The Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued today the following news release:
On April 28, 1959, the Government of the Republic of China directed the Chinese Ambassador to Turkey, Mr. Shao Yu-lin, to proceed to the United Kingdom of Libya to convey its felicitations on the occasion of the wedding ceremony of the Libyan Crown Prince on April 30. Ambassador Shao was also instructed to negotiate with the Libyan Government for the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. These negotiations having been successfully concluded, an exchange of notes took place at Benghazi on May 10 between Ambassador Shao and His Excellency Abdulmagid Coobar, Prime Minister and concurrently Foreign Minister of the United Kingdom of Libya, confirming the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Republic of China and the United Kingdom of Libya as well as the latter's consent to the opening of an embassy in Libya by the Government of the Republic of China.
Freedom versus Slavery in China by Wen Yuan-ning
The subject of my talk today is Freedom versus Slavery in China, but almost all I shall have to say will be on the commune system, recently introduced by the Chinese communist regime. Its success will mean absolute slavery for more than 500 million people, with grave economic and political repercussions throughout the world. Its failure, on the other hand, will spell the doom of Mao Tse-tung and his clique and bring in the possibility of mass uprisings for freedom throughout China. There would in that case be no repetition of what had occurred in Hungary, where precious lives had been lost in vain because there was no alternative government in being, with an organized army of its own, ready to take over from the then crumbling Red regime in that satellite country. In such an eventuality in continental China, instant help would come from the Government of Free China in Taiwan. And that help would not be in the form of pious UN resolutions, but in the blood and lives and treasure of brothers and fellow compatriots with an organized, experienced, administrative personnel, prepared to assume at any moment the reins of government, and with a well-equipped force of 600,000, capable of forming the nucleus of a large revolutionary army of continental proportions.
Why has the Chinese communist regime embarked on the mad un-Chinese commune system, which had once been tried by Stalin and then almost immediately abandoned? There are two reasons:
One, the Chinese communists have been thoroughly dissatisfied with the results of their past agricultural policies. Being essentially an agricultural country, the prosperity of China depends upon a sound agricultural economy. Her population of more than 500 million, with a yearly increase of about 13 million, requires an abundance of foodstuffs. Over and above this, there must be a sufficient surplus of agricultural products to provide raw materials for her factories. Capital investments, too, for industrial undertakings in the communist planned economy have to be obtained from the sale or barter of agricultural products. But so far agriculture on the Chinese mainland has failed to meet adequately those needs.
To increase agricultural production, the Chinese Reds have resorted to (1) reclamation of waste lands; (2) development of mountainous areas; and (3) intensive cultivation of land already tilled and irrigated. They have failed except in their scheme for the reclamation of land in remote areas: and in this they have only succeeded by forcible removal of peasants from one part of the country to another. According to figures released by the communists themselves, the yield per unit area in the period between 1953 and 1957 was below the average productivity index for the ten years before the Sino-Japanese War under Nationalist rule.
No doubt the failure to increase agricultural production has been due to sabotage, passive resistance, and lack of cooperation on the part of the Chinese peasants, who mistrust their communist masters, and have good reasons for doing so. Before coming to power, Mao Tse-tung promised land to the landless, thus winning their support. Once on the saddle, he started his so-called "land reform programme" by robbing the landowners of their land and distributing it to every tiller of the soil. The landowners naturally became his enemies, and the former landless peasants equally naturally his friends; but the latter instead of showing their gratitude by giving up to Mao's regime most of what they had sowed and reaped, sat down to enjoy the fruits of their labour. In spite of intensive propaganda to make the peasants understand their duty of voluntarily sacrificing themselves by eating less and turning over their surplus of agricultural products to the regime, their response did not come up to Mao's expectations. In consequence, Mao had to take back most of the land, previously given to the landless peasants, and turned it over to the 750,000 cooperatives which had been set up in his "collectivization plan," only allowing to each peasant a small allotment that he could call his own, in order to grow vegetables and rear pigs, ducks and chicken. By this step, Mao alienated the peasantry as a whole. Thus to the number of the disaffected who included at first only the former landowners was now added the vast mass of the peasantry who had enjoyed for a very brief period the possession of land. Being discontented with their lot, and feeling aggrieved because they had been cheated by Mao, they, as was to be expected, did everything they could to cheat him in their turn; and they did this by absenteeism, sabotage and refusing to work as hard for Mao's 750,000 cooperatives as they had done for themselves. The result was the low yield of foodstuffs in 1957 and the decline of the production of other agricultural products. This general lowering of agricultural production greatly retarded industrialization that depended for its capital investments on the sale of agricultural products. Hence the failure of the communist regime's first five-year plan (1953-1957). The measure of this failure can be gauged by the state of affairs in Manchuria, which is the show window of what the Red regime has done in the development of heavy industry, and to which all foreign tourists and journalists are taken on conducted tours when they visit China. Mr. Chow Ching-wen, a native of Manchuria and a recent escapee from communist China, who had till December, 1956, held high posts in that regime, had this to say of his native place in an interview on August 1st, 1958, at Hongkong: "Industry in Manchuria was built up by the Japanese. As regards their so-called achievements what the Chinese communists have done is simply to change a set of Russians for Japanese. Up till now, the production figures for both heavy and light industry in Manchuria have not yet come up to those attained under Japanese management."
Under the above circumstances, Mao was therefore forced to introduce the commune system.
But there is a second reason. Because of general discontent against his regime among the peasantry who compose more than 85% of the population, and upon whose help he had originally risen to power, Mao has found it imperative to institute a tighter control over the people for fear of mass uprisings. This the commune system apparently affords. Before it can be understood how the commune system does this, it is necessary to know its nature, its management and its advantages from the communist point of view.
The people's commune, according to Mao Tse-tung, is "a transitional form of organization from collective ownership towards ownership by the whole people." It is intended to be "the basic unit for the development of communist society in the future."
The agricultural cooperatives, which the communists had set up in the past, were simple productive units. The people's commune, on the other hand, is not only a multiple-purpose economic unit, an amalgamation of the strictly agricultural cooperative, the handicrafts cooperative, the supply and marketing cooperative, the credit cooperative and the transportation cooperative, but it also serves an all-inclusive combination of political, cultural, economic, military, and social functions. It is in fact an organization of workers, farmers, merchants, students and soldiers, all in one vast prison, so to speak.
The organization of the people's commune follows the principle of "one village, one commune." Sometimes several villages are combined into one commune, depending upon local conditions. The size of a commune varies from a little over 4,000 to more than 23,000 families. According to the latest figures published by the communists, nearly 95% of the whole of continental China has been organized into about 25,000 communes.
The over-all administrative machinery of the commune, responsible for law and order and also for directing the work of the commune as a whole, is "the commune management committee," whose members are composed of the original "village people's committee," with the original village chief becoming chief of the commune. The village Communist Party boss originally assigned to spy into village affairs has now the same job of spying into commune affairs.
All, irrespective of sex, between the ages of 18 and 50 must take part in the activities of the commune. Each and every man and woman are workers, farmers and soldiers rolled into one. They are organized into divisions, regiments, battalions, and companies, just like an army. All must receive military training. As conscript labour armies, they are expected to do productive work in time of peace; and as conscript armed forces, they are supposed to be ready to fight in time of war.
Private life is abolished. Everybody has to eat in communal kitchens, bathe in communal bathhouses, sleep in communal dormitories, read in communal reading-rooms, and even their leisure should be enjoyed communally. The communist slogan has it: "I am for everybody, and everybody is for me." Even husbands and wives are not allowed to be with one another except at stated intervals.
From the above, it will readily be seen what a tight control, at least on paper, the Communist Party will henceforth have on practically everyone in continental China. One of its objects in instituting the commune system is of course to squeeze the last ounce of energy out of every man, woman and child, in order to carry out at all cost Mao's programme of industrialization, "to catch up and overpass the industrial production of England," so runs one of the communist slogans, "within 15 years." But there is no doubt about it, that another objective of the commune system is the suppression of all incipient revolutionary tendencies and the consolidation of communist rule in China. Judged from this angle, the bombardment of Quemoy and the creation of tension in the Taiwan Straits between August 23rd until the end of last year may be regarded as mere pretexts for pushing through the commune system and suppressing all possible counter-revolutionary movements inside the country.
The short period of "let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools contend" in the early months of 1957 was initiated to find out how the wind was blowing among the people after eight years of communist rule. The communists never expected that discontent against their rule would be so vocal, so widespread and so virulent. When the situation worsened day by day, they were forced to violent measures of suppression. The screw was gradually tightened. Now that the Chinese Reds cannot very well back down, they are compelled willy-nilly to go the whole hog with the commune system as a last resort. This was what the communist propaganda boss Lu Ting-yi had in mind when he said of the commune system that the Chinese Reds were now engaged in a life-and-death struggle.
From what I have said above, it is quite ·obvious that the Chinese communists expect to derive from the commune system certain benefits, of which the following may be noted:
(1) Simplification and greater concentration of the social structure. From something like 750,000 cooperatives, there are now only about 25,000 communes. Savings in administrative expenses could thus be made, management would be more centralized and control tighter on the people. In this way, too, it would be so much easier for the communists to carry out their party, political, economic, cultural and social programmes.
(2) Through the commune system, an immense army of people's militia is in being, for the purpose of maintaining peace and Order and of suppressing any tendency to revolt among the discontented. In peace time, the militia composed of all men and women between the ages of 18 and 50 is one huge camp of slave labour in war time, it becomes automatically a vast barrack of slave soldiers. Besides, economy could be effected in military expenditure, because instead of the State having to spend money for the transportation cost and the uniform of every man sent to certain centers for military training, henceforth this would not be necessary as every man would be trained in his own commune.
(3) By uprooting and completely destroying the old family and social structure, making all persons mere cogs in a gigantic state machine, the Communist Party hopes to change the mentality and social attitudes of the people so that divided loyalty will no longer exist among them, but only loyalty to the State.
(4) By abolishing private property of any kind, even such things as household and kitchen utensils and making everyone a hired servant of the State, absolutely dependent on the commune for food, lodging and clothes, the Communist Party has in its hands a whip to push through any programme, industrial or agricultural, by the simple expedient of withholding food from those whom the commune Party bosses consider as not having fulfilled their quota of work, however onerous and unreasonable.
The above are some of the possible advantages on paper which the Chinese Communist Party can hope to reap from its commune system. But on the other side of the balance sheet, there are also grave disadvantages of which the following are the most obvious:
(1) Since the commune is an all-inclusive combination of productive, political, military and economic functions, its management must perforce require a personnel of a very high degree of scientific, administrative and technical skill. Without such a personnel, there would be utter confusion and chaos, leading not only to decreased production and general decline of the people's livelihood, but also to demoralization of the Party bosses who have to administer the commune system. And how on earth could such a personnel be found and trained in a few months since the establishment of the commune system?
(2) In the commune system, the people become the slaves and the Party bosses, who administer it, the masters. Men who become masters of slaves very soon develop a certain kind of arrogance towards those under them. Hence, resentment and hatred are bound to be felt by the people towards the Party bosses. Frictions in the working of the system would naturally arise, sharper than those which had existed during the period of collectivization. Sabotage, dissatisfaction, little enthusiasm: for work, and even active resistance would continue to increase.
(3) By organizing the whole country into communes, the Chinese Red regime has put in the hands of the masses a ready-made organization and weapon which can be turned against it, should they rise up in revolt. The commune is a double-edged sword, which can cut both ways.
(4) Now that the lot of the soldiers and their families is one with the peasants in the commune system, they share a common grudge against the regime because of their harsh and slavish life. A breakdown in army discipline is not unlikely under such conditions. Who can say that such an eventuality will not take place when desperation makes men willing to do anything rather than live as miserable slaves?
I have now almost done with what I wish to say. I have only one word more.
Speaking as a Chinese, I am sure that the commune system will fail in China. It is against the tradition, the historical background and the mode of life of the Chinese people.
The typical Chinese attitude towards any form of government is that it is a necessary evil. The less it interferes with their lives the better. Especially of the Chinese peasants, is it true to say that they like to be left alone. To them the commune system with its continuous and pettifogging interference with their lives must be hateful in the extreme.
Speaking as a man as a representative of humanity, I hope that the commune system will fail. It degrades men and women into ants, into robots, into slaves. If it were to succeed, then the future of the world would be dark indeed. It would mean that a gigantic system of slavery would have succeeded; and as you all know, nothing succeeds like success. And I am afraid to think what a successful militaristic communism of the Mao brand will do next.
Nothing less than a struggle between freedom and slavery is going on in China. The two protagonists are, on the one side, Free . China under the leadership of President Chiang Kai-shek, and, on the other, Mao's China which stands for slavery. Which side do you want to win? Choose.
Editor's Note-This is the text of an address recently delivered by His Excellency Wen Yuan-ning, Chinese Ambassador to Greece, before the Propeller Club, Athens.