Yesterday, October 1, 450 million people celebrated the third anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Here in the U S., this news is played down or ignored by the press, but among the billion people of Asia, the occasion is historic. They rejoiced when New China lifted the rusted anchor of Western" imperialism and threw it on board the exploiter's ship in sending her away. New China demanded equality. In an area where the white man's imperialism is most unpopular, New China’s conduct evoked sympathy and support. The Asians knew that China has also been used as a base to exploit other areas of Southeast Asia Now this operational base of imperialists is not only gone, but China is showing to Asians how they too, can develop their own countries as sovereign states.
Formerly a Land of Recurrent Famine, Now Supplies Famine-Struck India
China has set an example in agrarian Asia of turning the land over to the tillers. More than 300 million people have benefited from this agrarian reform policy in New China. They now produce more through cooperative efforts and by utilizing new techniques taught them by agricultural specialists. And China, which was known for recurrent famines, had enough grain last year to ship several hundred thousand tons to famine-stricken India. Last week I read in a local newspaper that Chiang Kai-shek's government on Taiwan had alerted its "guerrillas" in China for an attack against the People’s Republic. From Taiwan, Chiang's forces would attack the mainland, the report said.
Chiang cannot engage in military adventures without U. S. support. He was routed from China. The people repudiated his regime. He is now on Taiwan, which has eight million people. He is in a class with Farouk, the deposed king of Egypt. But unlike Egypt, the People's Republic of China is growing, with active participation of her people in building a healthier economy for themselves.
Kuomintang: Admits Lower Land Rent Helps Taiwan
In reading the article from Taiwan, I was amused by the paragraphs which said the peasants are working harder and producing more because land rent has been reduced from 50 to 60 per cent of the annual crop to 37 5 per cent Chiang's government had refused to lower land rent when it had dominant control of China.
The Yenan government reduced rent during the anti-Japanese war and New China has now redistributed the land to the peasants. Chiang is years behind the times, and he sounds stupid to boast of rent reduction on Taiwan when in China, "land to the tillers" has been realized.
In a way, the struggle of the peasants to own the land they till is like the struggle of workers in this country to organize unions for collective bargaining. One pertains to an agricultural society and the other to the industrial. One has landlords, the other has industrialists.
The Struggle for Pork Chop Like Struggle for Full Rice Bowl
Workers, as in Hawaii, quickly see anti-union activities. In the same way, peasants and their allies in Asia, notice unfriendly acts against them. One group calls his interest "pork chop"; the other, "a full rice bowl" and human dignity.
So any move by foreign industrialists and financiers and militarists to provoke war against China by using Chiang will be unpopular.
Illiterate Chinese Understand Better Than Well-Educated Americans
I still remember the words of Dr. Sydney Wei which I wrote down carefully in the early summer of 1946 when I was traveling in the Kiangsu-Anhwei border region. We conversed in English. Dr. Wei is a graduate of Oberlin College and took his doctorate in political science and education at the University of Chicago. He had once been a secretary to Dr. Sun Yat-sen and like many followers of the great leader, he was opposed to the Chiang regime. He was vice chairman of the Kiangsu-Anhwei border region government.
Dr. Wei said to me: "The Chinese people are very sensitive to foreign intervention. From students to illiterate peasants, by everyone in China, intervention will be understood, no matter under what guise it comes. On this score, the illiterate Chinese understand better than well-educated Americans. Imperialists and their Chinese running-dogs have plagued China too, long."
Old Colleague of Dr. Sun Speaks Out
Dr. Wei was one of the last persons I spoke to in the liberated areas under the Yenan administration before I left China in July 1946. Speaker T'ien Feng of the People's Political Council of the same border region, was another.
"The spirit of Dr. Sun Yat-sen lives with people like us," Speaker T'ien Feng told me.
The 72-year-old official had been a colleague of Dr. Sun. He said people like him and Mme. Sun Yat-sen belonged to the old and genuine Kuomintang. The Kuomintang of Chiang Kai'shek had perverted Dr. Sun's "Three People's Principles" and his "Three Great Policies." The former he described as democracy, national independence and improvement of people's livelihood.
The "Three Policies" he said were cooperation with the Soviet Union, cooperation with the Communists to resist imperialism, and supporting the interests of the workers and peasants.
Chinese Liberals Have Wide Interests
As I listened to Speaker T'ien Feng, I realized that men like him, who called themselves liberals in China, read and studied Marxism just as they did the writings of Chinese scholars and philosophers. Students did likewise in Kuomintang territory where Chiang's gendarmes enforced thought control. They took up competing philosophies and sifted the contents in their minds.
T'ien Feng said that the people will decide what is best for them. Chiang, with all his soldiers, gendarmes, concentration camps, informers and courts, failed to hold down the people.
Americans Are Literary But Ignorant
I recalled what an Indian student told me months before in Calcutta as Speaker T'ien Feng related his thoughts to me, his face glowing in the flickering light.
"You Americans as a nation are highly literate, but your ignorance is surprising," the Indian had said.
He was right. We generally shy away from serious subjects. Our schools help to develop this tendency. And here was Speaker T'ien, his mind open and active. He had lived under the warlords Yuan Shih-kai and Chiang. They certainly had given him no liberal influence.
My tour of China was about over. The morning after my talk with Speaker Tien. I flew out of the liberated area for the last time. I looked down on the panorama which is the land of China's peasantry. Down there on both sides of the truce lines, peasants in uniform faced each other, with captured Japanese and American military equipment in their hands. On one side stood Yenan's troops with popular support. On the other side, the Kuomintang troops sat out the truce with American support.
Here Was a Solution To Tobacco Road
This land below us was a "Tobacco Road" but it was transforming through the struggles of the people. Here, the land probem was being, solved.
Long ago in poor sharecropper areas of Georgia I visited, I wondered how the white and Negro farmers could lift their living standards. They were divided and pitted against each other by Jim Crowism.
In the rural areas of North China the peasants were organized. They were breaking away from the traditions of their ancestors who lived isolated, ignorant lives. The peasants among whom I moved in the liberated and guerrilla areas stirred and pressed for a change for the better. They became owners of their land, with government support. They had leadership in Mao Tse-tung and in the young city intellectuals and students who went to them, studied their age-old problems and helped them lick them.
Americans Stayed Off Streets of Shanghai
I arrived in Shanghai one week after a mass student anti-civil war demonstration. Fifty thousand students had sent off to Nanking a delegation of YWCA, bank, merchant, school and other representatives to petition General Marshall, Chiang Kai-shek and Chou En-lai to stop civil war. These businessmen and scholars, including my friend Mrs. Kitty Yen, who represented the YWCA, were beaten up by Kuomintang secret police and ruffians at Nanking.
These delegates were not Communists but liberals and conservatives. The assault against Communists had, like in Germany and Japan, turned into attacks against all opposition.
When Sunday arrived there was talk of another demonstration. Since these demonstrations took on an anti-American slant, GIs were instructed not to go out on the streets. In their barracks and hotel rooms, the Americans waited all day for it to take place. There was no parade.
Rohrbough Tried To Save Yang Chao; Stages Week's Sit-Down Strike
I spent part of the day with my superior and discussed with him the Yang Chao case. Yang Chao, a Chinese liberal, had been an employe of the OWI office in Fukien.
While carrying out his duties as news and information worker for the U. S. government, he became a suspect of the gendarmerie of a reactionary regional commander of Chiang Kai-shek. The gendarmes demanded that the Americans turn him over to them. Yang pleaded with his OWI superiors to give him protection, for he knew he would be killed by Chiang's police. The American in charge of the Fukien OWI office finally gave Yang to the secret police.
But not all Americans crawled before the Kuomintang gestapo. Edward Rohrbough, OWI news editor at Fukien and now of the RECORD staff, protested this arrest. When Yang was taken away, he headed for the Kuomintang prison to demand Yang's release.
He was refused. For one week he carried out a sit-down strike in the prison compound.
Months later, Yang died in another prison. All except one American had let him down at the moment he needed their support most urgently off area.