RED CHINA YEAR OF THE GUN?

[Music] [Music] I have a box with small crayons they make beautiful joins red yellow blue black all sorts of it I love my small box with crayons with my golden yellow crayon I draw the Sun which shines over us it's I'm so brilliantly over all children because the Sun is Chairman Mao [Music] with my crown that's black a brown I draw a negro boy oppressed ad in Paris oh dear friend we will help you children everywhere healthy carefully with my crown of red I draw the red banner of our nation always we will follow the party and the revolution and we will beat beat beat American imperialism [Music] the People's Republic of China has been in existence for 15 years these have not been trend for years the imperialists headed by the United States and the reactionaries of various countries have tried to strangle us by every means nevertheless as Chairman Mao said only heroes can crawl tigers and leopards never will the brave be cowed by wild bears [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] taking capital city of the People's Republic of China Red China the voice we hear is proud strident militant claiming power not yet achieve goals which may be only propaganda or maybe real yet only a few hundred miles from China's borders in South Vietnam America's military power is growing will China's rulers read the daily battle reports as foreshadowing an inevitable American victory which could not be tolerated will they choose war or a compromise peace in the following hour will try as best we can to answer that question through the eyes of experts who have been there this past year and through film some knew some historical some propaganda while making up a picture of Communist China at this critical moment of history 1966 perhaps the year of the gun for nearly two decades since the Communists seized power in 1949 China has kept much of Asia at war sometimes using her own vast manpower and is often urging her neighbors in two wars of national liberation fighting China's cause without spilling Chinese blood here indeed they know which moves on our part could provoke the Chinese rulers in Peking to decide on war and Washington is determined to avoid these moves but America's leaders are also determined to stand fast in Vietnam in assessing their ability to wage war China's leaders have not far to look to find their chief strength it is China's enormous landmass 150,000 square miles larger than the United States plus its people mostly crowded in a thick band toward the coast experts guess there are between 730 and 750 million Chinese here by the year 1980 there will be 1 billion Chinese [Applause] it is on the backs of this vast men power that China moves today as it has done for untold centuries even in the cities she moves mostly on bicycle power primitives yes to those of us in the West who have traded muscle power for machine power but if we are to understand China today her strengths her weaknesses and her intentions for peace or war we must look at China through Chinese eyes who are their leaders how do they exercise absolute power over so vast of population on top of the leadership pyramid is the national idol the unifier the leader of the revolution Mao Zedong now being deified by that revolution turned into a God to hold China together after he does he loved and respected Chairman Mao it is you who inspire us with willful revolution it is you who lead us from the victory to victory it is you who make us understand that we may find ourselves on being Chinese it is you who teach us to grasp the worldwide significance of the Chinese Revolution we will follow you forever and march on triumphantly he is an old man 73 at this point who obviously shows signs of the of the very difficult life that he has lived Mark gain of the Toronto Star knew the communist leaders in the 1940s he visited them again last year since their decisions for peace or war will be based partly on their knowledge of us I asked mr. Gein if they seemed to understand this there has been no change in the in the minds of the leaders of China between 1947 when I spoke to them in the northwest and the caves and last year on every key issue they're thinking remains the same now if I if I may illustrate this to you I went to see Mao in his cave at one point in our meeting which lasted for 10 hours Mao Zedong asked me how soon would the Great Depression come to the United States now this was in February of 1947 he said the fact is that once you have this depression which must come then the toiling masses of Americans will march on Washington and they will overthrow the wall street government and they will establish a democratic regime that will befriend to democratic governments outside democratic systems including our own including the Chinese Communist mr. Gein was in China again last year during the Vietnam protests marches in Washington here was an editorial saying that great masses of Americans have converged on Washington the toiling masses of Americans have decided have had enough of this imperialist bandit Wall Street government 17 years the interpretation of social and political currents in the United States has remained unchanged mouths misunderstanding of the United States is apparently shared by all China's top leaders who are as tough as Mao and old these are official portraits the Chinese people see everywhere Mao's chosen successor as Yu Xiao Qi 68 China's president I asked mr. Gein how you compared to Mao their minds are exactly alike if anything there is a slight variation in their thinking I found mouse' films slightly more moderate than than Liu Shaoqi I remember multi-tone was was talking about the possibility of taking chiang kai-shek into some sort of a coalition government Lucia which his comment was very simple : best known of China's top leaders is Joanne Lai 68 former foreign minister and world traveler he is now the Chinese Prime Minister Marshall Judah 80 father of the red Chinese army leading general in the war against Chiang Kai shek Tong Xiao ping 66 main spokesman in the bitter feud with Moscow Lynn BL a mere 58 defense minister issued last year's famous blueprint for China's worldwide revolution chun-yan 65 a top-flight economic planner even by Western standards such of the men who will decide whether indeed 1966 is to be the year of the gun will they allow old prejudices old suspicions - warped their decisions suspicions of foreigners and foreign ideas lies deep in China's heritage to keep foreigners out she built her great wall and behind it lived in splendid isolation today her leaders have built a more fearsome wall a wall of propaganda through which no ideas except approved ideas can penetrate if mal should call for war with the United States China's people will follow him and believe they will win these posters tell themself and there is no one to say otherwise contact with Westerners is discouraged as ABC News cameraman Ola nice guard discovered nice guard a Dane spent a month filming in Red China for this report he asked to interview people the answer was that I arrived peeking as a cameraman not as a correspondent so as a cameraman I couldn't ask question he asked me to go out to make film about the workers settlement which should be something very modern and he asked me to go out and do a film about that some things you would like to show and then I say well I would do that but I would also at the same time like to show people how the slum is after two days I get the mid court permission to go out to the slum I come out to the quarter of Shanghai and was received on the street by towers and thousands of people and wealth thousands of people that was waiting in the streets he was well nicely first and when I walk on the streets there plow me and I had of course apply them to but it was away was a part of the program it was arranged before I went out there they had to take two days to do it and then I wasn't received by thousands of people it's awfully easy to go around in China and do appeal if you just do as the people want as the guys wanted to do in short do as you're told and they do for they are constantly reminded of how bad things were and how good they are now by comparison a Chinese Russian propaganda film recalls China's bitter past her poverty and her humiliation by foreigners it was in such exhaustive drudgery that the people lived in a land where sweat and tears were equally cheap Shanghai was a city of the most cruel exploitation of men as with all effective propaganda this has a basis in fact dr. Han su Yin author of a many splendored thing and the crippled tree was born and raised in China she visits her homeland often she tells ABC's Liu Cioffi about pre-revolutionary times I got quite close to seeing the real problem of China the problem of peasant poverty the problem of the land the eighty-five to ninety percent of the people on the land living in absolutely miserable conditions and it was absolutely no use making beautiful cities because these beautiful cities were just like pimples you know superimposed on this poverty in sutram which is my province it meant that there were 148 taxes to pay 148 taxes to pay by the peasant and some of the taxes in sirtuin were levied 70 years ahead so that the poor peasant never had any means of accumulating capital he could never become in other words even moderately prosperous if he struck a bad year he went to their landowner who was also the usurer to to borrow money and money interest was at 36 to 59 percent and in times of famine 100 percent a year interest and I think it is very important to realize that it is from this mass of poverty that has from the Communist revolution today the regime decrees that the revolution must not be forgotten during and shortly after the Revolution a Russian film company using a Chinese cast of thousands recreated the bloodshed the revenge against the landlords and the victory for audiences inside China and out the peasants brought the landowners to trial took away the land they had stolen and their homes they had built with the tears of suffering of the people [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] this scene was carefully staged notice that in front of the tank you can see the tracks from the rehearsal this is the residence of the traitor to the people Chiang kai-shek [Music] there was no longer any force in the whole world that would stop or [ __ ] the liberation of all China the army had welcomed emancipation from the landowners yoke and from the plunder becoming tang officials it had brought them Liberty these young people wrote long live melt Sato don't live the People's Liberation Army [Music] multi-tone proclaims the birth of the People's Republic of China the year was 1949 out of the upheaval came Mao's China moving at times rapidly at times haltingly but moving mark gain back after 17 years observes there is a great deal of change and at the same time there's very little first the very small change it is especially obvious in the villages I would drive into a village and I would have to pinch myself to realize that 17 years have elapsed since since my previous visit everything remained the same including even people pulling ploughs and men women and children pushing these tremendous grindstones mill stones to grind their grain but there was also at the same time a very impressive and vast change that I found it was certainly obvious in education in pre-revolutionary China there were virtually no free public schools today there are 1 million free primary schools with a hundred million students these youngsters are learning characters when they can read pay King will provide the text again Mart gain in the past you had epidemics in China well the epidemics have been stopped you don't find children with scabs on and children with rickets you don't find children with distended bellies the sights that used to almost to carrot your heart in the in the past and in the 40s and the 30s these sites are no longer there another observer of change is Morris wills an American soldier in the Korean War he was captured and then defected to China for 11 years he returned to the United States last fall US officials consider his understanding of the Chinese city dweller unique in the West he has now has a feeling of security he knows that he's always going to have something to eat in a place to stay and something to wear it doesn't doesn't to preoccupy his mind at all for the next meal is coming from it may not be very much it may not be very good but at least it's going to be something what wills observed is true in the cities today during the harvest seasons a variety of food is available in the city in the countryside it's more hit and miss China today manufactures a sum of nearly everything but most of it is too expensive for the average worker in Shanghai for example leather shoes cost one week's wages appliances even the old-fashioned Credle type sewing machine cost a city worker his entire pay for four months a television set would cost him his pay for over a year and anyway television programming is available only in the big cities and for but a few hours a day even then most people must watch in public gathering places like P Kings a North Lake Park wants the playground of emperors [Music] the many it seems a good life a convincing reason to support the communist regime Morris wills I'd say that most of the young people believe that life is better in China now today than it was in the tank a shape and a certain percentage of the older people also believe it's better and I am inclined to believe that that their life is better than it was under Chiang kai-shek if life for the average Chinese is better than it was before the Revolution if the people know only what the regime wants them to know then they would follow their leaders into the year of the gun if Mao decides to pull the trigger two questions then arise is their meaningful dissent inside China and can China's economy sustained a major war