during World War II than the Communists have made literate in ten years; and next to Japan, progressing industrially more rapidly than the rest of Asia. It was not a miracle, but it was by free men, not slaves. It was not Utopia, but it was steady, and men and women were not brainwashed into ideological phonographs or dehumanized into blue ants. - GERALDINE FITCH
FORMOSA (TAIWAN)
by W. G. Goddard
pp. 161
This is a printed collection of lectures delivered by Dr. W. G. Goddard to the Rotary Clubs and United Nations Associations in England. The author is to be congratulated for adopting a novel approach to the discussion of the Taiwan problem. True to his calling as professor in ancient Chinese history, he approached the subject of Taiwan from the historical viewpoint by tracing the first Chinese immigration to the place as beginning with one Shu Kwan and Ho Man during the reign of Emperor Yang Ti of the Sui dynasty. But according to Sui Shu, History of Sui, from which Dr. Goddard has derived his information, the island Shu Kwan and his party reached in A.D. 605 was an island of the Liu Chiu (Rhyukyu) group. Though later scholars were inclined to think that it was one of the Taiwan islands, the early scholars and historians, being poor navigators, cannot be blamed for having failed to give the exact latitude and longitude of the place so as to facilitate identification by later generations. Since the writers of Sui Shu said it was one of the Liu Chiu group, we have to respect their opinion.
The next historical record mentioned by the author is only three years apart. Though also derived from Sui Shu, it shows definitely that Taiwan was discovered this time. In A. D. 611, General Chen Ling, at the head of an expedition, first reached Turtle Islands and claimed them for China and then sailed on to Formosa.
From such tracing of the historical record, the author succeeds in establishing the fact that Taiwan has been indisputably Chinese territory, despite its short period of cession to Japan after the Sino-Japanese War of 1895.
In his lecture on "Formosa and Its People" Dr. Goddard contrasts the prosperity, progress and liberty enjoyed by the people here with the backwardness, shortages, and suppression and slavery that are the lot of the people on the Chinese mainland. He closed this address with these questions to his audience: "Did not this country, in other but forgotten days, oppose slavery in Africa, pogroms in Poland, atrocities in Bulgaria, brutality in Neapolitan prisons and human slaughter-houses in Armenia? Did she not rise above politics and sound, with clear united voice, her disgust with naked and unashamed inhumanity? What, then, has happened to us and our British values, that this same Britain can, today, assist in the prolongation of a Communist structure in China, built on the broken bodies of millions of human beings and cemented with their blood?"
Dr. Goddard shows his understanding of the China situation when he says: "It (the China struggle) is essentially a spiritual conflict. ... The Formosa Strait symbolises the sharp division that separates freedom and bondage. It has a profound and universal meaning. Numbers on either bank are of no account, for the conflict is not with flesh and blood. When the Oracle of New Delhi asked Konrad Adenauer "What is the use of calling a few people in Formosa, China," he failed completely to understand the nature of the China problem. Civilization is a thing of quality not quantity. Had quantity been the determining factor, there would not have been any civilization at all, certainly no Christian civilization, for the transmission of the highest values has always depended on the few. Some of the leaders of the Western democracies are as blind as Pandit Nehru, for they fail to see the real nature of the conflict and imagine that territorial appeasement can solve a spiritual problem. One might have thought that, with such rampant anti-Westernism in Asia, they would have been encouraged to know that at least one country in Asia shared their ideals, knowing nothing of racial antagonism. History, however, will not wait for their enlightenment, and may well record that the course of civilization, together with the future of mankind, was determined by the outcome of this China issue." - YIH SHIN