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Review Article: The Impact of Communist China on Visitors from India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Margaret W. Fisher  and
Joan V. Bondurant
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Extract

The notion that democracy, as the West understands democracy, is meeting a crucial test in the conflict of ideas that agitate the minds and emotions of Indians, is everywhere receiving greater attention. It is a notion as commonly understood by the Indian intellectual as it is popularly appreciated by those who would observe the process from the West. That the Indian view of China plays a significant role in this process is readily apparent.

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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , February 1956 , pp. 249 - 265
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Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1956

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References

1 Moraes, Frank, Report on Mao's China (New York, 1953), p. 207.Google Scholar

2 Among those few may be mentioned Rabindranath Tagore (1924), Jawaharlal Nehru (1939), and Frank Moraes (1944–45).

3 The invitation came through the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi on behalf of five “All-China” organizations: The Peace Council, the Federation of Labor, the Democratic Women's Federation, the Democratic Federation of Youth, and the Federation of Literature and Arts Circles, and was delivered to the president of the All-India Peace Council and the presidents of the Bombay and Calcutta branches of the India-China Friendship Association.

4 For Panikkar's revealing reference to this delegation in his recently published book, In Two Chinas: Memoirs of a Diplomat (London, 1955)Google Scholar, see pp. 137–139. He had known many of the members quite well for many years, he tells us, and “felt that I would be able to handle the delegation.” He appears to have been right about that. However, he had a lapse of memory on one small point: this delegation was in China in September–October 1951, and not in May, as he states.

5 See also “The Indian Cultural Delegation to China,” Indian Press Digests (University of California at Berkeley), I, No. 6 (05 1953), 79–85.Google Scholar

6 In 1955 nine Indian delegates returned to India before the conclusion of the scheduled program in protest against the move to form a Communist-sponsored Asian Confederation of Labour. R. J. Mehta has written of his experiences as a member of this delegation in a series of articles in Thought (Delhi), beginning with the issue for June 25, 1955.

7 As edited, Kumarappa's praise of the British port of Hongkong and his criticism of the Chinese city of Mukden, largely disappeared. One paragraph describing the severity of Chinese punishment and two paragraphs dealing with Russian military and technical assistance were completely eliminated. “Communism of the evil type which the Americans dread” was altered to read “Communism of that type which the Americans dread.”

8 According to the publishers, The People's Publishing House Ltd., of Bombay, the most important Indian publishers of communist books and pamphlets. An account of this Fair, in which the prominent displays were those from communist countries can be found in Indian Press Digests, I, No. 4 (09 1952), 37–44.Google Scholar

9 Among passages appearing in Abbas' booklet which were deleted or altered in his article in the Sundarlal work, the following are noteworthy: (1) comments on possible duress in connection with the praise of the communist regime by a factory owner; (2) “Every worker (not only in this factory but everywhere in China) carries a fountain pen and a diary in which he notes down his daily progress in work”; (3) statements elaborating upon—and explaining away—the lack of legal restrictions on the authority of private management “to increase or decrease wages, to allocate work to the workers, to decide what to produce or how to produce it … to hire or dismiss any workers …”; (4) war in Korea and the incentive arising from increased wages were both deleted from Abbas' list of incentives to increased production; and (5) the statement that formerly “most” of Shanghai's textile mills had been owned by “British or American industrialists” was altered to read: “most of them owned by American industrialists.”

10 A Gandhian “basic education” center and teacher training institute in Delhi State.

11 See Professor Shah's treatment of his candidacy, pp. 5–17. See also “The Indian Presidential Election,” Indian Press Digests, I, No. 5 (03 1953), 67–75.Google Scholar

12 Special volume of the Annals, CCLXXVII (09 1951).Google Scholar

13 The Indian delegation was the only one among all those then visiting China which included non-Communists. (Shastri, p. 39)

14 See Shah, , pp. 67, 105–106, 118–119, 121, 152, 162–163, 302, 314–315Google Scholar. Other delegates made similar comments. See, for example, Hutheesing, , p. 142Google Scholar, and Moraes, , p. 52.Google Scholar

15 Hutheesing, , p. 235Google Scholar. Many delegates took note of the lack of facilities for hearing foreign broadcasts, but to some it only meant that the Chinese people were “too patriotic” to listen.

16 The Chinese interpreter intervened only once, Moraes observed. This was to amend the translation from “the late Kuomintang Government” to “the reactionary regime of the bandit, Chiang Kai-shek.” (Moraes, , p. 27)Google Scholar

17 Peking University, for example, was a ’restricted area” which could be visited only by pre-arrangement and with an interpreter. (Hutheesing, p. 13)

18 Panikkar spent many hours interpreting China to the various delegations, and most of the authors under review have recorded to a greater or lesser extent the views which he expounded to them, thus furnishing source material which the historian should not overlook when studying that diplomat's memoirs, In Two Chinas (see n. 4). Panikkar appears to have well deserved the nickname “Chinese megaphone” given him by some New Delhi wit. From these accounts it appears that he was able to answer the questions and ease the doubts of his compatriots more skillfully than a Chinese publicist could have done. Would any Chinese, for example, have attempted to explain his country's lack of statistical data by saying, as did Panikkar to Shah, that since foreign capitalists had been excluded altogether, the Chinese had only to “inform, instruct and educate their own people,” who, “seeing the magnitude and complexity of the tasks being tackled and accomplished, could easily dispense with the aid of statistics, in preference to the evidence of their own eyes”? (Shah, , p. 153)Google Scholar

19 Notes on Panikkar's statements in Mujeeb, , pp. 20–21.Google Scholar

20 Professor Chakravarti, Lecturer in Chinese History at the University of Calcutta, and Secretary of the local India-China Friendship Association, had taught Chinese history for thirty years. “The New China as I have Seen,” containing his impressions, was included in Sundarlal, , pp. 439–453.Google Scholar

21 Mohammad Habib, the brother of delegate Mohammad Mujeeb, had been at Oxford with Panikkar, and was Professor of History and Politics at Aligarh University. He contributed “Some Impressions of People's China” to Sundarlal's book, pn. 527–550.

22 Hutheesing, , pp. 173–183Google Scholar. Mujeeb's experience at a Peking primary school (established in 1910 by American missionaries) provided graphic illustration of the consequences of this policy. A large poster stood at the entrance to this school, showing “a beastly looking man suspended from an iron ring about to be bayonetted by a Liberation Army soldier.” The Party man turned headmaster gave the visitors a short talk, assuring them that all the teachers had been “converted and were fully conscious of their duties.” The children had been taught “to dislike aggression and injustice, and they had collected 6 million yen from their pocket money for aid to Korea. They were on the alert against reactionaries, and sometimes parties of ten and twenty children went out in the streets looking for reactionaries, so that they might bayonet them.” (Mujeeb, pp. 45–46)

25 The mild and impressionable Sundarlal, for example, might well have found in the Chinese system a degree of violence wholly unacceptable had not Panikkar explained that “when it was said that several million soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek were ‘liquidated,’ the meaning is that they were only disarmed and put out of action.” (Sundarlal, , p. 53)Google Scholar

24 V. K. R. V. Rao, Director, Delhi School of Economics, and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Delhi University, and at one time chairman of the U. N. Sub-commission on Economic Development, had travelled extensively in the West. He contributed “New China's Role in Asia” to Sundarlal's book, pp. 505–509.

25 See Mookerji, Radhakumud, Local Government in Ancient India (Oxford, 1919), p. 3Google Scholar:“… India presents the rare and remarkable phenomenon of the state and the society coexisting apart from, and in some degree of independence of each other. … Both of them were independent organisms with distinct and well-defined structures and functions of their own and laws of growth and evolution.”

26 Prasad, Beni, Theory of Government in Ancient India (Allahabad, 1927), p. 338.Google Scholar