Taiwan Today

Professor Richard Walker's study for the Senate how that Mao murders exceed those of Hitler or Stalin by a wide margin

INTRODUCTION

By Senator James O. Eastland

Chairman, Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security

Last fall, on the initiative of the late Senator Thomas J. Dodd of , the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security asked Prof. Richard L. Walker, a lifetime student of Chinese affairs, to prepare a study on "The Human Cost of Communism in ." Professor Walker, who serves as the director of the of at the of , is widely recognized as one of this country's foremost scholars - and it was precisely because of his scholarly background and his preeminence in the field that Dr. Walker was selected to do the job of research and writing.

The publication of the study comes at a particularly opportune moment. The announcement that President Nixon will be visiting Red China in the near future makes it more than probable that the coming period will witness important changes in our relations with Peking. But there can be no disagreement on the central point that, whatever the status of our relations with , it is imperative that we in have a realistic appreciation of the nature and objectives of Chinese communism.

For some strange reason, most of the newspapermen who have traveled to China for American press in the wake of Peking's invitation to the American ping­ pong team felt called upon to paint Communist China in the most positive hues and to ignore the massive evidence of inhumanity and aggression that has characterized Communist rule in China.

It was almost as though American reporters in Hitler Germany during the 1930's had limited them­selves to reporting that the streets were clean, there was an air of general prosperity, the trains were run­ning on time, unemployment had been eliminated, and the people appeared well fed and contented. All of these things were true about Hitler . But any reporter who focused exclusively on these aspects of Nazi rule and ignored all of the negative aspects, including the massive military buildup, would justly have been excoriated as a propagandist. Needless to say, there were such propagandists; and, to the extent to which they were successful, they succeeded in blind­ing segments of the public, in both Britain and Amer­ica, to the threat which Nazi Germany posed to their own security.

The great merit of the study which follows is that, while it does not deny the Communists credit for certain important economic and social accomplishments, it paints the picture whole by assessing and bringing to life the terrible human cost at which these accomplishments were achieved.

In an earlier companion study, "The Human Cost of Soviet Communism," Robert Conquest, the famed British Sovietologist, calculated that at least 21,500,000 human beings had been executed or killed in other ways by the Soviet Communist authorities. This, he emphasized, was a minimum estimate and the real figure might very well be 50 percent higher. In addition, he estimated that the Communist revolution and the civil war and famine which followed it cost another 14 million human lives. The total human cost of Soviet communism, therefore, comes to somewhere between 35 million and 45 million lives.

In the case of the , the estimates were based on a massive documentation that had accumulated over the years-including Khrushchev's ac­count of the crimes of the Stalin era. In the case of Red China, the available documentation, while not so extensive, is still substantial enough to permit estimates within wider margins. It is Professor Walker's esti­mate, after having studied all the evidence, that com­munism in , from the time of the first civil war (1927-36) until today has cost a minimum of 34 million lives and that the total may run as high as 64 million lives.

While it may be a matter of the pot calling the kettle black, it is interesting to note that Moscow has charged that "in the course of 10 years, more than 25 million people in China were exterminated ... During 1960 alone, Mao Tse-tung's government exterminated more Chinese than were killed in the entire war against Japan."

As Professor so aptly sums up the matter:

The Communist movement in , despite its proclaimed high ideals, must be judged on perform­ance, and, as regards the human equation, there is little to command it. Those who wish to rationalize public assassinations, purges of classes and groups or slave labor as a necessary expedient for 's progress are resorting to the same logic which justified a Hitler and his methods for dealing with economic depression in the Third Reich.

It is important that we in America remember some of the basic facts of human values lest we be beguiled into forgetting that those who succeeded in inducing an artificial American euphoria in the wake of ping-pong diplomacy from Peking in the spring of 1971, are the same leaders who have extracted such a great human cost from their own people, in the name of a doctrine long since discredited in the world, both in terms of performance and intellectual respectability.

In World War II, the fact that we were locked in struggle with common enemies brought us together with the in an alliance of convenience. Because it was widely felt that we must speak no evil of our Soviet allies, the American and British press submitted to a kind of self-imposed censorship on all criticism of the Soviet regime. It proved to be only one short step from this self-censorship to the euphoric belief that if we continued to see no evil and speak no evil where our Soviet allies were concerned, we would win the trust and good will of the Soviet Gov­ernment and pave the way to our peaceful cooperation in the postwar period.

And so we closed our eyes to the historic record; and we closed our eyes to the massacre in the Katyn Forest, where the Soviets in cold blood murdered 10,000 POW Polish officers; and we closed our eyes to the Soviet betrayal of the Warsaw uprising. Fear­ful of a deep Soviet penetration of Europe, and convinced that the Red Army would not simply liberate the countries it entered and then withdraw, Churchill strongly urged that the Allies invade Europe via the soft Balkan underbelly rather than via France, in order to meet the Russians as far to the East as possible. But we resisted Churchill's urging, in part because we wished to avoid anything which might arouse Soviet suspicions, in part because our military leaders thought in purely military terms and not in terms of ultimate political consequences. During the final days of the War in Europe it was in our power to take both and - but we abstained from doing so because it was feared that this would give offense to the Russians. It was these military failures, compounded by our diplomatic failures at and , which turned the whole of over to Com­munist rule. They also left Berlin an isolated and be­ leaguered island - which may, conceivably, lead to a major war because there is no way, short of abject surrender, in which we can withdraw from our commitment to the freedom of West Berlin, and no way in which Berlin can be defended.

This is the high price we have had to pay in for failing to remember certain essential things about Soviet communism during the euphoria that characterized our World War II military alliance.

In the , we have paid back just as high a price for closing our eyes to the truth about the So­viet regime and Soviet intentions. Because we looked upon the Soviet Union only as an ally and not as a potential antagonist, we made concessions at the expense of our Chinese allies to get Stalin into the war against in the closing days - to be exact, on August 8, 1945. In retrospect, it is clear that we should have done everything in our power to let know that we considered her assistance unnecessary in this area and to dissuade her from moving against the Japanese in the . The immediate result of our innocence was that the Soviets, with vir­tually no fighting, were able to take the surrender of the 1,000,000-man Japanese Kwantung Army, with all of its arms and ammunition. History will record that the Soviet occupation of Manchuria and the massive quantities of arms and ammunition which were turned over to the Chinese Communists by the Soviets, played a determining role in bringing the Communists to power in mainland China. And it is clear beyond dispute that if the Soviets had not occupied and imposed a puppet regime there, we would have had no Korean war. Finally, it is more than probable that there would have been no Vietnam war.

The validity of these assertions is confirmed to the hilt in a remarkably frank article which appeared in a recent issue of World Marxist Review, interna­tional theoretical organ of Communist and Workers parties. This is what the article had to say on the decisive role played by the Soviet occupation of in the Chinese Communist revolution:

The Soviet victory in had a direct bearing on the progress of the Chinese revolution. Kwangtung Army weapons and ’s military-industrial facilities were turned over to the Chinese revolutionary forces. No less important for the victory of the national liberation movement in was that Soviet political and diplomatic actions frustrated imperialist and Kuomintang intentions of crushing the revolution.

In autumn 1945 the Soviet Command in Manchuria denied Kuomintang troops landing facilities in (Port Dalny). Neither was the Kuomintang allowed to violate Point 4 of the agreement on Port Arthur, according to which defense of that naval fortress was entrusted to the USSR. This precluded and Kuomintang designs of using the for hitting the revolutionary forces in in the back. Dairen and Port Arthur, controlled by the Soviet Command, were support bases for the Chi­nese revolutionary forces. So much so that U.S. Admiral F. Sherman said in August 1945 that if the two ports had been open for American and Chiang Kai­-shek troops, developments in post-war China would have taken an entirely different course.

Manchuria and China's northern regions were the strategic area from which People's Liberation Army regulars ultimately mounted their swift offensive south, liberating the country, forcing the Kuomintang regime to flee, and compelling its imperialist patrons to with­draw. And none but a regular army could have crush­ed the Kuomingtang troops, for the militia was no more than auxiliary in this effort, a reserve force that secured the PLA rear.

The alliance of 's revolutionary forces with the and the world Communist movement contributed decisively to the victory of the Chinese revolution.¹

The article was equally frank in dealing with the Soviet role in fostering and establishing the North Korean Communist regime. This is what it said:

A mass movement unfolded for the democratic restoration of Korean statehood. People's Committees, which were new democratic bodies of power, sprang lip all over the country, consisting of workers, pea­sants, petty and middle bourgeois, and intellectual. Democratic organizations were formed in the South, as well as the North.

In October 1945 an Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of North Korea was formed in Pyongyang to found a mass party, which became the leader of the country's demo­cratic forces, its swift expansion testifying to its popularity and prestige. There were only 6,000 Communists in in December 1945, with member­ship climbing to 134,000 by August 1946. Subsequently, the Communist Party amalgamated with the New People's Party to form the Korean Party of Labor.

The Japanese colonial administration was at once removed from power in the northern part of the coun­try, where Soviet troops were stationed. The Soviet Command recognized and cooperated with the people's committees; factories and other possessions of Japa­nese capitalists were turned over to the people.

The Korean People's Democratic Republic (KPDR) was constituted in September 1948. Comrade Kim Il Sung, General Secretary of the Korea Party of Labor and Chairman of the KPDR Council of Ministers, said: "If there had been no Soviet Union, the great offspring of the October Revolution, and if the Soviet Union had not achieved its historic vic­tory over German fascism and Japanese militarism, Korea would still be languishing under the Japanese colonial yoke; we would have no independent state, the Korean People's Democratic Republic.²

Finally, the article made it clear, in the paragraphs which follow, that the Soviet invasion of Man­churia was the opening wedge in a coordinated con­tinental offensive that reached as far as and facilitated the success of Ho Chi Minh's revolution.

For the peoples of Southeast Asia, too, the Soviet entry into the war against was a call to the final battle. In the Communist Party of planned an armed uprising early in August, which the All-Vietnam Congress of People's Repre­sentatives, convening on August 16, fully endorsed. A National Liberation Committee was elected, and on August 19 the popular revolution triumphed in ; on August 25 it triumphed in , and with Emperor Bao Dai, the Japanese puppet, abdicating, in as well.

On September 2, 1945, at a mass meeting in Halloi, Ho Chi Minh announced the constitution of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), the first People's Democracy in Asia, born on the last day of the Second World War.

The victory of the August revolution in ended the more than 80-year-old rule of foreign im­perialism and centuries of feudal oppression.

"Twenty-eight years after the October Revolution," Ho Chi Minh wrote later, "victory of the Soviet Army over the Japanese imperialists considerably facilitated the success of the August 1945 revolution, which liberated ."³

Had our leaders better understood the nature of Soviet communism, they would have more clearly foreseen all the catastrophic consequences that would flow from the Soviet entry into the war against in its dying days. And had they foreseen these consequences, they might have moved to avoid them by discouraging, or, if need be, preempting, the Soviet occupation of Manchuria and .

There is nothing new historically about accommodations or alliances of convenience between basic­ally hostile powers. In certain situations, such arrange­ments are not only desirable but well-nigh unavoidable. Since it was considered in the national interest, prior to our involvement in World War II, to continue trading with Nazi Germany and to maintain relations with it, certainly it is a defensible proposition that we should seek to trade with Communist China and to enlarge our relations with it.

But if we are to have relations with Red China, let us do so with our eyes open. Let us not close our eyes to all the unpleasant truths about Communist China. Above all, let us not close our eyes to the , unpleasant fact that the fundamental hostility of Red China to the United States is spelled out, with un­deviating vehemence and consistency, in thousands of doctrinal pronouncements and propaganda statements over the years.

For, as our experience after World War II demonstrated so tragically, history exacts a high price of nations that indulge in euphoria over arrangements of convenience with basically antagonistic powers.

Assessments may differ, within Congress and within the Administration, on the question of our policy towards Red China. But the facts presented in this study deserve the most careful consideration in the context of any assessment.

It is the hope of the undersigned Senator that at least some of our alienated students who cannot identify with their own country and who, instead, brandish the banner of Mao Tse-tung, will show themselves open-minded enough to read this study and weigh its implications for themselves as students. Here they clamorously insist on their right to "do their own thing"-from smoking pot to throwing bombs. But in Red China no student is permitted to do his own thing. Instead, as this study points out, more than 25,000,000 young people have been sent to the countryside as common laborers, against their will - some­times for a year, sometimes for several years, sometimes for life.

It is also to be hoped that those intellectuals who are disposed to sympathize with Communist China be­cause they look upon it as some kind of brave new world, will be induced to reassess their sympathy in the light of some of the facts here set forth. They should ask themselves, among other things, how such sympathy can be reconciled with the following passage from the letter written by Professor Yang Shih-chan to the Yangslze Daily during the brief period of in­tellectual freedom that characterized the "Hundred Flowers" episode.

... During the social reforms campaign, unable to endure the spiritual torture and humiliation im­posed by the struggle ... the intellectuals who chose to die by jumping from tall buildings, drowning in rivers, swallowing poison, cutting their throats, or by other methods, were innumerable. If we say that comrade Stalin has not escaped from condemnation in history for his cruel massacre of comrades, then our Party, in my opinion, will also be condemned for our massacre of intellectuals who had already "sur­rendered" themselves to us. Our Party's massacre of intellectuals and the mass burying alive of the literati by tyrant Ch'in Shih-huang, will go down in 's history as two ineradicable stigma. This cannot but make us utterly heartbroken.

The Subcommittee on Internal Security is indebt­ed to Professor Walker for a study which painstaking­ly details the many aspects of Chinese Communist inhumanity and amorality. It is a study of outstanding quality which should be read by everyone who seeks a balanced understanding of Chinese communism.

James O. Eastland.

July 30, 1970.

Recommissioning of special studies on (1) the human cost of communism in the and (2) the human cost of communism in Red China.

Hon. James O. Eastland,

Chairman, Subcommittee on Internal Security,

Senate,

Dear Me. Chairman: Over the years the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, by way of estab­lishing certain essential background facts on commu­nism and the implication of Communist activities in this country, has held hearings and published studies dealing broadly with the crimes perpetrated by the Communist governments in those countries they con­trol, and the record of perfidy and aggression of these governments in their relations with other countries. The quality of some of the publications issued by the subcommittee has resulted in praise from competent authorities and has made them standard reference texts of permanent value.

It has occurred to me that it would be extremely useful and it would fill a gap in the existing literature if the subcommittee could commission studies by the most competent available authorities setting forth in comprehensive manner the human costs of communism (1) in the and (2) in Red . The story of Communist terror in the and Red China has been told in bits and pieces, but· to my knowledge, there is so far no comprehensive study that attempts to assess the entire cost of the communist system, in terms of human life, in the two major Communist countries. The nearest thing to such a study is Robert Conquest's book, "The Great Terror." But this is confined to the 20 years of the Stalin terror rather than covering the entire 50 years of Soviet communism.

Specifically, I would like to propose that the subcommittee commission Mr. Conquest, who is recognized as one of the West's foremost Sovietologists and perhaps its leading expert on Soviet terror, to prepare a study, approximately 10,000 words in length, on the subject of "The Human Cost of Communism in the

I would also like to propose that, as a companion volume, the subcommittee commission Dr. Richard L. Walker, director of the of national Studies at the , to prepare a study of comparable length on "The Human Cost of Communism in Red China." Profes­sor Walker, as you know, is generally recognized as one of our country's foremost experts.

Prior to writing this letter, I established contact with both Mr. Conquest and Dr. Walker to find out if they would be able to prepare the studies in ques­tion. I am happy to inform you that they have both answered in the affirmative, subject to the understanding that there would be some arrangement for compensation.

If you approve of this proposal and if the ap­proval of the Rules Committee is obtained, I will notify Mr. Conquest and Dr. Walker immediately so that they can get to work on their studies.

I feel that the publication of these studies would reflect credit on the subcommittee and that they would he particularly timely in view of the current debate ever the human cost of a Communist victory in and .

With my thanks for your consideration and with every best wish,

Sincerely yours,

Thomas J. Dodd.

FOREWORD

Of the many characteristics which make us human, two stand out. The first is our ability to train and use our intellectual powers - to reason, to create, to learn, to communicate, to transmit. The second is man's possession of a moral and spiritual nature which leaches him to value human life. In the truly civilized man, these two characteristics operate in tandem - one depends upon the other. They in turn are related to the finest achievements of man in art, in literature, in music and other forms of creative self-expression.

Man's ability to develop intellectually, morally, spiritually and creatively-his ability, in short, to realize his human potential-demands a condition of individual and cultural freedom. Those who persecute men for the free use of their intellect or for the views they hold on any subject, or for their artistic creativity are the true barbarians of any age.

The quality of being human is also related to the institutions created and carried on by successive generations of men. These include the great cultural tradi­tions with their varied styles of social, clan or family life from which the individual can never completely divorce himself and which change relatively slowly. Man is, after all, locked into his own life style by the very language - itself a cultural institution - with which he communicates with his fellow humans. Those who persecute their fellow men because they are a part of human institutions-a clan, a class, an occupation, or a faith - are also barbarians in the truest sense of the term. This is why so much of the religious bigotry in Western history is so reprehensible. Equally repre­hensible is the persecution of political dissidents under the modern totalitarian regimes of fascism and communism.

The Communist movement in , despite its proclaimed high ideals, must be judged on performance, and, as regards the human equation, there is little to commend it. Those who wish to rationalize public, assassinations, purges of classes and groups or slave labor as a necessary expedient for 's progress are resorting to the same logic which justified a Hitler and his methods for dealing with economic depression in the Third Reich.

It is important that we in America remember some of the basic facts of human values lest we be beguiled into forgetting that those who created an almost artificial euphoria in the wake of the ping-pong di­plomacy from Peking in the spring of 1971 are the same leaders who have extracted such a great human cost from their own people in the name of a doctrine long since discredited in the world, both in terms of performance and intellectual respectability.

Richard L. Walker July 1971

By Richard L. Walker

If the rains of Communism flood the world, humanity will drown. Would you understand me, dear friend, if I told you I saw an old woman weep because the sun had died in ?⁴

Stalinist ?

On July 1, 1971, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated half a century of existence. These five turbulent decades have been filled with prodigious changes but also with weighty tragedy for great numbers of the inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom. It can be doubted whether the twelve young revolutionary idealists who gathered in a girls' school in in 1921 to set their Party in motion could have foreseen the impact which their actions would have upon . One of the twelve, Mao Tse-tung, was to occupy the center of the stage in the Chinese Communist move­ment for more than thirty-five years. During the period of protracted conflict which led the Communists to power, Mao was, in many respects, the Lenin of China. Shortly after accession as Chairman of the People's Republic of in 1949, Mao's role seemed to take on more of the characteristics of a Stalin.

This parallel with the Stalin era deserves our sober attention. Aspects of it are uncomfortably precise. There has been the same monumental inhumanity and the same commitment to political terror as a means of crushing the opposition. There is an aura of mystery surrounding the activities and whereabouts of the "great supreme commander;" the cult of personality has at times reached ridiculous extremes; his whims and arbitrary decisions have made his associates tremble and have caused untold suffering for his people.

There has been the intellectual isolationism of his country, now a great bulwark and fortress for the spreading of his truth. And, above all, there has been distrust and suspicion focused against the very people who could help to gain support for the leader and aid the progress of the country: the intellectuals and students.

There is yet another aspect of the parallel between the Mao and Stalin periods deserving of attention - the treatment of their rule among the scholars and journalists in the outside world. It is difficult for many to remember the praise heaped upon Stalin in the 1930's, but we are made acutely aware of the fascina­tion with Chairman Mao, through a surfeit of scholarly and journalistic attention which helps to build his cult and his image as a sort of superman. It is not surprising that Stalin is still a great hero in Communist China. (His picture was prominently displayed in Peking on October 1, 1970, the 21st anniversary of the People's Republic of China.)⁵

For more than two decades, those few voices in the West who attempted to call attention to the reali­ties of Stalin's terror were drowned out by the strident chords of praise sung by the "intellectuals" in the out­side world who were fascinated with the grandiose ex­periments in the "." Those who call­ed attention to the mass executions or to the facts of slave labor or to the incredible cost of collectivization were frequently ridiculed or demeaned; it was asserted they did not seem to understand that some sacrifices have to be made for revolutionary progress. Even the show trials of the great purges were pronounced as signs of growing democracy. Such myopia seems almost incredible to us today in the wake of subsequent revelations from the itself, the outpourings of works like those of Solzhenitsyn, and the wealth of refugee testimony which became available after World War II.

But it was the Khrushchev "Secret Speech" of February 1956, which really jolted those who had for decades apologized ritualistically for crimes against humanity in the Soviet state. The American Stalin Prize winner, Howard Fast, was moved to deep soul-searching:

It is a strange and awful document, perhaps with­out parallel in history; and one must face the fact that it itemizes a record of barbarism and paranoic blood­lust that will be a lasting and shameful memory to civilized man ....

Where I failed miserably and where I swear by all that is holy that I will not fail again, was ... [in failing] to see that ... to ahandon the holy right of man to his own conscience, his own dignity, his right to say what he pleases, to speak freely and boldly for the truth as he sees the truth-and fearing no man, whether right or wrong-is no victory at all .... I knew that writers and artists and scientists were intimidated, but I accepted this as a necessity for socialism ...

This I can never accept again - and never again can I accept as a just practice under socialism that which I know to be unjust. ... Never again will I remain silent when I can recognize injustice - regardless of how that injustice may be wrapped in the dirty linen of expediency or necessity. Never again will I accept the "clever" rationale, which appears to make sense hut under scrutiny does not.⁶

Howard Fast's statements in 1956 make an eloquent point of departure and a warning for those who might still be tempted to hold up double standards - those who are prone to excuse the crimes and terror practiced against humans in the name of socialism and yet are in the forefront in fighting other injustices.

Fast also centered in on some of the very items which tend to set humans apart from other living creatures - the independence of the human intellect, the striving for freedom, and the standards of decency and individuality which dare not be sacrificed.

The scholars in the West have not yet had the equivalent of a Khrushchev "Secret Speech" detailing Mao's many crimes against his fellow Chinese and Communist comrades. Perhaps for this reason many still harbor those same sentiments which caused the Howard Fasts to ignore Soviet realities in Stalin's time; but surely the accumulated evidence as well as the example from the Soviet experience should give pause.⁷

For the sake of the socialist "higher goals" many of these scholars have been prone to excuse massive injustices in the questionable assumption that these in­justices were only temporary. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, not a few American "China-watchers" have hastened into print to denounce Chiang Kai-shek's government for this or that injustice, such as the imprisonment of Lai Chen, the editor of Free China in September, 1960 (the author joined in protesting what seemed to be a clear case of political persecution). But those same "China-watchers" have turned admiring eyes on the Chinese Communists and have either remained silent about some of the human costs described in the pages which follow, or have rationalized that these are a necessary part of some vague "inevitable" Chinese revolution.

With good reason the People's Republic of (PRC) has been called "the largest enterprise in the history of mankind."⁸. The problems of adjusting the world's longest lived, richest, and most traditional cul­ture to the demands of the age of the computer, atomic energy or jet aircraft are indeed unprecedented for any regime. These, too, are factors that have weighed heavily in the minds of the intellectual sympathizers. Further, there is the factor of the guilt complex of the Western world toward because of the period of imperialism in . This has tended to make many Western observers more inclined to suspend judgments of the Chinese Communists and to hold to those double standards which for so long blinded the outside world to the realities of the Soviet system. And yet, can the world ignore the monumental human cost of Mao's or its Stalinoid features, especially since the "Great Leap Forward" of 1958?

Chinese Communist Achievements - and the Cost

Those young zealots who pledged their lives to the Communist cause in during the early years of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) joined in ex­pounding a series of high-sounding general goals which Chinese from all walks of life could support. They promised unity for their long-divided country, equality with and expulsion of the foreigners with their hated "special privileges," industrialization and modernization, respect and standing in the world, and an end to oppression and tyranny at home. Many Chinese, especially students and intellectuals, knew that these goals would have to be achieved if were to take its place as a respected equal in the councils of the world. The hope for fulfillment of these goals evoked enthusiasm and support for the PRC-on nationalist rather than on communist ideological grounds - from many sectors of the population during the early years.⁹

There can be no gainsaying that under the rule of Mao Tse-tung some of these goals are in sight for the People's Republic of . is a thermonuclear power which has already given clear indications with its own "sputnik" in April 1970 that it is well on the way to becoming an ICBM power. During the first decade of Communist rule, the PRC made dramatic achievements in industrialization and modernization­ - steel production, for instance, reaching in excess of 12,000,000 tons.

The two decades of Communist rule in mainland have also witnessed some remarkable progress in other areas. Especially important was the early work in the fields of education and public health. The government made strenuous efforts to bring literacy to a vast population which, over earlier decades of warfare and division, had been offered little opportunity for education. Well-organized public health teams carried the message of elementary basic habits in sanitation and hygiene to the remote rural areas of . Then, too, there was an improvement in communications which, in combination with some formidable projects for water control and irrigation, helped to prevent those appalling losses of human life which had periodically occurred in in the wake of past natural disasters.

The initial achievements of the "New China" were owed in large part to a combination of factors such as the large-scale Soviet support, an early unity of dis­parate factions, and especially the enthusiasm and energies of the many students, intellectuals, and specialists - "bourgeois elements" Mao called them - who gave their all for the "people's government," out of simple patriotic motives.

In fairness, it should be pointed out that many of the projects implemented by the Communist government were originally conceived and planned and, in some cases, initiated, under the Nationalist government which preceded it. In fairness, too, it must be observed that it is an oversimplification to compare the progress achieved during the 20 years of Communist rule with the relative lack of progress during approximately 20 years of Nationalist rule. The Chinese communists since coming to power, have not had to contend with any foreign or domestic threat. The Nationalist government, on the other hand, during most of its rule had to contend with the Japanese invasion and occupation of much of its territory, and, simultaneously, with a massive Communist insurrection.

But the main question at issue is not whether progress has been achieved in various areas under communist rule, but how high a price has been paid for this progress. What would a balanced picture include? Could comparable progress have been achieved with less drastic and more humane methods? At the close of World War II and when the Communist movement in was driving to power, there might have been reason to wonder what methods would be most efficacious for the achievement of those standards of development and life which seemed to be the universal goal of the leaders in the third world. In the 1970's there can no longer be any question that the Chinese Com­munist "model" cannot begin to offer the progress for its people which a free system can; there are too many alternative examples. The wonder of the "risen sun" of Japan or the measured progress of a non-totalitarian India, both cooperating with an interdependent world in relative harmony, stand in stark contrast to the price which the Chinese people have paid for Marxism­-Leninism and the Thought of Mao Tse-tung.

It is my considered judgment, after following Communist China closely for more than two decades, that the cost of progress achieved under Communist rule is too high for the conscience of the world to absolve its perpetrators. In terms of human life and human suffering and in terms of destruction of moral and cultural values this cost cannot be condoned by any rationalization. The high Chinese Communist Party leaders who sit down at convivial banquets with visiting Americans may be guilty of as great crimes against humanity and their own people as were Hitler and Stalin and their followers. In the case of Chou and Mao, their commitment to their Communist faith has been one of more than a half century, and in its name they have not hesitated to commit any act.¹⁰

(Continued on page 70)

Editor's note: Style is that of the U.S. Senate publication.