Behind Mao's Lines

OUT OF RED CHINA (269 pp.) -- Liu Shaw-tong -- Duell, Little ($4).

As a jobless ex-college student in the middle of a Peking winter, young Liu Shaw-tong was a pushover for the poster.

It read: "For the development of the Revolution, a 'Southbound Working Group' will be organized . . . All except the pregnant and the illiterate are qualified to join."

The Southbound Working Group was a kind of boot camp for potential Red bu reaucrats, and for a political innocent like Liu, it turned out to be quite a school.

In one year (1949), his curriculum ranged from semi-starvation to marching till his feet blistered, from writing whoppers as a "People's Correspondent" for the New China News Agency, to a minor post with the Ministry of Propaganda -- while inwardly he fought to keep Mao Tse-tung and gang from using his brain as a Marxist sewage disposal dump.

When he escaped to Hong Kong at the end of that time, a curious friend asked:

"What's it like in Red China?" Liu Shaw-tong replied: "Would you understand me, dear friend, if I told you that I saw an old woman weep because the sun had died in China?" The dead sun -- Author Liu scarcely needs to say -- is the one that once shed the light of freedom and humanity in China.

Comes the Revolution. Author Liu approached Chinese Communism with an open but not a blank mind. He found that its pose was "liberation" but its practice was tyranny. The power that runs through his book is the high moral voltage an honest man always generates when he gives a straight account of a crooked thing.

The first assignment of the Southbound Working Group looked easy: each mem ber had to write an autobiography. But Liu found that no autobiography was accepted by the group chiefs unless the writer tagged himself a member either of "the squeezing class or the squeezed class," reviled his father and family ties in general, and -- if at all connected with the Nationalist government -- confessed to being an "accessory thug" of the "reactionary looting class." Next came reports in "creative history"; one of the most successful told how the Chinese Communist Party had united China and won the war against Japan. Anyone who failed to grasp this was rebuked for not being a "clear-thinking person."

One day Communist General Lin Piao, Mao's No. 1 man, came to address the group. "All you comrades came here for the Revolution, right?"

"Right!" shouted the well-drilled members of the Southbound Working Group.

"Well, right now, the Revolution needs you most in the army," said the general. "I hereby announce . . . your voluntary enlistment."

One volunteer who tried to skip camp was shipped north for further "study."

Assigned to become "People's Correspondents" with the Fourth Field Army,

Author Liu and 31 others were crammed into half a boxcar, .while an established Red journalist had the other half to him self. When they complained, they were told that "suffering is the diet of the hero."

The rest of the diet was coarse-grained rice -- but even that looked sumptuous be side the elm leaves the people of Shantung were eating at the time, after "welcoming" the "liberating" armies.

Saturday-Night Wives. In the offices of the Chungyuen Daily, in Chengchow.

Liu found "several women with their blouses open, nursing babies. It certainly was a strange way of running a newspaper."

The old comrades whose wives these were had other rough & ready ways after years of guerrilla society. They used floor rugs as blankets and toilets as wash basins. At a hospital, Liu found the comrade "nurses" ripping the labels off the medicines and reclassifying the bottles according to four sizes and five colors. As for such high-reform," sounding most old government comrades projects as treated them "agrarian as rackets. When a mock trial with agitator witnesses led to a landlord's being beaten to death or shot, the party members div vied the land and farm implements among his neighbors, but picked up any gold or silver, clothing or household goods for themselves.

One thing a party member could not pick for himself was a wife. Girls of the Southbound Working Group and all others who "joined the Revolution" were parceled out arbitrarily to old party workers within a year. A revolutionary couple could spend exactly one night a week (Saturday) "enjoying relaxation." One woman who objected to this schedule was released from Liu's group with a letter of condemnation. No school or employer dared to take her on, and she was soon utterly destitute. By this time, Liu had become adept at turning out the kind of prop wash the party liked, but he wondered "how long it would be before the pressures on my own mind and the conflicts in my own heart and feelings would become in tolerable."

In a movie-thriller finale, Author Liu tells how he escaped to Hong Kong. He eventually made his way to Formosa, where he wrote Out of Red China. Not every Chinese facing Liu's dilemma could have done this. Fortunately for the world's knowledge of Red China, Liu is an orphan -- without a family back home to suffer for his candor.

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