Chinese Communist leader Liu Shao-chi has been busy making "friendship" tours of four countries in Southeast Asia. In less than two months, he visited Indonesia, Burma, Cambodia, and North Vietnam.
Liu's junketing was seen by many experts on Communist affairs as sign of heightened Moscow-Peiping rivalry for influence in Southeast Asia.
Accompanied by a party of 43, including "Foreign Minister" Chen Yi, "Chairman" Liu went to Indonesia April 12 and stayed there for nine days as a guest of President Sukarno.
On arrival in Jakarta, the Chinese Communist No. 2 leader hailed the "brotherly friendship between our two peoples" and spoke of the "daily growth of relations of cooperation."
Sukarno, answered with such phrases as "comrades in arms" and "eternal friends".
Before he said farewell to Liu, Sukarno told him: "Between us is the wide sky and ocean. But more than ships and planes, the link between us is in the heart."
The Liu visit followed Jakarta consultations between Indonesia and Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Rodion Malinovsky. He left only a few days before Liu arrived.
Both Russia and the Peiping regime seem to be eyeing Indonesia out of strategic considerations as well as because of their ideological rivalry.
Indonesia's ideological preference appears to be for Peiping. But Russia has been a principal supplier of military and other aid. Indonesia owes its military power in Southeast Asia to the Soviet.
Economic disaster on the Chinese mainland has deprived Peiping of capability for helping Jakarta. The Chinese Communists promised aid worth US$30,000,000 when Chen Yi visited Jakarta last April.
Malinovsky's trip spotlighted the Kremlin's alertness to importance of a country with 100 million people and a leader bent on expansionism.
The Communist party of Indonesia is the largest in the world outside the Red bloc. Communists are pushing vigorously for representation in the government, presumably aiming at eventual takeover.
Communist affairs experts have warned of the danger that Indonesia may become an Asian Cuba.
They said the Soviets were moving militarily and the Red Chinese politically. The threat to Indonesia and Southeast Asia was adjudged grave in both cases.
Backhanded Lenin Salute
On April 24, two days after the 93rd anniversary of Lenin's birth, the Peiping regime branded Soviet Premier Khrushchev as an "ideological servant" of capitalism in a strong bid for Communist leadership.
The first Chinese Communist move came in an obviously inspired Lenin birthday editorial in North Korea's official Rondong Shinmoon newspaper. Radio Peiping broadcast excerpts.
This was Peiping's only acknowledgement of Lenin's birthday, which was celebrated in the Soviet Union April 22. The occasion had gone unreported in the Red Chinese press. It was the first time since the Red Chinese came to power 14 years ago that they had virtually ignored Lenin's birthday.
In previous years there were warm "Sino-Moscow" friendship meetings and editorial tributes to Lenin, the founder of the U.S.S.R.
Experts on Chinese Communist affairs said Peiping may have wanted to avoid public polemics.
But the Chinese Reds apparently decided to use North Korea, as they often have Albania, to unleash another salvo at Khrushchev, branding him anew as a "modern revisionist" who is twisting Lenin's teachings to suit his own policies.
The Radio Peiping broadcast carried only brief direct quotes from the North Korean editorial on Lenin. The rest of the broadcast was devoted to what appeared to be Peiping's own comments.
The Chinese Communists claimed Lenin forecast that leadership of international Communism against the capitalist world ultimately would fall to Peiping and other Asian Communist countries.
Weapons to Albania
Peiping further strengthened its ties with Albania by sending "considerable" quantities of weapons and "experts" there during March.
The two Communist nations at odds with Moscow also have signed a new trade pact.
The Chinese Communists are reported to have 400 "experts and instructors" in the small European state. New experts are on hand to build Peiping-financed factories, one source said.
The trade pact and three other agreements were signed in February. Albania is supposed to get $125 million in credits and $7 million in grants.
Scheduled for construction are a paper factory at Kavaka, brick-and-tile plant at Valona, phosphate installation at Lushnje, and copper cable plant at Shkoder.
Albania will receive Peiping corn, wheat, industrial equipment, farm machinery, chemicals, paper, and other goods. She will give Peiping crude oil, copper, tobacco, minerals, and other goods.
Albania reportedly has received tractors, corn, vehicle spare parts, and other equipment from the Peiping regime since March.
Roads for Infiltration
The Chinese Communists are constructing a network of strategic roads in northern Laos to facilitate infiltration of the Indo-China peninsula.
According to intelligence reports from Vientiane, some 10,000 Red Chinese coolies are building roads from China's Yunnan province across northeastern Laos to the borders of Thailand and Burma.
One road runs from Mangla, a key point in Yunnan, to the town of Nam Tha in northeastern Laos. From Nam Tha, a trail leads to the Thai border at Ban Houei Sai on the Mekong river.
Another road connects the Laotian town of Lau Ten and Muong Sing. Muong Sing connects with the strategic town of Ban Kan Kork, only a thousand yards from the Burmese border.
Unconfirmed reports say construction of a road connecting Muong Sing with Nam Tha is under way.
The Chinese Communists in April announced the completion of a 48-mile route from the Chinese-Laotian border to Phong Saly in northeastern Laos.
The Chinese Reds also have been feverishly repairing the Burma Road of World War II fame, as well as another main artery running into Burma from Szemao, an important Chinese Communist military base and trade center. From the Burma border, the road sweeps down into Thailand.
From their sanctuary in northern Laos, the Chinese Reds have been building other roads into the heart of the strategic kingdom. Supplies and troops roll over them to strengthen Pathet Lao Communist forces.
North Vietnamese troops move south along the same roads to the Red supply base at Tchepone in southern Laos. From there, between 500 and 1,000 a month infiltrate South Vietnam along the jungle paths of the Ho Chi Minh trial.
The Communist roadbuilding appears to be a violation of the Geneva pact which last year guaranteed the independence and neutrality of Laos.
Truth From the Mainland
A major Paris daily, Le Figaro, April 19 published an unusual article revealing the plight of the Chinese people on the mainland under the, brutal rule of the Communists.
The article, entitled "Chinese Testimony", included reports by a number of Macao refugees who described everyday life on the Chinese mainland.
In an introduction, the writer said: "In spite of the people's militia, the police dogs and the gunboats of Communist China, 700 refugees reach Macao each month. Most of them arrive penniless, in rags, exhausted, by sampan, in junks or merely by swimming. The Jesuit Mission in Macao cares for them, feeds and clothes them. And there, smiling, well-fed, free, they begin to talk. Mostly they are little people: workers, peasants, fishermen, or young people: students and apprentices, who tell what they have seen and suffered in simple phrases. A secretary takes down what they say, translates into French, word by word, keeping close to the Chinese text .... "
The following are testimonies assembled by the writer, Jean Raspail:
A Lonely Old Woman
A letter was sent by a sick old woman in the village of Vinh-Loh, Chung-San district, to her refugee son in Macao:
"My dear son Ngor-Man: If your memory is good you certainly know that I am now 70 years old. In the past, under the Kuomintang government, I would have stopped working. Now, unhappily, I must go out to work with the young people, water the rice-fields, cut grass for the plough-cattle and dig a channel in the neighboring village. Every morning at cockcrow we must get up and lean our beds against the wall so that we cannot lie down again. I am suffering from a painful disease and should be eating sugar and taking various tonics. But our village lacks everything and all that remains on the mountains are very ordinary medicinal plants so my wretched illness cannot be cured.
"Your only son Ah Kon-chai died last summer from smallpox in spite of the duck's egg dipped in urine which the doctor gave him. As to your wife, she has been deceived by the sweet words of one of the party leaders and has left our family and married that beast in human form. Naturally, I did all I could to prevent this but the new marriage laws allow a woman to remarry if her husband has gone to another country to earn a living .... "
The Dying Man's Dollars
"My name is Lam Man-fok and I was a foreman in a Kuan- Tong farm. My father, a barber in the United States, often sent me money but the bank would only give me one tenth and the remainder was confiscated by the Communists for 'expenses of state-building.'
"I could not warn my father since my letters were carefully checked. In 1959 the old man reached Hongkong in the hope of seeing me after the lapse of 25 years. There he fell ill and wrote to me several times urging me to hurry to him. With their usual cunning, however, the Communist authorities refused permission for me to leave the country so as not to lose the foreign currency which my father continued to send me. I therefore tried to escape but was arrested and sentenced to three years 're-education through hard labor.' My father died in Hongkong without seeing me again."
(This refugee reached Macao on January 8, 1963, by rowing a sampan. He was in a state of collapse since he had only had peppers to eat throughout his flight.)
A Fisherman Who Was Too Hungry
A testimony by Luig-Ho, 38, on behalf of 17 refugees who reached Macao by a junk on September 28, 1962:
"In the past we were free fishermen and made a fair living through barter with the local peasants. Unhappily, the Communists forced us to join a fishermen's association and work under their orders, either in the country or on boats. Thereafter there was a great gulf between the past and the present. Our three private boats and our fishing equipment were confiscated. A day's fishing lasted from cockcrow until eight o'clock at night without a moment's respite. We could only eat a very small quantity of fish because we were watched over in each boat by one or two leaders.
"If the year's production was less than the norm, our rations were reduced for the whole of the following year.
"One day, being unbearable hungry, we killed a guard on one of the boats. The guard on another boat was thrown overboard and drowned by the sturdy fishermen. With them out of the way, we were able to eat all the fish we wanted. We ate it raw because it had long been forbidden to have stoves in the boats. We fled in order to begin a new life in Macao, where, for the first time, we were able to eat six or seven bowls of rice each."
Inequality
Kong Chan-fat, 32, a Chung-San farmer: "In the Kay-Ko camp we have only three meals of rice gruel and one meal consisting of two and a half ounces of rice every two days. The room in which we are kept contains 100 people. It is dirty, dark and damp and filled with mosquitoes.
"The camp comprises 20 rooms containing 2,000 prisoners.
"At night, the prisoners sleep on the ground. Some of them wear leg-irons. Many of them are suffering from tuberculosis, malaria or beri-beri."
Tam Sai-hong, 28, a fisherman, sold his watch to a friend without paying the state tax. He was accused of private trafficking and sentenced to three years of re-education by hard labor.
Kun Tsao-tsi, a doctor in Canton:
"In the course of my work I saw with my own eyes a number of deaths from anemia or dropsy but I never saw a Communist leader swollen with dropsy. Whenever the hospital received new good drugs, the requirements of that privileged class had to be given priority or they flew into a rage."
Ngo Kim-tan, 18, a student in Nanchang, capital of Kiangsi, escaped to Macao on December 10, 1962:
"The Communists claim that students are intellectuals who work with their minds and have poor digestions; hence, they only distribute 27 pounds of rice per month to male students and 23 to female students."
Chen Kuen-lien, 20, a Chung-San farmer:
"When someone dies, a very simple bier is made from the door of the dead person's house or the planks of his bed. Good coffins are reserved for the Communist leaders. Every year during the festival of the dead, the Communists rifle abandoned graves and collect the bones to turn them into powdered fertilizer. Coffins which are not completely rotten are repaired and re-sold."
Penalties For Attempting Flights
A testimony by Leong Chan-kei, a farmer, 44, from the village of Kuen-Pac, Chung-San district, who reached Macao by sampan with his whole family in August, 1962:
"Because there were a number of escapes last month, the Communists are seeking to govern their people still more strictly through three new laws:
"1. Escapees captured after July, 1962, to be punished by re-education through hard labor in Manchuria or Mongolia for periods of three, five or seven years, depending on the number of offenses;
"2. The overall allocation of food to be reduced by one half for families where one member has fled and allocation to be completely suppressed where two members have fled;
"3. All food parcels sent by refugees in Hongkong or Macao to their relatives in the village to be compulsorily purchased at low cost so as to prevent envy among those without foreign assistance.
"As a result, many families where a member has escaped are compelled to buy rice on the black market. If they are poor, they can simply die."
Leap to Bottom
The 22,000-ton Yueh Chin (Leap Forward), pride of Peiping's merchant marine, sank mysteriously May 1 while en route from Tsingtao to Moji on Japan's southernmost island of Kyushu.
Had the vessel completed the voyage, it would have been the first visit to Japan by a Chinese Communist ship.
Crewmen said the ship was torpedoed by an unidentified submarine. But no one—including the Communists—appeared to believe it. All of the crewmen were saved.
Japanese maritime safety officials said the crewmen were confused or lying. The ship may have struck a reef, they said.
The vessel sent out a distress call in mid-afternoon May 1 and an American merchant vessel responded. The crew canceled the distress signal and said there was no need for assistance.
The vessel sank three hours later about 125 miles southwest of Cheju Island off the southern tip of Korea.
The first sizable merchant vessel built by the Peiping regime and one of its largest normally carries a crew of 42. There were 59 aboard at the time of the sinking. They were rescued from three lifeboats by a Japanese fishing boat and returned to the mainland by a Japanese patrol boat.
An announcement of the Peiping regime almost two days later said it "is attaching great importance" to the sinking and that "close investigation" was under way.
The Chinese Communists described the accident as a "suddenly met disaster."
The Japanese Maritime Safety Agency theorized that the vessel was plying waters probably unfamiliar to the captain. These waters have dangerous rocks and reefs. One of these is Sokotora Rock, a coral reef almost 1,640 feet long and about 164 feet wide. It is 15 to 20 feet below the surface and poses no danger to small fishing craft but is dangerous for vessels above the 3,000-ton class.
"I think the Chinese Communist ship made a mistake in course," said the chief of the maritime agency's rescue division.
The agency official also believed the vessel was overloaded. It carried a cargo of 10,000 tons of maize and about 4,000 tons of other goods.
Intelligence sources in Taiwan reported the ship was built in a hurry: 58 days as a supposed triumph of the Great Leap Forward.
After the launching on November 27, 1958, the vessel had continuous difficulty. In a recent voyage from Dairen to Shanghai, the vessel's port deck was cracked in several places.
Hongkong shipping circles suggested that the craft may have broken up as a result of faulty construction. A serious lack might have wet down the maize, causing it to swell and buckle the Leap Forward's plates.