Essay: WHAT THE U.S. KNOWS ABOUT RED CHINA

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China-watchers also pick up clues from the non-American tourists and businessmen (about 10,000 a year) who are now permitted to go on strictly conducted tours arranged by the Red Chinese tourist agency Luxingshe. Though they carefully emphasize the more attractive aspects of Chinese life, the tours nonetheless reveal a good deal of its quality and detail. The accompanying color pictures, taken on one such tour, show smiling children in their best dress, model schools, other civic projects and an air of brisk, bright uplift —but they also make clear the ceaseless indoctrination, the careful regimentation and the firm discipline that pervade life in Red China.

The volume of information about Red China has become so huge, in fact, that one of the major problems of both Government and academic Sinologists is how to handle, summarize and evaluate it all. Herewith, based on the best knowledge, deductions and estimates of more than 30 China experts interviewed by ten TIME correspondents in the U.S. and Asia, are the capsulated highlights of what the U.S. knows about Red China:

∙ THE REGIME. Seventeen years after its victory over Chiang Kaishek, the Communist regime is solidly entrenched on the mainland. The chance of an internal revolution that would overthrow the Chinese Communists, says Professor Robert Scalapino of the University of California, "seems remote, barring global war or some other major and unforeseeable crisis." Other China experts agree. The Communists have unified the provinces, centralized all authority and imposed a totalitarian administration that has steadily tightened its grip on all phases of government and life. Chairman Mao Tse-tung's chilling philosophy is that "all political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." The gun that ensures his control is held by the Chinese Communist Party apparatus, whose 19 million members make up the largest of all national Communist parties. At its apex perch Mao and his top comrades in a seven-member Politburo Standing Committee; beneath them are a twelve-member Politburo, then 94 Central Committeemen. From there the party descends into tens of thousands of local branches whose vigilance reaches into every city block and every village hut. This pervasive network controls all facets of existence, pulls young and old into the web of ideological influence and ensures that no "foreign" political concept can take root.