Red China

on the World Today

EXPERTS in Hong Kong say the Chinese Reds have now launched their second revolution since taking power, its aim being to make China strong. In their firsl revolution, whose aim was to nail down Red control, the Reds broke the landlord class, suppressed the Church, and cowed or got rid of hostile bourgeois elements. They also shook loose much hoarded wealth. That first, revolution was “destructive” and “easy.” The second is “constructive” and “hard,” for it sets out to make China a great power in modern terms.

The hardness of the task is obscured because the Reds have already made China a great power in a rather spurious way, through the Korean War. Helped by Russian arms and advice, the Reds since 1951 have created, or got hold of, a good air force and ground force. The latter has firepower on the Western scale, with organic artillery, a new thing in Chinese warfare. And it has been purged of the regionalism that made Chinese armies so difficult to control in the past. It has made China comparable in land strength to any other country but Russia or the Lnited States.

If the Korean War does not erupt again, the Chinese strength can be applied somewhere else toward what seems the main Chinese objective of the moment: to “liberate the oppressed peoples of Asia”

&emdash that is, to drive Western rule and influence from the Far East.

The most obvious line for such a move is toward Southeast Asia. China already has a well-developed railhead at Nanning in the southern province, of Kwungsi, opposite Indochina’s northeastern frontier. A great deal of new building is reported there. Another railroad is under construction to Kunming in the southwestern province of Yunnan, which fronts on both Indochina and Burma, The way is thus being laid for troop movements toward these borders, should they be desired.

In Indochina the French team has gained much American equipment of late, plus the help of more and more anti-Communist natives, while the rebels have come under stiffer Red control and have got more and more help from China — they receive 3000 tons of materiel a month now, by most reports. The rebels hold a huge wilderness whose border runs with China’s for hundreds of miles. China will soon be able to put pressure wherever she wants to on places round her border, if she doesn’t embrace them completely as she did Tibet. This situation has arisen from time to lime in the past and it lias always meant that China was in a strong phase.

How solid is Red China?

Yet how solid is that strength? Its main ingredients are Russian arms and the will of Chinese Communism, which has organized the manpower. It is insecure because Russia can stop the flow of arms, and costly because China must pay for the flow. In acting the great power, China is living beyond her means, and she can catch up only by industrializing. To face the West she must copy Western production methods, ;is Russia has. This is the aim of her second revolution.

Not surprisingly, the Reds arc out to do the job by a big economic plan on Russian lines. In September, Malenkov and Mao Tse-tung announced that 141 major enterprises were being, or would be, built or rebuilt with Russian aid. They will include steel mills, blast furnaces, power plants, cotton mills, mines, machine works, and an automobile factory, among other things.

Most of these new plants will be in Manchuria, China’s rich northeastern territory that Japan developed so fully; Hong Kong experts figure that half or more of the total investment will be there. Considerable new investment will be allocated to North China, which has good coal and iron and good cotton acreage. Cotton mills and power plants, incidentally, are being put up in a number of inland cities in the cotton-growing region. This reflects the change in polities —in the old days raw cotton moved from the country to the Western-dominated ports like Shanghai, for use in the Western-dominated mills. Cloth for the farmers had to travel all the way back.

For this and other reasons Shanghai, a relic of Western exploitation, is almost neglected in the new plans; just enough will be put in to keep existing plants going. South China —the huge half of the country below the Yangtze — will be neglected too, which is an old story. The Japanese neglected South China, as did the Chinese Empirre. Even Tsarist Russia neglected it in her diplomatic planning.

Can the Chinese industrialize ?

The Chinese have never been able to cope with industrial schemes by themselves; they have always needed foreign technicians and planners. Now, of course, the advisers are Russians. Russians helped draw up the new plans, Russians passed on them, and it is assumed Russian advisers will go through with the execution Step by step. Russian equipment will be used.

China must pay for it all, mainly in grain and other farm products — Pravda has told the Russian people that they may look forward to this. Soviet propaganda is against colonialism, but Soviet trade deals take the classic line of colonial exploitation. Russia puts out manufactured goods and takes raw materials in exchange. In the past, when Russia has dominated Chinese border regions — Mongolia, Chinese Turkestan — she has made deals to get their grain, hides, furs, wool, and so on. The border regions have got the worst of the bargain, as the raw-material partner always does in these things, and it is taken for granted, even by many Chinese, that China will get the worst of it now.

In the past few decades China has normally had a grain deficit. All she can do now is starve her own peasants or increase her yields through the series of five-year plans inevitably looming ahead. Her leaders say she can up production by 30 per cent in the first five-year plan, which began in January, and will have increased it 70 per cent after the second five-year plan. Foreign experts on Chinese agriculture doubt this. They think she may get an increase of 25 per cent in ten or fifteen years if all goes well. If not, she may get no increase at all.

The trouble is that Chinese yields per acre are high to start with — a good deal higher, for instance, than Russian yields either before or after the Revolution. Thus it may turn out that Marxism’s trick of production increase won’t work on Chinese farming. It may be that collectivization is no match for the Chinese peasant driven in the old way, by high rents and high interest. The Reds’ ventures toward farm coöperatives and collectivized farming have not been successful. Gains have been made by bringing in new acreage through irrigation, but that is about all. Peiping’s job is to make China strong and to pay for this with rice and vegetables from a land already squeezed to support the people on it. We can be sure the struggle will color the next page of Chinese history.

The North rules China

China is moving back toward her old layout in these changes. Historically she faced inland. Her meager trade with Europe was done overland by caravan. Her main foreign problem was the weight of Mongols and other nomads above the Great Wall. She turned away from her coastline and sought to ignore the sea.

In the past few centuries the West, led by Portugal and England, changed this posture of hers — opened the coasts and built up ports like Shanghai till they overshadowed China’s economy. The caravan routes withered. Even the nomad threat was ended by Western arms and railways in Chinese hands.

Now China has turned away from her coastline again. The neglect of Shanghai and South China is part of this —the South was a main field for sea-borne penetration, especially by Britain. The stress on the North and Northwest is also a part, — the Northwest, being the Chinese end of the overland routes, was important in the old arrangement.

The North rules China now as it did in the past when things were normal, and the South is overrun by Northern officials. But one exception must be noted to this: the presence at the head of the government of men from Hunan, the big Central China province just below the Yangtze. Mao Tse-tung is a Hunanese and so are almost a third of the top Red leaders.

Hunancse are strong fighters and able, hot-tempered, straightforward men. They contributed much to the Nationalists’ success but were kept out of power by Chiang Kai-shek. They are good statesmen, but are supposed to be poor at intrigue and at sticking together.

The present Red leaders have spent their adult lives in the dry Northwest, and in their campaigns have had trouble crossing so much as a river. This limits Chinese influence. Pressure can readily be put on Burma and Indochina over the land frontiers, but not so easily over the sea to the Philippines. There are millions of Chinese emigrants in the Philippines, but the Islands have moved steadily back into the American orbit since the war.

Japan is in the American orbit too, though the situation is more complex there, the Japanese being independent people with grave economic problems that reach in all directions. Japan is drawn to China, but she is repelled too, and her place may be decided by Japanese factors, not Chinese.

Formosa waits

Formosa is well outside the Red Chinese orbit for the present, guarded by water and the U.S. Navy. Reports from there indicate that Nationalist affairs are going smoothly enough in a quiet way. Though sound in herself, with American help, Formosa hasn’t shown that she is ready to deliver an attack on the mainland. The Nationalists have long indulged a habit of boastfulness, and Far Eastern observers on the whole are not impressed with their threats.

Finally, Hong Kong and Macao, the little European colonies on the South China coast —vestiges of the Western incursion — seem to be at Red China’s mercy now, spared only because she knows that to take them back would provoke the West dangerously.

That is how Chinese power seems to look, on the basis of Chinese factors. Factors outside China, however, may affect things unpredictable. The chief of these is American strength. Our American way with machinery has upset normal expectations in the past — the Berlin air lift did, for instance, and so did the amphibious war against Japan. Our machinery may upset China’s influence on her neighbors someday, or upset China herself. Meanwhile, we are watching how China develops.