"No More Flies"

THE LONG MARCH (513 pp.) -Simone de Beauvolr -World ($7.50).

French intellectuals are among the few left in the Western world who still trot out, straight-faced, the kind of cozy Communist maxims that have been wearing whiskers almost as long as the Russians. Samples: "The Chinese government . . . considers truth its soundest ally." "All |Chinese newspapers| are government-supervised . . . There must be the initial phase in which chaos gives way to a rudimentary order." "Russian assistance -as the Chinese leaders make plain in every speech and report -is disinterested." "In |France| ... the law is determined by the interests of a class." but in China, "justice is made to correspond to the welfare of the people."

These trusting quotations are from

Simone de Beauvoir's new hook on Communist China, based on a six-week visit in 1955, at the expense of the Chinese government. The author of two excellent (and appropriately titled) novels, She Came to Stay (TIME, March 15, 1954) and The Mandarins (TIME, May 28, 1956), was not alone: "There were some fifteen hundred of us [foreign] delegates roaming the length and breadth of China." But Author de Beauvoir seems to have got around on her own a good deal and to have seen a nation that, if her account could be credited, would seem to be by far the happiest and justest known to man since Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union. Items:

P: In Peking, "you see no fluttering old newspapers or leaking garbage cans as in Chicago alleyways; you see no down-and-out old men such as straggle about the Bowery in New York." There are "no more open sewers, no more flies, no more rats." "Nobody is arrogant here, nobody is grabby, nobody feels himself above or below anybody else." The whole population is "identically dressed in blue cotton." "Nightclubs and brothels have gone," and there is "not one drunkard." Pedicab operators are so content that they no longer quarrel and shout; when "two bicycles or pedicabs collide, those involved exchange smiles." Every morning, all the ministerial bureaucrats "line up in front of the administration buildings" and perform calisthenics -"mildly incongruous," perhaps, but "nothing [is] more reasonable than the principle of compulsory physical education." Such "germ carriers" as "dogs and cats" have been liquidated. The overall result is "a perfect image of a classless society" -a conclusion with which few readers are likely to quarrel. P: "From the train . . . window" the peasants were "all decently dressed." Only about 5,000 of the big shots among them have been "executed." Moreover, there have been "editorials guaranteeing a comfortable future to former landowners and rich peasants who have been suitably re-educated."

P: More than 7,000,000 children belong to the government-organized Young Pioneer group, but only critics who have "decided in advance that New China is headed by a totalitarian regime" will compare these jolly scouts with "Hitlerian youth outfits." Girl Pioneers may be seen "playing ring-around-a-rosy" in public parks. Boy Pioneers climb hillocks and scamper about. Between boy and girl university students, "flirting does not exist." P: "At least in theory every curb on freedom of thought has been lifted." However, "culture is today the instrument to a progress of which it will tomorrow be the consummation" -which is doublespeak for saying that all freedom of thought is strictly curbed. Confucianism has been re-examined to tie in with Sino-Marxist ideology; back-country illiterates are taught with "stories of work heroes, Korean volunteers, the tracking down of Kuomintang spies, free marriage, love." Chinese fiction makes fine reading -apparently because it tells the reader so much about heavy industry and "the conflicts that sometimes divide management and employees."

Author de Beauvoir's report would be unremarkable if it could be dismissed as the output of a party hack or a Red square. But it is no more appalling for what it reflects, in passing, of Red China than for what it displays of the mental fiber of one of France's doughtiest highbrows. With her great and good friend, Jean Paul Sartre, fellow apostle of the unmeaning of life, Intellectual de Beauvoir seems to be proving that bedfellows can make strange politics. It is an affront not only to her countrymen's prized tradition of reason but to something even closer to the core of France, when she reports approvingly: "At the registrar's bureau when young people are severally asked why they have chosen one another, the standard reply is because he or she is a fine worker."

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