Students overcome gut-rot to speak on China

During July 11 students from Victoria were given the chance to examine the day-to-day workings of the People's Republic of China. On Tuesday they presented their findings to a lunchtime meeting in the Smoking Room.

The students were part of a 24-member NZUSA delegation which visited the cities, of Kwangchow, Shanghai, Tsinan and Peking during a 21-day tour. They were shown through agricultural communes, factories, universities, schools, kindergartens, housing areas, hospitals (some for longer than others!), historic sites, cultural centres and an army base, while also having time to wander the streets and survey each city for themselves.

At the end of the trip the Hong Kong Federation of Students took the delegation on a tour of Hong Kong concentrating on seeing both the very poor and the very rich (when it was possible to get past their guard dogs!), in their actual living environment.

Tuesday's forum was a hotch-potch of rambling ideas and thoughts from delegation members. Initial comments and impressions concerned the impact of seeing China with your own two eyes and overturning a lot of half-truths and false pictures you originally had of the country. Many people smiled when Jules Maher commented that the Chinese were normal people who enjoyed normal everyday activities, and yet he had touched upon a fundamental point which each member of the delegation kept returning to.

To understand China, an appreciation of her unique cultural background is necessary, but that does not mean that anything happening in China can automatically be divorced from events in other countries. David Buxton mentioned that the Chinese believed that they were merely taking pact in an historieal struggle in their long movement towards a classless society - a struggle which was taking place, to a lesser or greater degree, in the rest of the world.

However the Chinese are very aware of the Soviet Union's experience and are determined to keep moving forward. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the latest campaigns to criticise Lin Piao and Confucius and to better understand the theory on the Dictatorship of the Proletariat are all orientated towards weeding out bureaucracy and other practices that attempt to turn back the clock and re-establish capitalism China.

The nature of the forum and the time available prevented any lengthy discussion on this topic, but other questions covered included Chinese social and sexual behaviour, women's place in China, law and order and the wages system.

In order to facilitate further discussion on China (and its 800 million population) there will be a supplement in the next issue of Salient written by Wellington members of the NZUSA delegation covering all aspects of Chinese life and society.