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¶ More than 7,000,000 children belong to the government-organized Young Pioneer group, but only critics who have "decided in advance that New China is headed by a totalitarian regime" will compare these jolly scouts with "Hitlerian youth outfits." Girl Pioneers may be seen "playing ring-around-a-rosy" in public parks. Boy Pioneers climb hillocks and scamper about. Between boy and girl university students, "flirting does not exist." ¶ "At least in theory every curb on freedom of thought has been lifted." However, "culture is today the instrument to a progress of which it will tomorrow be the consummation" -which is doublespeak for saying that all freedom of thought is strictly curbed. Confucianism has been re-examined to tie in with Sino-Marxist ideology; back-country illiterates are taught with "stories of work heroes, Korean volunteers, the tracking down of Kuomintang spies, free marriage, love." Chinese fiction makes fine reading -apparently because it tells the reader so much about heavy industry and "the conflicts that sometimes divide management and employees."
Author de Beauvoir's report would be unremarkable if it could be dismissed as the output of a party hack or a Red square. But it is no more appalling for what it reflects, in passing, of Red China than for what it displays of the mental fiber of one of France's doughtiest highbrows. With her great and good friend, Jean Paul Sartre, fellow apostle of the unmeaning of life, Intellectual de Beauvoir seems to be proving that bedfellows can make strange politics. It is an affront not only to her countrymen's prized tradition of reason but to something even closer to the core of France, when she reports approvingly: "At the registrar's bureau when young people are severally asked why they have chosen one another, the standard reply is because he or she is a fine worker."