Red China: Tourism for Ugly Imperialists

Every Friday morning, Pakistan International Airlines flight 750, a Boeing 720 jet, takes off from Dacca in East Pakistan and heads for Shanghai—the only major flight by a non-Communist airline into Red China. PIA has been making the run for three months, charging $428 for economy class round trip, and so profitable has it turned out to be that the airline is adding a second weekly flight. The Chinese Communists are using the Pakistani planes to open the door, at least a tantalizing crack, to Western business and tourist dollars.

Kits promoting the tourist pleasures of Forbidden China have been sent to thousands of travel agents. Chinese consulates now grant tourist visas in a startlingly quick three days. The result has been an increasing flow of travelers and fellow travelers from almost everywhere except the U.S. (neither Washington nor Peking will permit Americans to enter).

Kindergarten Quacks. Those who do get in are allowed to see only the carefully polished edges of China. For $30 a day, not including transportation, they are chaperoned by official guides over a neatly policed route that takes in six cities, including Peking, and a few selected communes, schools and factories for those who are interested. The visits can be deceiving: one kindergarten class began a quacking song for the benefit of a French tourist. As he recalls it, " 'How charming,' I thought, 'a song about ducks.' But then I learned they were singing something that sounded like quan quoat quai, which means, more or less, 'Ugly imperialists, go home!' "

The London Daily Mail's Angus Macpherson, who went in on the first PIA flight, described the New China as "a land of spacious loveliness cultivated down to the last inch, crisscrossed with power lines." To tourists, the most vivid first impression is cleanliness—the result of a Communist Party drive to shame, cajole and organize the people into cleanup squads that left everything shining.

Bare Subsistence. Kitchens may be clean, but they are also bare. The people still subsist on cabbage and rice, although good harvests have ended the near famine of the early '60s. Sugar and wheat are still rationed, but ice cream and cakes are plentiful and cheap, and the stalls at the central markets are banked high with ornamental heaps of vegetables, meat, tiny eggs and fish. "China has not forgotten how to eat," one tourist was told by his guide. Nor has it forgotten how to cook—for those who can pay for it. The once-great cuisine of Peking has slipped, but French TV Commentator Maurice Werther, who traveled 10,000 miles during six weeks in China, would still give even tourist-hotel tables a two-star rating in Michelín.