The most educational briefing that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance could receive prior to his trip to Mainland China later this month would be to spend a couple of hours with the Chinese pilot who recently flew a MIG-19 to Taiwan.
The former Chinese Squadron Commander, Fan Yuan-yen, has a lot to say, and practically all of it shoots holes in the fabric of deception that has been woven in this country about the Chinese Reds.
If you are among those who cherish the illusion that the Chinese Reds were merely agrarian reformers, that the leaders have mellowed after so long in power, that reports of Communist murders have been exaggerated, and that despite their political tyranny the Communists have improved the economic conditions, then listen to the first-hand report of pilot Fan.
He described how the Chinese Reds massacred millions of innocent Chinese when they came to power. He said that the life of the Chinese people is so miserable today that it is “beyond the imagination of foreign visitors.” He told how “many people on the mainland starve to death” and that some are even forced to sell their children to get something to eat.
Pilot Fan told how, before the Communists took over, the Chinese led free and easy lives. (This has often been confirmed by American missionaries to China who have related what cheerful people the Chinese used to be.)
“After the Communists came,” pilot Fan said, “the people were massacred in the public security establishments, detention houses and labor reform camps they were persecuted to death by the ‘revolutionary committees’ and people’s communes’; they were starved to death by the control of grain, meat and bean coupons; they were purged to death as part of the continuous class struggle.”
Pilot Fan pointed out that the Chinese told “a great lie” when they said they would “surpass Britain and catch up with the United States.” After more than 25 years of Communist rule, “the situation is turning from bad to worse… The 800 million people are living in a dark hell under Communist rule.”
Pilot Fan’s declarations ring with the sincerity of a special quality that I call “IWT: I Was There.” He was not only there in Communist China, but as a jet HYSE he belonged to a privileged class of those who get the best of whatever Red China has to offer.
Corroboration of how hideous total Communist control really is was given recently by journalist John Barron at a forum in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the American Conservative Union. He has just completed a 13-month study of the human cost of the Communist takeover of Cambodia.
The most conservative figure of the deaths deliberately caused by the Communists since they assumed control in April 1975 is 1.2 million. This is calculated as the sum of 400,000 who died in the march out of Phnom Penh forced by the Khmer Rouge troops, 100,000 who were killed in organized massacres, and 700,000 who died in the first famine and resulting disease caused by the Khmer Rouge destruction of the entire society, its institutions and its equipment.
Joseph Stalin once explained to Winston Churchill about the way he wiped out some seven million kulaks (peasant farmers) in the 1930s: “the death of a man can be a tragedy, but the death of a million is merely a statistic.”
And so it is. The deaths of the million or more in Cambodia and of the many millions in Red China are unfortunately, to most Americans, merely statistics. And it is safe to predict that the Administration that talks so much about “human rights” will not even consider those statistics relevant to Secretary Vance’s Asian visit.
