China

on the World Today

WHAT has happened in China in the last three months represents the biggest shift in the world balance of power since the defeat of Germany and Japan. Three months ago the Communists claimed, probably without exaggeration, effective control of about a quarter of China and about a third of its population. The fact that they claimed more population proportionally than they did territory was a danger signal that the character of the civil war was about to be transformed. It meant that the Communists were no longer fighting a ragged guerrilla war based on poor and undeveloped territories, but were moving in on rich river-basin provinces and productive cities.

Then the transformation became manifest: the rate of collapse in anti-Communist territory began to exceed the rapidity with which the Communists could push in, take over, and administer. The surrender of complete Kuomintang divisions, under their own officers and with all their equipment, became the most important military characteristic of the war. These troops are men who have been disindoctrinated of their loyalty to the Kuomintang, but not indoctrinated with Communist loyalties. The employment and feeding of these forces loads on the Communists an administrative burden which some Washington observers believe will mean that for some time the trained Communists will be spread very thin and will have to operate through influence and compromise rather than dictatorship.

Even if their control falls somewhere short of full freedom to act, however, the Chinese Communists now confront both America and Russia with dramatic problems. The strong probability is that the Chinese Communists will eventually dominate a country nearly as big as the United States and with more than twice the population of Russia. What will it mean to the world to have almost twice as many people controlled by Communists, all in one country, as there are now in Russia and its European satellite countries combined? And to what degree will the Communists who dominate China be controlled by the Communists who run Russia?

For America, a momentous decision is involved. Shall we, sooner or later, attempt to uproot Communism by the force of our own arms in China? Or shall we grudgingly accept what has happened in China and what no large, popularly led and popularly supported movement of the Chinese people has arisen to resist ?

Among the Western Allies the United States supplied most of the manpower as well as most of the industrial power in defeating Hitler’s Germany. We were the decisive lactor in defeating Japan. We have since taken the lead in the policy of containing Russia, and in China we have taken the full responsibility of intervention against the Chinese revolution, without even token support from Britain or any other great power. Since we alone tried to stop what has now happened, the whole world is waiting — and not offering help while we decide whether to give up or to try again.

What will the Soviet Union do?

Russia faces problems no less dramatic. The surge of power of the Chinese Communists is capable of shifting the center of gravity of world Communism. Titoism arose in the European country which had the strongest native Communist movemen I and an authentic folk hero, and which owed the least to the Russian Red Army. Although the Russians “liberated ” Manchuria, the Chinese Communists owe much less to the Russians than Yugoslavia does. In their eyes, Manchuria was not a Russian gift, and what the Russians did in Manchuria did not determine victory in the civil war.

When the Russians got out of Manchuria, the Chinese Communists had to negotiate there with local, non-Communist forces. Politically, it was their own acquisition. It is significant that the way between Manchuria and Communist North China was not opened until after the Communists, using only their North China forces, had mastered the key province of Shantung.

Mao Tze-tung, a Chinese Tito?

Will Mao Tze-t tung’s confidence in himself and his purely Chinese support lead him to turn Tito? To be sure, the Chinese Communists are on record as strongly condemning Tito in his quarrel with Russia and the Cominform. And, in November, an article by Mao was published in the Cominform magazine in Bucharest. In this double-barreled blast he hailed the “world revolutionary united front headed by the Soviet Union” and denounced “American imperialism and its running dogs,” which “in various countries replaced Racist Germany, Italy, and Japan and are frenziedIv preparing a new world war.” To round things off, he derided as “utter hypocrisy” the idea of a “middle road ” between Communism and capitalism.

It is always difficult to interpret Marxist doubletalk. Nevertheless, the ferocity of this language disguises, without being able to conceal them entirely, two of those “hard facts” which Lenin once warned theorists to respect. One is that hailing the leadership of the Soviet Union does not settle the question whether, in the “world revolutionary united front,” China is to be consulted as an equal or given orders as a subordinate.

China is a very large country, there are a lot of Chinese, and Chinese nationalism is quite as independent in spirit as Chinese Communism has been in its achievements. As World War If was ending, just when there was a prospect of renewing the contact with Russia which had been broken for so many years, Mao demoted from power the influential Russian-trained theorist Wang Ming. Me also warned “some of the comrades” not to follow “foreign” writings and theories (nationality not mentioned) too “slavishly,” and admonished them to pay more attention to the facts of China. Mao himself is not Russian-trained.

The other hard fact that cannot be concealed is that in spite of the “utter hypocrisy” of any “middle road” between Communism and capitalism, the Chinese Communists have been following such a middle road for some years, and will be bound to go on following it for some years more. Even with the newly won industrial cities, Communist China simply does not have the industrial strength necessary to embark on an imitation of Russia.

Granted that the Communists in China will go on compromising with private enterprise, they will not, however, do so through a bargaining process which concedes to private enterprise a share of political power in the enforcement of policy and the control of timing. They will make their own decisions on what to concede and how long to concede it.

Who betrayed Chiang Kai-shek?

For Americans, the critical problem is that of the relationship between the United States and China. Can we retrieve anything of what we have lost in the policy of supporting Chiang Kai-shek as the Strong Man of China? Can we retain any footholds in China, with or without Chiang Kai-shek?

Before the avalanche that followed the fall of Mukden, complaints were made that we were betraying Chiang Kai-shek by not moving to his aid with more munitions and more money. The military collapse, however, showed that what was lacking was not aid, but the ability to use the aid,

Chiang’s best divisions surrendered not because they had no American arms many of them had American training as well as American equipment., and many of them had been air-lifted to positions of supposed advantage by American planes, or transported by sea in American ships. They surrendered because, in spite of extensive aid, they could not be convinced that they were lighting for a good cause.

Their propaganda urged them to die like heroes; but they knew that their government showed no compunction for their families. They knew that many of their officers were corrupt — the higher the rank, the more flagrant the corruption. It could not be hidden from them that Shanghai and all other ports were choked with American machines and supplies which the corruption and incompetence of the bureaucracy prevented from entering the economic bloodstream of the country.

The abuse of American aid

There is strong evidence for the bitter judgment that the conditions under which American aid was given were in themselves the real betrayal of Chiang Kai-shek. Aid was given on the premise that he was a strong man who must be allowed a free hand. The truth is that he never had the dictatorial power popularly attributed to him, and therefore never had a free hand. Throughout his career, he controlled such parts of China as he did control by a very careful balancing of his own followers with allies who were at times undependable and at times downright tricky. Even among his own loyal followers there never ceased to be divisions between rightists, moderates, and relative liberals.

The most damning criticism of American aid is that at each stage when American aid was increased, Chiang was being exhorted by some advisers to press forward and make himself a true dictator, and urged by others to negotiate and — even more important — to take steps that would bring to his side a larger following of moderates and progressives.

Each new grant of American aid turned out to be, in fact, not “aid to Chiang,”but aid which increased the power over him of those of his followers who were most intransigent and at the same time most incompetent and corrupt. Thus each increase of “ aid “ operated to decrease Chiang’s alternatives of action and to bind him to the more disastrous course.

What hope?

There is a limit to the value of post-mortems. It is important now to salvage whatever can be salvaged of the American interest in China. The ruinous consequences of unwise military aid and futile economic aid have decreased the influence in Washington of those who insist that the wrong policy could miraculously he converted into the right policy if only there were more of it. The discrediting of the demands for “all-out aid" has strengthened the position of the career experts on China in the Slate Department.

The majority view of this group has always been that it is risky to project a too neatly defined policy into a country as chaotic as China. A “policy,”they argue, is inappropriate for a country like China, where imponderables run wild, measurements are undependable, and forces are volatile. What they believe in, therefore, is not “policy,”but “a course of action ‘—something that can be adapted to the twists and turns of events.

The State Department tradition of putting what can be done in China above what ought to be done was reflected in Secretary Marshall’s statement to the House Foreign Aflairs Committee on the China Aid bill, on February 20, 1948. “The United States should not by its actions,” he said — and note the word “actions,” not “policy" — “be put in the position of being charged with a direct responsibility for the conduct of the Chinese Government and its political, economic, and military affairs.”

The full weight of the professionals in the Department of State is against attempting to retrieve losses in China, at a time when our mobilizable resources are increasingly committed in Europe, by assuming now the kind of “direct responsibility" that Secretary Marshall so cautiously advised us to side-step last February.