China

THERE are many interpretations of the Chinese Communist rise to power and most of them go to extremes. Some regard it as simply a Russian plot, overlooking its allChinese cast. Others see it as an unavoidable act of nature like an earthquake, neglecting the very human nature of history. Some say we helped Chiang Kai-shek too little, and somerather few — protest that our error lay in helping him too much.

Amid all these confusing claims and considerations, military, economic, and political, we have neglected the realm of ethics. I believe our chief failure in dealing with the Communist revolution in. China has been to underestimate the vigor of Chinese moral sentiment as the basis of patriotic effort and to pay too little attention to the morality of our own position in the eyes of the Chinese. Aware of our own revulsion against Communist methods and doctrines, we have generally assumed that other sensible people would see through them too. Aware of our own generous good will toward China, we have assumed that it would shine through our aid programs, no matter how the aid was used. Yet today we are up against the fact that a significant proportion of Chinese Christians and Westerntrained Chinese professors, the natural protagonists of Western ideals in China, have been heatedly denouncing our “aggression" in Korea and Formosa. We find ourselves most violently condemned in China, not only by the Communists but also by patriotic Chinese who have been close to our way of life. This is an unhappy denouement to a century of Sino-American friendship. How shall we account for it ?

The quick and easy explanation is Communist propaganda and indoctrination. Communist lies are so big that they really constitute an entire realm of thought, beginning with Lenin’s great half-truth that imperialism is the final phase of capitalism. In China the Malik view of the world now holds sway. The Chinese people are at present a “captive audience.” If Mao Tse-tung can feed them the “facts,” he can control the judgmnents they reach. This still does not explain, however, how so many Chinese have come to put their trust in Mao. What is the explanation of his rise to power?

On this point our counsels are discordant; yet it is plain that if the American public cannot agree on why we failed in China, we have little prospect of constructing an effective policy either toward China or for the rest of Asia.

The popular explanation among Republican political aspirants is to blame it on the Democrats. This is reminiscent of the old Chinese ritual which made the Emperor in Peking responsible for drought, flood, famine, or other acts of nature anywhere in the empire. As used today by people who ought to know better, there is a slick element of self-flattery in blaming the revolution in China on the administration in Washington. It assumes that we Americans can really call the tune if we want to, even among 475 million people in the inaccessible rice paddies of a subcontinent ten thousand miles away.

Copyright 1950, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

This theory that Mao Tso-tung’s rise to power in China is somehow our fault in America appeals bol h to the Puritan conscience and to our view of ourselves as world arbiters, but it leaves Chiang Kaishek out of account. After all, he came to power in Nanking during the Coolidge administration. Since then the leadership of Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, India, and Pakistan has seen cataclysmic changes amid two decades of violence and disaster. Hoover, Roosevelt, and Truman have occupied the While House, Chiang Kai-shek sat on top of the Chinese revolution as long as he could, lighting it with arms rather than reforms, but no amount of American aid could have kept him there forever, nor could even a nation of MacArthurs put him back today.

The final word on the Generalissimo, as a recipient of American aid and advice has long since been written, by several score American specialists who were not political appointees and who included General George C. Marshall. Six hundred pages of their sober reports and appraisals were published as appendices to the White Paper on China in August, 1949, and may still be obtained from the Superintendent of Documents for three dollars. Among them General Wedemoyer in his famous report of September. 1947, concluded that “the only working basis on which national Chinese resistance to Soviet aims can be revitalized is through the present corrupt, reactionary, and inefficient ( hinese National Government.” Wedemeyer recommended military aid “under the supervision of American advisers.” Secretary of State Marshall, who had sought vainly for a year to advise Chiang Kai-shek, refused to take the risk involved in trying to save him with American military power. This was fortunate, indeed, for by 1947 Chiang was beyond saving. The explanation of his collapse, like the explanation of ( hinese anti-Americanism today, must be found within the Chinese scene, in the realm of Chinese public opinion and its moral and ethical sentiments.

2

AN ancient Chinese military maxim runs: “Know your own side. Know the other side. In a hundred battles you will win a hundred victories.” With our European background, we know little of Asia or its ethical values. Today our greatest danger is that the Russians may capitalize on our ignorance.

The conditions of Chinese life are far outside our experience or even imagination; rice or millet without meat, shoes without leather, a board to sleep on, worms in the belly, and an age-old dislike of landlords and foreign invaders all this has been the stuff of everyday experience among an intelligent people crowded in a hundred thousand villages across the face of the world’s oldest country. In a modern world where there is hope of betterment, these conditions have been inevitably the wherewithal for revolution. When our missionaries and traders first stimulated the revolutionary process in the old Chinese empire by importing subversive Western ways a century ago, they represented a dominant Western society which had no need to understand the effete East. Today it is different. The spread of industry and nationalism, science and democracy, has turned the tables on us. Asia is changing faster than we are.

The Communist success-story in China is now well known in out line: the methods of indoctrinating students who can mobilize peasants, the techniques of rent reduction and land redistribution, of village “liberation” and class reorganization, of personal conversion and guidance by self-criticism. Not many serious observers fell for the line that the Chinese Communists were “mere agrarian reformers.” They take pride in being Communists, but they use agrarian reform as a basis for power, just as they use Chinese patriotism. As yet no signs of Titoism have appeared. Nor should they he expected as long as the Stalinist dogma retains its appeal to Chinese idealism, and its moral respectability in Chinese public opinion.

This peculiar Chinese public opinion is a pervasive force which we have neglected to our own disaster. It is not expressed in editorials, in a country where the press is controlled and the people largely illiterate. But it led Chiang’s armies to surrender, taking with them the American weapons that Mao’s armies now can use against us. This Chinese public opinion is the force that bestows the traditional Mandate of Heaven upon the successful rebel in Chinese politics, it goes back to the beginning of Chinese history and is intimately bound up with the Chinese moral sense. It includes a healthy respect for military and police power, but not for them alone. In political life this force of opinion is seen in the acquiescence of the people in the government of the day. One might call it part of the “ unwritten constitution ” of the Chinese polity: and let us remember thal the Chinese body politic is the oldest in the world. In short, in the crowded life of China the attitude of the populace, their coÖperation or avoidance of coÖperation with the regime in power, has been the index of that regime’s longevity. This attitude has not been expressed through political institutions like the elections and parliaments of the West, but it has been made evident through many centuries in the daily conduct of the people. Bad government., for example, invites corruption, which produces worse government. A regime whose leaders have lost public respect is soon knifed by its own bureaucracy, in which bad men drive out good. Community noncoÖperation, well known to us in Chinese shopkeepers’ boycotts, can spread to the whole nation.

The Russians or the Nazis may have been able to get results from a slave-and-police state, but the Chinese Communists are taking no chances. They rose to power by establishing within China greater moral prestige than the Kuomintang, and thus far they have worked hard to keep it — long hours, ascetic living, incorruptibility, and devotion to their cause. Their Communism, though genuine Marxism-Leninism of the Moscow orthodoxy, is operating in the shadow of twenty centuries of Confucianism. While no one expects China’s dead past to reassert itself, one must still acknowledge that the Chinese way of life is distinctive and persistent. In dealing with the Chinese people neither we nor the Communists can disregard it.

3

IT MAY seem paradoxical that a Communist system which uses slave labor and terror in East Europe and Russia can maintain a genuine moral prestige in China. Of course many millions in China oppose the new order. Newly “liberated” peasants find themselves taxed as never before. But let us remember that our own revolution of 1776 was carried through by the active one third among us. The inner core of the Chinese Communist Party, which now claims five million members, has been knit together and battle-tested over a generation. It is operating a coalition in which nonCommunists actively participate. The broad extent of this active non-Communist collaboration among China’s small literate elite is the index of Communism’s ideological success and of our failure. These non-Communist intellectuals include scholars and administrators of international repute, men of integrity who defied Japan, spent the war years in the shanty towns of Free China’s universities, and refused to be intimidated by Kuomintang police. They are not men easily bought or coerced. Their active collaboration seems due to several factors.

First, China is in a period of hope; the promises of the new order are still untarnished, as in the first years of Soviet Russia. Second, the period of Nationalist collapse is still fresh in memory — the inexorable inflation, the Kuomintang terror against intellectuals, the insecurity. Today the inflation has been suppressed, albeit by Draconian methods, and civil war is over. Third, what one expects of any government in China is not what we would expect in America. Incorrupt officials area blessing even if public services are few. Young Communist administrators can shine against a background of warlordism. Fourth, while the Peking regime is far from thoroughly established over large areas of the South, where disaffection and unrest are reported on a large scale, the fact remains that for the patriot who wants to save his country there is no rival channel for his effort, no competitor to Mao as a leader, no one else with his prestige.

What is this moral prestige? Mao has it not merely because he fought for thirty years and won. It springs rather from his apparent “sincerity” (in the sense in which Chinese and Japanese diplomats used to accuse each other of lacking it), his purity of intention. By his pronouncements and conduct, Mao and his party have established the general belief that they mean well toward the Chinese masses, that they know China’s basic problems and have the means and determination to solve them. If he and his party lead China only to disaster in the end, it will not be the first time that self-appointed saviors have believed themselves utterly sincere.

This sincerity can be understood only in the old Chinese context, where the ideal government is not “the rule of law,” but “the rule of men and virtue” — that is, government by superior men whose decisions are guided by their enlightened moral sense. This was the essence of the Confucian tradition. The rigorous training in the classics, the ancient examination system, the inculcation of orthodox Confucian morality, all aimed at administration by superior men who could rule benevolently and justly by applying the moral precepts of the sages, not by following the letter of the law. The opportunity for Marxism-Leninism to exploit this Chinese tradition is obvious.

The inveterate evil in the grand moral concept of sage-government has been that Chinese officials often mouthed virtue but grew corrupt. Personal despotism has been the twin brother of Confucian morality. The pluralism of our society, which requires no One Man at the top and which gives us variety and strength, stems from the rule of law as opposed to the rule of men. It is on this ground that we line up against Marxism-Leninism and also against the Confucian tradition. But in the Chinese context, a Marxist-Leninist regime which is distinctly below the level of political life which we would tolerate in our own country seems to hold the promise of being an improvement over the old order. It is judged by the professed intentions and the conduct of its leaders. Can their promise be realized ?

If we also judge by the aims set forth by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, it seems possible; judged by the Russian record, it seems entirely improbable. Russian manipulation of the Chinese revolution, so badly bungled in the 1920s, has achieved a new high point. The Marxist-Leninist ideology of the Chinese revolution, which commends itself by promising increased production and welfare at home, is the same ideology that proclaims the Kremlin’s international crusade against “capitalist-imperialist aggression” in foreign relations.

The Communist thought-control system which mobilizes great production drives and efforts at national reconstruction within China is the same system that feeds the Chinese people Moscow’s lies about American “aggression" in Korea or Formosa. Russia contrives to get the Chinese people to do her dirty work. Militarism is likely to eat up China’s small productive surplus and impoverish her people; Mao is likely to lose ins moral prestige and find himself head of another Communist police-slate. But this is still for the future.

4

Our first step in the necessary long-term job of appealing to Chinese moral sentiment and enlisting it against the Russian system is to recognize our own past errors. When we supported Chiang Kai-shek, both he and we fell into a trap. Relying on our support, his shaky Nationalist regime was under less pressure to carry through reforms which would compete with Communist reforms; with our arms, it was the more inclined to use force against the Communists, which quickly proved disastrous. On our part, having committed ourselves to approach China only through Chiang as the legitimate channel during our war against Japan, we were less able to bargain with him for post-war land reform and other reconstruction programs which might have headed off collapse. The White Paper documents our long frustration in this quagmire, unable either to influence the Nationalist regime effectively or to dissociate ourselves from it, impotent either to reform Chiang Kai-shek or to disillusion his political backers in America.

First, we must recall that Chiang, like other Asian leaders in contact with the West, had to have two faces: toward us abroad he was a true patriot and a Christian, incorrupt and unflinching; toward the world of Chinese polities, he functioned as a power-holder and political manipulator, head of the government, party, and army, but not a reformer. While chief of state, he had to be his own Boss Hague, enmeshed in political deals with the conservative landlord-warlord forces of the countryside. This made him the natural target of complaint and moral indignation.

Second, the Chinese Communists used against us the well-tried tactic of polarization, which operates in two phases. In phase one they espoused all things good and desirable, all the reforms and freedoms dear to the liberal heart, and denounced all Nationalist evils. This made the liberals regard the Communists as almost liberal, and made the Nationalist right wing regard the liberals as almost Communist. Phase two followed when the Communists proclaimed, “There is no middle road; who is not for us is against us,”while the Nationalist right wing, being themselves totalitarian-minded, attacked the liberals who tried to stay on a middle ground. Fxamples abound of this pulverizing of the center by both extremes. Thus in June, 1940, a non-Communist liberal peace delegation from Shanghai came to Nanking to protest against civil war. Nationalist thugs surrounded them at the station for several hours and finally gave them a. professional beating up — no one was killed but all were hospitalized. Several of these genuine wouldbe liberals are now collaborating at Peking. In incident after incident the Communists, with an assist Irom Nationalist goon squads,won over the liberals of ( hina.

I lord, it has not been difficult for the Communists by ceaseless repetition and illustration to identify the I idled States with the hated Nationalist regime, especially when the Nationalists t homsels es and their ardent American backers have constantly asserted this identification. Our asserted identify with Chiang has been the (ommunists’ trurnp card, the big gun used against us. Thus the good name earned by three generations of our missionaries and educators has been all but smothered, and China is being steadily mobilized against American influence.

5

WHAT is the remedy for our disaster? In general 1 think we must bring the moral factor more fully into our political-economic-military thinking. We must distinguish in our own minds between the Communist reform program within China, which has both good and bad points, and the Chinese Communist integration in the Russian system of imperialism, which menaces both world peace and the welfare of the Chinese people. We must abandon any hope of engineering a Chinese Titoism by some tactic of wooing or bargaining; yet we must never forget that China and Russia are two different countries with different ways of life and different group interests, which may not be forever controllable by Stalinist dogma. It seems apparent to us that the best interest of the Chinese people conflicts with the ulterior interest of the Kremlin: within the wall of Moscow propaganda, however, the Chinese people may have great difficulty in seeing this. We should make it possible for them to do so. This calls for a more vigorous American information program, but primarily it calls for an American determination to avoid the Russian trap of polarization.

This tactic has given the Russian and Chinese Communists their greatest success. When Mao says, “We lean to one side,”we play his game by saying. “China is in the Russian camp.”Actually, Mao is engaged in trying to drag the Chinese people into the Russian camp, but we give a push, too, by refusing recognition. It now seems plain that the Stalin-Mao axis never wanted us to recognize Communist China: the British recognition has not been accepted in practical terms, nor would ours have been. But to the Chinese people we, not the Communists, now hear the onus of preventing friendly relations between the United States and the new China. By neglecting the struggle for moral prestige within China, we have let the Communists consolidate their position as defenders of China’s welfare and national interest. In actual fact, we are convinced that Chinese Communism is selling out China’s true interest to that of Moscow. But we cannot demonstrate this so long as we are successfully pictured by Moscow as acting out the role of “imperialist aggressor” which Moscow ascribes to us, and which keeps us in an immoral and suspect position in Chinese eyes.

This Russian success has two bases, one domestic and one foreign. In domestic affairs the Chiang Kai-shek regime, as the record is compiled and reiterated against it, has no way to regain its shattered moral prestige: the Communist tactic is therefore to keep us identified with it. This is done much more effectively than the American people realize. As long as the Chinese Communist effort to solve China’s domestic problems keeps its momentum, as long as the (’hinese people are brought by persuasion and coercion to acquiesce in oinmunist leadership, and as long as we seem to threaten the Communist-led effort at China’s national upbuilding by our apparent support of Chiang, this tactic will work. Our big news and picture magazines help it week by week.

In foreign affairs, the Russian effort in China is like the Russian effort elsewhere, to pin the evils of aggression upon us. Since this concerns events outside the direct experience of the Chinese people it can he accomplished by the Moscow lie-machinery, and we can combat it only by getting our own information into China, as into other parts of the Soviet orbit.

This suggests two essential lines of approach to China. First, it is absolutely essential that outinformation program become effective. The Voice of America is hardly a w hisper in China, and must be greatly enlarged, but it may prove to be less important than other channels of information that we might develop. The overseas Chinese communities of Southeast Asia are closely connected with South China. The traditional grapevine, by word of mouth, still operates in every village if we can only reach it with the facts.

Second, we must make every effort to avoid taking unnecessary positions where the ( hinese Communists can force us into conflict with the Chinese nation. Either diplomatic or military conflict with us helps them to consolidate their control in China and to wipe out our moral and practical influence among the Chinese people. In such conflicts, Chinese Communism stands to build up further support for its polarized anti-American position in China, while Russia stands to involve us in an enormous side show which cannot be decisive but can weaken us. Our strategic problem is therefore to decide what positions we must hold at all cost, even at the cost of lighting Chinese, and what positions are not necessary to us.

Our effort to support the UN in Korea is essential and must continue even if China is maneuvered into fighting us there. A majority decision to seal China in the UN by which we have promised to abide, might help the Chinese people view the world more independently. Meanwhile Formosa is of marginal military value to us and less distinct than Korea as an issue of principle. As General Mac.Arthur’s famous letter made clear, it could be neutralized by whichever side had air superiority in a war. Thus with superior air power on Formosa we could dominate the air over the coast; but with superior air power on the continent, an enemy could dominate the air over Formosa. Meanwhile SinoAmerican hostilities over Formosa can waste the military strength of both parties and make Stalin that much stronger. In the long term Formosa is less valuable to us than peace with China. We must try to settle its disposition through the United Nations.

Jn summary, we will get nowhere in China either by further support of Chiang or by appeasement of Mao. We can, if we try hard on all levels, build up our prestige by helping other, accessible parts of Asia solve their problems. We can try to get this story into China; we must get the facts before the Chinese people. Although under Communist control, it will be many years before they can be thoroughly “communizcd. In the meantime we have a bare chance to rebuild our moral position in their eyes and to combat the prostitution of China for purposes of Russian imperialism. But this requires a recognition among patriotic antiCommunist Americans that our failure in China has only partly been due to the knavish tricks of Communism and was partly our own grievous fault, for giving our aid too carelessly to a regime which had grown incapable of representing its own best aspirations or our moral position. It is on the score of domestic reform in China that we parted company with Chinese public opinion, for we (thinking of ourselves first?) considered that the evil ol Russian imperialism would outweigh the benefil of the reforms promised by Chinese Communism: and too many of the Chinese people did not agree with us. It is never too late in history for great peoples to change their minds. But there is no hope of friendly relations with the Chinese people until we take ourselves out of their purely domestic politics, take China out of American party politics, and concentrate upon the paramount menace of the Russian totalitarian imperialism which we both face.