THE LONG MARCH
by Simone du Beauvoir
Translated by Austryn Wainhouse
The World Publishing Company
Cleveland and New York
501 pages, US$7.50.
Many French writers, both men and women, have been visiting mainland China in the past few years and bursting into print as a result. Some are keen enough to observe the loss of freedom, the parroting of the official line, as was Robert Guillain. Others believe anything and everything the Communists say is so, and swallow all the statistics as well as the propaganda. This is true, of Simone de Beauvoir.
In an American review, William Henry Chamberlain, an outstanding authority on Communism, says "The difference between John Gunther's account of the Soviet Union ("Inside Russia Today") and Simone de Beauvoir's tales of Red China is the difference between first-rate reporting and second-rate fellow-traveler propaganda." But I think it is more than that. There seems to be a devotion to the cause of Communism on the part of Mlle de Beauvoir, so that she is determined to "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" of the Red regime in China. To be sure, this makes her look like three monkeys. She believes all the promises, all the fantastic plans, and knows less than nothing about what has actually happened to the 80% of the population which is rural, as well as to most of the 20% which is urban.
As Mr. Chamberlain pointed out: "In the 500 pages of this wordy book, reeling with lush false sentimentality, there is not a word to explain why the majority of Chinese prisoners in Korea chose to go to Formosa, or why Hongkong is bursting at the seams with refugees, or why ... there have been so many executions, mass deportations and famines."
The author's red bias is apparent even from her introductory chapter. She says, "China, for me, was this stirring and reasonable revolution which has not only delivered peasants and workers from exploitation, but had rid an entire land of the foreigner." Why she should think it good to drive nationals of all other countries out of any one country, she fails to explain. Would Mlle de Beauvoir recommend the same for France?
In her next breath she says that China's revolution is only halfway accomplished: "Capitalism, private property, profit, inheritance still remain, They are scheduled to disappear by stages without violence." They were on the way out when she was there in the fall of 1955, are practically nonexistent now (which she obviously approves), but violence has marked every stage. Since Mile de Beauvoir was there, some of her friends have been liquidated, including such literary lights as Feng Hsueh-feng, Ai-Ching and Ting Ling.
In her exuberance over Mao Tse-tung's invitation to "Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred thoughts contend", she exclaims: "Never has a popular democracy carried liberalism so far ... At least in theory every curb on freedom of thought has been lifted ... no attitude is heretical anymore." Does she know that not only the attitudes but the "heretics" were purged?
Errors are bound to creep into any book written by a mere visitor in a big country, and it is a mistake to write exhaustively of an unfamiliar country. But many of this writer's errors could have been checked by asking any Chinese, or even anyone who had lived in China. She dates the Japanese invasion a year early; she says "the Chinese have never developed a taste for meat ... are condemned to a monotony of millet, vermicelli or rice", all of which she thinks are broth; that cotton grows in the sub-tropical south; that the blossoms of Lotus Lake (Nanking) are white; that farmers had to "surrender as much as 90% of their harvest."
This figure on taxes-in-kind is fictional, and at least 20% higher than any other writer has put it, as far as I know. The foremost authority on land tenure in China is Dr. J. Lossing Buck; with his three volumes (and much else) on "Land Utilization". He says: "The misinformation about land tenure in China is colossal. It is said that some 70% of the crop in Szechuan is paid to landlords ... but the Szechuan farmer grows two crops a year, a winter crop of wheat, barley, rapeseed or broad beans, and a summer crop of rice. The tenant pays no rent on the winter crops ... surveys show that the average rental paid was only 31.8%." It took the Reds to demand that the farmer give up his entire crop to the government, and buy back at fixed price a part for his family. This has caused many thousands to resist, and other thousands to leave the land.
The author's ignorance leads to contradictions as well as to errors. On one page she says: "In some countries women of the lower classes have achieved material emancipation through work; this opportunity was denied to Chinese women." Later she refers to the women of South China working in the fields. In one place she says: "In no other country were the horrors of the situation for women so appalling." In other places she refers to Chinese women who ruled their country. She may, of course, be ignorant of the fact that Chinese women traditionally controlled the finances of the household, in modern times owned and ran their own banks, that for many years women have entered the professions as lawyers, doctors, nurses, dentists, judges, professors - long before the Communists made life miserable. After saying "Every member of the family group was subject to the patriarchal authority", she says: "It was the mother-in-law who in the most everyday and implacable manner incarnated familial oppression."
The exaggeration and distortion of infanticide (as if it persisted until Communist "liberation"), of foot-binding, of family life as devoid of normal affection of wife for husband, of parents for children, is evidently aimed to defend the Communists in their effort to break up traditional family life. She knows nothing of five generations and nearly a hundred members of a family-clan living harmoniously under one roof.
She approves the mob action of "people's courts", the socialization of the land, the abolition of private ownership and private enterprise, and of the collectivization which the farmers are admittedly still resisting.
Mlle de Beauvoir should read one reliable, well-documented book like "CHINA UNDER COMMUNISM, "by Dr. Richard L. Walker, based on the monitoring of all the official broadcasts from Peking and on an analysis of all Communist newspapers, and learn the facts of life as admitted by the regime itself. Their admissions include corruption, waste of funds, poor management, unreliable statistics, incompleted plans, and many other things - but these are not for foreign visitors. Instead of "not more than 5,000" whom she says were liquidated, Communist admissions of "reactionary landlords", "dissidents" and "counter-revolutionaries" bring the figures much nearer the 15 million reported by the United Nations some years ago (and many more since). - GERALDINE FITCH