CHINA: Reporter’s Second Looks

After the grand spectacle and the initial glimpses of China that came with Richard Nixon’s trip, a few American reporters have had a chance for second thoughts, second looks — and new looks — at the country’s less familiar phenomena. TIME Correspondent Jerrold L.

Schecter, one of two U.S. newsmen who were allowed to remain in China after the Peking summit ended, took a twelve-day journey through the land of Mao. Herewith some of Schecter’s observations, accompanied by an album of his photographs:

Homemade Industry

The Tungching People’s Commune near Nanking has a farm implements workshop where homemade steel is produced for tractor harrow blades. Even though the Nanking Iron and Steel Works plant is less than five miles away, the commune insisted on making its own steel as part of the drive for self-reliance.

This may seem like absurd duplication, but the Chinese today are less interested in rationalizing their resources in an economic way than in developing industry and self-sufficiency. The results of this urge to do it themselves are often impressive. At the Shanghai Shipyard, for instance, 10,000-ton freighters are being constructed on berths originally designed to hold ships one-third the size. By using automatic welding machines to prefabricate sections and then moving the sections into place with Chinese-designed cranes, the yard has cut building time on a ship from one year to seven months.

Another example of China’s industrial ingenuity is the Shanghai Watch Factory, which was founded in 1955 with a staff of 55 workers. The first trial watches lost a minute and a half each day. Today the factory employs 3,600 people who turn out 2.4 million watches a year, which lose, I was told, less than 30 seconds a day. Although some lathes are imported from Switzerland, most of the delicate watchmaking tools are now made in China.

An even more impressive example of China’s industrial leap forward is the Shanghai Automobile Factory, which produces two-ton trucks and the Shanghai model sedan. There is no assembly line. Clusters of workers carry pieces to autos being assembled, which cranes then move along to another pile of parts in the factory. Last year the plant turned out 2,900 trucks and only 500 cars, in accordance with a quota set by the First Ministry of Machine Building. The cars, though, look well made and appear to be assembled with tender loving care. By American standards the styling is stodgy, since the last model change was made in 1964. But the factory is working on a bigger, wider model of the

Shanghai sedan, which still will not have automatic transmission—a piece of machinery that the Chinese have yet to master.

One reason why auto technology lags behind is the fact that Soviet technicians who helped build the plant left the country in 1960, and have not been replaced. “The Russians offered us only reverse aid,” says Liang Wen-chan, a member of the factory’s Revolutionary Committee. “They said we could only make toy cars here, and they took their plans with them when they left.”

In most of the factories I visited, the workers—whose average pay was 60 yuan ($27.27) a month—had not received raises in at least seven years. “Workers are not concerned about their salaries,” Liang told me. “They want to reduce the wage differential between the city and the countryside. If people in one factory make more money than others, then they are not really serving the people.” Despite the lack of financial incentive, the workers appeared content. The plants are generally clean and the pace of work intense but measured. There are periodic breaks for tea, food and exercise during the eight-hour day. At one Shanghai machine-tool plant, I saw a woman nurse moving among the lathes, distributing vitamins and asking the workers if they had any physical complaints.

Wherever I went, I asked about importing foreign technology and new equipment. Invariably the answer was a quotation from Chairman Mao about the need for self-reliance, and the half-proud, half-apologetic explanation that “yes, we have many shortcomings. We have to learn from the advanced countries—but first we have to consider the local situation.”

Literature in Service

The Cultural Revolution of 1966-69 was a form of shock therapy prescribed by Mao to maintain revolutionary momentum. This traumatic exercise in self-criticism had its most pronounced effect on China’s intellectual life. In Nanking, I talked with three writers—two novelists and a poet. In the past five years they have published nothing except for criticisms of revolutionary operas for local newspapers. They are still “studying” in order to carry out Mao’s dictum that “all our literature and art are for the masses.” Teng Feng-chang, 42, who published three novels and two collections of short stories before the Cultural Revolution, says: “We spend a lot of time going down to the factories, the mines and the countryside to get the feel of the people. Otherwise, what can we write about?”

Even though he has not published anything since 1967, Teng continues to draw his monthly pay of 110 yuan ($55) as a writer. He is currently study ing revolutionary operas in hopes of writing one himself. He is also rewriting some of his earlier works, which in clude a collection of tales for children that sold 210,000 copies, to portray his heroes and heroines in the proper proletarian manner. “Some of our work needs to he rewritten and repolished,” he said. “The times keep progressing, and our thinking must keep progressing.” Teng is familiar with the major Russian works of the Lenin and Stalin eras, as well as with such writers as Chekhov, Pushkin, Hemingway, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. But he had never heard of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, or of any contemporary American novelists.

He believes, with Mao, that “literature must serve proletarian politics.”

He likes Chekhov because of his descriptions of ordinary people — “But of course they do not compare with revolutionary opera, which depicts work ers, peasants and soldiers heroically.”

Teng also believes that the Cultural Revolution has enabled him and his colleagues to do a better job of depicting the heroes of today. “We hope,” he said, “that some of our new work will be published by next year.”

Sex and the State

To a visitor from the West, the Chinese attitude toward sex is confusing.

At first it seems as if there is no interest in it at all. Baggy unisex clothing de-emphasizes the shape of the body, and in three weeks I did not see a single woman wearing a skirt or a dress. In Peking and Shanghai department stores, though, there was a wide array of skin creams at toiletries counters. At the Shanghai Industrial Exhibition, I asked a girl guide who used all the perfumes and lipsticks — in twelve shades of pink, purple-red and orange — that were on display. She tittered and said that they were for export. Later, a male member of the exhibit’s revolutionary committee explained that “Chinese girls like natural beauty.”

I saw many extremely attractive, vibrant young women in China, several of them working on such unfeminine jobs as operating lathes in machine shops. Like beautiful girls everywhere, they acknowledge an admiring glance with a knowing smile. In the Shanghai Shipyard, I stopped to talk with a tall, clear-skinned girl carrying two heavy drills. After a few preliminary questions about her job, I asked if she was married yet. “That’s rather personal,” she parried. Then she answered with a laugh: “No, not yet.”

Premarital sex is taboo in China, and the expression of love and affection is extremely restrained. You rarely see boys and girls together, although there were a few couples strolling on Chung-shan Road along the Whangpoo River in Shanghai. Boy meets girl at school or on the job, or at a people’s culture palace. All the Chinese men I met said that that was where they had met their wives. They laughed when I asked them if they ever said “I love you” to their wives. “That is not necessary,” answered the editor of a Shanghai newspaper. “We understand those things without having to speak them.”

Still, sex is acknowledged in China.

Wherever I traveled there were gynecological sections in the hospitals attached to communes and factories, dispensing free birth control pills and providing low-cost abortions. Maternity wards were basic but seemed adequate.

Women usually get a 50-day maternity leave and stay one week in the hospital after childbirth. But they are up on their feet after the first day, I was told.

“For a woman who works in the field, having a baby is no problem,” explained a doctor at the Hsuhang commune, which had just completed a new extension to its 130-bed hospital.

Traditionally in China, sons were desired as heirs and daughters thought worthless. “We have changed our attitudes about having sons,” said Yu Shi-teh, my interpreter in Shanghai. “Now the state provides for our old age, and we no longer look to our children to care for us.” Asked what career aspirations they held for their sons, Chinese invariably answered that “the choice is up to the state. Whatever will serve the state will be good for my child.”

“Barefoot Journalists”

The building that houses the Shanghai daily Wen Hui Pao (Literary Gazette) is a ponderous prewar Western-style structure, with worn marble steps leading up to its impressive entrance and shabby inside corridors. But that is about all that a Western news paperman might find familiar about China’s most fervently Maoist paper.

On a visit one day I found an editor setting type in the composing room. To freshen their “labor experience,” all the editors and reporters put their pencils aside one day each week to hand set type, sweep up or bundle papers with straw rope as they roar off Wen Hui Pao’s seven Chinese-made high-speed presses. Once a year staffers pack off for a month of regenerative toil at a machine-tool factory or on a farm. In the office, they regularly play host to groups of 20 or 30 peasants or mill hands who are brought in for a crash course in newspapering, then sent back to their jobs as “barefoot journalists,” on-the-scene amateur correspondents.

Explains Shen Kuo-chiang, 47, the paper’s intense editor: “We are tempered in the countryside.”

For years after it began publication in 1938, Wen Hui Pao was cherished among students and intellectuals as the most radical, most controversial — and best-written — political journal in China. Since 1965, when it published the first ideological broadsides that helped launch Mao’s struggle to unhorse his conservative opponents by means of the Cultural Revolution, it has been — more than any other Chinese journal — the voice of the Chairman and his wife Chiang Ching. It has been harder on the Soviets than other Chinese publications, and signals ideological shifts through its interpretations of revolutionary operas.

The paper’s circulation (cheap at 2¢ a copy), which was barely 140,000 in pre-Cultural Revolution days, has swelled to 800,000. Shen, who is the top-salaried employee (at $42 a month), heads a policymaking Revolutionary Committee that includes party cadres, soldiers and peasants as well as pressmen, typesetters and editors. Day-today operations are run by Shen and his bright young deputy Wang Chun-lung, 32, who worked in an enamelware plant before he came to journalism. At 7 every evening, the paper’s twelve top editors gather for story conference in a room hung with portraits of Mao, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Page One of the four-page layout is devoted to domestic affairs; there is a page for Shanghai area news, one for the study of Marxism-Leninism and one for international news, all of which comes off the New China News Agency ticker.

The editors schedule “investigative reports” — not Jack Anderson jobs, but pieces on, say, how the Shanghai Number One Commercial Bureau persisted in their study of Mao Thought. Even though it meant that their morning paper might not be out until afternoon — a not unusual occurrence — the edi tors decided to hold open for a late picture of Prince Sihanouk returning to Shanghai from a trip to Hanoi.

Do the editors feel an obligation to lay bare the errors of officials? “Yes,” came the reply from around the conference table. Well, how had Wen Hui Pao handled the recent power struggles in that,” Peking? smiled “We’re Wang not very clear Chun-lung. “We about have nothing to comment.”

Contrast with Russia

China has a sense of vitality that is not found in the Soviet Union. Russia, which I toured extensively as TIME’S Moscow correspondent from 1968 to 1970, is a classless society with a privileged elite. In China, by contrast, everyone is poor together. There are no private cars, no summer dachas, no resorts for key bureaucrats or favored intellectuals. Instead, there is a drab, intense and self-absorbed society, where workers, peasants and soldiers appear to be running everything from schools to shipyards with only barely perceptible social gradations. The leader of the Revolutionary Committee in a Nanking fertilizer plant does not seem to be depressed that all he has to show for his exalted status is the wooden floor he has in lieu of the usual cold, raw concrete slab in his flat.

Russia and China have endless superficial differences and similarities. For instance, one does not find public drunkenness in China—an everyday sight in the Soviet Union. It seems strange to a visitor that the one vice that thrives in a spartan socialist land devoted to physical fitness is addiction to tobacco. Chain-smoking cigarettes seems to be one of the few licit tokens of individual prosperity in China. Stores feature Panda pipe tobacco and three kinds of cigars; the Great Wall brand is favored by Chairman Mao.

Soviet society is increasingly bourgeois. By contrast, the Chinese are devoid of luxuries; they do not have motor scooters and are far behind the Russians in refrigerators and television sets (which in China are still mostly owned by communes, factories and other organized groups). But China is ahead of the Russians in some material areas, especially those not requiring modern, heavy industry. The quality and variety of many consumer goods in Shanghai’s Number One Department Store exceed that found in Moscow’s massive GUM. Food (a Chinese fixation) seems to be more plentiful than in the Soviet Union, especially fresh vegetables, meat and poultry. At dusk, the outskirts of Shanghai begin to look like one vast, endless vegetable market as peasants, by barge and handcart, bring their harvests to market.

Beneath the enthusiasm evident all over China the visitor senses an almost palpable current of restraint and hesitancy—a whiff, perhaps, of the kind of fretful, nervous caution that pervaded Russia during the Stalin era. There is an echo of Stalinism in the prevalence of the cult of Mao, which overwhelms the visitor. The country seems slightly dazed, as if only recently emerged from shock therapy. There is a visible effort to blend in, not to be singled out because of deviant actions or opinions.

The price of China’s advances, in short, has been a conformity and group discipline that would be beyond belief in the West. It is far more rigid than anything to be encountered in the Soviet Union.