In the China we saw there were no signs of despair. There were poverty and hard living, but the people seemed to have enough to eat and enough to wear. Above all they had hope. Things were getting better, and they could see that happening. All improvements in any Communist state must be regarded in the same light as improvements within a penitentiary.
Some prisons are more comfortable than others.
Some even offer more freedom of choice, such as having a radio in one's cell, or a pass to the prison library, or permission to use the prison work-shop. The so-called liberalization within the Soviet Union is on the same order. While Mr. Rusk was joyfully playing badminton with Khrushchev, men and women were still being killed trying to get over the Berlin Wall. Formosa, too, is part of China, and the Chinese regard it as suffering under American occupation, with scarcely a word of Chiang Kai-shek. In due course, somehow, the Americans will leave, and Formosa will be reunited with the mainland, they believe.