The Dividends of Rediscovery

The rediscovery of modern China is a continuing journalistic event, and each visit by foreign newsmen adds fresh insights into a still largely unknown country. TIME Hong Kong Correspondent David Aikman, who speaks Mandarin, recently visited China for eleven days as one of a small group of journalists covering an official visit by British Foreign Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Excerpts from his report:

WITH a total area of 3.7 million square miles, China is not only larger than the U.S. but embraces at least as wide a variety of climate. There can be few more vivid ways of finding this out than to fly suddenly down from Peking to Canton in the early days of November, exchanging the brisk cold, the austere browns and russets of a northern autumn for the rich greens and the sensuous, languid heat of the tropics. The contrast is greater than moving from New England to Miami at the same time of the year. To leave Peking is to leave an almost Russian-style city ?monumental, dogmatically laid out along enormous avenues, dwarfing the population and evoking a sense of enormous power and discipline. To arrive in Canton, the principal city of China's deep south, is to be unmistakably in Asia, surrounded by paddyfields.

Canton itself has a 19th century appearance. The houses and factories and warehouses are packed together in unplanned gray proximity; the skyline of low roofs is broken only by scores of factory chimneys pouring out smoke into the fetid air. It could be a daguerreotype of industrial Liverpool, except that the Pearl River is alive with sampans and junks.

The people did not all look well-dressed or well-fed. Many of the children, even some of those being marched in school groups on the road itself, were without shoes, and their clothes were often shabby and patched. They looked, on the whole, distinctly thin. The adults mostly wore plain, sleeveless white shirts, which lent an air of brightness to the city that it badly needed.

In contrast, the citizens of Peking appeared uniformly healthy and well nourished, wrapped against the cold in padded blue cotton jackets, and bicycling carelessly along the vast avenues. There seemed fewer people in greater space and perhaps a greater sense of well-being expressed among them.

Canton airport was like a deserted movie set, the cavernous terminal silent and still and lit only in the section where we got out of our 13-car motorcade. We were ushered through to the waiting Antonov-24 Turboprop on the apron. Two rather sullen stewardesses in creased olive-drab army-style uniforms helped us put our heavy typewriters on the shelves above the seats (contrary to international regulations), handed round candy before takeoff, then retreated to the rear of the 48-seat aircraft. A barely intelligible English-language announcement warned that "all passengers should register inflammables, corrosives, explosives, and radioactive materials with the cabin attendant before takeoff. Use of binoculars, cameras, and other optical equipment is not permitted during the flight."

Our Shanghai interpreter, whom we shall call Mr. Chen, is 33 years old; he was trained in English at one of Shanghai's universities. Every Thursday he goes to a radio assembly factory to learn from the masses, and he has every Sunday off, like most office workers. Mr. Chen is a patient man. He has been applying without success to join the Communist Party since 1965. At any rate, he considers himself fortunate to be able to get away to the countryside for productive labor on a commune one month in every twelve. It is, after all, the only time in the year apart from two days in the spring that he ever sees his wife and their two children who are needed full time on the commune.

Veteran China watchers report that there has been a lessening of the Mao cult in recent months. There is no reason to doubt their word, but it is difficult for the Westerner encountering China for the first time to imagine how the cult of Mao was ever more extensive than it now seems to be. One cannot escape Mao in China. It is a certain bet that if you turn on the radio his name will be mentioned within three minutes, no matter the hour of day or night, either in a song about him, a musical setting of one of his poems, or a lecture on how to apply his thought.

Beneath the inescapable incantatory presence of Maoism, which comes close to being a fanatical, albeit secular faith, cultural life in China is desperately impoverished. "It is time we had a change," a Chinese friend told me. "There is not enough variety in our revolutionary operas." A graduate of a foreign-language institute, my friend had played the saxophone in the institute's orchestra. He also had had a fine collection of Chinese-made recordings of Beethoven's works, which he "lost" during the Cultural Revolution. How? "Well, perhaps my sister put them somewhere," he responded with a grin.

Signs of a cautious return to wider literary interests than poetry praising Mao or socially conscious tractor drivers did appear last year with the republication of Western classics like Thucydides and such traditional Chinese novels as The Dream of the Red Chamber and Monkey. But contemporary Chinese fiction is still appallingly banal by Western standards. At the Hsin Hua bookstore in Peking's main shopping district, I asked a salesgirl to tell me which of the recently published Chinese novels was reckoned the best. "Take your pick over there," she answered unselfconsciously. "They're all the same."

Foreigners in Peking who are long-time residents of the city say that the atmosphere now is more relaxed than it was before the Cultural Revolution. A Western diplomat is as perplexed by the change as he is delighted by it. "Three years ago," he said, "people were spitting at you in the street and little children threw stones if you walked down a hutung (side street). Now they smile and applaud. All of us who were around then are asking ourselves: Who are the real Chinese?"

Not once during the trip was there any mention of the price of rooms or the cost of meals. When the final bill arrived, it was the lump-sum total of air travel, lodging, meals, laundry, beer, and shoe cleaning for 25 people; it was arbitrarily divided by that number to determine what each newsman had to pay. Eleven nights in Chinese hotels, none of them first-class or even second-class by Western standards, worked out at about $210.

Considering the unprofessional if unquestionably courteous and friendly service (one could never be sure that one's ashtray would be emptied, or that a stale glass of beer from Tuesday would be removed by Thursday), the price would be enough to make casual tourists think twice before deciding on China for their two-week interlude away from Brooklyn.

Yet there are dividends to travel in China that one would find in no other country. In the gigantic hotel restaurants, the food and service were superior to those in most Russian hotels. And where else could you encounter a notice in the main dining room (in Canton) that read in English, "Notice, 26.10.1972. At the evening dinner time, on the 24th (the day before yesterday), a gentleman who sat at table No. 41, after having paid his bill, left his change here (one yuan in number). Please come to the conter [sic] to take it back. ?Dinning [sic] Hall."?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.