AN ENTHUSIAST IN CHINA
_ $ir,-Your reviewer of Margaret Garland’s Journey to New China has written a nicely calculated mixture of sarcasm and faint praise. However, anyone who goes to China and is rash enough to tell an unbelieving world the truth on returning. offers himself to just this kind of attack-as well as the other kind which is less subtle but easier to answer. I am sure Mrs. Garland expected no less. Independent political viewpoints are, of course, not quite respectable in New Zealand. Gad, Sir, the daily papers can’t be wrong! So Mrs. Garland must do penance for her rash enthusiasm. However, believe it or not, her book is a very fair account of what the visitor finds in present-day China: a united people hard at work pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, mighty keen about having. a clear goal in sight after so many dark years of oppression and frustration; delighted with their great spurt of progress even if, as Mao TseTung tells them, they have only taken the first steps on a march of ten thousand li; full of enthusiasm (dreadful word!) for the new life they are making for themselves; and moved by a spirit of personal dedication that is disturbing to comfortable burgesses from more fortunate lands. The English journalist, Basil Davidson, in his Daybreak in China, gives a very similar account. Of course, the impartial visitor must have some criticisms, too, but I, for one, am not going out of my way to do Mr. Dulles’s work for him. There are two slighting references in Mr. Hall’s review that cannot be let past: to the Chinese peace movement (no inverted commas) and: to Rewi Alley. Is it strange that a people so devoted to peaceful toil who have suffered so Jong from the bloody confusion of invasions and warfare should yearn
for peace and even make voluntary contributions to a movement which works to secure it for them? Is it strange that Rewi Alley, a big-hearted man who has seen more than enough of cruelty and suffering, should also so far forget himself as to show his enthusiasm for the new life and peaceful aspirations that now surround him?
H. W.
YOUREN
(Napier).
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 790, 10 September 1954, Page 5
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369AN ENTHUSIAST IN CHINA New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 790, 10 September 1954, Page 5
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