So now it has come to the point where the local post office is quietly burning incoming issues of the China Monthly Review, a magazine published in Shanghai by American-born William Powell, a graduate of the University of Missouri school of journalism and a son of a well-known newspaperman with an extensive background in the Far East.
The postmaster has been acting under orders of the solicitor of the U. S. Postal Department.
Evidently those behind this book-burning policy do not want the people of this country to know what actually is taking place in China. The China Monthly Review carries articles on reconstruction and rehabilitation programs going on in China. It describes the peace sentiment of the Chinese and it has been critical of U.S. militaryintervention in far-off Korea. This magazine has prestige. Numerous experts and students of Far Eastern affairs subscribe to it. The periodical is found on the shelves of numerous libraries.
The China Monthly Review has shown that despite the U. S. embargo against China, that country has been spurting ahead in economic development.
It has given statistics on the increase in the number of schools and teachers and students, on new housing developments and on the increase in production of consumer goods.
This banning of the Review is part and parcel of the U. S. arm-twisting of dependent nations in the UN last year, when allies like England and France balked at U. S. charges of "aggression" against China. The protesting dependencies finally came along.
Behavior Follows Pattern Set By Chiang
The stopping of the Renew is intended to keep Americans ignorant about China while at the same time, our official government and vested interest propagandists who constantly yell about the "bamboo curtain" speak and write of "Chinese imperialism." They want the people here to believe them that China wants to "conquer" Asia.
Hard-hitting magazines like the Review frustrate their stratagem and bring information to Americans that the Chinese do not want war, but peace.
What the U. S. authorities are doing follows the pattern of Chiang Kai-shek's behavior. Chiang slapped a blockade against Yenan during the last war.
His propagandists then told the world that Yenan drugged people in its territory with opium, ran slave labor camps and was making deals with the Japanese invaders.
When finally foreign correspondents forced Chiang to let them visit Yenan's territory in 1944, they found in contrast to Chungking's graft and corruption, a clean and responsive government.
Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, Gunther Stein of the Christian Science Monitor, Israel Epstein, who wrote for Indian and American newspapers, and others, all wrote of the guerrilla warfare, cooperation of the people in increasing - production, the complete absence of prostitutes and beggars in Yenan. They also exposed the lie about the use of opium in Yenan's areas.
U. S. Refuses To Allow Chinese Students To Return Home
During the war years, Chiang kept a tight blockade against Yenan. Today, Chiang's regime is on Formosa.
And now, while U. S. authorities attempt to keep Americans from visiting New China or from reading on-the-spot reports about her, delegations of visitors from abroad are going there. People of foreign countries are reading about China in reports from China, not from Formosa. They find that China is not bent on war and they demand trade with that country. But Washington restricts these dependencies from trading with China.
The Washington administration has taken the extreme position of refusing to let Chinese students who have studied in the U. S. return to China. Several months ago, a group of Chinese who had studied in Mainland universities and colleges, was detained here in Honolulu, and the immigration authorities said that such action was taken because these students had studied technical and scientific courses which would help the People's Republic of China.
Veteran YWCA Worker Carries Message of Peace and Friendship
Free trade and co-existence are the basis for peace. Recently, I read of speeches being made on the Pacific Coast by Miss Maud Russell, for 20 years a YWCA worker in China. She is speaking out against embargo and for China trade, which would mean two million jobs for U. S. workers, that do not depend on a war economy.
I recall that in the summer of 1946, just before I left China, I heard the young and old talk of China's reconstruction. I received letters from distant places in the Liberated Areas, asking for American periodicals and technical books. From a faraway coal mine an engineer wrote me that he had received a magazine on mining the OWI sent him through his border region government. He stated that he had not read about American technical improvements in mining for almost 10 years. Could we send him more? he asked.
Awakened By Drum Beats And Clash of Cymbals
In 1946 I made one last trip to Kalgan and Hsuan Hwa, medium sized cities which the Japanese had industrialized on the border of Inner Mongolia. Americans in Peking and Shanghai had asked me after I had made my first trip there whether the Communist-led governments which had operated for years in the countryside, could run modern industrial cities.
The coal mines were working at greater efficiency than when I had visited them a month before. An iron foundry, with four blast furnaces in Hsuan Hwa, were under repair.
Factories producing matches, tobacco, rubber, vegetable oil and other products were going almost at full capacity. On my first trip to Kalgan I saw a paper factory which was under construction. When I visited Kalgan a month later, this factory was producing newsprint.
On my first trip to Kalgan I was awakened every morning by loud drum beats and clashing of cymbals. This was election campaign week during which time education and dramatic groups from schools and every mass organization went out on the, streets to interest the populace In the election. Teenagers with makeup on and in costumes, danced the popular yang ko, a folk dance.
A Candidate for Office Speaks 10 Sentences
As dancers went up and down streets, the people gathered. Then someone with a pail of water sprinkled the ground to keep the dust down. The dramatic groups formed a circle right there in the street and put on short skirts. Songs emphasized election of "good, responsible people."
When a large gathering filled the street, the youngsters stopped dancing. They faced the crowd from inside the circle and gave short talks on the responsibility of each citizen to exercise his franchise. They urged everyone on that street to study the candidates whose names were posted on a blackboard at the street entrance.
On a back street we heard Ho Tama, who was more popularly known as the "mother of the Eighth Route Army." Her speeches were short. She spoke about 10 sentences and ended with: "I have the interest "of the people at heart." She received the best response from her people.
A liaison officer who was standing by me said she would get elected to the city council because she had helped wounded and sick soldiers during the anti-Japanese militarist resistance as though they were her sons.
"It Seems Now the Toilers Have Their Chance"
I asked him if Ho Tama could read and write. The officer looked at me as though I had asked a stupid question.
"We believe in democracy. Our government is not a monopoly of the landlords and the merchants," he said, "We have them, too, but we also have people like Mother Ho to represent the common people." And he added that Mother Ho had been deprived of opportunities to acquire a formal education.
Later on that day Liu Ts'eng-chi, chief of the OWI Chinese division in Shanghai, who accompanied me on this trip to Kalgan, started a conversation with a merchant who was listening to a campaign speech.
Liu asked the merchant about the election. Wasn't this something new in China? Was it fairly done?
Without turning to look, at Liu, the merchant said casually as he puffed on his long pipe: "It seems now the toilers have their chance. Up to now, they had nothing to do with government."
Illiteracy No Bar To One's Right To Vote
One month later the election was in full swing. Schools were closed and students were canvassing and participating in elections, as were workers during their noon break and after working hours. The students told me that this was the practical side of their education. Kalgan was really in a carnival spirit. I had never seen an election popularized for the people to this, extent.
Illiteracy, prevalent among the majority of peasants, was no bar to voting. At one booth I saw a voter dropping beans in jars placed behind candidates who faced the wall in a curtained-off area.