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WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO?
CHINA!
WHAT
DO YOU WANT T O KNOW?
ALL ABOUT IT!
SEVEN SEAS PUBLISHERS BERLIN
SEVEN SEAS BOOKS are published by
SEVEN SEAS PUBLISHERS BERLIN
Berlin \X1 8 . Glinkastrasse 13-15
Published as a Seven Seas Book 1959
Cover design by Lothar Reher
Chinese woodcuts in colour: The Ten Bamboos collection
The Shining Treasures collection
Photographs:
Chang Jui-hua, Chang Shen-min, Chen Cheng-ching. Chi Kuan-shan, Chiang Chi-sheng, Chou Shuming, Eva Hsiao, Hsu Chih-cheng, Lu Houmin, Tang Mao-lip, Hsinhua (Chinese News Agency)
Printed by Betriebsberuf sschule Heinz Kapelle Pößneck V 15,34 License Number: 306/90/60
Manufactured in the German Democratic Republic
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
CHINESE WOODCUTS IN COLOUR
Insert I From The Ten Bamboos collection facing page 80
Insert II From The Shining Treasures collection facing page 96
PHOTOGRAPHS
Insert I The Rivers facing page 16
Insert II Landmarks facing page 48
Insert III The People facing page 128
Insert IV Work and Play facing page 152
FOREWORD
Today thousands of people visit China. They go from all over the world - kings and princes, presidents, Cabinet Ministers,
parliamentarians, scientists, writers, artists, poets, clergymen, business men, journalists, ordinary tourists. Few of those who go
know much of the country they are visiting. Many of them have vague or even completely false ideas of what awaits them - some
from the glamorous angle, some from the reverse. Both have trouble in getting things as they are into focus.
This is a book for those thousands. It is no less a book for the millions who can visit the country in their dreams. It aims to give
an introduction to China - its history, its culture, its places of interest and beauty, its progress. Perhaps it would be more exact to
say it aims to give snapshots of the essential things. To those who seek a more extensive knowledge of China's history, its
culture, its poetry and prose, authoritative books are available in most languages - books of great interest, of great value.
This book, then, aims at giving a general picture, so that when the visitor steps on to Chinese soil, the scenes that confront him
will fall into correct perspective.
Everything is relative. A backward Western country has merely a century to catch up. China has an inheritance of economic and
cultural backwardness of two thousand years. It is well to remember this when seeing men working with primitive tools alongside
gigantic modern factories covering acres - factories that are filled with machine tools, some of them two-storeys
page 11
high, complicated machines, motor lorries, tractors, aeroplanes, coming off the assembly lines; factories going over to
automation. Five years ago most of those working in these factories could neither read nor write. Had never heard of
mechanisation.
It is well to remember that the poorest peasants in Spain and Italy work their plots with tools almost as primitive.
It is well to remember this when faced with the contrast of a huge modern building that could grace the Strand, the Champs
Élysees, Fifth Avenue or the central square of any great city in the world, while alongside are mud shacks, or even matting
shelters, occupied by families.
It is well to remember, also, that there are mud and tin shacks and matting sheds and cave dwellings in Spain, in Southern Italy,
crude, comfortless huts in the French countryside, over-crowded hovels in the centre of Rome and Paris and sunless, damp
basement rooms in England and slums in the United States. For every hundred of such habitations in the industrialised West, of
course, there are hundreds of thousands in China. The difference is that in the West they stay - in China they are being
displaced by modern apartments. Two thousand years of backwardness -its legacy from feudalism- takes a heavy inheritance.
China is catching up.
Alongside earth removers, bulldozers, modern lorries on an excavation job for one of the innumerable big blocks, or on a bridge
construction, men fill little baskets with earth, with stones, which they transport dangling from shoulder poles. Laborious,
time-wasting, uneconopage 13
mic! But the steam navvies and bulldozers increase and the motor lorries are rolling off the assembly line by the thousands.
Kwantung pledged the end of the carrying-pole for the whole province by the end of 1958. Villages and counties have taken up
this challenge to the age-long method of transport.
Three men pull a seemingly immovable load of coal, straining on a slight gradient. Twenty men pull on a rope, pull a piece of
machinery, chanting as they move it slowly down the street. A small Mongolian horse and a tiny donkey follow with a heavily-built
cart loaded with a miniature forest of timber. They move in towards the gutter at the honk of a modern three-wheeled Japanese
motor delivery van. Domestic manufacture and imports are still limited but ultimately human traction will disappear, though the
water buffalo will long remain despite the new rice-transplanting machines.
Today the Chinese people are adequately clothed. Only a few short years ago hundreds of millions of them had patched jackets
and pants, and tens of millions of them shivered in the winter because they had only the thin rags of summer. And rags means
rags! Millions had no clothes. Today they all have clothing - winter and summer clothing. The winter clothing for the majority is
padded cotton - bulky but utilitarian. It is warm. It is cheap. Remember this when you find so much Chinese clothing drab.
Remember the patches and rags that are gone forever. Now everyone has clothes!
Until 1950 scores of millions never had enough to eat. And when they ate it was the poorest fare - rice
page 14
gruel, millet, Kaoliang (sorghum), a little vegetables; meat maybe once a year, maybe not at all. This for the millions. They had
no reserves. At some time or other they staved off hunger with wild herbs; with leaves. In any catastrophe -flood, drought - they
died of starvation. Yes, starvation! They died of starvation in the cities, too. They froze to death in the cities. One feels that one
should repeat those sentences in capital letters. A cruel country, Old China. A heartless China. And then remind yourself that
today no one starves in China. China is no general paradise. The living standard is low by Western standards. There are places
where it is very low. Two thousand years of economic backwardness left from the Old Society is a heavy handicap. But today no
one starves in China.
Wuhan has a museum in which are life-size models of the mud hovels in which most of the people of the city and nearby areas
lived. And they contain the few cracked pots, the wooden structures that served as tables, and the rags which were the
occupants' only clothes, summer and winter.
There were hundreds of thousands of beggars in Old China. Scores of thousands were professionals - they were born beggars;
they died beggars. But hundreds of thousands begged because they had no land, no work, no one to help them. They were the
casuals: they begged for existence, not as a profession. Maybe not all professionals have taken kindly to re-education. I should
be amazed if they have. But I have not seen one. Nor has anyone I know. Yet I have seen them by the dozens in Naples, in
Rome. Yes, even in Paris and London.
page 15
Prostitution has ceased. The greater number of prostitutes were little more than slaves. Most were sold by heartbroken parents
who thought prostitution better than death from certain starvation; orphan girls sold by heartless relatives; peasant girls deceived
into thinking they were being given jobs in factories. Prostitutes were beaten; murdered when sickness or disease cut off their
earning power for the worst of the brothel keepers. Little wonder that they welcomed the new life that opened to them.
It is difficult for Western readers to get a clear picture of the absolute poverty of the Chinese peasants. When the peasants
formed the Hsinfu (Fukien Province) Co-operative in 1954, they had no animals, no harrow. The co-op had to borrow money to
buy a plough. Three households of the seventeen did not even have a hoe. They had no axe; no saw. They had only four
matting raincoats for twenty workers, so that work in the rain was difficult. Some did not even have straw sandals.
Even after land distribution, many poor peasants, although they had land, still had to hire themselves out to landlords and rich
peasants in order to live. The sweep of co-operation in 1956 saw the end of that.
So far as Hsinfu Co-op was concerned, poverty- stricken though it was, by 1957 it was prosperous – the term, let it be
understood, being strictly relative. Today, the new People's Communes ensure bumper harvests and the Commune kitchens
and restaurants mean more and better food for peasant and city dweller, alike.
page 16
Everywhere, the pace out of extreme poverty into sufficiency - sufficiency of clothes, of food, of implements - has been
extraordinarily rapid.
And this extract from a study published in Washington in 1949 by the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations,
tells its own story of conditions in Old China, as they were up to the day of Liberation.
"At the mine in Santan, operations still follow the primitive methods of a thousand years ago. Small pits are opened and the
miners burrow their way down narrow passages a hundred feet below the surface. Several thousand children called ‘ants' are so
employed. Half or completely naked and carrying small pottery oil tamps and small primitive picks these little miners stagger up
from the pits with a few handfuls of poor quality coal. Long labour stunts their frail bodies: their average expectancy of life barely
exceeds fifteen years. However, some 600 coal pits continue to operate in this way."
Those who knew Peking before 1949 remember the dirt, the garbage, the unspeakable filth of so many places off the few main
thoroughfares; the stagnant, overgrown pools and swamps; the stinking ditches; the littered parks and open spaces. Hundreds of
thousands of tons of rubbish were cleared from the squares and "gardens ", and hundreds of thousands of tons of silt and weeds
and refuse from the ponds and pools and swamps which today are tree- and flower-lined fresh lakes that help to make Peking
one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
THE RIVERS … The Chu Tang Gorge on the great Yangtze.
Above: A man-made waterway that has lasted 2,000 – the Tu Kiang-yen irrigation project has been watering central and eastern
farms and fields in China since 250 B.C. Made of mud, stone, and wood, it irrigates more than 800,000 acres of land – land that
now belongs to the Chinese people.
The beautiful, picturesque Yu His River in Szechuan Province
Sanmen Gorge Dam, one of the new Yellow River projects --- it creates the third greatest area of impounded water in the world.
The huge gorges, once a menace to river traffic, serve as an asset to the dams which will govern the water's flow in »c Yellow
and Yangtze Rivers . . .
Above: Log rafts and sampans ply their course on the Hsiang River, Hunan Province.
Waterways of Southwest China - morning comes to the Chin Ning, one o f the great rivers of Szechuan Province. Szechuan, the
country's most populous section as well as a great granary, is a wet and mountainous area. The Yangtz,e River also passes
through it on its way to the sea . . .
The Ching Lan Harbour in Hainan Island. Hainan lies to the south of China's southernmost tip. The remnants of luxuriant forests
cover it and palms grace its tropical shores.
Evening at Shenchiamen in the Choushan Islands-over 10,000 islands comprise this group on the east coast, and the site is one
of China's major fishing grounds. Here, throughout the fishing season, boats of every description, numbering in the thousands,
are found anchored when the day comes to a close.
It isn't true that there are no flies in China, although I travelled two thousand miles before I saw the first, and he came in when we
stopped opposite a goods train laden with squealing pigs. And I saw one here and there, and some - not many - in the villages.
But, the campaign here and there eased. And flies multiply by the millions. So in the summer just passed I have seen more. So
once more Death is on their trail. And on trail of other disease carriers, mosquitoes and rats; and of sparrows, which, in China,
are bandits in the wheat fields. The village, town and city authorities declare confidently that they will keep on and that all these
pests will be completely wiped out in a few years. I imagine it will call for eternal vigilance. After all, China is bigger than Europe,
the United States or Australia, and to arrest every fly is a colossal task to set oneself. Yet this leads naturally to the statement
that bubonic plague, cholera and smallpox have been conquered, and malaria in most areas. Malaria in the remaining centres,
and other endemic diseases are being eliminated by scientifically-planned campaigns throughout the country.
Obviously, in a book of this description one does not rest on one's own knowledge - one draws heavily on the works available,
taking the utmost care to refer only to the authoritative. And one finds, too often, a difference of opinion as to European spelling
of Chinese places, names, even of dates in the histories.
I have been content with approximations, because the visitor is satisfied to know that China's population
page 18
is 600,000,000; (the exact 1953 census figure was 601,938,035. No official figure has since been published, but the expectation
of an annual net increase of 2 per cent is known to have been exceeded in the three subsequent years, but the campaign led by
the Women's Federation for scientific family planning was expected to affect the 1957 and subsequent figures); that a street is a
mile long when it might be only 1679 yards. Yet approximations and generalisations are so often incomplete and the greater the
condensation of material the greater the difficulty in maintaining exactness. If and when you find an inexactitude or material
about which there is discussion or disputation, you can go to the authoritative books which deal in detail with that specific
subject.
A full list of the kings and emperors from the Shang to the Manchus would convey nothing. Indeed, they would be confusing,
because sometimes the historians refer to them by one of their names, sometimes by another. Even dynasties are mentioned
only when they have significance.
China is rich in legend and superstition, the latter fading out with modern instruction. Almost everything has a legend or
superstition attached to it, more even than one finds in southern Italy. They demand no place in a book that is dealing with facts.
As for New China? It is everywhere to be seen - in the broad new streets, the new buildings (some gracious, some splendid,
some utilitarian, some positively ugly), in the tens of thousands of new apartment blocks, in the
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giant factories. Those that can be seen will be a fraction of what there are, for they are duplicated in the cities, old and new, that
dot the map from north to south and east to west. These are the outcome of the First Five-Year Plan. The Second is in progress.
Commencing with the "great leap forward" of the 1958 spring, the progress has been so extraordinary that most of the official
estimates will be shattered. Many objectives set for 1967 will have been attained.
The workers have pledged themselves to outstrip England in industrial production in 15 years. Ambitious. Yet there is every
indication that China will do so. Coal already is setting the lead, and the brilliant victories in iron and steel production achieved by
the people in their home-made furnaces and back-yard clay and brick smelters have brought output to a high that challenges
world production records.
After the Second Five-Year Plan will come another and another. By the end of the Third Five-Year Plan China will be a
modernised industrialised country. It will have caught up most of its two thousand year handicap of economic and cultural
backwardness.
The average visitor to any country sees only the principal cities. So it will be for most who go to China: Peking, Shanghai,
Hangchow, Nanking, Wuhan and Canton, and the cities of the industrialised northeast - Shenyang (Mukden), Anshan,
Changchun, Harbin. The specialist, the archaeologist, painter, writer, geologist, may go further afield. But the beauty spots and
easily accessible interesting places most likely to be on the list are in the east, and it is these that are briefly
page 20
described. "Briefly", because guides are always provided for those who don't know places or language.
History in China falls into two eras. Just as in the West we speak of B. C. and A. D., in China they speak of Before Liberation and
After Liberation. It is well to get used to the phrase for it will be heard often, and it is the clue to New China.
Time sets its limitations. It is possible to cover only so much in a given time. This book suggests what should be seen and gives
the background to understand what is being seen. If it makes more interesting, more pleasurable the visit it will have justified its
compilation.
N. F.
Peking, 1958.
INTRODUCTION
China is larger than Europe, the United States of America or Australia.
China is the oldest continuous civilisation in the world. For an unbroken period of four thousand years it has developed and left
its record in stone, in bronze, in sculpture, in writing, in painting, in discovery.
When so many of the Western races were hunters, still clothed in animals' skins, China had already been civilised for a thousand
years.
Egypt and civilisations of the Mesopotamian area were older, but they died, and were lost until the archaeological researches of
the last century disinterred them. Today, only broken fingers poking up through the desert dust remind us of their greatness.
Chinese writing was never lost as were the hieroglyphs and cuneiform writing. Much of the culture that is cherished in New China
has roots in a past so old that it is lost in the mists of Time.
Where in the world would one find a festival (the Dragon Festival) celebrated each year on the anniversary of the death of the
poet Chu Yuan, who committed suicide 2,300 years ago in despair at the actions of the Court?
Where else can one hear (in the third class popular theatres visited by peasants, pedicab drivers and ordinary workers) operas
played day and night that celebrate the heroes of more than two thousand years ago, in music brought by the troops of Genghis
Khan 900 years ago?
page 22
Where else hear children singing as they walk along the lanes, songs of the ancient history, such as the song of the building of
the Great Wall?
China's history is before the visitor's eyes in its cities no less than its villages. Today in the streets of Peking can be seen the
iron-studded, solid wheels that figure in the stone-rubbings (i.e. copies taken by rubbing on paper over the tomb - or cave, etc. originals) of more than two thousand years ago; men drawing carts, casting fishing-nets, as they figure in the wonderful picture
scroll of the Sung Dynasty of a thousand years ago.
Two thousand years ago China traded with the West. Rome wore her silks. Greece sent her vine cuttings (Greek putes; and
grapes in China are "puto"!).
Marco Polo, the great Venetian traveller, brought back to Europe stories of riches and beauty. He brought back as well to his
native land noodles and chiao-tze, which are the great Italian dishes of today: spaghetti and ravioli.
The art of cloisonne went from China to France and came back with a French name.
Manet, the celebrated French Impressionist painter, was influenced by Chinese art.
In the last few centuries the West has influenced Chinese culture, but tens of centuries earlier the cultural flow had been the
other way.
page 23
NEW CHINA
Even within a short stay limitation, much of New China can be seen. But the most spectacular progress - apart from Peking,
Shanghai, Wuhan and the industrialised north-eastern cities - is away from the eastern strip.
Statistics make heavy reading for all but the experts and the deeply-interested. And detailed figures of tonnages and acreages,
etc., are of little use because time so quickly invalidates them. They are available in the official publications and the country's
periodicals for those who want them.
Here, a broad picture must suffice.
The First Five-Year Plan, 1952-1957 was overfulfilled.
Originally 694 big projects - that is, projects costing £1,400,000 or more - were planned. Eight hundred and twenty-five were
started.
Of giant enterprises, constructed with Soviet aid, 152 were completed.
China is now producing ships, motor vehicles, aeroplanes, locomotives, large machine tools - many of them veritable monsters
in size - powerful generators and electrical equipment. precision instruments, ball bearings, turbines, cables, pneumatic tools,
and of course all manner of steel that makes the foregoing possible.
One hundred thousand spindle cotton mills have risen in the cotton-growing areas. Neglected in the past, geological prospecting
has already disclosed oilfields of wide expanse. Oil refineries are rising on the fields.
page 24
Blast furnaces and steel mills spring up where iron ore and coal are handy to each other, with associated industries nearby. New
coalfields already proved, contain sufficient to supply China's needs for centuries.
It is the same with commonplaces, but most important, salt.
Smaller mines and smaller iron and non-ferrous smelting plants are springing up by the thousands, thus solving local problems,
meeting local demands and relieving the strain on the big enterprises.
Only visitors who are specially interested and have the time brave the discomfort of the long journeys - disappearing as air, rail,
and service car transport reach the distant parts. Already thousands of miles of railways are running across deserts and
mountains. Freight which took ten thousand camels a month to transport from point to point in the western provinces can now be
drawn by one locomotive in one day.
Thousands of miles of new highways stretch across regions hitherto considered impassable for roads - to Sinkiang, to Tibet and join areas hitherto related only by time-consuming, roundabout routes. Rivers are being bridged and navigation made
possible over hundreds, shortly to be thousands, of miles.
China is fabulously rich in mineral wealth, and is, perhaps, the one country which is self-sufficient in this respect. It has the
largest known tin deposits in the world. It holds first place in molybdenum, the United States being second. China's known
resources of tungsten are greater than the whole of the rest of the world combined. The Soviet Union occupies second place.
page 25
China is second in manganese, lead and aluminium, its resources of the last-mentioned being far greater than those of the
United States. It occupies third place in iron ore reserves and sixth in coal and copper. It has most of the known rare metals, and
even diamonds. In addition, old mines, whose reserves warranted, have been restored and extended, modernised and, in
important cases, mechanised. All the new and large mines are mechanised.
New centres are being established in areas where previously was bare country, or perhaps a village. Within months there are
cities of 50,000. Within a few years they will be in the half-million category - modern cities with all that modern cities have,
including universities.
In one year alone (1958) the total new area placed under irrigation was greater than the total area of the preceding thousands of
years.
For semi-feudal, semi-colonial China to develop quickly into a modern industrialised state is almost impossible to visualise. Yet
these figures will help the visitors to get a picture of the rapidity of the progress towards that goal.
1949 production
Steel 158,000 tons
Coal 31,000,000 tons
Crude Oil 122,000 tons
Grain 108,000,000 tons
Cotton 440,000 tons
Electric Power 4,300,000 kwh.
1958 target
7,000,000 tons
150,000,000 tons
1,700,000 tons
196,000,000 tons
1,750,000 tons
22,450,000,000 kwh.
page 26
Few figures are given and then stated with caution, because the rate of progress is so often beyond the official calculation.
Upward revisions of output are constantly taking place (for example, the 1958 figures as shown above, had been twice altered
upwards), periods of construction being reduced. Tourists interested in statistics can find them in the daily and weekly
publications and in the official statements.
CHINA'S CULTURAL CONTRIBUTION
China has contributed to world culture and development in many ways and instances, long before the West. The Chinese
preceded the Greeks in many discoveries, and were abreast of the Arabs, who for so long led the Western world.
It is unnecessary to detail the long list in which China is accepted as having contributed to the world's discoveries. Some of the
more important may be enumerated.
Paper was invented in China at least six centuries before the West.
Printing was known in China in the eighth century and the Confucian classics were printed from wooden blocks a century later.
The invention of gunpowder is mentioned as early as the third century, and fireworks were known in the seventh century.
China was the sole supplier of silk to the then known world until the middle of the sixth century.
Porcelain of a kind was made before the Christian
page 27
era. True porcelain was produced in the Tang Dynasty (600-900 A.D.). It was not until a thousand years later that it was
produced in Europe.
The principle of the compass was known in China in the third century B.C. although Chinese legend fixes
the date many centuries earlier.
The first suspension bridge with iron chains was constructed in China in the sixth century A.D. Somewhat later (about 600 A.D.)
the first great segmental bridge was constructed. These would be 1,200 and 700 years respectively before European examples.
Sugar is mentioned as early as 900 B. C.
Other instances in which Chinese discovery predated those of the Western world are: Cast iron, sternpost rudder, magnetic
compass, wheelbarrow.
It is an impressive record, and if the last centuries 4 dynastic rule were barren, present-day China, although a late starter in
science and technology seems likely to register achievements of world status.
GEOGRAPHY
The People's Republic of China is roughly three thousand miles from cast to west, one thousand five hundred miles from north to
south. Its territory includes many islands, the largest of which are Taiwan (Formosa) and Hainan.
Geographically, it divides into five divisions:
1. The north-eastern provinces (Manchuria) and the areas north and north-east of the Great Wall.
page 28
2. The provinces watered by the Yellow River.
3. Those watered by the Yangtze River.
4. Those watered by the Pearl River and its tributaries, plus Fukien and Chekiang which lie on the coast.
5. The two great western areas, Tibet and Sinkiang. The north-eastern and north-western provinces have a climate which is
dominated by Siberia. They have a six months' winter.
The Yellow River basin is hot in summer, its rainfall undependable. In winter the temperature is around or below freezing point
from December to March.
The Yangtze area is wet and hot in summer, cold in winter. Canton is sub-tropical and its climate varies within relatively narrow
limits. Its average winter temperature is 14 degrees centigrade (57 Fahrenheit); its lowest temperature, minus 3 C. (27 F.). Its
average summer temperature is 28 C. (82 F.) and its peak 37.7 C. (100 F.).
Peking, although a thousand miles nearer the Arctic, has very wide variation in temperature. In summer its peak is 42.6 C. (109
F.), the average being 25 C. (77 F.) and while the winter average is minus 3 C. (27 F.), it goes as far as 23 C. (9 F.) below.
But as you go south from the northern border the severity of the winter cold diminishes from six months at Harbin to only
occasional snow falls at Wuhan and merely cold weather further south.
Yunnan, although one of the southernmost provinces, is temperate because it occupies a high plateau. Yet Szechuan, hundreds
of miles further north, has a warm sub-tropical climate, because of its sheltered position.
page 29
The Yellow River plain is loess country, light, yellow, sandy soil, the accumulation of countless centuries of desert dust from
Mongolia. It is rich land, but because of the uncertain rainfall, is largely dependent on irrigation. Huge projects are under way to
render it free of the ever-present menace of drought or flood. It produces one crop a year.
The Yangtze is largely hill and valley country. The valleys are levelled and terraced for rice, and the hills for tea, fruit and
mulberry groves for silk culture.
Whereas the northern country is suitable for horses, the soft, wet southern plains depend on the water buffalo for the farm work.
Most of the distance-transport is carried by boat, from ocean-going liners to shallow craft which appear -apparently in the middle
of cultivated fields - along the network of shallow waterways which lead into the river.
In the Yangtze area two crops a year are possible.
Pearl River area is, in general, like the Yangtze except that it is sub-tropical and can produce three crops a year. It produces
most tropical and sub-tropical crops - sugar-cane, fruit, fibres.
Two provinces have large desert areas: Sinkiang (80 per cent desert) and Mongolia. Both are in the northwest. Both areas,
however, have wide stretches of grazing country and are China's main suppliers of cattle, sheep and horses.
Tibet, after being socially stationary for ages, has been advancing with every month. The monasteries, or lamaseries, were
corporations which were at once land owners, traders and taxation authorities. Those which
page 30
had large areas and populations were practically feudal states. The social pattern of the area is changing under the Tibetans'
own autonomous governing body. Despite its altitude, the climate has been found suitable for many crops never grown before.
Electrification, irrigation, industrialisation are under way. Already two highways lead into Lhasa, one from the east, one from the
north, over mountains 12,000 feet high and endless streams of trucks are carrying freight and passengers each way. Planes
make the trip in a day. A railway is planned.
Tibet the hidden, mysterious, is no more.
RIVERS
China is a land of great rivers. The Yangtze has the fourth greatest volume of water in the world, with the Yellow River, ranks
fourth in length. The Yangtze is navigable for 10,000-ton ocean-going steamers for 600 miles to Wuhan. The Heilungkiang,
which forms the north-eastern border with the Soviet Union is eighth in length.
The rivers represent life for China. They water the central and eastern fields and farms. They provide cheap communication.
Their enormous hydro-electric potentiality, already partially harnessed, will, within a few years, provide power for half the
continent. The mileage that will be available for large steamer traffic once the hydro-electric schemes are completed will run into
thousands of miles.
page 31
The Huai is as well known as the Yellow and the Yangtze. Prior to Liberation their waters were uncontrollable, due to the fact
that no real attempt was made by past governments to maintain the dykes or to harness them.
In the past the Huai area was said to have an annual big flood or a small flood, and, if it had neither, it had a drought!
Immediately after Liberation the harnessing of the Huai was commenced and reservoirs large and small and flood detention
basins were constructed which soon reduced the summer menace. When the full plan is completed the Huai will no longer
threaten the scores of millions of peasants who live in its area.
Plans for the building of huge hydro-electric plants on the Yellow and Yangtze are in hand and work on the first of the great dams
is under way. Sanmen Gorge dam, one of the great Yellow River projects, will create the third greatest area of impounded water
in the world, only Kuibyshev and Bratsk (now under construction) in the Soviet Union being greater. The huge gorges on the
rivers, a handicap and a menace to traffic in the past, will serve well for the dams that will govern the flow in both rivers and turn
it into power and make it available for irrigation of hundreds of thousands of acres.
The Pearl River, which flows past Canton, is another important river. It is more dependable.
The Yungting is relatively unimportant. It is well known merely because it flows past Peking and is a source of water and power
for the capital and Tientsin and irrigation for the nearby area.
All China's principal rivers figure in the Five-Year
page 32
Plans. Several huge dams have already been completed, Others still greater are now under way and others equally great are
planned. By the end of the Second Plan most of them will have been completed.
The Chinese waterways, rivers, lakes and channels are rich in fish life - a source of food already enormous and being further
expanded by scientific methods of fish breeding.
POPULATION
China's first population census under scientific methods was taken on June 30, 1953. Two and a half million persons were
officially employed apart from voluntary assistance.
Total population was found to be approximately 602 million of which 87 per cent was rural and 13 per cent urban. Males
accounted for 52 per cent.
Natural growth of population has proved to be greater than the estimated 2 per cent per annum.
The Chinese people (like the British, Russian, Swiss, etc.) consist of a number of races, of which the Hans comprise 94 per cent,
national minorities of other racial origins the balance.
Largest towns according to the census were:
Shanghai ---- 6,200,000
Peking ---- 2,770,000
Tientsin ---- 2,700,000
Shenyang ---- 2,300,000
Chungking ---- 1,800,000
Canton ---- 1,600,000
Wuhan ---- 1,400,000
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These are the census figures. But the annual increase makes folly of them. The natural increase in 1957 was greater than
anticipated. An unofficial estimate is that 24 million children were born during the year.
Also, Peking's area has been extended - doubtless those of other big cities will be - and its industrialisation has drawn
population, so that its population now exceeds four millions. And even that figure is declared to be too low. 86 per cent of the
population is in the eastern provinces, in the lower valleys of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers and in the rice-growing areas south
of the Yangtze.
The biggest cities stand in the midst of farming regions, which for centuries have been the chief sources of their food supply.
NATIONAL MINORITIES
National minorities under the Constitution have complete equality. These are those racial groups, which from centuries of
residence hold China as their Motherland, but have maintained their racial characteristics, their languages and their culture.
Although the many national minorities together number 35,300,000 they account for only a shade over 6 per cent, of the total
population.
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Here are the main ones:
Chuang ---- 6,600,000
Uighur ---- 3,600,000
Hui ---- 3,600,000
Yi ---- 3,200,000
Tibetan ---- 2.800,000
Miao ---- 2,500,000
Manchu ---- 2,400,000
Mongolian ---- 1,500,000
Puyi ---- 1,200,000
Korean ---- 1,100,000
The lesser nationalities total ---- 6,700,000
There are roughly ten million Moslems in China spread among ten different nationalities: Uighur and Hui (each 3,600,000),
Kazakh, Kirghis, Tajik, Tartar, Uzbek, Tungshsiang, Sala and Paon.
There was even a settlement of Chinese Jews in Honan until the middle of the nineteenth century. After the death of their Rabbi
they became merged with the Chinese.
This land of contrasts! Towards the end of 1956 seven years after Liberation! - scores of thousands of Yi slaves were liberated. It
was chattel slavery. The slave-owners had the right to do with the slaves what they willed. They took the women when they
willed. They beat when they willed. They killed when they willed. And this they did for the least offence. There was no one to
forbid this. The slaves were their property.
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This is how the New China News Agency (Hsinhua) reported on the last area in which slavery existed:
" Chaokioh, Szechuan Province, November 28. - Ten thousand households of newly-freed slaves have just moved into new
cottages in the mountainous Liangshan Yi Autonomous Chou in Szechuan Province. For the first time in their lives they live in
homes of their own . . . These former slaves gained freedom in the peaceful reforms in the area earlier this year . . . This year,
after pressing for reforms they achieved their freedom, after consultations with their masters."
The slave-owners were left with all their property except their slaves.
PRE-HISTORY
Peking Man lived in North China 500,000 years ago. In 1927, at Chou Kou Tien, the remains of some skulls and teeth were
found. While one skull in one place is scientifically unsatisfactory - it may be an exceptional specimen - at Chou Kou Tien was
found a group of skulls, male and female, young and old, and anthropologists, while admitting incompleteness, consider that
Peking Man is almost certainly the remote ancestor of the present-day Chinese.*
-----------------* There is discussion, controversy and disputation about almost every aspect, anthropological, archaeological, sociological and historical, in
China itself no less than in the outside world. And this controversy ranges from statements as to Peking Man, through the interpretation of
the pre-history period (Confucius is declared to have made some woeful errors in his interpretations of the customs of the ancients), the first
use of iron and even to the actual commencement of feudalism. Decisions acceptable to the authorities in the respective fields have yet to
be reached.
The material in this book must be read in the light of this explanation. Always truth is relative. The Shang passed from legend into fact. The
Hsia may do so ultimately. Discoveries may invalidate much of what today is accepted as proved; may confirm some of the things viewed
with scepticism and still subject to discussion. But until they do so, we work on the material available, always keeping in mind that there is no
such thing as the unknowable, only the unknown; and that applies to man's social beginning and early progress no less than to science.
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No other race can take an hour's bus ride from its capital and gaze on the site accepted by anthropologists as that where its
ancestors lived an estimated 500,000 years ago.
Peking Man belonged to the Old Stone Age. He used fire and rough stone tools.
The later New Stone Age (Neolithic) people, who according to archaeological evidence, were scattered over China, ground and
sharpened their stone tools. They used stone knives, axes and spears, and bows and arrows. Their mode of living varied: in
some places they hunted; in some places they probably cultivated millet, rice. They wove and made pottery. The dog, sheep,
cattle, pigs and horses were domesticated.
Five thousand years ago the area in and around the big bend of the Yellow River became an important centre of Neolithic
culture. The soft, easily worked loess soil made possible the cultivation of food on a large scale. It made irrigation possible. In
turn, this made possible the congregation of population in large groups. And large groups resulted in the development
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of a social structure necessary to handle the problems that such groups presented.
There is no evidence thus far of the use of milk or butter by the early Chinese. This indicates a farming beginning. Had it been a
nomad beginning far back in the ages it is most likely that the knowledge and the use would have been carried over. Thus it may
be accepted that farming was the beginning and domestication of animals came afterwards.
Additional evidence of the continuity of Chinese history is the use today in the backward areas of implements of iron exactly the
same in shape as their stone prototypes.
This early Chinese civilisation later spread eastward and southward absorbing the population in the areas as it passed. It was, in
the early stages, a process that extended over thousands of years. And then subsequent thousands of years saw the people
from Mongolia to Burma and Viet Nam, from Tibet and Sinkiang to the coast, form the Chinese people.
MYTH AND LEGEND
According to Cinese "traditional" history - largely myth and legend in its early stages - when the Earth was separated from
Heaven, twelve Emperors of Heaven ruled for 18,000 years, then eleven Emperors of Earth for 18,000 years. Then nine
Emperors of Mankind for 45,600 years, then sixteen kings and then the Three Sovereigns Fu Hsi, Shen Nung and Huang Ti. By
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coincidence the total is roughly the number of years back to Peking Man.
According to the legend the Three Sovereigns were the inventors of the arts and crafts. They dwelt in what is now Honan. Shen
was the first to till the soil. Huang Ti had four successors who were responsible for formulating the forms of government and all
the wisdom of the day.
One of Huang Ti's descendants, Yu, is credited with being the great regulator of floods and diverter of rivers.
Yu is given as the founder of the Dynasty of Hsia, earliest date being 2205 B.C. but there is a variation of more than two hundred
years in the "records".
The Hsia ruled for four hundred and thirty-nine years. The Hsia capital, according to the legend, was in south-western Shansi.
The last Hsia ruler is described as a tyrant who was deposed by Tang, a noble, who founded the Shang (or Yin) kingdom (in
1766 B.C.). Tang claimed descent from Huang Ti.
With the Shang Dynasty we come to certain history. The Shang Dynasty persisted until 1100 B.C.
Until the present century, the historians dismissed the Chinese "orthodox" history creation of stories as myths. They dismissed
also the Hsia and Shang Dynasties as fables. But the curtain of history was rolled back hundreds of years by discoveries at the
end of the last century which confirmed the rulers of the Shang Dynasty.
New discoveries will roll it back still further. In Kiangsu at the end of 1956 a ncolithic settlement was
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found with Shang and Chou settlements superimposed. Legend became fact by the discovery of the Oracle Bones. And the
Yang Shao pottery in Honan - the latter probably older than 2000 B.C. - and other discoveries, take history into the Hsia period.
Also, now that Shang is proved, it is to be noted that all the Chou nobility claimed descent from the Hsia.
THE ORACLE BONES
At the nineteenth century's end, inscribed bones and tortoise-shell were brought to the notice of Chinese scholars. Oracle bones
or tortoise-shell were means by which the Ancestors were consulted on matters of importance (the ruler, for example, might have
planned a war on a neighbouring tribe). They were engraved, then submitted to heat, and the resultant cracks were interpreted
by the Court magicians who decided whether the answer was favourable or unfavourable.
For three thousand years these oracle bones had lain buried in Honan. Yin Hsu in Honan was the capital of the Shang Dynasty
until a Yellow River flood destroyed the city in 1100 B.C.
Study of the bones - more than one hundred thousand pieces were discovered - proved the names of twenty-five Shang kings
and five other royal names.
Historians of the Han period (206 B.C. - 221 A.D.), although a thousand years had elapsed, had written down the names of the
successive Shang rulers. The oracle bones confirmed their writings.
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The Shang period confirmed, the Hsia, which preceded it, is immediately brought into discussion. The Han historian also gave
the names of the Hsia rulers.
The writing on the oracle bones was not primitive. Writing of such a developed character does not spring into being in a day: to
pass from picture writing to ideograph in those leisurely ages must have taken a long time. Which again brings the Hsia into
history, yet to be proved in detail.
The Shang were a bronze-casting, bronze-using people. Their bronzes were excellent. That slavery existed in the Shang
Dynasty is indicated by the burial alive of people with the dead.
Investigation in China depends much on chance. The Shang and earlier Chinese civilisations were situated on a plain, cultivated,
flooded, covered; and only a washing away or some sort of accident discloses the ancient places.
Also, unlike the older Western civilisations with their stone structures (sphinx, pyramids, temples and tombs) the Chinese used
wood and mud-bricks, easy to destroy and dissolve, like Nineveh and Babylon and Ur. Records were on wood. Those on bone
and stone, and; less frequently, on metal are the chief sources.
Today, tens of thousands of specialists of all kinds are investigating, surveying, prospecting, excavating for buildings, for mines;
these inform the state immediately of finds which they believe of interest; archaeologists are promptly on the spot to investigate.
For example, at the end of 1956 an ancient wall - the oldest city wall yet found in China - was discovered at Chengchow.
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chow. It was immediately placed under protection. Archaeologists place it as early Shang - at least 3,300 years old.
HISTORICAL PERIOD
Now that there is proof of the Shang Dynasty together with proof of earlier periods, the Hsia period must be accepted, though
details have yet to be discovered, analysed and connotated. It is obvious that there has been continuity of the Chinese race for
longer than had been thought. But the records of the later dynasties are complete and it is these we can briefly survey.
Changes of dynasty in China have been changes of people of the same stock. And foreign invaders have never been of such
numbers as to alter materially the basic stock. When they stayed they were absorbed.
The oases of far-western China afford an illustration of the absorption. Most of the original inhabitants were Turkic by speech,
and just as the Chinese are considered to be descendants of Peking Man, anthropologists say they are related to the white races
who are represented at the present day in Switzerland and the Tyrol. Yet they are today and have been for centuries Chinese.
Just as it is impossible to get any understanding whatever of English history from the recital of kings and queens and their wars
and marriages and murders, so it is of little use to look for the real history of China in a recital of the names of scores of princes,
kings and
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emperors who ruled from the Shang period onwards. Where rulers or dynasties are mentioned herein it is merely to point a
period in which certain important things - historical, cultural, economic - occurred. And the difficulty of finding English equivalents
for Chinese terms is the excuse for the loose term of princes, kings, emperors, etc.
Historians date authentic Chinese history from a late period in the Chou Dynasty (1100-722 B. C.). It is to the Chou period that
feudalism in China belongs.
The rich, easily-cultivated valleys made intensive cultivation possible, each valley a domain of a tribal chief. At the same time,
the necessary accumulation of grain for the six winter months, for the tribal lord and for his soldiers and retainers, offered
prospects of rich booty to predatory tribes. To protect the grain, walled cities were built in each area. The soldier class was
created to protect the walled cities.
As in the feudal states in the West, the Chou, themselves feudal princes, ruled as the head of the lesser feudal lords, who gave
them allegiance.
But the great southern plains were not suitable for feudal rule. And out of the subsequent conflicts the feudal kingdoms fell, one
after the other. Within the Chou period was the Period of the Warring States from which emerged the Chin (221-206 B.C.) which
finally shattered the feudal kingdoms and united the North and South into the first Empire and gave China its Western name.
When Chin shattered the Feudal States and made himself first emperor he found that the feudal spirit
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was kept alive by the literary monopoly and influence of the educated class. Because of the pro-feudal philosophy of the leading
scholars he ordered the "Burning of the Books" and the silencing of the teaching of history. In consequence much of the ancient
literature was lost forever.
In the Chin period the laws, weights and measures were standardised, also the cart axles. This latter was a very important
measure because the ruts in the soft-soil tracks or roads were such that axles from different provinces had to be altered when
they reached the borders of the central province, a serious matter in the transport of grain.
Chin deprived possible rivals of all weapons, which he ordered to be brought to the capital and destroyed.
The provincial feudal aristocratic clans, although deprived of power, were nevertheless a potential danger, so - a total of 120,000
families - they were collected from all parts of the Empire and transported to Shansi.
During the Chin Dynasty portions of the Great Wall were linked and the wall extended for 1,400 miles from the seacoast to the
north-west of the state. Tradition has it that a million men died in the building of it.
Liu Pang, founder of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. 221 A.D.) which succeeded the Chin, was the first Chinese ruler who was of
humble origin. He was a poor peasant who had been a minor official and a bandit. Prior to Liu all rulers had claimed divine
ancestry, for only nobles had the right to political power.
With the collapse of the Han Dynasty a period of turmoil followed and the first stable dynasty which
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entrenched itself for a long term was the Tang (618-907 A.D.). It was notable as the peak point of Chinese poetry. It is dealt with
later.
The next emerging dynasty of importance was the Sung (960-1127 A.D.), the period during which Chinese painting reached its
great height. It was during the Sung that some of the world's great mathematicians thrived. Widespread use of hydraulic
engineering, improvements in bridge construction, in architecture, shipbuilding, and chemistry, belong to this period. Medicine
was raised to higher levels and the physicians were famed. The Imperial Medical Encyclopaedia was compiled by leading
medical men of the period. In 1178 appeared the world's first book on citrus culture.
The Sung Dynasty was overthrown by the Mongol. The West has painted Genghis Khan as a bloodthirsty monster (which he
was) who swept into Europe out of what is vaguely called Tartary (which most readers accept as being China) to massacre,
pillage and destroy on a scale previously unheard of, and just as suddenly disappeared.
Genghis Khan was chief of a Mongolian tribe. He gained power over one tribe after another by treachery, by force. He was fifty an old man in terms of those days - before he had consolidated his position sufficiently to venture on conquests beyond his
northern areas.
When he turned his attention to China he did not complete his conquest, for while fighting near the Yellow River, he died.
It was his grandson, Kublai Khan, who carried his
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bloodied sword to success and founded the Yuan Dynasty, which lasted from 1280 to 1368 A.D. - less than a century.
Kublai Khan would doubtless have continued his grandfather's career of wholesale slaughter and destruction had it not been for
a Chinese sage who (with good motives, it is said) advised that millions of Chinese were of far greater value to him alive than
dead. As it was, he devastated whole areas.
Kublai Khan carried his conquests right down to Burma.
Being nomads the Mongols made little contribution to Chinese culture. However, their distant conquests took Chinese
discoveries - notably gunpowder and printing - abroad, and in turn, since they did not trust the Chinese, they brought to China
experts from other lands to help them in their government of their latest conquest. With them came cotton and kaoliang.
Marco Polo, the celebrated Venetian traveller, came to serve at the Court of Kublai Khan. The accounts of his voyages as retold
by popular journalism and popular fiction, have left a romanticised picture of the times. The facts are that the backward Mongols,
faced with the running of an empire whose revenue was based on taxes derived from millions of tiny holdings and on irrigation
charges channeled through a landlord class bureaucracy, went through the same cycle as preceding dynasties, except they went
through it more rapidly. The Mongol Court wallowed in luxury. To internal discontent against these foreign rulers was added
discontent from the distant Mongol areas, which as time elapsed,
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viewed the Southern Yuan Dynasty as Chinese rather than Mongol.
Out of the turmoil rose a figure to take advantage of the discontent - the first Ming Emperor, Chu Yuanchang. The founder of the
Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 A.D.) was born in 1328, son of poor peasants in the Huai Valley. Famine had wiped out his parents
and most of his relations. He became a shepherd boy, later a Buddhist monk, then a beggar, then a bandit. Chu progressed. His
ambition did not stop at being a bandit officer - he established his own band; added other bands. Soon he had an army.
He captured Nanking and made it his capital. In twelve years he was master of the south. He took Peking. In a few more years
he had conquered the western and south-western provinces. He then advanced north and destroyed the old capital of Genghis
Khan. By 1381 the Ming Empire was greater than any of its predecessors.
The Ming Dynasty followed the almost stereotyped progression of events to weakness, decline and termination.
Just as the Dynasty owed its beginning to a peasant so it owed its fall. Li Tze-cheng had invested Peking and the new Dynasty
seemed assured, when one of those extravagant events occurred which mark history at times. The Ming general Wu was
apparently not seriously involved in loyalties and was prepared to accept the new rule. But Li Tzecheng had taken Wu's favourite
concubine and, despite demands, had refused to relinquish her to Wu. So Wu deliberately "opened
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the gate" to the Manchu forces (who otherwise would have been no serious threat) and switched his loyalty. Thus do subjective
factors play a part at times.
The Manchus came from the north. Their forces were a mixture of Manchu, Mongol and Chinese. Because they were foreigners,
and, by Chinese standards, uncultured, they made great show of preserving unchanged the Chinese culture inherited by them.
There was further expansion under the Manchus, and under the Emperor Chien Lung in the eighteenth century the Ching
Dynasty reached its highest prosperity and its most extensive territory. By the nineteenth century, however, decay was showing,
and rebellion and foreign wars were beginning to shake its edifice.
The Manchu Civil Service, as in the case of the dynasties that preceded it, consisted of men who were successful in the
examinations based on conservative philosophy; men whose minds were closed to the idea of change. In addition, despite the
fact that the Manchus were only a fraction of the population, to preserve their rule they decreed that a disproportionate number of
Manchu candidates be passed irrespective of their examination results.
The Court saw its territorial successes - Mongolia, Turkestan, Tibet, Annam, Burma, Korea, Nepal - and its one hundred and fifty
years of peace as a natural corollary of its rule. To it success appeared normal; change unthinkable.
But the exploitation of the peasants to maintain a luxury-loving, extravagant court, which demanded enormous sums for its
palaces and gardens; the army,
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which had degenerated as a fighting force in the long period; the corrupt, bureaucratic Manchu-dominated Civil Service - these
were factors accumulating to assist the changing social forces in their disintegrating process. The dynasty began to crumble. In
the last half-century of its life it owed its existence solely to the support of foreign powers.
CHINESE ECONOMY
History is not a recital of all the actions of chiefs and warriors and kings, of court intrigues and corruption - these are the lesser
things. Yet the history of China as known to most people in the West, is one of warrior or rival ruler or revolutionary leader taking
over, then a growth, slow or rapid, a flowering, a period of court corruption, of intriguing eunuchs, of weak monarchs, of decline
until again a strong challenger appeared, and once more a new dynasty was founded.
The explanation is to be sought in the economic life of China over the centuries. Only by an understanding of this does the
picture of China from its early years fall into correct perspective. Only by a knowledge of this is the rise and fall of dynasties
understandable.
Over the whole of its history China has been based on a peasant economy. Grain has been the standard of wealth, the basis of
taxation, the source of state revenue. Thus, the ownership of land was the important factor in the economy of the state. And the
capacity to collect the taxes in grain determined the power and
LANDMARKS … The world’s longest structure – the Great Wall, built in the Ming Dynasty (twelfth to thirteenth centuries)
incorporates fortress walls dating back to 300 B.C.
Enchanting as a fairy-tale – Peking’s Summer Palace.
Water-front reality at Canton – thousands of sampans, river craft resembling tenements afloat, serve as home to the Pearl River
dwellers who live and follow their pursuits on these boats. The water-front community still bears the imprint of the past, even
though the stigma of “untouchable” has been erased. Life moves ahead with new, forward strides.
City of sin, sorrow and sweat – Shanghai has already done away with the first two of these. Today, only the scars of the past
remain. Above is Nanking Road, commercial centre of Shanghai which is China’s greatest industrial city, and heart of the
country’s light industry …
A thing of beauty – Peihai (Park of the North Sea) is Peking’s fabulous park, on the lake shore where the Golden Tartars built
their twelfth and thirteenth century palaces and gardens.
Birthplace of a revolutionary: A view of Shaoshan Hsiang, an administrative village, Hsiangtan County, Hunan Province. Here
Mao Tse-tung was born …
Holiday fun – mountain climbing, one of the bitter hardships and hazards during the thirty years of Chiinese revolution, has
become a peacetime sport. Vacationers on their way to Tien Tu Peak in Anhwei Province, pass the Scorpion’s Back (Fish Back)
at Mt. Huang.
Buddhas large and small – stone sculptures at Mt. Fei Lai on the West Lake include the amiable god above. Most of the figures
are works of the tenth and eleventh centuries – not so long ago when one realizes that recent archaeological discoveries include
terracote statues of eight century origin.
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stability of the state, for stocks of grain were essential I -or the non-producing armies and garrisons, apart from the
non-producing court and its officials and parasitic entourage. The Grand Canal, a colossal undertaking for its period, was to
enable the grain to be brought I from the growing areas right to Peking itself.
There was perpetual conflict between the state and the lie landlord class - the state getting or endeavouring to get the revenue it
needed from its taxes, the landlords, for their part, keeping as much of the grain harvest as they dared.
Both rent and taxes were, in the ultimate, extracted from the peasants, who were left merely sufficient grain to continue living and
reproducing. Actually, too often, millions were not left enough even to live.
A contradiction was present from the earliest periods, in that the landlords and the tax-collectors were so often the same
individual - or, more exactly, individuals of the same class. The higher the state official the more likely he was to have come from
the rich land-owning class. But, because it was through the landlord class that taxes were collected, the king, emperor, state
were tied to the landlords. It was the alliance which maintained the dynasty. It was the dependence that, in the period of its
weakness, made certain its disintegration.
This is the explanation of the process which was a feature of Chinese history: a strong state, a cultured, luxurious court,
land-owning families of enormous wealth, degenerating over the centuries more and more deeply into luxury-loving indolence;
insatiable in its demand for revenue. The landlord class, protected by
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the bureaucrats (members of their own class) refusing t lessen its own inflow of wealth, shifting the imposts o to the peasant
masses. Then, out of the process of in creasing hardship, suffering and oppression, rising revolt, which rival princes, generals,
warriors - even later, ex-bandit and peasant leaders - exploited.
A new ruler, a new dynasty. Once in control of the state the new ruler is in charge of an economy in which the productive forces
and production relations remain unchanged. He must have revenue to run the state; for the civil service, for his armies. To collect
the revenue over a vast country from countless millions of small producers he needs an educated class. That educated class is
to be found only among those who have graduated from or actually belonged to the landlord class.
And so the repetition of the old phenomenon; officials protecting the interests of their landowner class, allowing the process of
enrichment to proceed; aiding that enrichment. In the process the wealthiest becoming powerful-; with power withholding more
and more of the revenue that should flow to the state; the less powerful exacting any increased taxes from the peasantry,
refusing to bear any themselves.
The unbearable lot of the peasantry, in almost every case, is crowned with the ultimate oppression resulting from war, the means
for which and the lives for which, they provide. And the stage is set for the inevitable last scene: revolt -and a new ruler.
Some dynasties were marked by revolt after revolt. Sometimes the process of fall and rise and once more fall was rapid and the
new dynasty short-lived. At other
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times the ruling dynasty held power for centuries before events completed the full circle.
The early rulers realised the danger inherent in the hereditary power of the landlords; their virtual monopoly of education; the fact
that the servants of the state passed down from family to family. The court officials were of this class, and their influence was
dangerous when the monarchy was in danger from within or without.
The principle of eunuchs was instituted as one means of mitigating the danger - certainly it was hoped to curb it as far as the
court was concerned. The eunuchs were not merely servants to be trusted around the harem as they are so generally pictured in
Western literature. From the earliest periods, right up to the end of the Manchu Dynasty, eunuchs ranged from ordinary servants
right up to capable officials and trusted advisers. But there were others -always immediately thought of because of their
spectacular careers of corruption and crime.
Eunuchs who played their part in weakening and bringing down rulers and dynasties, were never more than contributing factors only when the weakness was already present, only when the material conditions made the end inevitable did their activities have
any decisive or hastening effect.
A factor which gave the eunuchs power in such circumstances was that kings rarely moved out among their people. Officials
were limited in their contact with him by the rigid court procedural and ritual restrictions. The eunuchs, on the other hand, had
regular
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and ready access to him. If he was a minor they were his chief source of information and gossip. Too often it was poisoned.
Naturally they (and all high and trusted officials) had greater power for ill when the ruler was weak or a minor.
The principle of eunuchs achieved nothing. The necessity to the state of the landlord class remained and the determining social
factors, productive forces, and production relations continued without change.
The intrigues, the rivalries, internecine wars; the lust for power or greater power of kings, princes, chieftains, military leaders,
opportunists, peasants or bandits; the brutal tyrants; courts wallowing in incredible luxury, degenerate monarchs - all the vivid,
colourful features of China's unbroken history of four thousand years, are tempting material for the politically immature and
unscientific writer, and the novelist, but the true progress of events is as briefly outlined.
On a broad canvas, the fall and rise of dynasties was not, however, a matter only of weak or strong, good or bad governments,
but a steady forward development of an important phenomenon: the creation of a purely Chinese culture; the expansion of that
culture; the absorption of the conquerors and the conquered, and the extension and consolidation of its territory to the position it
holds today.
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LANDLORD POWER
The basis of China's wealth as was stated was the products of the land - for taxation purposes, grain. Grain crops depend on
water. With so much of the land subject to irregularity of rainfall, irrigation was widespread; in the areas controlled by the early
kings, almost general. Thus, to the book-keeping details of countless millions of small tiny farm strips and of their taxation, was
added that of water rights and charges -quantities, times of access to flow.
These problems called for persons of high educational level. And this leads us to an apparently lesser, although in reality an
important factor - that of the Chinese language.
The Chinese language is difficult to learn, read and write. Throughout history it has been a language of scholars. The
overwhelming majority of the Chinese people throughout the ages right up to the present day were illiterate.
It is a reasonable assumption that the written language was, from the earliest period of standardisation (in the Han period 206
B.C. - 221 A.D.) purposely made difficult. Or, if preferred, it was never simplified. For two thousand years the language has been
kept in its archaic form. Only in 1958, after investigation and wide discussion have a phonetic alphabet and ordinary lettering
been adopted.
Although the examinations for the state appointments were public, the subjects were classical literature and philosophy, and
these demanded years of study,
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apart from the preliminary time necessary to learn the characters. The sons of landlords, the wealthy, the aristocracy alone had
this necessary leisure. They could have private tutors. For generation after generation the landlord class provided the candidates
for the examinations. Century after century sons of landlords ran the Empire for the Court, right up to the last dynasty.
By the Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.) the examinations had reached the stage that the deeper the candidates' knowledge of and
capacity to quote the classics the more assured he was of the higher positions. A useless equipment for a bureaucracy of any
epoch, but no more so, perhaps, than the capacity to write and quote Greek and Latin verse - the path to high position in the
British Home and Colonial Civil Services.
The scholar-landlord class was the class of the long fingernails - proof that their possessors did no physical work; the
"mandarins" as they were known to the West during the Manchu Dynasty. The mandarins neither knew nor were they expected
to know science or economics. They knew classical Chinese - a dead language - the ancient philosophers, writers and poets and
could quote them freely. It was the mandarins who resisted to the end not only the incursion of "barbarian" Westerners, their
customs, their ideas, their discoveries and their trade, but also reforms from within.
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CULTURE
A hundred years before the Christian era an Imperial University had been established which examined candidates for
government posts. Accepting it as the forerunner of the present Academia Sinica - for there has been continuity - then the latter
is older than any existing European academy by almost a thousand years.
Chinese scholars have always been meticulous in their reproduction of the ancient works, never departing in any way from the
original text. They have been quick to detect and expose forgery. Chinese historians have been scrupulously careful in recording
events, abstaining from romanticism and paying close attention to chronology. Their conduct has been a lesson and a
stimulation to historians of all countries over the ages. The result of their attitude to the classics has been to preserve faithfully
the ancient Chinese literature.
Apart from confirmation of the Shang kings, it is important to note that dependable recording of events in Chinese history goes
back almost three thousand years, for from 841 B.C. the records are uninterrupted.
FROM SHANG TO HAN
Magnificent bronzes were produced in the Shang period, but the art attained its highest development in the Chou Dynasty
(1100-221 B.C.).
The Chou was known as the Classical Age. The Book of Change, the Book of Odes, the Book of History, the Book of Rites and
Spring and Autumn Annals - books
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which have influenced Chinese writing and thought up to the present century - belong to it.
The three famous philosophers, Confucius, Mencius and Lao-tze belong to this period of incessant turmoil, war and changing
social conditions. Confucius was the most notable. He expressed the philosophy which fitted his era. He preached the authority
of the father over the son (the Emperor over the people - all his sons!). The logical concomitant was the relegation of women to
complete unimportance and to subordination to men. This philosophy had its basis in the desire of the feudal kings and princes
of the time to leave their goods and their conquests to their families, and through the eldest son was the logical way. Confucius's
doctrine of filial piety took on added clothing under the Empire when, to establish and consolidate the Emperor's authority, it was
necessary to "prove" that it had been the right of the ruler from the beginning of things. Confucius had already supplied the
literary framework.
More scientific methods of investigation have revealed that, in most primitive social forms, at some stage the family was traced
through the mother; that ancestor worship was based on phallicism, the religion of the earliest primitive people - the fertility cult
ensuring the continuance of the ancestral line, the cult which was concerned with the fertility of the fields, the means of life.
Ancestor worship was the cult not of the people but of the noble clans. The peasants of the early periods could have no part in
ancestor worship because they had no certain ancestors; that is, they had no named fore-
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bears for they had no surnames. In winter they lived in primitive villages. In summer they lived in shelters built in the fields in
which they laboured. Every spring, as in ancient Greece, there was a festival at which the peasant youths and girls of
neighbouring villages mingled freely which was only confirmed by marriage in the autumn if the girls were pregnant.
These customs, the historical evidence of which in "The Odes" is unchallengeable, were ignored, distorted or wilfully
misinterpreted by Confucian scholars.
This flowering of philosophy of the Chou period, however, was not comparable to that of the Greeks of the same period with its
conception of political democracy (for a class) and its poetry and arts. The Chinese philosophers never placed monarchy in
question. Only its moral foundations were subject to their discussions. But, whereas the Greek grew, faded and died quickly, the
Chinese developed with the centuries.
Much is written of the philosophers (The Hundred Schools) of this period. This does not mean one hundred contesting schools of
thought - it referred to the different teachers who were surrounded by their followers and their pupils as in medieval Europe. They
philosophised but they also acted as advisers on all manner of subjects and as diplomats to the rulers.
The Han Dynasty which covered the period from 206 B.C. until 221 A.D. was the rich period of Chinese literature. Writing by
brush instead of by pointed instruments had important effects: the invention of paper and printing - at first a page carved in wood,
later, movable type. The characters were standardised, thus
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ensuring future standardisation of all works. Previously, copying of manuscripts by hand resulted in character variation and
consequent variation in interpretation.
In the Han period came the first Chinese encyclopaedia, first dictionary, editing "The Odes", an anthology of ancient poems and
folk songs - oldest writings in the Chinese language.
One of the most valuable "Memoirs of an Historian" by Ssu-ma Chien (actually the work was started by his father) was a
comprehensive history from the legendary and feudal periods to the First Empire.
A famous family, the Pans - father, son and daughter - carried on the work started by Ssu-ma. The work was completed by their
sister, Pan Chao, the most celebrated Chinese woman scholar, whose book for the education of girls remained one of the three
basic books for the education of women until modern times.
It was during the Han period that Buddhism became an important cultural influence in China. Its monasteries were centres of
scholarship and knowledge generally, of skill in farming, irrigation, canal construction. It ranked with Confucianism and Taoism
as China's religion.
For many centuries Chinese Buddhists went to India - a long and hazardous journey - not only on pilgrimages to the holy
Buddhist places but to obtain copies of the Buddhist books. Despite the destruction following the persecution of the Buddhist
monasteries in the Tang period the fact that so much survived is an indication of Buddhism's enormous spread and influence in
the intervening centuries. The gigantic rock carvings of Shansi and Honan which belong to the Wei period –
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apart from countless others - are evidence of Indian Buddhist art, the Greek influence sometimes clearly visible.
However, as in Europe later in the Middle Ages, the Buddhist Church during the centuries accumulated immense property and
used its peaceful religious aspect to obtain freedom from taxation and to establish the principle of its neutrality in war time. The
revival of Confucianism in the Tang period (618-907 A.D.) was a factor in the weakening of the Buddhist monasteries whose
accumulated wealth was at once a potential menace and a temptation. Thus, later in the Tang Dynasty the Church was
persecuted and most of the lands and monasteries and temples confiscated. But Buddhism left a heritage in the scores of
thousands of carvings in `tone, in wood, in plaster, in paintings, and in those temples that escaped destruction.
The Tang period was a period of high cultural ,achievement. It was the golden age of poetry and sculpt ure. Chinese culture
spread east to Japan, west to the Caspian. It was the period of the improvement in the examinations; of the richness of
invention.
In its early period it was a period of scholarship and tolerance: Buddhism, Confucianism, Mohammedanism, Taoism, Christianity,
Manicheism, Zoroastrianism - all were accepted. In Changan, the capital, were to be seen Greeks, Indians, Arabs, Persians,
Japanese, apart from ,ill the minority races within the Tang Empire itself.
In the Sung Dynasty painting rose to its richest and most original level. In printing and silk-making it was notable, and Sung
porcelain reached a level that has
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never been equalled. 'as all branches of culture it was unparalleled.
The Ming period was rather imitative in the arts. But in drama and the new literary form of the prose novel it opened up new
artistic fields. The celebrated novel " Shui Hu ", translated by Pearl Buck as "All Men Are Brothers", belongs to the period.
In the course of its three centuries Ming further developed the high standards in porcelain, Chinese pottery and ceramics
generally. It left a heritage of architecture that remains today as one of the wonders of the world.
Unlike the earlier civilisations of the West whose structures were made of stone, few structures of the early dynasties have
survived. Wooden and mud-brick buildings cannot withstand the elements over the centuries and are easy victims of deliberate
or accidental destruction.
Drawings, paintings, literary descriptions, models, cave murals and paintings and carvings give us a clear idea of the early
structures, some of which were quite magnificent.
Most of the surviving architecture of note in China is Ming. Ming architecture was magnificent in colour as well as in form, and
Peking with its palaces, temples and artificial lakes and gardens is a living reminder of Ming constructional and decorative
genius, perpetuated by the work of renovation, redecoration and even complete, faithful reconstruction carried out by the present
Chinese Government in its Twelve-Year Plan for the restoration of China's historic works of art.
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Although the feudal system had been broken by the Chins, the nature of production in China continued semi-feudal. The greater
part of the Empire was self-sufficient; it produced what it consumed. Circulation of goods was on a limited scale.
Individual incidents have tended to mislead some historians and commentators into the belief that China early in its history had
substantial surpluses for which it sought markets. The trade with the northern "barbarians" was not an outlet sought for surplus
products but a method of buying off the barbarian chiefs. The Romans hired one set of barbarian tribes to fight the others. The
Chinese did the same where they could. It was cheaper to keep the tribes quiet than to go to war with them.
The method used, was in its way, what Danegeld was to the early English. The tribes beyond the Wall were allowed to send
"missions" to the Chinese Court. They were given the courtesy title of "embassies". They brought gold, horses - and other
northern products, politely called "tribute". In return they were given "presents" - notably silks highly coveted and prized. Honour
was satisfied. But the members of the missions made substantial transactions, buying and selling.
It is probable that, out of these beginnings, silk made its way westward until it was carried as far as Imperial Rome.
When Rome was at its height more than two thousand years ago, the Han Empire was also at its zenith.
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Each great empire knew little of the other, yet by that time China exchanged silks and spices for ivory, tortoiseshell, precious
stones, asbestos, good horses - from Rome or the lands between. Neither Roman nor Chinese merchants made the full journey,
but in mid-Asian oases, traders bought from each other and made the exchanges. This was China's method of trading with the
rest of the world for a long time.
The feudal economy persisted through the centuries. There was, in general, no accumulation for capital investment. The landowning class used its wealth in luxury, in hoarding of foods, goods, gold and silver, and, utilising usury, fraud, robbery,
oppression and violence, including murder, to add to its holdings of land.
There were some deceptive instances of little significance. The Emperor Wu (120 B.C.), for instance, made a state monopoly of
iron and salt - industries which were controlled by wealthy merchants who became powerful by exploiting the people. During the
Sung Dynasty, there was progress in banking and printing. But trade was very limited.
It was because of this limited volume of trade over the centuries that the trading or merchant class did not become politically
important, as they had been so much earlier in the Western world.
While there had been some sea-borne trade earlier, chiefly with Malays, the beginning of trading contact with Europe dates from
1516 when a Portuguese ship berthed at Canton. For almost two centuries Portugal had the trade to itself.
The Portuguese traded when they found that the
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Chinese were strong. When they realised that the forces were weak they robbed and plundered her ships and cities.
The earlier Malays had been peaceful. Therefore the Chinese regarded the violent Portuguese as pirates, akin to the Japanese
who made a practice of raiding their coastal cities. And so they treated them.
Twenty years later the Portuguese came again - this time to Ningpo. Once again, finding the Chinese weak, they acted as in the
past. This time they miscalculated. The Imperial troops went into action and all the Portuguese who could not escape were killed.
Seven years later the Ningpo experience was repeated in Fukien.
Nevertheless in 1557 the Portuguese were allowed to establish a trading centre at Macao.
The Dutch came in 1607 and behaved in the same way as the Portuguese. The English did the same when they came in 1637.
And a few years earlier both English and Dutch had plundered Chinese junks trading to the Philippines.
It was not a reassuring background.
English trading became systematic in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century with the great activities of the East
India Company.
Although there had been American trading earlier, it became regular only from the middle of the nineteenth century.
Following the Industrial Revolution in England the pressure for outlets for the products which came in increasing quantities from
the new factories, forced the rising industrial capitalists to challenge the monopoly
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of the old Chartered East India Company and to influence the government. Ships had to carry a quantity of textile exports.
In the narrow, undeveloped stage of the trade with China, which did not need, and was, in any case, contemptuous of foreign
products, much of these forced exports had to be sold at a loss.
Indeed the trading of that period was largely a one-way traffic, for China had the tea and silk which the outside world wanted,
and she wanted little or nothing in return. So the purchases had to be paid for in silver which flowed in to enrich the Manchu
Court.
The Manchus closed their eyes to developments in the outside world.
The Civil Service of the Court - the landlord-scholar bureaucracy - was selected because of its knowledge of the Chinese
classics; of Chinese philosophy. It neither understood world development in science, commerce, military achievement, nor did it
want to.
Highly cultured as were its members - even if that culture was of another age - they judged the West by the early behaviour of
their traders and sailors and despised them as barbarians. However, while the balance of trade continued heavily in favour of
China, the "barbarians" were tolerated.
Then opium came to alter the whole picture.
The first shipment of opium was brought to China by the East India Company in 1781. Soon there was a substantial vested
interest in the trade and in its expansion. Addiction became widespread and accepted. It was not long before the East India
Company, which
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previously had had to carry large quantities of silver dollars to pay for its purchases, found the position reversed - it took away far
more than it paid out.
The trade was channeled through Canton, where merchants and officials encouraged the trade, because of the money they
could make corruptly and the profits that enriched the local retailers and merchants.
The trade expanded with great rapidity: from two thousand chests at the turn of the century to forty thousand chests in 1838.
The inflow of silver ceased. But, there was no compensation - the huge profits in the trade did not reach the Manchu Court.
Instead, they went into pockets far removed from the Court's control and far removed physically - to far-south Canton.
The Emperor banned the importation, and the smoking of opium was made illegal. But the vested interests had become so great,
widespread and powerful that the trade continued.
The Court despatched a special commissioner to Canton to suppress the trade. He seized and burnt 20,000 chests approximately three million pounds weight of opium.
The East India Company protested at the prohibition and the burning. All merchants interested in the trade, and in trade
generally, supported the protest. In addition they demanded of the British Government that it force China to open its doors to
trade in ALL commodities, particularly cotton textiles.
The Manchu Court refused to withdraw. The outcome was the Opium War.
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The prohibition of its most profitable article of trade by a country of backward natives, of barbarians (as the West generally at that
time viewed China), was not to be tolerated. War was declared.
The war was a relatively leisurely process for it took months to transport troops and materials sufficient for campaigns. The
Imperial Troops resisted.
The Manchu mind was a closed mind. It had been from its advent as a dynasty. It had a contempt for the Western "barbarians".
Thus, in far-north Peking, the Manchu Court found that closed minds could not close doors against a militarily-advanced foe.
England won.
Under the Treaty of Nanking of 1842 and the Supplementary Protocols of 1843, England exacted that China:
Permit the continuance of the opium trade.
Pay for the drug that had been destroyed.
Restrict import duties on all goods to a maximum of 5 per cent.
Open the five major ports.
Exempt British nationals from the operation of Chinese law.
Cede Hong Kong.
The 5 per cent maximum made growth of national industry almost impossible.
The exemption of English nationals paved the way to the extra-territoriality which later crystallised into the Foreign Concessions
and International Settlements in which Chinese law did not run.
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The Americans were not to be left behind. In the Treaty of Wanghsia in 1844, further concessions were obtained, including
additional extra-territorial rights and right of internal navigation.
Just how profitable the drug traffic was to England was disclosed in a report by the British Colonial Government of India a few
years later which showed that approximately 20 per cent of its revenue came from profits from the opium trade.
As a result of the Treaties, China was compelled to allow the importation of opium until 1917. By that time, of course, the usage
of the drug had become so widespread and the vested interests in it had become so powerful that "compelled" is hardly the word
to use.
The 5 per cent restriction lasted until 1928. Extra-territoriality lasted until 1949.
There were other effects. To the outflow of silver and the indemnity payments had to be added the money paid for textiles which
China had previously been able to produce itself. Hundreds of thousands of weavers were ruined.
SECOND OPIUM WAR
AND TAIPING REVOLUTION
China's semi-feudal structure began to crack under the combined influence of the growing trade activities of its own and foreign
merchants and the discontent and revolt of peasants and workers against increased exploitation, unemployment and oppression.
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After the Wanghsia Treaty, the Taiping Revolution (1851-1864) engulfed the country.
While the Taiping Revolution was in progress, England, and later, France declared war - what is known as the Second Opium
War (1856-1858). The outcome was further exactions. The Treaties of Tientsin gave England, France, the United States and
Russia, among other things:
A heavy war indemnity.
Right to residence in Peking.
Perpetuation of customs control.
Acceptance of missionary activity.
When ratification of the treaties by the Manchu Court was delayed the Anglo-French troops advanced to Peking, destroyed the
magnificent group of structures known as the Summer Palace and looted its priceless contents. What was not carried away was
mutilated or completely destroyed.
During this time the Taiping forces were sweeping much of the country. It was no mere anarchic rising of dissatisfied peasants,
lacking coherence and objective. The Taiping held most of the country for twelve years and made Nanking their capital.
The facts about the Taiping are little known in the West. This was a national revolution which had as its basis Western
Christianity and had as its principle democracy unheard of for its time. The Taiping leadership absorbed Christianity and took its
precepts seriously. They proclaimed that:
The land should be cultivated by the common people.
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Gambling and corruption should be punished. Women should be free and equal.
Opium should be prohibited.
Footbinding, prostitution, and sale of women in marriage should be abolished.
However, the historical conditions were not ripe. China was still a peasant economy. Almost a century had to elapse before
some of the objectives sought by the Taiping were to be achieved.
The Powers, after weighing the possibility of supporting the Taiping against the corrupt Court, decided that a malleable Court
was more desirable than an unpredictable force that took the precepts of Christianity seriously. To enable the Manchu
Government to crush the Taiping, the Powers supplied the Imperial forces with modern arms. The ill-equipped Taiping were soon
crushed.
The modern arms allowed the Government forces in the ensuing years to crush more rapidly and ruthlessly risings of the
peasants and minority peoples. In Kweichow alone a million Miao people are declared to have been massacred by the Imperial
Army.
OTHER LOSSES
For the rest of the century England, France, Japan and Russia took advantage of the revolts and risings to move into areas of
Chinese influence.
England took Burma. France took Viet Nam. Japan seized Korea. Russia entered the northwest. (It later withdrew.)
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Seeing the weakness of the Manchu State, Japan in 1894 entered Korea (where on the invitation of the King of Korea the
Manchu troops were suppressing a peasant revolt), annihilated the Manchu troops, took possession of Korea and crossed to
Port Arthur.
The treaty which Japan imposed gave her 200 million ounces of silver indemnity, Taiwan (Formosa) and the Pescadores. She
had to drop the demand for Port Arthur and Dairen because of the opposition of Germany, France and Russia, who viewed
unfavourably Japan's increasing influence.
This increasing weakness of the Manchu Government was a temptation which the other powers did not resist. Germany seized
Tsingtao and the eastern Shantung Peninsula. England took Weihaiwei. France took Kwangchowan. Tsarist Russia forced a
lease of Port Arthur and Dairen.
At the close of the century America declared the "Open Door" policy for China. The Manchu Government was not even
consulted!
EXPORT DEVELOPMENTS
Following the Opium Wars the character of exports from the West began to change. By the close of the century export of capital
to China had displaced export of goods in importance.
In the initial stages the capital was not for construction or for industry, but loans to enable the Manchu
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Dynasty to meet its heavy war-indemnity payments. Later it was for the construction of railways. The lenders, English, French,
Russian, German, demanded as security customs receipts plus some internal taxes. Thus customs revenue went first to meet
interest payments. What was left went to the Chinese Government. From 1858 onwards the entire Chinese customs
administration was controlled by foreigners, chiefly English.
BOXER RISING
The Yi Ho Tuan - Boxers as they are known to the West - started as a secret society, the Chinese peasants' usual preliminary
move to rebellion. When it emerged into revolt it was aimed primarily at the Germans who were colonising Shantung in a ruthless
manner. Aimed at one set of foreigners it almost inevitably covered all foreigners. And, as the missionaries were the foreigners
best known to them and most active amongst them, it soon became anti-missionary as well as anti-foreign.
A factor which added fuel to the blaze of peasant anger was the actions of Roman Catholic missions of all nationalities, through
the whole country. Under French pressure, the Manchu Government had given them privileges and power of which many had
taken full advantage to exploit and oppress the people. To the peasants, the missionaries who acted badly were
indistinguishable from those who concerned themselves only with their proselytising activities. And, in any case, they were
foreigners. An important factor in understanding the
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peasants' reactions was that in those days foreigners acted as people of a superior race; as masters of a backward country and
a backward people - a half-starved, rag-clothed, illiterate people. Their conduct belonged to the period: it was the period of
colonialism. "All natives were inferior." The peasants rallied in their millions to the anti-foreign offensive.
Unlike the Taiping, the Boxers were without any clear political objective. It seems that in the initial stage they were against the
feudal court but this was very soon lost in the anti-foreign aspect under the influence of various sections which, for their own
particular reasons, were anti-missionary and anti-foreign. Some officials, traders and landlords joined the rebels with the express
intention of venting their hatred against the foreigners for wrongs, true or imaginary, suffered at their hands.
By May, 1900, the Boxers had entered Peking and Tientsin and, supported by the Imperial troops, had laid siege to the Foreign
Legation area in Peking.
The foreign troops fought their way to Peking and the Empress Dowager and the Emperor fled.
The Court pretended to support the revolt. It saw in the anti-foreign hatred a means of side-tracking attention from itself, realising
that any peasant movement must logically end with opposition to the landlord class and the dynasty. Thus, while simulating
support, it actually kept on terms with the Powers, and, in the end, came out openly against the rebels.
The rising was crushed. The foreign troops, comprising soldiers of eight countries, entered Peking and
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proceeded to rapine, massacre and looting. Putnam Weale, a famous English journalist of his day, wrote that every house in
Peking was looted.
The treaty that was subsequently imposed included indemnity of 450,000,000 taels of silver (with accrued interest 980,000,000
in the 39 years of its payment), a demand for the suppression of all anti-foreign activity, the right to station troops along the
Peking-Shanhaikuan railway and to station soldiers in the Legation Area - a section of the inner city of Peking in which Chinese
were prohibited from residing.
AFTER 1900
With the Manchu subject to foreign control and foreign investments therefore protected, loans flowed in from England, France,
and Russia - at first to provide money for payment of the indemnities, then for railways, mines, shipping, and, last of all, for
investment in factory production.
The comprador class (those Chinese who acted as buying, selling and managing agents of foreign companies) became more
numerous.
National capitalists increased in number - and, of course, industry in general and the working class grew in numbers
simultaneously. But the national capitalists had to compete on uneven terms with foreign plants in China which were exempt
from Chinese taxes. However, here were forces that were soon to develop and finally depose the dynasty and weaken the semifeudal social system which, with variations and modifications
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(adding a semi-colonial aspect in its last century) had ruled the country throughout its known history.
CHINESE NATIONAL CAPITALISTS
AND THEIR MOVEMENT
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, from the millions of Chinese who had emigrated (and those who had been
recruited by various companies as indentured or free labour) had emerged wealthy Chinese who were influenced by the
democracy of their adopted countries. They wanted to see their own country become modernised - capitalist democratic of a
Western type instead of absolute monarchist, semi-feudal or semicolonial.
A section of the Chinese landlord class and the compradors favoured a constitutional monarchy -such as in England.
By the turn of the century there were a number of light industries in China. The irresistible economic effects of the early
investments by foreign capital were showing themselves. Railways, steamships, machinery, equipment - all have to be
maintained, repaired, renewed. So, workshops have to be established. In turn, markets are created for products needed by
them. Small industries spring up. Small industries call for feeder industries: light industries. These small, less profitable fields are
not attractive to foreign investors and are usually initiated by local small capitalists.
One section of this mixture of national capitalists,
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landlords, compradors, intellectuals, army officers, was democratic in its outlook, although its political concepts were confused,
its aims limited. This was the group led by China's notable early revolutionary democrat, Sun Yat-sen, who, from 1894 onwards,
developed more and more contacts among the national capitalists, the intellectuals, the army officers and, of particular
importance, among Chinese overseas.
Another section sought reform only within the framework of the Manchu Dynasty. This section actually succeeded in 1898 in
getting the Emperor to issue a series of important decrees. The reactionary elements led by the strong-minded Empress
Dowager -- who was the real ruler - acted promptly. The Dowager took over control completely and placed the Emperor Kuang
Hsu under house arrest. Those of his liberal advisers who did not escape were executed by being cut in halves at the waist.
The outcome of the, Boxer revolt further shook the Dynasty.
Anomalous with its out-of-date thoughts, customs, outlook and structure, its luxury, its extravagance, its corruption, its blind
acceptance of the belief that all that was Manchu was perfection, the last of the dynasties was crumbling. The Empress Dowager
died unconscious of its near decease. The weak Emperor was also dead - murdered, so rumour said, by his aunt. The infant Pu
Yi was on the throne.
On October 111, 1911, the national feeling of protest burst. The Imperial garrison at Hankow revolted. The navy, ordered to
attack the rebels, refused to fire. The
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South went over to the revolution. The Manchu Dynasty was ended. The last act of the Emperor, through his ministers, before
abdication, was to appoint Yuan Shi-kai as Prime Minister.
A Provisional Government was formed at Nanking on February 1, 1912, and Sun Yat-sen was appointed Provisional President of
the Republic of China.
Sun Yat-sen's ideas had spread, but, lacking political perspicacity, least of all scientific understanding of social processes, he
and his associates allowed their democratic plans to be side-tracked by the conservative elements who had gathered control into
their hands.
The Powers hardly hesitated. A strong war-lord, responsive to their suggestions or pressure, one who would not interfere with or
menace the indemnity payments, treaty rights, loans, investments, properties, was infinitely preferable to Republicans who
appeared to be safe, but whose future was unpredictable. So Sun Yat-sen's appeal for a spread of the national revolution was
answered by British and Japanese warships up the Yangtze, by Tsarist and Japanese troops in the north, and hostility from the
provincial war-lords, landlords and bureaucrats.
The Southern Republican section under Sun Yat-sen was weak. Seeking to hold the whole of China as a republic it feared
partition into North and South. It also feared foreign intervention and the loss of everything.
Because of these beliefs and the thought that nothing must be done which would be a menace to the unity of China, Sun Yat-sen
resigned.
Later, several parties combined to form the Kuominpage 77
tang. But Yuan Shi-kai viewed even this combination as dangerous to his control and in 1914 he dismissed the K.M.T. members
from the National Assembly and suspended Parliament.
Yuan Shi-kai was the most powerful of the warlords - those militarist--politicians with their own armies, who financed themselves
by retaining the taxes within the area they controlled - the most powerful, because of the position he occupied as head of the
state and the support he received from the Powers.
From 1911 to 1927 the war-lords controlled China, and the Powers, singly or in groups, supported the warlords who seemed the
best insurance for their interests and who best suited their plans at a given period.
Japan pursued a different policy from the other powers (or perhaps, it might be said an "additional" policy) basing its support on
any action or individual which or who would help to keep the Central Government weak, or at least stop it from gaining strength.
With the continued support of the Powers, Yuan Shi-kai stayed in control, declaring himself emperor in 1916. Only a storm of
protest prevented him carrying out his ambition of crowning himself in traditional manner. He died shortly afterwards.
War-lord control remained unaltered after Yuan Shi-kai's death.
In 1917 came the overthrow of the Tsarist regime in Russia - an autocracy, not much removed from feudalism and, in some
respects so like the conditions under which the Chinese lived. The response was immediate. The nationalists were particularly
influenced. They
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saw in the achievement of the Soviet Republic that for which they also were striving: the abolition of an undemocratic, brutal rule.
The opposition to the Japanese, the War-lord Government and the "Legation" Powers intensified.
The preoccupation of the Great Powers with the life and death struggle of the First World War had allowed Japan to gain a
stronger foothold in China. It made its notorious Twenty-one Demands on China, the acceptance of which would have made
China practically a Japanese colony. The pro-Japanese Chinese Cabinet was prepared to agree. The national anger burst.
On May 4, 1919, three thousand Peking students demonstrated, denouncing the pro-Japanese ministers and the Versailles
Treaty Clause which endorsed the seizure of Shantung Peninsula. Thirty students were arrested.
The movement spread throughout the country. A month later the students demonstrated again. This time a thousand were
imprisoned. The result was widespread strikes, demonstrations, and boycott of Japanese goods. The protests were successful.
The significant feature was that, for the first time, the whole of China was aroused.
Innumerable actions of the Powers in the subsequent years were calculated to inflame the feelings against them. (It is important
to realise this because of the bearing it had on the Chinese national movement.) Active nationalists caught in the Concessions
were handed over to the war-lord police and later to the K.M.T. In November, 1919, the Japanese organised a massacre at
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Foochow because of a fancied incident. From 1920 onwards demonstrations and strikes were suppressed with great violence by
the Government forces, sometimes with the active help of the Powers, but always with their declared or covert agreement. When
the Kaolan miners struck in 1922, British troops were sent to help in the suppression of the strike. Japanese troops landed at
Changsha and fired on people because of a boycott demonstration against Japanese goods. On September 5, 1926, British
warships fired on demonstrating civilians at Wanhsien. Several thousand were killed or wounded. They fired on a "national
victory demonstration" at Hankow.
When the Northern Expeditionary Army occupied Nanking (March 24, 1927), British, American and other destroyers bombarded
the city. The casualties ran into thousands.
By 1923 Sun Yat-sen had begun to enunciate his triple policy for the establishment of a democratic republic: endorsement of the
policy of national unity advocated by the Communists (then a tiny handful); cooperation with workers and peasants; alliance with
the Soviet Union. His manifesto of 1924 was an open declaration that only by defeating the war-lords and forcing the withdrawal
of the foreign powers whose support ensured continued war-lord rule, and depending on the support of the workers and
peasants was it possible to achieve a democratic China.
He came north to Peking but fell ill and died on March 12, 1925.
In July, 1923, the Soviet Government notified its
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readiness to relinquish the privileges exacted by the Tsarist Governments. Only after widespread popular protests did the Peking
Government agree to sign the Sino-Soviet Agreement. The Diplomatic Corps stated that, inasmuch as they did not recognise the
Soviet Government, they would not permit the Soviet Ambassador to occupy their own embassy in the Legation Quarter.
Chiang Kai-shek and his associates, having taken over the Kuomintang, converted it into a junior partner of the war-lords. So
matters continued until August 1, 1927, when the workers and peasants, united in a disciplined army numbering thirty thousand
under Chou En-lai, Chu Teh and others, moved against the Kuomintang. It was the beginning of the Second Revolutionary Civil
War which was to last until 1937.
A few months later the first revolutionary base was established by Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh at Chingkangshan in Kiangsi.
Within two years, nineteen bases had been established in other parts of the country.
During this time, Japan had not remained idle, but had gathered strength and planned its actions. On a flimsy excuse - that a rail
was torn up on the South Manchurian Railways (no train wrecked, no harm done, the place guarded by Japanese troops!) - it
took over Manchuria. Within a matter of hours it had occupied all key positions in the huge territory.
This gave Japan an advantage over all the Powers. Nothing was done because the leaders of the Western Powers had
conflicting interests, and were united only in their oft-repeated statement devised to justify their
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presence: the Chinese were politically backward and could not possibly run their own country efficiently. In addition there is no
lack of evidence that they hoped, perhaps believed, that the Japanese would use the industrialised North-East as a base from
which to attack Russia. If so, and the Japanese were successful, then they would be so busy with their conquest of Siberia as to
leave China to the rest of the Powers. If, on the other hand, the conquest of Siberia proved difficult, so much the better. It was an
opportunist policy fated to boomerang disastrously.
Diplomats are presumed to foresee the future when they plan the present. And it is so easy for laymen to "be wise long after the
events".
The London Economist once said Austin Chamberlain's error was that he did not realise that in 1927 you could no longer kick
Chinese off the footpath. Yet for many years afterwards they still were being kicked off. In 1927, kicking Asiatics off their own
pavements seemed the correct order of things. The failure to recognise what now seems so obvious has its important bearing on
history to 1949 - and later.
Knowing these things, we can more readily appreciate present-day China and its attitudes. Not that there is any bitterness,
official or from the people, so sure are they of themselves, of their power and of their future.
Japan set up a puppet government and appointed as emperor Pu Yi, last Manchu Emperor. Japan renamed the territory
Manchukuo to prove that the area was independent and not Japanese! But it also showed no intention of attacking the Soviet
Republic.
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Encouraged by the lack of protest from the other powers, the Japanese attacked the large province of Jehol in 1933 and handed
it over to its puppet Manchukuo Government. Japan then proceeded systematically to ruin China's trade by organised
smuggling, protected by troops. This deprived the Chinese Government of customs revenue. Many Chinese national capitalists
were crippled and many more actually ruined by the competition of duty-free goods.
Chiang Kai-shek did not fight the Japanese. Resistance to the invaders fell on the Resistance Movement and the young Chinese
Red Army. The attack against the latter reached a climax in ferocity and magnitude in October, 1933.
In July, 1934, the Red Army issued a declaration to march north to resist Japanese aggression. Three months later, the famous
Long March to the north began.
Meantime the tide of nationalism was rising. Demands for action against the Japanese came from all sides and all strata, from
peasants and workers to intellectuals and national capitalists. In December, 1936, Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped at Sian by
Chang Hsueh-liang who wanted action against the Japanese. Out of a conference which included Chou En-lai (present Chinese
Prime Minister) representing the Communists, came an agreement to form a united front to fight against the invader.
Japan was undeterred. Six months later it launched its second plan with carefully arranged forces using traitors, weaklings and
K.M.T. officers. The incident at the Marco Polo Bridge was the signal to move into action.
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The ordinary Chinese soldiers spoiled their plan and wrecked their timing: they refused to obey their treacherous officers and
fought the Japanese.
However, although the unexpected opposition threw this Japanese offensive askew, they soon recovered. Peking fell.
The Japanese had planes, plenty of artillery and motorised equipment. They took a heavy revenge. For weeks after entering
Nanking, they murdered, looted, raped and burned.
The Powers, and particularly America, supplied Japan with essential raw materials, while at the same time limiting sale and
transport of war supplies to China and refusing loans for war purposes. In his "Memoirs", President Truman says the
Administration thought of throwing "into China unlimited resources and large armies of American soldiers to defeat the
Communists . . . and compel Russian withdrawal from Manchuria by force". But realisation that "the American people would
never stand for such an undertaking" resulted in the idea being abandoned. England surrendered the customs revenue to the
Japanese from 1937 to 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
KUOMINTANG
When it is realised that the Kuomintang betrayed China to the Japanese and, acted as brutally towards their own people as did
the invaders, the attitude of the Chinese towards them is understandable. In April,
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1927, for instance, Chiang Kai-shek ordered his soldiers to attack the striking workers in Shanghai. Thousands were killed. He
also ordered massacres of the democratic members of the K.M.T. in Nanking, Canton and elsewhere, after which he set up his
"Nationalist Government". In 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, Chiang refused to aid Chinese soldiers who fought the
invaders. He gave no help to his own 19th Route Army which fought the Japanese when the latter attacked Shanghai in January,
1932.
In the years following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Chiang pursued a relentless fight against the guerrillas and
Communists, forcing them out of their southern areas. The world-known Long March from the central-south provinces, west to
the Tibetan mountain border, then north to Shansi in 1934-1935 was the attempt of the Resistance Army, which had been
fighting the Japanese, to preserve itself as an anti-Japanese and national revolutionary force.
Chiang's attitude is shown clearly, moreover, in the fact that, although the Japanese occupied the country, massacred and
brutalised people, and ruined its economy from 1933 onwards, he did not declare war on it until 1941 when Pearl Harbor brought
America into the war. And in 1941 he ambushed and massacred the headquarters column of the New Fourth Army - which was
part of his own anti-Japanese force! - because it was Communist-led.
In all it is estimated that Chiang killed 450,000 workers, peasants, students, intellectuals in the period 1927-1929, and an
additional half million (apart from
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the huge war losses) in his struggle to maintain his dictatorship and preserve the colossal wealth he had appropriated by various
means.
In addition, it is estimated that, when the Kuomintang, retreating before the Japanese in 1938, broke the Yellow River dykes, a
million and a half peasants were drowned and six million ruined.
Because Chiang Kai-shek was known to be dependable as far as indemnity payments, treaty rights, interest and investments
were concerned, America particularly, but also the West, had endeavoured to gloss over the facts of his rule, even when that rule
was actually detrimental in the war effort. However, throughout and after the war every prominent paper in the world, at some
stage or other, as well as Allied diplomatic and military leaders, exposed the wholesale corruption, inefficiency and treachery of
the Kuomintang and particularly of Chiang himself and his family connections.
Soldiers and diplomats who were intent on defeating the Axis Powers realised that the K.M.T. was making very little real effort to
fight the Japanese. However, America particularly, but also the Western Powers were influenced by his opposition to the
"Communists" accepting Chiang's definition as applying to the tens of rnillions of Chinese citizens who sought a democratic
China, and whose anger at the Japanese invaders was raised to bitter hatred because of their massacres of ordinary citizens
and their complete brutality.
Once the Japanese were defeated, Chiang and his family and his associates (today referred to in China as the "bureaucrat
capitalists") used their control of the
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state to appropriate the industries, ships and properties which the Japanese had seized - in so many cases from. Chinese
national capitalists.
The tens of millions of pounds which went into their pockets from profits, from corruption, from sheer robbery, from engineering
the inflation, most of which they succeeded in transferring to America, from the funds which the China Lobby uses today to
influence United States Congress policy and American public opinion.
By November, 1948, the north-east was clear of K.M.T. troops. A year later all important areas were cleared, and on October 1,
1949, the People's Republic of China was proclaimed.
POLITICAL STRUCTURE
Before acceptance, the Constitution of the People's Republic of China was first discussed throughout the country. Copies by the
million were distributed, translation having been made into the chief minority languages. It is estimated that one hundred and fifty
million people participated in the discussions.
THE CONSTITUTION
The draft, revised in the light of scores of thousands of suggested alterations, was adopted by Congress on September 20, 1954.
It was in that month that the first Congress was elected. Until that date, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference
(CPPCC)
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acted as a provisional parliament It remains in force as a consultative body.
The Constitution declares that the People's Republic of China is a democratic state led by the working class and based on the
worker-peasant alliance. It states that a united democratic front comprising all parties will continue to play a full part. To elect and
stand for election is the right of all citizens of eighteen years or over whatever their nationality, race, sex, occupation, social
origin, religious belief, education, property status or length of residence.
Voters can at any time replace their deputies in accordance with procedure laid down by law.
Freedom of the person is inviolable; no citizen may be arrested except by legal process. Women have complete equality, the
state protects marriage, the family, mother and child. It protects too, the right of citizens to own savings, housing, and other
means of life and to inherit private property.
All nationalities are free and equal.
CONGRESS, CABINET, ETC.
The Republic was declared on October 1, 1949.
China's Parliament is called the National People's Congress. Congress alone exercises supreme power. The head of the state is
the Chairman. He is elected for a term of four years.
National Congress is elected for four years by provincial, autonomous region, the two big city (Peking, Shanghai) congresses,
the armed forces and overseas Chinese.
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Congress is composed of 1,226 deputies and meets once a year. Its permanent interim body is called the Standing Committee,
which acts in accordance with the Constitution.
What would be equivalent to the Cabinet of Western countries is the State Council. It is responsible to Congress and reports to it,
or, when Congress is not in session, to the Standing Committee.
Provinces, autonomous regions, large municipalities (Peking, Shanghai), counties, municipalities, towns, townships (with certain
minority variations) all have local congresses of specific levels.
Deputies to the congresses of the larger administrative divisions are elected by the congresses of the next lower level.
And deputies to the congresses of the smaller adrninistrative are directly elected by the voters.
Deputies to provincial congresses are elected for four years, and for the others, two years.
Almost five and three quarter million deputies to congresses of the lower levels were elected last general election. These
members carry on their usual occupations in addition to their work for the state.
THE CPPCC
AND OTHER POLITICAL PARTIES
The Chinese People's Political Consultative Council, usually known as the CPPCC, held its first session in Peking in September
1949. It acted as Parliament until
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the convening of the National People's Congress in 1954.
It continues in existence as the organ of the Chinese People's Democratic United Front. Its function is to assist and supervise the
activities of the government. In the Western sense it would be considered a second parliamentary body.
Just as the CPPCC continues as a regular body so do the political parties other than the Communist Party. These are eight in
number and their membership has been increasing each year as more and more of every stratum became politically conscious.
They are:
Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang. Democratic League.
Democratic National Construction Association.
Association for the Promotion of Democracy.
Peasants' and Workers' Democratic Party.
Chih Kung Tang.
Chiu San Society.
Taiwan Democratic Self-government League.
They represent the democratic sections of the Kuonintang that refused to follow Chiang Kai-shek: intellectuals, special sections
of the intellectuals, officials, national capitalists and other elements in the population. Since Liberation their membership has
increased fivefold.
There is no bitterness against their ex-enemies - the Kuomintang. When officers and men cross over from Taiwan (Formosa),
when agents and spies give themselves up they are welcomed on their present attitude, given land, trained, or given positions
equivalent to
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their capacity or their rank. Again the evidence of sureness and confidence.
"There is good in everyone - use it!" That is one phase of Government policy. A die-hard and very vocal anti-Communist
professor is still in his job. The K.M.T. general who was in charge of the defence of Peking is now Minister of Water
Conservation. An ex-Manchu prince is a member of the National Congress. An ex-Manchu princess is an employee of one of the
sections of the Academia Sinica. High ranking ex-K.M.T. officers are in important positions.
Scores of capitalists and non-Communist intellectuals are in the National Parliament.
The multi-party CPPCC at its National Conference in 1957 spent twenty days in most critical comment on aspects of government
of the country. The criticism is duly noted and, when well-based and logical, adopted.
"Let all criticism, no matter how hostile, be allowed freedom. Then we will know what our people are thinking of their government
and what they want, and we can explain or provide accordingly."
From May, 1957, for months onwards, business must have been sadly interrupted while non-Party people, in innumerable
afternoon sessions, enjoyed themselves criticising and attacking their Communist colleagues and their leaders.
The great fight internally in the Communist Party is for modesty; in the nation as a whole against great nation chauvinism in
international matters; against great Han chauvinism in internal matters.
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LAW
the courts function the same as in the West. That is to say the right of appeal applies up to the highest courts.
The difference is that the Constitution provides for a system of people's assessors who are elected by the people. The principle
is to give the people the opportunity to participate in and supervise the work of the courts.
The accused has the right to have counsel (whom he must pay) or friends or relatives to help his defence. If both parties desire a
divorce it is granted.
Under the Constitution, being a multi-national state, every citizen has the right to use his own spoken and written language in
court proceedings.
EDUCATION
Education is free and based on state schools and universities.
Children commence in kindergarten (where these are available).
Primary schooling begins at seven and continues until twelve years. Junior Middle School and Senior Middle School courses are
each for three years.
Those who have attained Middle School standard and can pass the necessary examinations can proceed without cost to
technical or other universities.
Because of the high illiteracy rate (85 per cent upon
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Liberation) what are called spare-time schools have been established - equivalent to night schools of the Western world except
that they are held before, as well as after normal school hours.
These spare-time schools range from primary to upper middle and the students go on to evening universities or continue their
studies from the correspondence schools. There is no age limit.
In higher learning the Academy of Sciences has set up twenty-two institutes. The number of universities and colleges with
university status has increased. A Cultural Plan aims for the Western scientific level.
LANGUAGE
One heritage from early scholars which was at once an enormous aid and an enormous handicap was the standardisation of the
written language. In a vast country like China, with many completely different dialects, each a foreign language to the other, the
ideographs have been a uniting factor. The spoken words might be unintelligible, but the characters fixed the meaning
throughout the country.
In a modern, industrialised, scientific world, however, ideographic writing is an anachronism. This has been known by Chinese
intellectuals for a long time and the suggested revision and adoption of a romanised alphabet is neither a new idea nor a new
proposal. But only with the advent of the People's Government has the idea been translated into planned action.
First step was the simplification of more than five hundred of the characters by the elimination of strokes considered superfluous.
Then a new alphabet was compiled - outcome of a long, exact, thorough examination by a large committee, consisting of
linguists, teachers, scientists and public figures from Peking and other parts of China. The new phonetic system is based
exclusively on the Latin alphabet (originally five arbitrary new letters were proposed).
The first step in the language reform was concerned with the spoken language. It was relatively simple: it was decided to
standardise the spoken language by adopting the Peking dialect as a state language, compulsory for official work and school
language. That was done shortly after the new government took power.
The change from characters to an entirely new written language is a far more complicated matter. This has been recognised. For
some time it must march side by side with the present character writing. The enormous literature of China is in character printing.
Translation will be necessarily limited, at first to the most important and most useful. A forcing factor is likely to be the youth,
which, faced with learning two written "languages ", is likely to neglect the more difficult; to choose the easier.
Difficulties in China are made to be overcome. Within measurable time China will start on the path of a language easily learnt
and applicable to the modern world in which it finds itself playing an increasingl: important part.
Some of the minorities have never had a written
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language. Some have already been given one. Others are being compiled. It is not a simple process. The Miao will now get a
written language based on the Latin alphabet. But owing to the great variety of Miao dialects there will have to be at least three
different written versions.
The backward Yi - so many were slaves - now have their own written language.
TRADE UNIONS
Although working class struggles occurred in China almost a half-century ago, permanent union organisation was lacking. The
historical conditions were, generally speaking, absent. But, with the growth of industry in the country came sporadic working
class economic protest, soon to be tied with the political struggle for national liberation.
Strikes took place in 1919 in support of what subsequently became known as the May Fourth Movement. Three years later, out
of strikes in the major cities emerged the first All China Labour Congress. In the following year the railwaymen on the PekingHankow line struck but were bloodily suppressed and the unions went "underground".
In May, 1925, the All China Federation of Trade Unions was formed. However, during the long internal struggles and the long
period of Japanese occupation to 1945, open organisation was impossible. The Association of Labour which was functioning in
the K.M.T.
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areas affiliated with the All China Federation in 1945, and aided unity by voluntarily dissolving in 1949.
Since 1950 the tremendous expansion of industry has carried with it a corresponding growth in industrial workers. The union
membership has reflected that increase. In the circumstances of the present widespread establishment and growth of industries
throughout the country any figure of membership is necessarily an approximation. To the eighteen million (approximately) of
December, 1956, must be added the millions of workers who will go into industry each year of the FiveYear Plans.
The principle of organisation is industrial: all workers in the same enterprise or office are covered by one union. All trade union
members in the works coming under the Ministry of Heavy Industry are in the Heavy Industry Workers' Union.
The supreme body is the All China Congress of Trade Unions. This elects the Executive Committee and auditing Commission of
the All China Federation of Trade Unions. The Executive Committee elects the Presidium and the Secretariat.
The number of industrial unions is twenty-two. All official positions are elective.
The All China Federation of Trade Unions has sixteen Departments including housing, labour protection, women, sports,
newspapers - "Workers' Daily" and "Chinese Worker" - and the Workers’ Publishing House.
The unions administer the labour insurance fund, which deals with injury, pensions, retirement, sickness and special
circumstances. They set up their own clubs,
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sanatoria, libraries, rest homes, sports areas. They help in the promotion of cultural activities - opera, dramatics, song and dance
ensembles.
Work is based on piece work in production and bonuses are paid for special achievements.
Union dues are equal to 1 per cent of the wages received.
The unions share responsibility in the national sense in that they confer with the Government on the part wages shall play in the
State Planning, and participate (after fullest discussion by the workers themselves) in deciding the production targets which shall
be set. They then lead the workers in the effort to achieve the Plan, and if possible, to fulfil it ahead of schedule.
PEKING
More than one world traveller has found Peking one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It has been ranked with Isfahan (the
capital of Persia, sixteenth to eighteenth century) and Rome. It changes each year as modernisation and beautification proceed
according to plan, and big building blocks displace the little dwellings that still face the main streets. The heterogeneous
structures that serve as shops and houses will remain.
SITUATION
The city is built on a plain in the north of China, just south of the Great Wall. To the north are the
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Yenshan Mountains, to the west the picturesque Western Hills. It is one hundred miles from the coast.
The Yungting River flows to the west of Peking. It ranked with the great Yellow River in the volume of silt it carried and, in the
past has been responsible for floods every few years. After a riotous life for two thousand years it is now tamed. A reservoir
holds it at Dwanting Gorge, 2700 feet up, and sluice gates govern its lower flow not far from Marco Polo Bridge. Water, electricity
and irrigation have replaced the previous disasters.
CLIMATE
Although Peking has approximately the same northern latitude as Naples and Madrid, and equivalent southern latitude as
Launceston in Tasmania, its climate is continental and its variations extreme. In summer the heat is intense, and in winter there
are four months of severe cold. Spring is short and variable, autumn short and pleasant. May and June are the flower months though there is no lack of flowers up to November - and the city is a green city until the end of October. July and August are the
wet months with their sudden tropical downpours.
POPULATION
Peking Municipal Council (Peking People's Congress) governs a population figured at four millions - a population which is
growing daily - for, apart from the
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city proper, it takes in much of the farming and industrialised environs.
RAIL AND AIR
It is the hub for all of the internal and external railways and airways. There are direct railway services to Europe via PekingHarbin-Moscow, Peking-Ulan Bator (Inner Mongolia) -Moscow, and a third, Peking-Urumchi (Sinkiang) -Moscow, soon to be
completed.
Jet airliners do the Peking-Moscow trip in eleven hours, and, allowing for prompt connections, one can be in London the same
day. There are direct lines to India, Burma, Viet Nam. The connection with Hong Kong's many airlines is slower because of the
transfer at Canton. And there are, of course, all the internal lines, rail and air.
HISTORY
Peking is a walled city. Actually it is four cities: the outer city - usually referred to as the Chinese city; the inner city with
practically all of the walls and remnants of the moats still existing; the Imperial City, a square within the inner city, with the
southern wall and part of the western wall still standing; and, within the Imperial City, with its wall and moat as they were five
hundred years ago, the Forbidden City.
The walls of the inner city are twelve miles around and of the outer city, nine miles.
Peking had its beginning in the thirteenth century,
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although there was a Chungtu city on a portion of the site a century earlier.
The Mongols (1267-1378) built on the present site but with more area to the north.
Kublai Khan built magnificent palaces and created lakes and gardens in the earlier city. The Round City was his palace.
The Mongol (or Yuan) Dynasty was short-lived. Its successor, the Ming (1368-1644) took over the magnificence and added still
more. They were responsible for the reduction of the original city to the present northern rectangle, and the extension of an
almost equal area, south, when they were faced with the need to protect the greatly increased population and to strengthen the
defences. That was in 1553. The plan of present-day Peking dates from that period.
The Manchu (or Ching) Dynasty maintained the glory and colour of the Imperial City and added palaces and temples outside the
City.
THE CITY
The Forbidden City (centred in the Imperial City slightly to the south) is still forbidden in one thing: it is forbidden to traffic everything must go round it.
Actual centre of the city is one of the Imperial gardens, Chingshan, wrongly called Coal Hill because of a legend that an emperor
built it of coal in order to have a supply in case of a siege.
The visitor to Peking is usually asked: "What would you like to see? Where would you like to go?"
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The answer should be - and it should be insistent: "I want first of all to go to Coal Hill."
A visitor can spend weeks in Peking, being taken everywhere in cars, and have only the faintest idea of the lay-out of the City.
But a view from Coal Hill (and neighbouring Peihai) gives a mental map of the capital, its lay-out and its beauty.
From these vantage points one sees, immediately below, the Forbidden City, its yellow-tile-topped high walls, its surrounding
moat, its main palaces and groups of buildings.
In a direct line north-south lies the Bell Tower (which used to ring the curfew; the big bell lies on the ground near the Tower), the
Drum Tower (which used to mark the hours with drum beats), the Forbidden City with its mass of buildings, and the Gate of
Heavenly Peace (Tien An Men), the enormous blockhouse that guarded the Palace.
To the west lie the great artificial lakes - Peihai, Chunghai and Nanhai, and the pavilion of the Winter Palace.
From the Tien An Men directly south is Chien Men (the front gate), the Arrow Tower and the outer city road to the Temple of
Heaven and the Temple of Agriculture.
From the Imperial City, east and west the city stretches to the walls. To the south lies the crowded outer city.
Peking is a green city once winter has passed. The Imperial edict was that no building should overlook the Forbidden City. Thus
Peking's houses were one
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storeyed, with inner courts, all of which had trees, even in the quarters of the poor. All had the half cylinder grey tiles and grey
bricks, all were behind walls, all had the spirit wall in front of the entrance (to keep out evil spirits, for -tradition had it - evil spirits
flew in a direct line!) so that Central Peking was a walled city of walled streets, as much of it is today.
The glance travels past the distant walls to the fields beyond. The farms come up to the walls in places, though they are rapidly
being eaten up with large buildings and blocks of buildings of all kinds that already extend miles beyond the city.
Coal Hill is a hill of a series of terraces each with its pavilion. The hills, like the lakes, are artificial, being constructed from the soil
and mud dug from swamps or fields to form the lakes.
Near the foot of one of the paths of Coal Hill that rises to the summit is a locust tree on which, in 1644, the defeated last Ming
Emperor hung himself.
One of the halls, the Hall of the Aged Sovereign, is a Children's Palace. It is a paradise for the young: everything is there for
them - science, reading, art, acting, parties, camping and recreation generally.
PEIHAI
Peihai (Park of the North Sea) is next to Coal Hill, and one would go immediately to it from Coal Hill. A strip of land each side
encloses the lake in which is set an island. On the island's highest point is the White Dagoba built three hundred years ago.
101
The approach is a tribute to the old planners, architects and workmen who were artists in the truest sense. Fifty yards beyond
the entrance a bridge with carved white marble balustrade leads to the island. Immediately ahead lies the hill, the White Pagoda
seeming to reach the sky.
To the left the goldfish - in big bowls; a variety of extraordinary form and colour.
To the right the marble balustrade stretches, curve after curve, around a covered corridor that skirts the lake front - the lake front
(and that of Chunghai) on which the Golden Tartars in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries built their palaces and gardens.
Golden-topped pavilions with red columns and multicoloured wood-work and ceilings adorn the waterfront.
Peihai is the most beautiful of Peking's city parks. It certainly is the most popular. Everywhere are green trees and brilliant
flowers. The lake is crowded with rowing boats and here and there move covered barges, duplicates of those in which the
emperors were poled when they sought escape from the troubles or the boredom of the court.
Peihai is no less popular in winter for then the lakes are natural ice rinks.
Before leaving, the visitor will want to see the five-hundred-year-old Nine Dragon Screen - 16 feet high and 84 feet long -a piece
of glazed tile work, unparalleled in beauty, a deep bas-relief in many rich colours.
As usual, the children are given special attention. There is a club for the Pioneers.
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In addition the popular Museum of Natural History, a Branch of the National Library and a Historical Research Institute are in the
old Imperial palaces and temples in the grounds.
Peihai's restaurants are famous and its tea shops are crowded summer and winter.
FORBIDDEN CITY
Once the city has been seen from Coal Hill and Peihai the next place to visit is the Forbidden City. It is a place to visit many
times.
Only those who know Peking well will visit the Forbidden City alone. There is so much to see, that even with a guide explaining
and answering questions, one finishes the first visit confused. Without someone to explain much of the pleasure is lost.
It is unnecessary to give here more than an outline of this, one of the world's wonders. To deal completely with the Forbidden
City would call for a big volume.
Make your entrance by the Chien Men, the front gate of the Manchu city, as the Emperor would have done returning from the
Temple of Heaven. By so doing you will see what was the royal processional route to the Forbidden City.
You enter Tien An Men Square. Here is the monument to those who have fallen in China's revolutionary struggles. It is a
monolith on a base of two tiers surrounded by carved marble balustrades, approached by steps - the Monument to the People's
Heroes.
The characters in gold, a replica of Mao Tse-tung's
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script spell out: "The People's Heroes Are Immortal." The marble bas-reliefs around the base depict incidents over the centuries
of China's fight for national freedom.
Tien An Men Square is one of the largest and most beautiful in the world. It was once the parade ground of the Imperial Guards.
In the forefront of the Square is a slim flagpole from which flies the national flag.
Before you towers the gatehouse that led to the Forbidden City - Tien An Men, Gate of Heavenly Peace, which is becoming
familiar to everyone because of the world circulation of the newsreels. For here in Tien An Men Square are held the impressive
celebrations of National Day and May Day.
The Gate itself has five entrances, tunnels through the wall which is enormously thick at this point for above it is the great
blockhouse. In front stand the beautifully carved victory columns and the two traditional lions. Centre front is a series of five
marble-paved bridges, balustrades of cunningly carved white marble, over a moat - a clean stream whose water flows from the
Western Hills. On either side are reviewing stands - two below the Great Hall, two on the street side of the moat.
Most photographs fail to give the slightest idea of the proportions and grandeur of the Gate of Heavenly Peace and its setting.
On the wall itself are two slogans in huge Chinese lettering: "Long Live the People's Republic of China" and "Long Live the Great
Unity of the Peoples of the World."
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The reviewing stands are for visitors; the Chairman, Ministers and distinguished visitors take the salute from in front of the great
blockhouse which is now a beautiful hall.
You enter the first court of the Forbidden City by the centre tunnel of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, its huge studded doors no
longer closed, walk along a broad stretch, and, through the heart of three tunnels under the massive Meridian Gate (Wu Men),
enter the Forbidden City itself. Its buildings are perfect examples of classical Chinese architecture.
If you continued on, you would pass the Gate of Supreme Harmony, Throne Halls and Inner Court, cross the moat at the Gate of
Inspired Military Genius and face Coal Hill. Instead, ascend the ramp and stairs of the Meridian Gate and from the top get an
impression of the Forbidden City from inside. From here you see more closely than from Coal Hill the glazed tile-topped walls,
the towers at the four corners, the other two gates - the East and West Flowery Gates.
Below is a great court-yard, and, in the near foreground five carved marble bridges, and north, as far as the eye and the mind
can encompass, entrances and temples and halls in the central south-north line, and, on the sides of the wide court-yards, finally
massing past the throne rooms into a crowd of palaces and temples and buildings large and small, right up to the north wall. All
are roofed with the yellow tile, for yellow, the colour of the earth, was one of the colours reserved for the Imperial buildings. Along
the central line one glimpses the occasional rich red of columns
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so essentially a part of Chinese traditional decoration. Descending from the Meridian Gate cross through a gate and, at the far
side of another court-yard, climb the marble stairs that lead to the Hall of Supreme Harmony, once the Throne Room. It is set on
three marble terraces.
Here are perfect bronzes of cranes, turtles, incense burners, enormous bowls. On some, the gold plating has been scraped mute sign of the looting of 1900.
The hall itself and its contents will tempt the visitor to stay. But this is a first visit and it will be well to get a rapid, general idea,
leaving a full, leisurely absorption of the beauty and the richness to later visits.
Across another court-yard to the Hall of Complete Harmony, then the Hall of Preserving Harmony and then the Inner Court.
Here were the Emperor's personal apartments. The large halls are the Palace of Heavenly Purity, the Hall of Heavenly and
Earthly Intercourse and the Palace of Earthly Tranquillity. The latter two were the family residences.
The buildings which lie to the side include smaller palaces, each with its own court-yards - once, while on a tour of the palace
grounds, the Empress Dowager found a group of buildings sealed, the approaches overgrown; no one in the palace had ever
been inside the deserted court. It was assumed that, some time in the past, some member of the Imperial Family had died there
from an infectious disease - and the scores of buildings necessary to provide for food and service for the Imperial Court and its
attendants. A city in itself!
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Today the Imperial Palaces serve as museums and to house exhibitions. Some are preserved as museums in themselves.
Viewing the richness of the treasures it is possible to realise how much wealth was accumulated over the centuries by the
luxury-loving courts, for what there is, is but a portion of what there was. In 1900 the palaces were looted by the foreign troops
and many priceless treasures stolen or destroyed. In 1911, the last of the Manchus disposed of much of the treasures. The
warlords and the Japanese took their share during their years of occupation. When the Kuomintang realised that their rule was at
an end, they had thirteen thousand cases of treasures packed to ship out of the country, but the rapid sweep of the liberation
forces was such that they succeeded in taking away only about two thousand.
However, so much wealth of art was accumulated over the centuries that more and more treasures have come to light, and
today much yet remains to be catalogued and exhibited.
PARKS
Coal Hill (Chingshan) and Peihai have already been seen. But time should be taken to see Peking's other parks.
One of the first acts of the Peking Municipal Council on Liberation was to plan the cleaning and beautification of the city. Those
who know Peking of those days, will appreciate the tremendous task that had to
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be tackled: the accumulation of filth and rubbish, the streets and lanes and alleys " a foot of dust and garbage in summer, a foot
of mud and garbage in winter"; within three months 210,000 tons of residue garbage was removed. Only a small percentage of
the sewage and drainage system functioned - more than two hundred miles of sewers were repaired or built in three months.
The waterways and lakes were filthy ditches and stagnant pools, overgrown with weed, clogged with rubbish and mud, sources
of disease, and spreaders of epidemics.
Cleanliness and beautification went hand in hand and the task was a Number One Priority.
Peihai Lake had become a stagnant pool, the channels filled with rubbish and overgrown. The lake was cleared and deepened,
the channels opened.
CHUNGSHAN PARK
Sun Yat-sen Park (Chungshan) is a sixty-acre area which lies to the west of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. It was the Altar of Land
and Grain where the Emperors made appropriate offerings, and solemnly went through the gestures of tilling the land.
The altar itself is a raised square divided into four sections filled with earth of different colours - red, black, blue and white - with a
central square of yellow.
The old Hall of Worship, built in the fifteenth century is now the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. The Peking People's Congress
meets here. It is the largest, oldest wooden traditional style structure in Peking.
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Here, too, is the magnificent roofed "open-air" theatre. It seats 5,000.
Covered promenades run to the lotus pond, to the beautiful Water Pavilion, to a hot-house. Another runs through the grounds,
with their groves of 500-year-old cypresses, their rock gardens and flower beds, to pavilions with such enchanting names as the
Pavilion for Throwing Arrows into the Pot, the Pavilion Embowered with Pines and Cypresses.
The lay-out of the grounds is superb - pines and firs, cypresses, willows, bamboos; tree- bordered streamlets and quiet paths.
From Chungshan, too, one gets another view of the moat, of the walls, and of the gates and palace roofs of the Forbidden City.
Chungshan Park is beautiful always, but in spring with the riot of colour from flowering trees and shrubs, with masses of peonies
and roses it is at its best. Chungshan is a place to go, to see; and then to revisit, at leisure.
PALACE OP CULTURE
The temple where the Tablets of the Imperial Ancestors were displayed lies east of the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tien An Men).
There the sacrifices were made to the ancestors. Since 1950 it has been the Working People's Palace of Culture. Time has its
ironies.
One enters through the wall, passing through a park filled with trees to the Hall of Supreme Harmony. The
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Palace is a place of transient exhibitions of all kinds. In the grounds are a theatre, a hall, a library and a sports ground (capacity
4,000) and dancing floor. Lectures on science, art and literature are held frequently and there are schools for literature, drama,
music, dancing and art.
There is a stage on which amateur singers, dancers, orchestras and ensembles give performances. Any individual or group that
shows talent may be selected for special tuition. This area, too, had been allowed to get into a condition of decay with the lake
and grounds calling for the same attention as the other parks.
LAKE OF TEN MONASTERIES
The Lake of Ten Monasteries runs north-west south-east from the North Wall, junctioning with the top of Peihai Lake. It
presented more problems than all the other silted lakes and filthy drains that now are Peking's beauty spots.
In the thirteenth century the Lake of Ten Monasteries was the end of the Grand Canal System which brought the grain tribute
from South China to the capital. More than three hundred years ago its use was discarded by the Mings and, in the course of the
centuries the flow ceased. By Liberation it had become a stagnant pool. It was one of the first to get attention under the 1950
plan of the Peking Council.
Before beautification was possible an engineering problem had to be dealt with. A huge volume of rain water collects in the area,
a flood menace to much of
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the city. To ensure outlet a tunnel nine feet high by nine and a half wide almost two miles in length had to be constructed.
All was done by 1951 and one of Peking's filthy spots had been transformed.
On the southern end is a swimming pool, eight acres in extent. It is divided into four pools, one deep, one shallow, one for little
children, one for racing. It has showers and a sun-bathing area. It is unnecessary to say that this is one of Peking's most popular
spots in the summer heat.
GOLDFISH POND
AND DRAGON BEARD DITCH
In one of the poorest sections of the outer city was the worst blot in Peking: Dragon Beard Ditch, known as Stinking Ditch. It was
a repository of all the city's filth, including dead dogs and cats. It was a garbage tip. It was a breeder of flies and mosquitoes in
the summer, the home of rats always. It was a spreader of epidemics. Children had been drowned in it. In the rainy season it
overflowed and flooded the miserable shacks and matting and mud huts that lined its banks and the surrounding alleys. But it
was far away from the city centre and its inhabitants the very poorest of citizens, so nothing was done about it, though much was
talked about it, decade after decade.
It was made Number One Priority in the 1950 Plan. The Ditch was cleared, sewage pipes laid, and this was covered by road.
The residents helped enthusiastically.
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The nearby stagnant pond, not much better than the ditch itself, was dredged, its banks strengthened and railed. Today it is a
clean little lake with goldfish giving splashes of colour to its waters and with trees and flowers lining its banks.
JOYOUS PAVILION PARK
Joyous Pavilion Park has a history. In days when Imperial parks were for the Court only, joyous Pavilion was frequented by
scholars and poets who sought its quietness, and there wrote, mused, recited, gossiped, drank with their fellows. An old temple
stood on the grounds. By Liberation, Joyous Park was a rubbish dump; a place of stagnant pot holes in a swamp.
It was dealt with in 1952. Today it is still another beauty spot for the people of Peking. The old swamp is a lake of 46 acres, of
miles of paths; of hills - one 33 feet high - formed from the rubbish, silt and earth from the swamp. Fish swim in the clear water
and trees and flowers brighten the area. A home has been found for the pailou - Chinese traditional archways which used to
stand in important streets, picturesque, but a hindrance to the heavy flow of modern traffic.
Pavilions and open-air dance spaces and children's playgrounds make the Park popular for family outings.
TEMPLE OF HEAVEN
Looking south from any Inner City vantage point, dominating everything, is the brilliant blue roof of the
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Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests in the Temple of Heaven Park.
The triple roof is surmounted by a top-shaped finial of gold. Its beauty matches its uniqueness, for it has no parallel anywhere in
the world.
The architects, astronomers and court magicians of five centuries ago planned on a grandiose and luxurious scale and the
craftsmen of the period built truly.
Three miles of high walls topped with glazed green tiles enclose a park of 565 acres, and several thousand cypresses planted
when the Temple was built have made a dark green setting that contrasts pleasingly with the white of the terraces and steps and
causeway.
The Temple of Heaven is not the triple-roofed blue circular building but a collection of many buildings that stretch north and south
along a quarter mile of limestone and marble. There are three main buildings - the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, the Imperial
Heaven Hall, the Imperial Vault of Heaven - and the Circular Altar. The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests is on three tiers, each
circle with its carved white marble balustrade. The blue shrine is ninety-nine feet high (the good spirits of those days flew at one
hundred feet and were not to be obstructed in their missions!). The carved balustrades are dazzling in the sunshine. Bronze
incense burners six feet high stand sentinel beside the steps and on the terraces.
The central ramp, one enormous slab of white marble, is sculptured with dragons and phoenixes and clouds and waves. It is
roped off. Today its beauty is preserved against wear or carelessness.
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Inside the hall the dome is supported by four huge pillars - wooden tree trunks, of course - decorated in gold. They represent the
four seasons. Beyond is a circle of twelve lacquered pillars, representing the months of the year, and beyond them an outer
circle of twelve.
The lesser temple, the Imperial Vault of Heaven, is also circular. It lies within a high circular wall - the famous Whispering Wall. A
whisper from one end of it can be heard at the other end, or any point between, with perfect clarity. And from a stone in the steps
which lead to the temple, called the Triple Sound of Voice Stone, a shout echoes three times.
The Circular Altar is a marble platform on three marble terraces, all with carved white balustrades.
The Temple of Heaven is in the Outer City. One captures new beauty on each visit.
DRAGON POOL PARK
Dragon Pool Park has no relation to Dragon Beard Ditch. It lies in a corner of the walls east of the Temple of Heaven. It is still
another lake and land area made beautiful; one of the largest and least-known park areas of the capital.
ROUND CITY, AND BRIDGES
The Round City - an island block only - is one of Peking's treasures that can easily be overlooked. It is a remnant of Kublai
Khan's short-lived Mongol Dynasty.
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Unless there happens to be an exhibition in its rooms, interest is monopolised by the large carved bowl made of a single piece of
jade, and a famous jade Buddha, also carved from a single piece of jade.
Along the Round City is the now widened Golden Turtle and Jade Rainbow Bridge which crosses the narrow water that joins
Peihai to the Central Sea (Chunghai Lake). The original carved white marble balustrade has been continued over the new and
greater length.
There is another bridge the visitor usually glimpses only - the Marco Polo Bridge. To foreigners, it is a reminder of the great
Venetian traveller, who recorded the wonders of the Mongol Empire. To the Chinese it is a reminder of the unprovoked attack by
the Japanese in July, 1937, and the long anti-Japanese war which ended with Japan's defeat in 1945. To the archaeologist it
recalls the fact that it was built during the period of the Golden Tartars in the twelfth century. Constructed of white marble, it is
820 feet long, 26 feet wide, and each of its 140 carved uprights is crowned with a different lion. It has eleven arches.
It is worth calling the car to a brief halt to admire the beauty of the Marco Polo Bridge and pay tribute to the engineers who
designed and the workmen who built it.
PLANETARIUM
Peking's planetarium has the usual Zeiss projector. It differs ,from planetariums of other cities in that it has its own observatory
and meteorological station as
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well as a section for research into Chinese history of astronomy. It is near the Soviet Exhibition Centre.
ZOO
Peking Zoo is not far from the Soviet Exhibition Centre, in a park that was once an Imperial resort. Here the Dowager Empress
established a small zoo. Today the zoo's wild animals include three of the rare giant pandas.
Much of the area is given over to gardens, towers, pavilions. As with zoological gardens all over the world, it is crowded at
weekends with families and children.
COURT OF PURPLE BAMBOO
The Court of Purple Bamboo is a place where the Empress Dowager and Emperor customarily rested on their way to the
Summer Palace. As with the other parks it had been allowed to silt up and had degenerated into marshy swamp and paddy
fields. By 1953 the work of rehabilitation had been completed and a lake of 33 acres, its waters clean and fresh, two small
islands, several bridges, trees and flowers had replaced still another insalubrious area. Its country quietness so near to the city is
one of its attractions.
HOTELS
Peking's new hotels are the Hsinchiao, the Ho-ping, the Chien Men and a new wing added to the Peking
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Hotel. The entrance, the foyer and grand hall of the Peking, where many of the big official functions are held, are in traditional
Chinese style and must rank in magnificence with anything in the world.
There are special hostels and transit hotels, apart from some of the hotels existing before 1949, some of which have been added
to and modernised.
RESTAURANTS
The chief hotels have two or more dining halls - one in which European meals are served.
The hotel food is equivalent to Western hotels of similar standard. The selection of Chinese dishes available runs into a smallsized book and has all the exotic foods known to the West only in fiction.
Peking has countless restaurants and eating houses, apart from the thousands of street stalls that cater for workers and
peasants. Some of the restaurants are famous: the centuries-old Peking Duck; the Instant Boiled Mutton Restaurant in Tung An
market, with its paper-thin slices of mutton (three kinds, lean, medium and fat) which the diner selects and boils in the stove and
boiler with which each table is equipped.
The Peking Duck as a gastronomic delicacy has been developed over a long period. The ducklings are raised normally until they
are 45 days old. They then are fed to their full - an accomplishment with ducks! - for another 45 days. In this period they put on
three or four pounds more weight than did their less pampered brothers and sisters.
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Only the old Peking resident knows the many other restaurants whose excellent cooking is hidden behind some unattractive
shop front. And in these the prices are amazingly low.
AMUSEMENTS
Peking Council has added thirteen theatres and six new cinemas to the sixteen theatres and ten cinemas of pre-Liberation, and
has rebuilt three theatres. Some of the new theatres are luxurious buildings with large foyers and side rooms. Here, hundreds of
guests can be regaled with light food and drinks between performances or during important commemorations. The latter are
usually followed with films relating to the occasion documentary of the author or artist or political figure; or film or stage play
based on his work.
The new Capital Theatre seats 1385 and the stage capacity is 400 performers.
The best performances (operatic, dramatic, ballet, orchestral, virtuosi, ensembles) are usually staged in the best of the modern
theatres. Peking and other regional operas played by the second and third-class troupes, are presented at cheaper prices in the
older theatres. But because they are No. 2 or 3, they should not be missed. The chief difficulty in Peking so far as theatres are
concerned is obtaining tickets, for the demand for the best performances is always in excess of the supply.
Other entertainments include Chinese acrobats (accepted as being the best in the world), puppet shows, folk artists.
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There is a steady stream of the world's great ballets, orchestras, artists, plays, dancers and ensembles.
Cinemas are crowded. In addition to Chinese films are the best of the films of most foreign countries - English, Soviet, French,
Polish, Yugoslav, Indian, Japanese, German, Czechoslovak.
For the theatre lover this hint is given: Make persistent inquiry, suggesting gently that a perusal of the daily papers might disclose
some performance of wide interest.
SHOPPING
If shopping means the conventional wares sold by stores all over the world, then Peking has centres great and small. And the
stores in the lesser streets and hutungs (lanes) of the outer city are as well stocked - often, in special things, better stocked than those in the broad avenues.
The Wang Fu Ching is one of the busiest centres, but one comes unexpectedly on big department stores and co-operatives in
the outer city and the other shopping areas.
In the Wang Fu Ching is the largest state store, the Arts and Crafts Shop (not to be missed for any reason!) the International
Bookshop (the books and papers of many countries) and the Tung An Bazaar.
The entrances to the Tung An are openings that lead into acres of arcades with scores of shops and stalls handling goods of
every conceivable kind. Within its area is a theatre and famous restaurants and food shops,
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and rows of stalls and shops dealing with antiques and second-hand books.
The entrance to the People's Market, one block away from the Tung An, is up a narrow street. Here again are new goods, but
second-hand goods also. And rows and rows of antique stalls to fascinate the visitor - antiques of age and beauty.
Beyond the Ho-ping Men, in the Southern City, is the Street of Antiques, the Liu Li Chang. Here is all that is ancient, fascinating
and beautiful. Origin and price are marked and there is no haggling. The antique dealers will tell you whether you can take your
purchase out of the country. Only those under eighty years old can be taken out without a permit.
Nearby is the Jung Pao Chai (Studio of Glorious Treasure) where Chinese paintings, ancient and modern, are reproduced.
In the narrow lanes off Chien Men street is Tung Jen Tang, a centuries-old Chinese traditional medicine shop known to Chinese
throughout the world. Those recipes which seem so strange to Westerners, recipes which go back hundreds of years - some are
reputed to go back thousands - which include such things as scorpions, sea-horses, elk-horn, among other unusual ingredients,
are there to be seen. And there is Silk Street where old embroideries of unbelievable richness can be bought.
HANDICRAFTS
Chinese handicrafts and art have existed since the beginning of civilisation. Peking has for long been one
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of the chief centres. Here have been the masters of carving in jade, ivory, stone, wood; lacquer-ware, carved lacquer, cloisonne,
silk embroidery (recall the costumes in the Peking Opera!).
These arts were dying because of lack of support and cheap substitutes over the forty years of disturbance, war and occupation.
The loss to the world and China would have been irreplaceable. The craftsmen had drifted into other work. Most of them had
died.
The New Government helped the craftsmen themselves to gather the workers together in co-operatives. At the start only 1,680
were found. Within five years they had gathered more than 13,000 members, old, new and apprentices. The result has been a
revival in all these old arts.
The artist-craftsmen work out their own designs and they can work on what they feel is their metier - figures, birds, flowers,
animals, etc.
One work, the carving of a panorama of Peihai Park on a 6 1/2 foot ivory tusk occupied a master craftsman and six assistants for
fifteen months. It has been exhibited in the outside world.
It is the Peihai of today, the trees, the covered corridor, the building, the people - 1,298 figures! - some so small that they need to
be picked out with a magnifying glass.
The intricate processes of cloisonne work are today being carried out in objects and designs of a quality equal to the best of its
500-year-old tradition.
In embroidery the same story can be told.
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A morning should be spent seeing these men and women artists at work.
PLACES OF WORSHIP
There is no lack of places of worship in Peking temples, lamaseries, mosques and churches.
The Buddhist Temple of Broad Charity is the centre of Buddhism in Peking. The original temple was built in the twelfth century
but has been rebuilt several times in the intervening ages. It has been repaired and repainted since Liberation.
Its library has more than one hundred thousand volumes of Buddhist works and relics.
Its extensive court-yards have an appropriate air of quiet meditation.
The better known Buddhist Temple of Harmony and Peace was originally the residence of Yung Ho-kung, after whom it is
named. Yung became emperor in 1723. Its Imperial origin accounts for the palatial buildings and the yellow glazed tiles. That is
the exterior. The interior bears the Tibetan imprint.
The great, tree-shaded court-yard into which one enters leads to three lesser court-yards with five principal halls. One, the Hall of
the Prayer Wheel, has side buildings and five small pavilions, each with a small pagoda rising from the roof.
In the third hall is a giant figure of a Buddha carved from a single sandalwood trunk. It is 55 feet high. There are shrines with
10,000 Buddhas in the hall - and this has given it its name.
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The halls had fallen into disrepair, but the greater part has been repaired and redecorated. This two-century old lamasery, with
its Mongol and Tibetan lamas, is well worth a visit.
Other pavilions are the Pavilion of Eternal Health and the Pavilion of Lasting Tranquillity.
A Buddhist nunnery, the Temple of General Teaching is a new building, with lesser halls built in 1953. It is on the site of a
sixteenth-century building.
Peking's largest and oldest mosque is on Ox Street (Niu Chieh). It dates back to the eleventh century. The faithful are called to
prayer from one of two towers in the grounds.
In the south-west area of the outer city near the mosque are many Moslems (mostly Huis, a national minority) and the
Government has built them a special school and hospital.
To those interested there are other mosques, the best known being that in the Tung Sze district.
The Roman Catholics have their North Cathedral and a score of others. The Anglicans have the Cathedral of Our Saviour, over
near Hsuan Wu Men, and other churches. The Congregationalists have a church at Lantern Market and the Methodists the
Asbury Church not far from Hatamen (Chung Wen Men).
EXHIBITIONS
Peking, like all great capitals, is a city of displays. The most important are arranged at the Soviet Exhibition Centre -an extensive
new building (north-west
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just outside the wall) with an imposing front and a basin in which fountains play, and its delicate spire piercing the sky. It has
numerous halls available for exhibits of any size. An open air theatre accommodates 3,000, a cinema seats 800, and a
restaurant serves 400.
Elsewhere are many halls for exhibitions of smaller size, including the halls in the Forbidden City. The museums in the latter
should be put aside for the rainy days when outside sight-seeing is impossible.
Each year sees numerous foreign art displays, as well as national exhibitions of all kinds.
LEGATION QUARTER
The area from the central gate (Chien Men) east of the wall to the next gate (Chung Wen Men) usually known as Hatamen, and
north to Changan Avenue, the big east-west boulevard - was the Legation Quarter. This was the part of Peking which was
occupied by the Powers after the Boxer Rising. The visible buildings in the Legation area are European of a diversity of
architecture, to which the term "uninteresting" is the grossest flattery. Today it is still the quarter of the Legations and some of the
extensive walled areas are again occupied by the same powers. The embassies of some of the smaller countries are in other
parts of the city.
NATIONAL LIBRARY
The National Library is a group of buildings set in beautiful surroundings on the banks of Peihai. It has
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almost four million volumes in 65 languages, including 13 Chinese minority languages, and scores of thousands of valuable
ancient manuscripts.
It receives and gives all the services of the great libraries of the world.
SPORT
New China is catching up in sport. Where there is space to set up two goal structures, whether jammed between a group of
buildings or beside a village threshing field, a basketball contest will be seen in action. Near the centre of the city is a large area the old Legation polo field - half of which is now flower beds and tree-lined paths; the other half a bare playing field. At any hour
of the day a score of good-humoured games may be in progress. One is amazed whenever the contestants identify their
footballs or basketballs.
In 1955 a large gymnasium was erected in the outer city. It has three buildings. The chief hall has seating capacity for 6,000
spectators. The swimming pool, 164 by 65 feet, is air- and water-conditioned and there is seating accommodation for 2,000
spectators. A parachute tower is nearby.
HOSPITALS
To hospitals existing at the time of Liberation have been added many new and enlarged ones in all the big cities and new
sanatoria in the beauty spots -mountain and seaside - of the country.
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These latter are large, new, modern buildings.
Of the new hospitals the Soviet Red Cross Hospital in Peking is one of the largest. It has been handed over to the Chinese.
The Sanatorium for Asian Students in its pleasant grounds in the capital's environs is a lesson in international friendship. It is well
worth a visit.
FLOWERS
Peking florists are never short of flowers. Though the northern climate in winter is "arctic", the sub-tropical south is still a source
of blooms.
Peking itself is a green city; its people a plant- and flower-loving people. Few houses lack plants or flowers inside or outside.
Hotels and public buildings have their inside and outside display of flowers, in plots; in pots. They are changed as the seasons
change. With winter's approach the less hardy trees and plants are given tightly-wrapped overcoats of straw, and the plants for
indoors come from the hot-houses.
In their flowering period, peonies (China's national flower), lilac, chrysanthemums (two thousand different varieties in one
exhibition, one thousand in another!) and the flame-red cannas, zinnias, cockscombs and a dozen others are everywhere, in
park, in street square.
SCHOOL OF NATIONAL MINORITIES
In the recent past many, if not all of the national minorities have been subject to special oppression and
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worse. One estimate of a massacre of the Miaos by Chiang Kai-shek places it at one million.
The new Goverment's first declaration was that all the people of China were free and equal. Equality is provided in the
Constitution. Written languages are being devised for the national minorities which lacked them, and they are being aided in
every way to preserve their languages, their customs, their culture and to run the affairs of their own autonomous areas.
A visit to the National School of Minorities should be made. (It has also an exhibit of minority arts and costumes.) There the
people from the minorities are fitting themselves for the tasks that confront their areas; tasks even more basic than confront the
nation of which they at last form a respected part.
CULTURE AND EDUCATION
Peking is the cultural centre of the Republic. Here are old universities and the new; the science, law, historical, philosophical,
literary, dramatic and publishing centres. And a "University City" already imposing and extending is growing up on the city's
outskirts.
Each of the great cities and some of the lesser have their own universities, cultural bodies and activities.
INDUSTRIAL PEKING
Until 1949, Peking had little industry; what it had was, in the main, small scale and inefficient.
Today it is already on the road to becoming one of
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the country's large industrial cities. Old works have been reconditioned and expanded, and new large-scale industries
established. New cotton mills with 50,000, 80,000 and 100,000 spindles; machine tool works, agricultural machinery works,
structural steel; additions to and modernisation of steel works, woollen mills and a score of lesser undertakings - all these are
resulting in a Peking that spreads wide into the contiguous areas; plus a new skyline in which lofty central heating smokestacks
for the endless groups of residential apartments are partners to those which rise from the mills and works themselves.
SUMMER PALACE*
The world knows the famous Summer Palace which lies at the foot of the Western Hills, less than eight miles from the City.
Waters from the jade Fountains form a lake at the foot of the Hill of Longevity. The first temple was built
------------* Lord Elgin gave the order to burn the Summer Palace. General Sir Hope Grant issued the General Order, and Gordon (later General) saw that
the instruction was carried out.
' . . that night he (Sir Hope Grant) very kindly issued a general order that half the officers of every regiment might go and loot (the Summer Palace).
They had to return at noon so that the other half might go." - Capt. J. F. Harris, "China Jim", 1912.
" We . . . went out and after pillaging it, burned the whole Palace, destroying in a Vandal-like manner most valuable property, which could not be
replaced for four millions . . . You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the Palace we burnt. It makes one's heart sore to burn
them; in fact, these palaces were so large, and we were so pressed for time that we could not plunder them carefully." - Captain (later General)
Gordon, quoted in A. E. Hake's " Gordon in China and Sudan", 1896.
THE PEOPLE . . .Is the commune good or bad? This seems to be matter of concern in some places – bu here are a few folks who
apparently aren’t troubled about the matter. They are members of the Yuyuantan People’s Commune in the suburbs of Peking at a local
festival. This photograph articulates quite plainly their feeling, from youngsters to greybeards.
Bearers of new ideas … Time out for repairs. These youthful pioneers are some of the thousands who are turning border areas into
farmlands.
Li Wen-cheng, 71-year-old farmer celebrates a farm commune opening in Kirin Province.
Theirs is the future! – time was when a child’s only value to her sorrowing parents was the price she commanded on an overcrowded
market. Time was when a baby was killed at birth to spare it starvation later – such was the fate of babies in Shansi Province. Time was
when toddlers slaved in the coal pits. And this time that was did not end until 1949 . . .
In New China, the glowing faces of the youngsters in a typical crèche in that very Shansi Province
… And the mischievous joy of playmates say more for the changes made than do reams of print and mountains of statistics.
Modern medicine --- a mobile inculation team doctor at work. His team is one sent by the People’s Hospital to outlying villages in Sinkiang
Province. This is part of the service that has been ensuring good health and wiping out epidemics.
The traditional – the lover or collector of old Chinese art objects will find delight in the curio shops in the People’s Market in Peking. Warning
to tourists: Nothing older than 80 years may be taken out of the country without special permit.
Leisure moment – Hsiang River boatmen exchange tales of the day’s travel. The boatman is a man of consequence; whether he sails a junk
– the vessel which has served China for some thousand years – or whether he mans one of the spanking new river boats, he is solving his
country’s shipping needs.
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and the area of the lake first expanded in the twelfth century. Through the subsequent centuries additional changes were made.
Lake Kunming was dug 200 years ago to provide water for Peking. Today Peking's lakes still depend on Kunming for water. In
the eighteenth century Chien Lung had the gardens made and palaces built.
In 1860 when the English forces invaded Peking a great many of the buildings were burnt down or seriously damaged.
In 1888 the Empress Dowager appropriated 800 million taels of silver which had been voted for naval expenditure; the garden
became the Summer Palace. Again it was damaged and looted by the forces of the Eight Powers after the Boxer Revolt of 1900.
Most of the damage and destruction was made good by the present Government, though evidence of the damage can still be
seen among the trees.
Of its area of eight hundred acres more than four-fifths is water.
More than a hundred structures - pagodas, pavilions, towers, halls, bridges - are visible or hidden in the greenery on the hills and
flats or around the lake.
The three groups of buildings nearest the entrance are the Hall of Delight in Longevity, Hall of Virtuous Harmony, the theatre and
stage and the Hall of Benevolence and Longevity.
The bronzes are exquisite examples of the bronze founder's art.
The Hall of Virtuous Harmony is now a rest home. The others are used for exhibitions.
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A covered promenade, a half-mile-long corridor in traditional rich Chinese colouring, winds along the lake front.
Before proceeding to the southern end first walk up the stone stairways to the Sea of Wisdom Temple on the summit.
The view alone repays the effort. Then follow the stream to the Garden of Harmonious Interest and the neighbouring riot of
flowers. Then down to the lakeside and once again enter the covered, multi-coloured corridor that ends in the Marble Boat.
The lake is pleasant for boating with its islands and its six bridges - a copy of the Su Embankment of the beautiful West Lake at
Hangchow. The seventeen-arch Long Bridge of white marble joins the east bank with the isle of the Temple of Nagarajah.
The north-west part of the lake is a swimming pool.
On the run out to the Summer Palace can be seen the tall pagoda on jade Fountain Hill.
MING TOMBS
Probably next to the Bund, Shanghai's water-front street of tall skyscrapers in the International Settlement, the picture of China
best known throughout the world is the avenue leading to the Ming Tombs. The approach of large-scale statues of statesmen
and warriors of the period and of animals actual and mythical, all in pairs, have figured at some time or other in almost every
pictorial paper in the world.
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There were fourteen Ming Emperors. Thirteen are buried in an irregular semi-circle at the foot of the Heavenly Age Hills near
Peking. The greatest tomb is that of the second emperor Yung Lo. The approach to his tomb is impressive. It begins at the
magnificent pailou - a lofty, carved archway - more than a mile from the actual burial mound. Then along the road to the Great
Red Gate, the Tablet House with the largest carved stone tortoise in China, to the triumphal way with its eighteen pairs of
statues, still almost as they were more than five hundred years ago; onward to the Triple Dragon and Phoenix Gate, then the
sacrificial hall. The pillars of the hall are bare columns of wood each one representing the trunk of what must have been a
magnificent tree that rose erect and branchless for fifty feet.
One tires of the word "enormous" as one does in descriptions of the ruins and churches of Rome but it is the word or its synonym
that so often fits. The tree-trunks probably came from Burma. Picture the problems of transportation five hundred years ago!
The court-yards between the buildings are large, shady squares with trees of various greens, and flowers in long garden plots,
magnificent flowers in season.
Behind, the mound where the Emperor's body lies perpetuates the tradition of mound burial which goes back into legend.
There is much to do these days recovering or safeguarding archaeological discoveries that are shortly to disappear for ever
under the water on the new reservoirs on all the main rivers.
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So the tomb of Yung Lo remains sealed. One day it will be unsealed and its contribution to history will be assessed by scholars.
Even if one has a limited time, a visit should be made to the most grandiose and interesting monument to the dead in the world.
OTHER CITIES
The tourist and guest will have guides to give them detailed information. The wishes of the visitor will be sought. Thus, those
interested in specific subjects - universities, hospitals, industries, farms - will see these. In the main, they will find them akin to
those elsewhere in the world since the agricultural co-operatives have ended the multitude of tiny strips in all but a few remote
spots. Of course, in the case of the farms, the variation will be greater.
The villages, the co-operative farms, the monuments, the architecture, the handicrafts - all vary from province to province.
Museums and exhibitions are the same the world over, yet here will be found differences from those of the Western world - to be
expected with a different social form and a different social approach, and a different traditional art.
To those interested in Chinese history, its culture, its sculpture, its paintings, etc., the requests will be for those things and the
places which hold them. And of these China offers a wealth beyond description. The interpreters and guides will be helpful and
the directors will be eager to explain.
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Every visitor should see the best of what China offers in these cultural aspects, for they can be seen in no other place in the
world in such great wealth and variety.
So many of the places of historical interest, of wall and cave paintings and sculpture are off the beaten track. These are beyond
the reach of the ordinary tourist with his limited time, although the archaeologist, the historian, the anthropologist, research
student - if he will suffer the inconvenience of accommodation and travel - is given every facility.
However, each city offers obvious points of interest to the tourist which should not be missed. These are mentioned in the brief
accounts of the cities which, in this large country, are most likely to be in an itinerary possible to cover in the average tourist's
period of stay.
HANGCHOW
When people speak of Hangchow they frequently mean the West Lake - for so often the visitor sees the thriving city with its
population of 600,000 only in the glimpse he has from the car that takes him to the famous beauty spot on the city outskirts.
Indeed, many depart under the belief that the West Lake is the city proper and that the bustling business centres where silks and
fans, baskets and hats, sandals and other goods are sold, are the outskirts.
Hangchow itself was given its name in the sixth century during the Sui Dynasty. Twice it was a capital once in the ninth century
and again in the twelfth century at the time of the Southern Sung Dynasty.
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The feudal rulers built many magnificent palaces and temples on the shores of West Lake, but they were destroyed in the
various wars and revolts. During the Mongol Dynasty (1279-1368) the lake degenerated into a swamp. Restored in the early
years of the Ming Dynasty it later fell into neglect. The early Manchu rulers restored the area, Chien Lung (1736-1795), in
between suppressing local peasant revolts, had the lake dredged and buildings constructed.
During the period of Japanese occupation it was again neglected.
To the natural beauty that comes from its situation it lies in a rough circle of hills - are the embellishments that have been added
during the centuries - the causeways, the bridges, the islands, the pavilions. It is easy to understand why it has been the subject
of paintings by the great artists of the dynasties and has been immortalised by China's poets.
Today, due to restoration and improvements made by the Government, West Lake is probably more beautiful than ever in its
history. Most guests are accommodated in the newly-built hotel splendidly situated on the lake shore. Before it stretches the lake
waters, placid and peaceful. Boats move quietly from shore to island and brilliant dragon flies alight on the slow-moving craft.
Islands, rockeries, bridges, pavilions, lawns and trees and flowers, masses of lotus plants, their stately flowers splashes of white
and pink against broad, dark leaves, fish swirling for scattered crumbs - such is the picture.
In the section of the lake known as the Lake of Fifpage 135
teen Moons, three bronze pagodas rise from the water, each one pierced with circular openings in which lanterns are placed at
the Moon Festival. These reflect the moon in the lake so that the boats glide under the moonlight over water in which it seems
that fifteen small moons are floating.
See West Lake from its calm waters. Wander leisurely across its islets, and then go around its nine miles of shore by car.
Hangchow has many attractions. It was a centre of many famous temples and pagodas as far back as the tenth century. The
Caves of Buddhas belong to that period. Cave after cave - cool retreat in the burning summer days - with Buddhas carved into
the walls Buddhas large, Buddhas small. Buddhas carved on the hillside rock faces.
However, little else of those centuries remains.
The Monastery of Souls' Retreat has been over the centuries destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed, rebuilt. And it is said that, as it
stands, it is today an exact copy of what it was 1600 years ago.
A place of such beauty was the natural selection for rest homes and sanatoria, and these are being added to as one organisation
after another feels that here is the best place for members to gather contentment and health.
Here in Hangchow is the tomb of Yueh Fei, hero and martyr of the twelfth century.
And one of China's pre-revolutionary heroines, Chiu Chin, has her memorial here. She was one of the earliest to seek the
substitution of a democratic republic
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in place of the extravagant, corrupt, feudal-minded Manchu Court. She was tortured, then executed, in 1907.
Other points of interest to the time-restricted visitor are the tea-plantations - Hangchow area is famous for its teas -the silk
weaving - the fame of Hangchow's brocades and woven silk pictures is world-wide - for its fans and silk umbrellas.
No one who comes to China fails to see West Lake. And no one who sees West Lake ever forgets it.
NANKING
More than two thousand years ago, Emperor Chin is said to have established a city on the site of present day Nanking. The next
report concerns the building of a new city there, or nearby, by one of the lesser kings after the fall of the Han Dynasty. More
certainty may be attached to the Eastern Tsin which founded its capital on that site in 317 A.D.
Like most Chinese cities of the distant centuries, the predecessors of Nanking rose and fell; were destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed,
rebuilt. History records its rebuilding in 907 and its destruction by the Mongols in 1280. It lay in ruins for almost a century. Then
the Mings made it their capital, but, after 35 years, military considerations determined the shift to Peking.
Nanking was the capital of the Taiping revolutionary Government. It was the First Republic capital, the Southern capital (the
War-Lords ruled the North from Peking) until the Japanese occupied the country. But
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with the defeat of the Japanese in 1945 Nanking was by-passed for Peking.
Nanking is a mixture of the old and the new; of ancient and revolutionary history and modern city planning.
Sun Yat-sen's memorial, with its imposing approach and memorial building, is China's tribute to its much revered revolutionary
democrat. Its setting has been well chosen; its architectural treatment excellent.
SHANGHAI
To the visitor Shanghai offers - Shanghai.
The Bund, the river, the sampans. The International Settlement - international no longer - reminder of the greatest trading city of
the East, with its skyscrapers, its imposing modern buildings with Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns of granite and their
architecture reminiscent of London's Threadneedle Street and of the financial districts of the capitals of the Western world.
Reminder of other items, to nations, to individuals. The tin-hare racing track, now a cultural centre; the racecourse, today a place
of pleasure, recreation, of culture, but minus races; other disease spots, social, human, where previously were vice, disease,
filth, poverty, crime; where today youth practises folk dances and studies; where one can walk safely at midnight; where the
prostitutes no longer walk; where unspeakable filth has given way to broad avenues, tree- and shrub-lined.
A huge city isn't changed fully with a magician's
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wand, and yet it needs no detailed exploration to see the relatively great changes. Shanghai, the old city of sin, sorrow and
sweat has wiped out the first two; there is little likelihood that it will ever lose the third in its simmering, sultry summers.
The "old hands" regret the passing of "sin" Shanghai vied with Peking and Tokio as having the highest percentage of prostitution
in the world, and it must have had the highest venereal disease rate.
The criminal statistics of this crime-soaked city were never complete because the old authorities never bothered to keep
accurate statistics. The administration was corrupt. It was gangster-ridden. No American city was worse. It is to be doubted if any
was its equal in political corruption, gangsterism and crime, and certainly none in vice, poverty and disease. Not a single robbery
case has been reported in the preceding ten months stated the Hsinhua News (New China News Agency) in its April 3 1957
commentary on Shanghai, a city of seven millions, only seven years removed from the old gangsterism.
Today all but the scars are gone. The scars are the old, Chinese section of the city, in the past congested, filthy, unspeakably
poverty-stricken and the sickness and disease that sprang from it; unsewered, so much without water and light. Today only the
first remains and the tens of thousands of modern blocks are slowly replacing the worst of the old. It will be a long time before
the last of the scars disappears.
Shanghai is still the greatest industrial city; the centre of light industry, but with much heavy industry added
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in the past few years. It is still the most modern shopping centre of China.
Its water-front, like that of Canton, is an unceasing movement of craft of all kinds, from replicas of those to be seen in the stone
carvings of two thousand years ago to modern ocean liners of a score of different countries. And its streets are never silent.
CANTON
Here the city holds the tourist. The throbbing life of the Pearl River with its diversity of watercraft, its thousands of sampans of all
shapes and sizes, its amazing river craft that look like floating several-storeyed flat buildings which ply to the limits of the
tributaries that join to make the Pearl; the riverfolk and the life that goes on on the tiny boats that house a family.
One does not leave without seeing the river and its people at close quarters. The community still bears the imprint of the past,
even though the stigma of "untouchable" has gone from the river-dwellers. With equality with their shore brothers and sisters the
picture is already changing. Within a generation it is likely that the sampan river life will be only a memory.
The life of the city itself is equally fascinating. The European influence of a century is evident in its buildings, yet Canton is
essentially Chinese.
The two Memorial Parks are beautiful. The largest zoo in the world is under way and the largest botanical garden is in
preparation.
More than any other Chinese city Canton offers a
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variety of food unparalleled in the world (ask the Chinese and the gourmets!), and the shops offer fruit and vegetables and field
and forest products of every known - and to the Westerner, unknown - variety.
Canton's native wares in bamboo, cane, grass, reed and clay are shopping temptations that are irresistible. It is as well to buy as
you see them, for you may see them in no other place in China.
Cantonese opera is vigorous and less formal than Peking opera. You will enjoy it.
WUHAN
Wuhan is the triple city of Wuchang, Hanyang and Hankow. Its name is inseparable from Chinese history. The democratic
revolutionary movement commenced with the revolt of the garrison in 1911.
That was the past. Today its fame rests on the amazing victory over the all-time record flood of the Yangtze in 1954 when the
triple city was threatened. The dykes had to be built up, inch by inch, foot by foot above the highest levels ever known. More than
a quarter of a million men and women and boys and girls fought for ninety days and ninety nights. They won.
It rests, too, so far as China is concerned, on the victory of New China's bridge builders who have spanned the giant river -something which experts of Old China, and some from the West said could not be done.
Wuhan is becoming one of the giant centres of heavy industry. It is China's great inland port. Visitors get their first glimpse of the
river from the train and note
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with unfailing astonishment the large ocean liners six hundred miles from the coast.
Wuhan offers beauty, too --- the river scenery and East Lake, an area of clear water that has a natural beauty which, when
present plans are completed will make it a competitor of West Lake at Hangchow.
SHENYANG
Despite its modernity Shenyang has a history. Once a Manchu city, there are reminders of its old glories in the ancient palace
with a throne room.
The tomb of one of the Manchu Emperors, although not comparable with the great tomb of the Ming Emperor at Peking, is
nevertheless a magnificent memorial. It is situated in a beautiful park and provides a fitting setting for the splendour of the tomb.
Here the carving is in stone, where in Peking it is in white marble.
Shenyang is the centre of some of the great industrial projects, and these, pride of the city and its people, are worth inspection
as showing how New China's industrialisation is making pace.
Its universities and colleges reflect the earnestness of the students and the development of education along utilitarian lines,
practice being applied to theory in the field of study no less than in the field of politics.
CHANGCHUN
Although Shenyang (Mukden) was the capital of the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo which the Japanese set
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up after their occupation, they made Changchun their centre.
Changchun is a magnificent modern city, with well-planned wide streets and boulevards, free from disfiguring street poles, for all
lines and cables are laid underground. The Japanese even built brick dwellings, albeit poor ones, for the Chinese workers.
As elsewhere there is the inevitable contrast of the modern section and more particularly of the modern factories and modern
housing blocks set up since Liberation, with the remnants of the old Chinese dwellings, but the villages which are being
enveloped in the city's rapid expansion, will soon have disappeared.
Chief industry of the city is the No. 1 Motor Car Works - in itself a city with its own housing, its crèches, kindergartens, schools,
shopping centres, its sports, recreation and cultural activities.
HARBIN
Harbin was a centre for Russian administration of the Manchurian railway. It bears the Russian imprint in its lay-out, its
architecture, its churches. While most of the Russians who fled in 1917 have returned there are still a few thousand in the city,
and it is not unusual to see figures in the streets that one would see in any Russian village, even to the boots and the scarves.
Harbin is a well-laid-out city. It offers much to the interested: schools, universities, the Museum of Martyrs of the Resistance and
the beauty of the Sungari River on which, if time allows, a trip should be made.
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Sections of the old Chinese quarter will repay a visit. Here is a relic of the old, with its storytellers, its fortune tellers, its letter
writers, but minus the crime, the violence, the vice and the poverty.
THE CHINESE FAMILY
AND THE CHINESE HOME
Although in rural areas the Chinese family remains much as it has been for centuries, under the stress and necessities of
modern conditions, in the cities it is changing.
One is likely to be thrown into confusion by hearing that there are thirty-five in the So-And-So family.
In China, the "family" consists of the husband, wife, children, mother, father, grandmother and grandfather, and, if living, the
great-grandmother and the greatgrandfather.
In families undisturbed by events of 1949 and onwards, it consists also of all the sons' wives and their children, and often of
more distant relations.
Up to Liberation it would also include the husband's concubines, the sons' concubines and their children. Like everything else in
China, conditions are changing so rapidly, the remnants of the old are vanishing daily.
It is necessary to understand the Chinese family in order to understand the Chinese home.
The higher the rank of the individual, or the greater his wealth, the greater the residence.
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The description of the Buddhist Temple (Peking) gives a description of a noble's residence in Peking -- in this case a Prince of
the Royal Family later to become Emperor. But the residences of the war-lords, although not on palace level, were on a
magnificent scale. They were duplicated in the case of the very wealthy in every big city throughout the Empire, and their
magnificence lessened only in proportion to the lessened degree of the individual's wealth.
Chinese homes for the wealthy built early this century in no way vary from those built when the Imperial Palaces in the Forbidden
City were built six centuries ago. One describes one, one describes all.
The outside conveyed nothing of what was within. A high grey wall, like ten thousand other high grey walls, anonymous,
forbidding, secretive.
The home might even be up some narrow alley -- the width necessary for a rickshaw or pedicab to pass. (The motor car came
later.)
The entrance alone would be different from the thousands of homes of lesser officials and less affluent persons - it would be
wider. Outside would be two stone lions. (The lesser homes have these, also.) The gate opened. One stepped over a wooden sill
to be confronted by a brick wall - the spirit screen. Evil spirits can fly only in a straight line, so the screen stops them from
entering the house. Inside is a gatekeeper. In other less tranquil days, the guard or guards. And their quarters.
One entered the court-yard. Built against the outer wall and the side wall of the entrance court was a
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series of rooms, the servants' quarters. There were scores of servants in the home of any great family or high personage,
dozens in the lesser; and so downwards.
In the old days, the women of the family rarely ventured as far as the outer court.
One enters the next court-yard through the moon gate in the dividing wall, again stepping over a sill. On each side more rooms.
And so on, court after court, three, four, perhaps more. Between some of the courts, instead of a plain wall would be a big
reception room, drawing rooms.
The northern wing would be for the father and his wife and children. The east and west rooms in the other courts for the married
sons and their families.
The windows and doors face the courts. All the buildings are one-storeyed. The side rooms are low. Only the central rooms have
any height.
All the courts have trees and flowers, ponds and rockeries.
The ordinary peasant home today is generally one court or compound minus all the trimmings of the wealthy houses. Within the
walls is contained everything. The latter tends to alter, as co-operatives take over livestock and make the necessity of stores no
longer a vital matter for the individual. But, of course, in the countryside (80 per cent of the people) the process is slower.
In the cities, the workers, petty tradesmen, hawkers, pedlars, pedicab-men live in courts or "compounds", or many may occupy a
once luxurious, multi-court
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property. In pre-Liberation days many lived in shacks and primitive shelters - matting sheds in the south -poor protection from
cold, wind, snow or rain. Hundreds of thousands of these have already disappeared, thousands more disappear with each
passing day as the modern blocks go up.
The youth, as they leave school or university, go to posts in the co-operatives or on to the farms or into industry, where, in the
case of the latter, they live in the hostels or flats belonging to the enterprise. Thus the old family is breaking up. It belonged to the
feudal concept of the family. The powerful economic factor is that one can no longer get servants at tiny wages and, even for the
wealthy, big homes become a burden unless occupied.
MISCELLANY
In the following pages are to be found a few of the facts, figures and footnotes which the visitor to China may find helpful, and
which the reader may find interesting. They cover a wide range of subject and yet remain, I hope, informative.
EMBASSIES
Nations which have established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China and which have embassies in Peking
are listed in alphabetical order on the following page:
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Afghanistan
Albania
Bulgaria
Burma
Ceylon
Czechoslovakia
Denmark
Finland
German Democratic Republic
Hungary
India
Indonesia
Korean Democratic People's Republic
Mongolia
Nepal
Norway
Pakistan
Poland
Roumania
Soviet Union
Sweden
Switzerland
United Arab Republic
Vietnamese Democratic Republic
Yemen
Yugoslavia
The United Kingdom announced its recognition in January, 1950, and an exchange of Chargé d'Affaires took place in June,
1954.
Holland also has a Chargé d'Affaires.
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Israel announced its recognition in 1950 but has not yet established an embassy.
CHINESE WEIGHTS AND MEASURES
The following are exact or close computations:
Foot
Li
One-third of a metre; one and one tenth of an English foot.
Half a kilometre, less than two-thirds of an English mile.
Mou
Sheng
Catty or Chin
Picul or Tan
A shade more than six to the acre.
Equals a litre; just over four and a half make an English gallon.
Half kilogramme or one and one-tenth pound.
Approximately 110 lb. Twenty and one third make one ton.
NATIONAL HOLIDAYS
China's main national fete is the Spring Festival, formerly and still locally known as the Chinese New Year. It is a three-day
holiday and runs from the first to the third day of the first moon of the lunar calendar and usually falls in February.
Most important holiday is National Day, a two-day national holiday in celebration of the founding of the People's Republic on
October 1, 1949. National Day is the day of the great procession past the Tien An Men, reviewed by Mao Tse-tung and the
leaders of the Government and visiting celebrities. The spectacle
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probably equals anything in the world. On National Day are displayed the air, sea and land forces, and their equipment. The
evening is given over to fireworks.
May Day is Labour Day and a one-day holiday. By working on the preceding Sunday some of the cities make May 2 also a
holiday. May Day, too, is a spectacle, with hundreds of thousands of paraders youth, minorities, artists, cultural, athletes,
dancers, acrobats. Again the evening is given over to fireworks.
New Year's Day (January 1) is a national holiday.
There are holidays observed by the respective sections of the populace: Women's Day, March 8; Youth Day, May 4; Children's
Day, June 1; Army Day, August 1. Religious and customary holidays for national minority people are fixed by local authorities.
PUBLIC BODIES
Called "People's Organisations" (what the West would term "Public Bodies") are such organisations as the China Welfare
Institute, founded in 1938 by Soong Ching-ling (widow of Sun Yat-sen); the Red Cross Society of China; the Friendship Societies
- the Sino-Soviet Friendship, Sino-Indian, -Burmese, -Indonesian, -Pakistan, -Nepal, -Egyptian; the religious bodies Buddhist,
Islamic, Protestant, Catholic; Committee in Defence of Children; Peace Committee; Journalists' Association; Athletic Federation;
numerous scientific, literary, art, music, theatrical, women's, youth, students and commercial bodies; Trade Unions; the Chinese
People's Association for Cultural Relations with
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Foreign Countries which sponsors the exchange of cultural delegations and visits of scientists, artists and writers and the
commemoration of outstanding cultural figures of different epochs and different countries.
DYNASTIES
Hsia
B.C. 2205-1766
Shang
1766-1100
Early Chou
1100- 722
Chun Chou
722- 481
Period of the, Warring States
481- 221
Chin
221- 206
Han
206- 221 A.D.
Three Kingdoms
A.D. 221- 265
Tsin
265- 316
Northern and Southern Empires
316- 589
Sui
589- 618
Tang
618- 907
Five Dynasty Period
907- 960
Sung
960-1127
Kin and Southern Sung
1127-1280
Yuan (Mongol)
1280-1368
Ming
1368-1644
Ching (Manchu)
1644-1911
Republic, War-Lords, Kuomintang
1911-1949
People's Republic
1949
Articles and books on China more frequently refer to dynasties than to centuries. It is also more
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customary in shops - as well as in print - to date an object by the dynasty to which it belongs.
FOOTNOTES
A source of tolerant amusement to the West with its variety of table cutlery are Chinese chopsticks. But it is well to remind
oneself that our forbears used fingers with knives up to the sixteenth century, whereas the Chinese have been using the more
hygienic chopsticks for several thousand years.
The fabulous Chinese dragon was not a malevolent "animal ", but one of beneficence. The dragon and phoenix - the latter later
to be modelled on the pheasant which are seen in conjunction in carved and painted decorations became the dual
representation of Yang (positive male) and Yin (negative female).
To the ancient Chinese jade was a sacred stone. Its beauty was considered to need no decoration.
Lacquer goes back two thousand years; cloisonné a mere five hundred.
As early as the third century B. C. local walls in the North were joined into the first Great Wall. But the walls were changed and
added to in succeeding dynasties. Later, with the lapse of centuries and the extension north of the Empire the wall fell into
deterioration from the elements and human destruction for
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its materials. However, most of the Great Wall still stands, winding snake-like over a thousand mountain ridges from the sea
coast to the distant west. One part of it is a morning's run from the capital.
The burden on the peasants, in general, was unbelievably heavy. It was on their production of grain that the state was carried.
The landlord, to maintain a standard of luxury - very often relative - wrung everything possible out of the poor peasants, holding
what he could, according to his own power and the conditions of the country and the dynasty at the moment. The rest he passed
on to the state, much of it to be wasted in luxury and extravagance by the Court. As if that was not enough, enormous sums
disappeared in corruption. When the state confiscated Chi Shan's wealth, it took 11,000 oz. of gold, 17,000,000 oz. of silver,
many chests of jewels and 427,000 acres of land - a gigantic sum for that period and all, or practically all, obtained corruptly.
Chinese names are the reverse of the West, that is to say the surname comes first, e. g. Mao, Chou, Chu. Surnames are
monosyllable.
Personal names are generally double, e. g. Tse-tung (Mao Tse-tung), En-lai (Chou En-lai). But the single is quite common - Teh
(Chu Teh).
WORK AND PLAY … A new coke oven battery in Wuhan
]
Shattering records - one of the great open hearth furnaces in the Taiyuan Iron and Steel Plant, Shansi Province . . .
Popular pastime - the people of Honan Province join the national effort to raise steel production and gain top victories. Inhabitants of the city
of Chengchow smelt steel with the reverberating furnace method. one of the best in use.
China proudly presents - Hongchi (Red Flag), first of the new Chinese luxury passenger cars. Before 1949, there was no motor vehicle
industry in the country. At the end of 1958, one type of lorry was produced. In 1959, 50 different kinds of motor cars were manufactured. The
Hongchi is a six-seater, air-conditioned, with electrically-controlled doors and windows, a maximum 200 HP and a speed of 120 miles per
hour.
Down on the farm --- rice-growers dry their crops al the Funanhsiang rural district, Junghsien County, Szechuan Province. China gathered a
record harvest of paddy rice last year. It is not only in industrial effort that the Chinese people ar breaking precedent. The proved figures
which show the increase of agricultural production reached the astronomical --- the result of the intensely cultivated experimental plots.
A Chinese favourite -Peking duck is a dish for the gods (ask anyone who has eaten it!) and the raising of ducks has been undertaken on a
grand scale. There are those needed for home consumption and those being exported the world over. Duck and goose farms abound in
Kiangsu section o f the Grand Canal.
Chinese fish is another tasty item in demand a home and abroad. The cuttle fish catch at Chengshan Island.
Now it's our turn - the younger set of the Anfeng People's Commune, Anyang County, Honan Province, take over their elders' cotton harvest
for the best o f possible purposes: fun!
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Even within the time limits imposed on the average tourist (remember China is bigger than Europe, Australia or the United
States) the visitor will get a bewildering variety of impressions - from modern cities to backward villages.
Travel is comfortable, clean and not expensive by Western standards.
First class hotel accommodation is excellent and cheaper than its equivalent in Western capitals. But, in the main, the hotels are
"First Class" to "Luxury".
You will receive friendly service wherever you go from people who do not consider their work menial or their status inferior to
yours.
Tipping is forbidden and you will affront your service boy or girl if you try it. Also it is desirable to speak of "service boys or girls"
rather than waiters or chamber maids.
The word "coolie" has been abolished.
Travel services will arrange your itinerary and make your bookings.
You can travel by train or plane. The former is better - you see more of the country.
Most of the sleeping cars are excellent. Indeed, I struck only one very old Pullman of the type still current on some American
lines. But I also travelled on the best and most modern sleeping car I have ever encountered in a world's travel.
In the cities you can travel by all the usual methods car, taxi (not enough of them and dear), pedicab
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(plenty of them and cheap), tram, bus or trolley bus. No back street is barred to the visitor, and I have never experienced, or
heard of anyone experiencing other than friendly curiosity.
Officials do not always explain the difficulties which impose restrictions and delays on the issue of visas. Despite the new hotels,
and other buildings, accommodation is limited.
The demand for interpreters by all the Government Departments and outside bodies (cultural, artistic, film, political, diplomatic,
union) is hard to meet. These demands run into the thousands.
Despite the thousands of new motor cars, Russian and Polish chiefly, but also English, French, American, Italian, German, and
the thousands of miles of new railways, the hundreds of new passenger waggons, all internal traffic is still overcrowded. So, too,
with plane services.
Nevertheless, once official permission is obtained the tourist can go where he wishes to go, if prepared to put up with the
discomfort and meet the considerable expense.
I. know an English woman tourist who insisted on going to the Great Wall when the authorities regarded the roads as
impassable; a middle-aged sinologist who bounced his way over primitive roads, enduring bad water and poor food to
see the dream of his life, the Tunhuang caves. I know of a crippled writer who had always wanted to see nomad life in
Mongolia, and was taken there.
II.
But groups and individuals who book on arranged
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tours, naturally are restricted to their itinerary in quite the same manner as when they book through Thomas Cook, C.I.T., or any
other tourist agency.
In any case, to cover the principal interesting and beauty spots, from Canton in the South, inland to Wuhan, to Shenyang
(perhaps Harbin) in the North is equivalent to going from Tunisia in North Africa to Sweden with a detour to London, and will
absorb all the time available to the average tourist. The rest must remain for another trip.
TOURIST PROCEDURE
The following are extracts from the brochure of the China International Tourist Service. The information may therefore be
accepted as official.
VISA APPLICATIONS
On the matter of visa application, the following is the correct information: Application for entry visas to China may be submitted
to the nearest or most conveniently located embassy or diplomatic mission of the People's Republic of China. In Canada, the
United States and the countries of Central and South America applications may be submitted to the Chargé d'Affaires, office of
the People's Republic of China in London; in Western Europe the Chinese Embassy, Berne, Switzerland, might be most suitable.
In Asia, Africa and Australia, the embassy in Egypt and India. Tourists from Hong Kong may make direct applications to the
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Foreign Affairs Office of the Kwangtung Provincial People's Council in Canton.
China International Tourist Service does not secure entry visa applications.
Upon obtaining a visa, tourists desiring the services of CITS should notify the head office of these particulars: Name, sex,
occupation, number of members in the tourist party, date and place of entry, length of stay, cities to be visited, and details of
requirements in food, accommodation and transportation.
The CITS is not represented in Hong Kong nor does it have a branch there. For all services necessary from Hong Kong to the
border, tourists are referred to China Travel Service, 6 Queens Road c., 1st floor, Hong Kong.
CUSTOMS AND FOREIGN EXCHANGE
On arriving at the Chinese border, tourists are asked to fill in the "Baggage Declaration" form. A tourist may bring into China such
personal effects and articles as: 1 camera, 1 cine-camera, 1 radio, 1 gramophone, 1 typewriter, 1 accordion, etc. Arms and
ammunition, forbidden wireless apparatus and spare parts, opium, morphia, and other narcotics, lottery tickets, printed matter
and any other propaganda material deemed harmful to the public order and morals of the People's Republic of China may not be
brought into the country.
No limitations are set by the Chinese customs regarding foreign currency and bills carried by tourists. Having been declared,
such foreign currency may be
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exchanged for Chinese currency at any time through the Bank of China at the official rate, and any remaining foreign currency
may be taken out of the country.
Remittances of foreign currency to China may be arranged through the Bank of China in London or elsewhere, or through any
bank.
The following is the rate of exchange:
100 British pounds…………685.90 yuan
100 Hong Kong dollars…………42.70 yuan
100 Swiss francs…………58.20 yuan
100 Indian rupees…………51.60 yuan
TRAVEL HINT
Take a warm suit, light suit, light plastic raincoat, an overcoat (for any season but mid-summer). Take easily washable nylon
blouses or shirts and underwear. Laundry facilities are good but you will not stay long enough in many places to profit from them.
Take also a small face towel for travelling, also toilet tissue problem on trains all over the world.
All manner of clothes, luxuries and necessities are available in China, but so that you don't waste time shopping that can be
better spent, bring your own shaving soap and toilet necessities.
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Anyone who sets out to write a book about China is faced with the problem of keeping up to date - for the records of yesterday
are shattered by this morning, and what was planned for tomorrow was done three days ago. In the few statistical facts that
follow, I have tried to catch up, as it were, with the news of these broken records.
The difficulty is actual; but there is also a positive aspect - the visitor to China may see that most heartening of realities; human
beings in the throes of progress, in the very process of making life a better and happier experience for all.
SHATTERED FIGURES
A year ago, when I took the last sheet of manuscript out of the typewriter, the pages of the Peking dailies were filled with reports
of records in almost every field of economic activity. The staff writers grew lyrical over each amazing performance, only to find
next day that they had to seek further superlatives. But not one single person that I know of in China envisaged the nation-wide
progress that was to burst into the news a few months later.
The wave of co-operation that had swept the country in 1956 had caught the Government, close as it was to the people, by
surprise. Of course, the steady upward revision of the estimated production of primary and manufactured goods had been noted.
Planned agripage 160
cultural production had been fixed for countryside - 800 catties per mou for the southern provinces, 500 for Hopei and Shantung,
and 400 for the northern section - by 1962! But the 1958 harvest averaged 1000 catties. Some counties achieved 3000 catties.
Then came the records from the small plots - 10,000 catties; 16,000 catties, and astronomical figures that belong only to
intensely-cultivated experimental plots, but which forecast what will be done in the future. So heavy was one experimental crop
that small children could walk on it! Many lots, which in the preceding year had produced less than 200 catties, reached the fourfigure mark.
With caution (praiseworthy, but entirely misplaced as events quickly proved) the Government spoke of exceeding the United
States as a wheat producer. It was achieved in 1958. Cautiously they spoke of equalling England in coal production. They
exceeded England's output in 1958.
HOME-MADE STEEL
The basic policy to concentrate on heavy industry necessitated a rise in steel production. "We must try to equal England in 15
years (then, great caution!) or so."
As the pace warmed up in other fields, the slogan was modified to " 12 years or so". Then to " 12 years or less". Then,
confidence gathering strength, in September, 1958, the country was asked to double the 1957 steel production of 5,350,000
tons. And it was
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registered with some to spare, an unparalleled achievement in world economic history.
When the call was issued to double the 1957 figure by utilising old and modern methods to the maximum, the whole nation was
swept up in a wave of enthusiasm. Overnight, the main topic of conversation became steel-making.
To the West, with its large-scale heavy industry, the task seemed impossible. And impossible it would be anywhere else. China
alone, with its unbroken civilisation of four thousand years, has the historic conditions which made the attempt possible. In all
other countries, primitive industries have vanished; the conditions for them no longer exist. But in China they are still present.
Smelting furnaces were built in the courtyards of private houses, of city office blocks, of schools, on vacant land, in peasant
compounds, even in village streets.
Mao Tse-tung rightly said that China's greatest wealth is its 650 million people. In the country, "native" iron and steel furnaces
sprang up overnight by the scores of thousands. (I confine myself to round figures, for, even as I write, as likely as not another
hundred thousand are being built!) Honan was estimated to have forty thousand furnaces in production within one month. Even
remote mountain villages which had never heard of steel, began making it. Scores of millions of peasants, office workers,
housewives, children, became iron and steel makers. Many of the tiny plants were uneconomic, even with the advantage of
voluntary labour. These were ultimately combined into a
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central furnace, with the enthusiasts taking turn in shifts.
Experts went from the big modern steel plants. College and university students helped with technical advice and worked on the
job. One county helped another. Wherever a new method or improvement was developed, central conferences passed the
knowledge on to others.
Short railways were built by the peasants with homemade rails and makeshift engines, bringing ore to coal or coal to ore.
Travelling from Paoting to Peking at night, the glare from the seemingly endless little steel furnaces lit up the darkness on each
side of the railway line. Nanking at night was in a red glow from the furnaces in the surrounding countryside.
It is now history that the asked-for production was attained.
Now caution was thrown to the winds. Forgotten the fifteen years. Forgotten the twelve years. Let us produce 18,000,000 tons of
steel in 1959. As I write, it seems undue caution to question the certainty of its achievement.
The people no longer talk in decades but in years. They speak with an enthusiasm strange to the West, but with a confidence
that is sound.
THE COMMUNES
Enthusiasm alone does not explain the amazing progress in agricultural output or in iron and steel
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production or industrial advancement. There is a transformation of thinking among the peasants, whose backwardness,
superstition and conservatism less than ten years ago a report by UNESCO described as an almost insuperable barrier to any
attempt to raise the abysmally-low living standard. Today the Chinese peasants not only appreciate the material advantages they
have received from agricultural co-operation, but they see in its further application the future they are aiming at.
The movement for communes began in Honan at the beginning of the summer of 1958. Those which were formed, quickly
showed their advantages over the cooperatives, just as the co-ops had shown their superiority over individual production.
The movement spread throughout the country like a grass fire in mid-summer. By the end of August methods and principles
were issued for the guidance of cooperatives proposing to merge.
Briefly, a people's commune consists of a number of co-operative farms. There the similarity ends. The coops were engaged
chiefly in farming, of a nature suitable each to its particular area, with side activities of lesser nature. The commune, however, is
concerned not only with agriculture of all kinds (limited only by local climatic conditions), but with animal husbandry, forestry,
fishery, essential occupations (repair shops), side occupations (handicrafts).
The accepted definition of a commune is an organisation which merges industry (the worker), agriculture (the peasant), trade
(the merchant and shopkeeper),
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culture and education (the student), and defence (the militiaman).
As a commune generally has a small township centre (into which it is incorporated) the members of the township council serve
as the management committee of the commune. Thus the basic political structure is simplified.
While there are variations from commune to commune, the general picture suffices.
As in the co-ops, collective ownership is the rule. The small personal plots, the privately-owned animals and tools will gradually
be taken over by the commune. Their continued individual possession will become superfluous.
With the formation of communes the restrictions inseparable from the co-ops - difficulties in the matter of large-scale projects,
irrigation and otherwise - disappear. The commune has a greater mass of labour power at its disposal. Its superior organisation
and control of larger funds allow it to form crèches, kindergartens, build community dining rooms (with a much wider selection of
dishes), sewing shops, laundries.
In three provinces, 10,000,000 women released from home cares and duties by these aids were able to join in full-time work. In
all, scores of millions of women are now working side by side with their men folk in every branch of activity throughout the
country.
One writes in terms of huge figures when writing of China. Hundreds of millions of workers are active on large-scale projects.
Commune, county and even provincial boundaries no longer count. When a big project
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is to be carried out, areas which will not benefit send teams to help. " We are helping ourselves by helping our Motherland" is the
common expression.
It can easily be understood how huge projects are completed with magic swiftness when hundreds of thousands and even
millions are thrown into action. On one project a million peasants took part. In a county in Kirin Province, scores of thousands of
peasants dug 150 miles of flood prevention channels and ditches -apart altogether from other extensive works within one week.
In a rather backward county in Anhwei the peasants built the whole of the county's highways -necessary under the new
conditions - in three days. Tens of millions of peasants have built reservoirs, small, medium and large, mostly by hand labour
and with the pole and carrying baskets, although these are disappearing as machines more and more take their place. They are
enclosing areas to hold vast quantities of water in flood time, using the ground for crops when the flood waters recede. They are
leading water around hundreds of miles of mountains to irrigate the slopes and plains.
Each production group in the communes is a unit of the militia, the workers, including many women, training during working
hours, prepared to take their place alongside the regular troops should ever the need arise.
The system of payment in the communes is a wage system, based on the principle of the amount of work done. Already, in
1958, many communes were providing grain to members, free of charge. A few had also provided food, clothing, housing, fuel,
medical care,
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education, public baths, hairdressing, and (important for the older people) free funeral expenses. Special homes have been
established in communes for old people who have no one to care for them - a comparatively rare event with the closely-knit
Chinese family system.
The greater resources of the communes are allowing them to set up hospitals, maternity homes, libraries, dramatic groups and
folk ensembles, middle schools and colleges. And each province aims at establishing its own university.
The communes are steadily building new centres, replacing the old shacks with modern buildings, bringing electricity into the
homes, the streets and the workshops.
Each year marks a new stage. But the standard of living and of housing will remain low by Western standards for some time yet.
The point to remember is that the tens of millions of shacks are diminishing in number day by day; that the people no longer go
hungry; that all are clothed for summer and winter; that the living standard is rising.
The communes are viewed as a logical step on the road to communism. But the leaders point out that this latter is not yet in
view. For some time to come the principle will be recompense for work done. Only when the ideological level is raised much
higher, they say, will it be possible to move to the stage in which the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each
according to his need" comes into operation.
It is unnecessary to glamourise New China. Indeed,
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New China gains the more by stating clearly the deficiencies that spring from the terrible heritage of past oppression, and the
relatively low level of the present standards. For the former has been buried in history and the latter is being altered upward at a
rate which, considering the area of the country and the hundreds of millions of its population, plays havoc with official estimates
and tempts optimists into an extravagant prophecy.
Today, all is confidence and hopefulness. The old despairing songs are heard no more. From mountain and plain rise new ones
that dismiss despair, hopelessness, fatalism, and breathe a challenge and conviction that the future is in their hands. Here is a
favourite:
There is no Jade Emperor in Heaven.
There is no Dragon King on Earth.
I am the Jade Emperor!
I am the Dragon King!
Make way for me, oh! ye mountains.
I'm coming.
NORMAN FREEHILL
February, 1959.
A WORD ABOUT
CHINESE WOODCUTS IN COLOUR . . .
The first Chinese woodcuts appeared in 868 A.D., but it was not until the late sixteenth century that woodcuts in colour were
invented. These reached their flowering in the seventeenth century.
The colour prints used in this volume come from two noteworthy collections: The Ten Bamboos, originally printed in 1644 and,
The Shining Treasures, a modern collection.
All of the colour prints have titles although the names of the artists in The Ten Bamboos collection have been lost to time. The
following lists the prints as you will find them in our book:
From The Ten Bamboos Collection
Bamboos beside a rock
Writing a poem on a mountainside
Blue crane
Listening to the river
Making music Dawn
Carrying rice
Lotus flowers
From The Shining Treasures Collection
Portrait of a lady by Hsu Tsao,
Reminds me of the time I began drawing by Chi Pai-shih
Picture without a name by Chi Pai-shih
Children at play by Kuang Yu
Pine cone belonging to a rich old owner of 300 stone signets on which are engraved: "He who lives long will have many children." by Chi Pai-shih
In the autumn, go to the high mountain and look upon the distant land by Chang Ta-chien
Landscape by Chang Ta-chien
Poem: The peony is the queen of flowers, The litchi is the prince of fruits. Why not call the Chinese cabbage The king of vegetables? by Chi Paishih
Briefly,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Norman Freehill is an Australian who has travelled widely, and written widely. He is a noted journalist, financial editor, short-story
author and dramatist. He has visited most parts of the globe, and has spent considerable time, East and West.
For several years prior to his coming to China, he had made a broad study of that country's cultural and political history. His book
reflects this. It also embodies his visits to all but forgotten villages, to huge modern factories- a commonplace today in
industrialised China - and also to the libraries, schools and museums of the great cities. Most of all, his book reflects his hours
spent with the people: Chinese of all types and from every walk of life. And if it is a kind of personal history of one man's
experience and findings, it is also good reading for dreamer or fact-seeker. Anybody going to China -or hoping to go - will find it a
treasure-trove of what to see and what to look for.