The First Million

Premier Chou Enlai, a mandarin's son whose smiling, suave manner had once persuaded many U.S. diplomats that he was one of the "all right" Communists, last week quietly announced a stupendous fact. Summing up the accomplishments of 20 months of Red rule, Chou reported that the Communist government has killed 1,000,000 "saboteurs" and Nationalist guerrillas.* The figure does not include an estimated 500,000 executed in the current purge of "counter-revolutionaries."

But some people are slow to recognize the nature of the Communist Chinese regime--even when they get the word from the regime itself. From all the signs, for instance, India's Prime Minister Nehru and his advisers are still of the opinion that the Peking regime is the best government China has had in centuries.

K. R. Damle, a special emissary from India's Ministry of Food and Agriculture, was on his way home from Peking last week after concluding a deal whereby half-starving China agreed to sell famine-ridden India some 500,000 tons of milo and rice (although China could ill afford the gesture--floods and drought had destroyed 20 million acres of Chinese crops).

Stopping over in Hong Kong, Damle, with a smile and a shrug, told a reporter that the stories of Red China's purge had been greatly exaggerated. "Some few hundreds have been shot in Peking and its neighborhood," said he, "but these were mostly scoundrels who have committed misdemeanors under the old regime and who are receiving their just deserts." Furthermore, Damle added in admiring tones, Communist China's trains are running on time.

*Putting China's Red masters well up in history's hierarchy of political purgers. Highest reliable estimates for Herod's slaughter of the Innocents, 20,000; Catherine de Medici's 16th Century massacre of the Huguenots, 50,000; France's 18th Century "terror," 30,000; Russia's Red Terror (1918-21), 50,000; Stalin's deliberate starving of Ukrainian peasants, 5,000,000, and Hitler's extermination of Germany's Jews (over twelve years), 6,000,000.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.