Stalin and China

BY GEORGE F. KENNAN

ONE permanent element of Russia’s policy in Asia which stands out with reasonable definiteness and clarity in the historical record is the sheer geopolitical necessity of protecting from foreign penetration and domination those areas of Asia — Manchuria, Outer Mongolia, and Sinkiang — which lie adjacent to the Russian borders. For decades, the Czar’s government was absorbed in this task. Before the building of railways and the opening up of China and Korea to penetration by the great powers, this question was less urgent for Russia. But by the end of the nineteenth century, the development of modern techniques of transportation and communication had facilitated the extension of great-power influence into hitherto untouched, or little touched, areas. With these developments, and with the simultaneous settlement of Siberia, the Asian border became a problem to Russia as it had never been before.

I do not mean to say that Russia’s interest in these regions was only a reaction to the imperialism of others. You could just as well put it the other way around. The building of the TransSiberian Railway by the Czar’s government, and particularly its extension across Manchuria, was itself a stimulus to the activity of the other powers. They feared Russia’s expansion into China as much as Russia feared theirs.

The fact is (and it is a fact we tend to ignore in these days when we are all such good anti-imperialists) that the process of nineteenth-century imperialism took place everywhere in a highly competitive atmosphere, so that to refrain from being imperialistic yourself did not generally mean to spare the area in question from becoming the victim of imperialism. The alternative to the establishment of American power in the Philippines, for example, was not a nice, free, progressive Philippine Republic; it was Spanish, German, or Japanese domination. Abstention on our part from the taking of the Philippines could have been argued, and was, from the standpoint of our interests; it could scarcely have been argued from the interests of the Filipinos themselves. And so it was in the great underdeveloped, politically unorganized spaces that lay between Russia and China.

In the period immediately following the Revolution, the Soviet leaders made a great point of condemning the former czarist Russian hegemony in these border areas as imperialistic and of promising the Chinese people that never, never would Soviet Russia move along this path. In 1919 and 1920 fulsome proclamations were issued in Moscow denouncing the unequal treaties by which Russia and China had previously been bound, renouncing all the privileges and rights flowing from these treaties, promising henceforth to live with China on a basis of complete equality. Initially, these promises even included the transfer to China of the Chinese Eastern Railway, which before the war had been the property of the Russian state. But this promise was made during the extremity of the Russian civil war in 1919, at a moment when it was of vital importance to keep the Chinese from giving aid and comfort to Admiral Kolchak. As soon as Kolchak was defeated, the Soviet leaders had second thoughts. The Chinese authorities in North China and Manchuria were at that time, in the Soviet view, Japanese puppets. Did one really want to turn the railway over, in effect, to the Japanese? The answer obviously was no. So Moscow reneged on this offer by the simple device of denying that the offending passage had ever been included in the original proclamation and struck out on a line of policy which kept this railway in Soviet hands until 1935, when the Japanese, not the Chinese, forced the Russians to sell it.

This is a good point at which to remind ourselves that throughout the period between the two wars, the greatest problem for Soviet foreign policy in the Far East was the Japanese penetration into Manchuria — a phenomenon which had been stimulated by Russia’s extreme weakness around the time of the Revolution.

There was no more ardent desire on the part of Soviet policy makers than to see Japanese influence removed from the Manchurian area. But throughout the twenties and the thirties, Russia remained too weak to take anything more than a defensive attitude in this question. Her main concern — and the best she could hope to do — was to prevent the Japanese from advancing still farther and encroaching on Soviet territory itself.

In Outer Mongolia, a different situation prevailed. This great region, which in the years just before the Revolution had been a Russian protectorate, was formally part of China. As good antiimperialists, the Russian Communists should, of course, have been content to leave it to the Chinese. But the Chinese lacked the power to administer and protect the region. And when the anti-Bolshevik forces lost out and were expelled from Siberia in the Russian civil war, some of their least attractive leaders took refuge in Outer Mongolia, terrorized its inhabitants with their bands of bloodthirsty followers, and made use of the territory as a base for anti-Bolshevik military activity.

All this held considerable danger for the men in Moscow. Their only link with the Soviet Far East was the slender five-thousand-mile line of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Outer Mongolia lay close to the vulnerable part of this line that bends to the south around Lake Baikal. To remain inactive would have been to invite penetration and domination of the area by the Japanese, acting in association with anti-Bolshevik Russian forces. This was particularly dangerous, because the part of Siberia just west of Baikal contained, itself, a large Mongolian population. If the Mongols to the south remained under Japanese and White Russian influence, this could become a source of disaffection for the Mongols within Siberia proper.

Faced with this problem, the Russian Communists acted in the best Asian tradition. They arranged the establishment of a puppet government in Outer Mongolia, got it to request their military assistance, intervened militarily, and restored, in effect, the old czarist protectorate — an arrangement which has endured to the present day.

ALL this had nothing to do, of course, with democracy. This was one of those situations (Americans sometimes find it hard to believe that they exist) where democracy was neither here nor there. The motives that prompted Soviet action in this case were exactly the same as those that had moved the Czar’s government to intervene in these areas in the first place. I have gone into these details in order to show how compelling, how inexorable were the geopolitical considerations that governed Russian policy here, both before and after the Revolution. But let us note that at the basis of this geopolitical necessity there lay, invariably, the weakness of China. It was this weakness that brought the whole complex into play. The existence of a strong China clearly undermines the rationale for such a policy. The fact that today the control of the Chinese Eastern Railway and Northern Manchuria lies with China is a reflection of China’s new strength. It will be interesting to see how long Russia will be able to retain her hegemony in Outer Mongolia now that the alternative to it is not Japanese power but the power of China itself.

So much for the purely defensive part of Soviet policy in the Far East — the part that related to the border areas. But the question also arose: What should Soviet policy be toward the Orient farther afield, toward China proper and the other countries of the Asian mainland? In Europe, the answer had been at least reasonably clear. First, it was the incitement to revolution; then, after 1921, it was that (somewhat less hopefully) plus the tapping of the economic resources of the great European powers in the interests of the physical strengthening of the Soviet state. But what should be the objective with respect to a great backward country such as China, a country devoid of the classic prerequisites for revolution in the Marxist sense and so weak economically that its resources could contribute very little to Russia’s economic development?

In the approach to this problem, Soviet policy makers were bedeviled by a question to which, down to the present day, they have found no adequate answer. It is the conflict between the goals ol social revolution and of national liberation. Let me attempt to define it.

You have, in the Marxist view, an individual who owns none of the means of production and who works for someone else who does own them. He is the worker. He is exploited. Because he possesses no property, he is socially and politically pure, capable only of worthy and constructive impulses. You are for him; you are against the capitalist who exploits him. So far, so good.

But it is not only capitalism that figures in the Marxist scheme of things: there is also imperialism. Country A is rich and highly industrialized. Country B is weak and underdeveloped. Country A dominates country B economically: drains it of its raw materials, builds industries on its territory, profits from its cheap labor - in short, exploits it. That is imperialism, and you are, of course, as a good Marxist, against that. You are for Country B and against Country A.

But wait a minute. Country B, which you are for, does not, as it happens, consist exclusively of downtrodden workers, languishing in the sweatshops operated by the capitalists of Country A. Such workers make up, in fact, only a negligible portion of its population — far too few to constitute anything even like a mass movement. Despite the general state of underdevelopment, the bull of the population has a social breakdown not wholly dissimilar to that of some of the imperialist powers. Some people own property; some work for others. If you look at this place through the Marxist lens, you can, in fact, see what appear to be all the familiar features of the Marxist landscape: poor peasant, rich peasant. landowner, bourgeoisie, worker, capitalist, toiling intelligentsia, nontoiling intelligentsia, feudal reactionary — what you will. A variegated society, in other words.

Now, are you sure, when you say you are for this country in the name of anti-imperialism, that you are really for all of it? Even for its bourgeoisie, for its capitalists and lackeys of capitalism, for its nontoiling intelligentsia, for its reactionary military cliques? Can you reconcile this with Marxist doctrine, especially when it becomes evident that the exploitation perpetrated by these people upon their fellow citizens is no less oppressive, and sometimes more oppressive, than the exploitation conducted by the foreign capitalist? And what do you do, in particular, when it becomes apparent that it is precisely some of these people, some of the local exploiters, who are the heart and soul of the anti-imperialist movement, the movement for national liberation? Do you support them in the name of the struggle against imperialism, or do you fight them in the name of the struggle against capitalism?

This was the conflict with which Soviet policy wrestled in China throughout the period between the two wars, particularly in the years from 1923 to 1927. It is also, incidentally, the problem with which Soviet policy is contending today in Egypt and Iraq, and perhaps will face tomorrow in Cuba.

IN THE case of China, the Russians never found any really satisfactory answer to this question, though endless variations were suggested and attempted. Both of the objectives, the defeat of international imperialism and the defeat of indigenous capitalism, were too close to the Communist heart for either to be wholly rejected. It was clear to everyone in Moscow, therefore, that one tried, despite the conflict between the two, to do both. There was a difference, though. One’s concern for the workers was permanent; they were to win in the end. The anti-imperialist bourgeois forces, on the other hand, were to be supported only temporarily, until they had done their work, alter which they were to be destroyed or, to use Stalin’s phrase, to be flung aside like wornout jades. On this all were agreed. Lenin himself had said, after all. that the workers in such countries should enter into temporary alliance or agreements with the bourgeois national-liberation movements, for the purpose of defeating imperialism; but he had stipulated that they were not to merge with these movements entirely, that they were not to lose their own organizational identity; they were to retain their independent existence in order to undermine the political strength of their bourgeois allies. They were first to use the bourgeoisie as an instrument against the foreign imperialist; then they were, at the proper moment, to destroy it. Beyond this, Lenin himself did not go. His successors were left with the difficult task of putting this vague and contradictory injunction into practice.

There were, in the early twenties, many centers of power in China. The relations between them were invariably ones of rivalry and struggle — struggle modified from time to time by temporary and highly unstable alliances, which were marked, in turn, by a maximum of expediency and a minimum of good faith.

Of these various centers of power in the China of the early twenties, two stood out in importance from Moscow’s standpoint. One was Peking, where there still functioned, by tolerance of and arrangement with the local war lords, an authority terming itself the government of China and recognized as such by the powers. The other was Canton, in the south, where there was centered (also by arrangement with the local war lords) the Kuomintang movement, headed by Sun Yat-sen. The Soviet leaders, with their general fondness for having two strings to their bow, played with both. From 1921 to 1925 Moscow labored to attain recognition from and to establish normal relations with Peking. This was not easy. The Chinese were, as always, reluctant to give up on paper even that which they had long since ceased to possess in fact. They were, therefore, sticky about the Chinese Eastern Railway and Outer Mongolia. But the precedent set by Britain’s recognition of the Soviet government in 1924 was helpful. Formal diplomatic relations were established between Moscow and Peking later that year, on a basis calculated to save Chinese face while giving the Russians real control in both instances.

Diplomatic relations with Peking were moderately valuable to Moscow so long as they lasted. They contributed to Moscow’s prestige. They gave the Soviet government a regular observation post in China and a chance to have a voice in the problems of China’s foreign relations. But the Chinese elements which stood behind the Peking government were regarded by Moscow largely as reactionary collaborators and allies of Western imperialism, and of little use to the anti-imperialist cause. Sun Yat-sen’s movement, being strongly nationalistic and at the same time socially progressive, was much more interesting as a possible vehicle of Soviet influence. The result was that in 1923 a high-powered Soviet adviser, Michael Borodin, was sent to reside, so to speak, at Sun Yat-sen’s court. Under Borodin’s direction, the loose political movement called the Kuomintang was whipped into a fairly tight militant organization, patterned structurally on the Russian Communist Party but having, as Moscow clearly recognized, a different ideological inspiration and political significance.

In addition to the non-Communist political forces of Peking and Canton there were also the Chinese Communists. The Chinese Communist Party had been founded only in 1920, by a motley band of intellectuals. By the mid-twenties, it had achieved a certain degree of ideological unity, but it remained weak and without mass support. Its members accepted Moscow’s leadership and submitted to Comintern discipline. For this reason, Moscow could not absolve itself of responsibility for the Party’s political fortunes. But Stalin, for temperamental reasons, was much more interested in achieving the expulsion of the imperialists from China than in pursuing the will-o’-the-wisp of an early Communist revolution within that country. He viewed the Chinese Communists primarily from the standpoint of their potential usefulness to the anti-imperialist cause; and in view of their lack of mass support and their military helplessness, he did not rate this usefulness very highly.

The result was that the Chinese Communists were instructed by Moscow, even before Borodin’s arrival in Canton, to enter the ranks of the Kuomintang, to merge with it ostensibly, though retaining clandestinely their own organizational structure, their own discipline, their own bonds of subservience to the Comintern. From this delicate and ambivalent position within the Kuomintang, it was to be the task of the Chinese Communists to strengthen the Kuomintang in its anti-imperialist efforts, yet at the same time to penetrate its organizational structure, to win domination over it from within, and thus to place themselves in a position where they could eventually take it over and use it as an instrument for the Communist conquest of power within China itself. In this way, Moscow hoped to kill with one stone — at least, to appear to be killing with one stone — the two birds of international imperialism and Chinese capitalism. It was over this impossibly delicate and contradictory undertaking that Borodin was supposed to preside.

To tell the Chinese Communists to merge with the Kuomintang was, of course, a violation of Lenin’s injunction that Communist parties, while aiding the national liberation movements, were to retain their own political identity. But this was rationalized on the grounds that Lenin had at one time contradicted that injunction himself by urging the British Communists to merge with the Labor Party for the purpose of disintegrating and destroying it. In this rationalization — ignoring national differences and invoking a precedent for a situation to which it was really quite irrelevant — there is a good illustration both of the sacred, revelatory quality attached to Lenin’s words and of the schematic, undiscriminating manner in which his successors attempted to apply his recorded utterances to the situations of a later day.

SUN YAT-SEN died in 1925, a year after Lenin. His death, leaving, as it did, a serious vacuum in the leadership of the movement, served to enhance the importance of the Russian advisers. From this time on, the burden of shaping Kuomintang policies and of guiding the relationship between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communists fell increasingly to Lenin’s successors in Moscow, and particularly to Stalin, whose authority, while still not unchallenged by others in his entourage (especially in the field of foreign policy), already exceeded that of any other single figure in the Party. Stalin seems to have been particularly apprehensive, at just this time, about British policy in China and about the possibility of further British penetration there. It was always difficult to judge how much of Stalin’s professed anxiety, in cases such as this, was genuine and how much feigned. In the years 1926 and 1927, a relatively high component of Stalin’s professed fear of British intervention in China appears to have been genuine. Certainly his calculations must have been affected by the reverses suffered in Russia’s own relations with England in the mid-twenties and the strain placed on the relationship with Germany by the rapprochement of the mid-twenties between Germany and the Western powers. All this was enough to suggest to Stalin’s suspicious mind that the bogeyman of the Soviet imagination — an anti-Soviet coalition of the Western powers, including Germany, under British leadership — was beginning to take concrete shape.

It was presumably considerations of this nature that caused Stalin to attach such great importance to the anti-imperialist potentialities of the Kuomintang, as compared with the domestic-political potentialities of the Chinese Communists, and to insist on the subordination of the latter to the former. The same considerations explained the emphasis laid by Moscow on the creation by the Kuomintang of a regular armed force. In pressing the Kuomintang to establish such a force, Moscow showed little concern for the social origins of the corps of officers selected and trained for this purpose; it was more interested for the moment in their military competence and in the possibility of their effectiveness against the imperialists. Here Stalin was no doubt misled by the success of Trotsky, during the Russian civil war, in making effective use of men from the officers’ corps of the old czarist army, even when these men wore far from having any sympathy with the principles of Communism. The appeal had been made successfully to these Russian officers on a straight patriotic basis. Why, Stalin must have asked, could not the same be done in the case of China? One of the results of this line of reasoning was that a promising young Chinese officer by the name of Chiang Kai-shek was brought to Moscow for training and then sent back to Canton to found there and to head a new military school to be known as the Whampoa Military Academy.

This, I suspect, laid the foundation for the catastrophe. No sooner had the Kuomintang armed force become a serious reality than Chiang Kai-shek made himself, by a series of brutal and questionable devices, not only its effective commander but also the dominant figure in the movement as a whole. And no sooner had he achieved this status than he began to take measures with regard to the Communists which made it increasingly evident that a continued subordination to the Kuomintang might be not only their personal but also their political undoing. Anxious warnings that Chiang was taking an unfriendly and menacing attitude toward the Communists went forward repeatedly to Moscow, with pleas that the Communists be at once released from their bond of subordination to the Kuomintang and permitted to remove themselves from the danger area before it was too late. In Moscow, the question quickly developed into an acrid issue of Comintern policy. But Stalin, stubborn and on the defensive, stuck by his guns. Repeatedly, the answer went back to China that the Communists must continue to try to collaborate with the Kuomintang. It was made clear that there was to be no “treason to Chiang Kai-shek.”

IN LATE 1926, despite the growing evidences of tension and disunity within the Kuomintang camp, the decision was taken to launch a military expedition northward to the Yangtze, in order to enlarge the area of Kuomintang power. The expedition was successfully conducted in the military sense; but it led, as military success so often does, to open political disunity. The movement split. One faction, led by Chiang himself, headed for Shanghai and the treaty ports, with a view to getting control of their great financial and material wealth. A second faction, composed of what was regarded as the Kuomintang’s liberal wing, established itself at the Wuhan ports, farther up the river, but fell increasingly under the influence of its own non-Communist and anti-Communist generals.

On the approach of Chiang to Shanghai, the Communist supporters in that city, still putting their trust in the Kuomintang, as Moscow had ordered, rose up in a manner strikingly similar to the later uprising of the Polish patriots in Warsaw against the Germans at the approach of the Red Army in 1944. Chiang behaved, on this occasion, so much like the Stalin of 1944 that one wonders whether the unoriginal and imitative Stalin did not take his cue from this example. What Chiang did was to pause at the gates of Shanghai and to wait for the Communists to fight it out with the anti-Kuomintang authorities in that city. Not until this fracas had ended with a Communist victory and the anti-Kuomintang forces had been effectively destroyed did Chiang enter the city, on Communist invitation, with his fresh forces. He then fell upon his exhausted Communist allies, slaughtered them unmercifully, and thus emerged the undisputed master of the situation.

This was, of course, a dreadful reversal for Stalin’s China policy and a heavy blow to Moscow’s prestige. It led, naturally, to bitter recriminations and heart-searching in the Comintern and in the Central Committee of the Party in Moscow. From the time the news of the Shanghai events was received, it was finally recognized in Moscow that Chiang himself must be regarded as a traitor and an enemy. Stalin went along with this view, although, with his usual tactical skill, he contrived to evade personal responsibility for the disaster. But he was still reluctant to give up his belief that the Kuomintang could be employed as a useful instrument of Soviet policy. He insisted, therefore, that the Chinese Communists now adopt the same sort of semisubservience to the more liberal wing of the Kuomintang, centered in the Wuhan ports, that they had previously been required to adopt toward Chiang. This, too, ended in a woeful setback. The Wuhan Kuomintang, also under the domination of its military leaders, likewise proceeded, somewhat less dramatically but scarcely less effectively than had been the case with Chiang, to make short shift of its Communist allies.

This completed the disaster. The Chinese Communist Party was decimated and forced to go underground. Moscow, with its remoteness and its lack of feel for the situation on the spot, had simply pushed the Party into the dragon’s mouth. To save Stalin’s face, the Party’s leader, Chen Tu-hsiu, had to be expelled and denounced, without a shadow of grounds, as a Trotskyite. It was Mao Tse-tung who rescued some of the underground remnants of the Party and took them away to the hills to lead for many years the life of outlaws, in company with criminals and desperadoes, until, in the mid-thirties, they could effect their long march around the periphery of China to the north and there, on the border between Chinese and Soviet power, lay the foundations of the new Chinese Communist movement.

WHAT all this amounted to was that by the end of 1927 the effort of the Kremlin to build up and exploit a national-liberation Chinese movement, with a view to the expulsion of overseas imperialist power from China, had ended in an irreparable fiasco. The movement, as soon as it acquired military strength, had got quite out of Moscow’s control. Then it had turned, with contemptuous ruthlessness, to bite the hand that fed it. Furthermore, to the interests of this unhappy venture there had been sacrificed the incipient and not wholly unpromising Communist movement of China of that day — sacrificed to a point where remnants of it could survive for a decade into the future only as individual underground conspirators in the Chinese cities and villages or as a tiny band of outlaws in the remote fastnesses of the western mountains.

Why had all this occurred? What had gone wrong? What was the lesson of this catastrophe?

Stalin’s political opponents — notably the Trotskyites — laid it to his willful departure from Lenin’s principles and charged him with having persisted in grave tactical errors.

This argument need not, I think, detain us long. We have no need to assume, as Stalin’s Marxist critics felt obliged to do, that Lenin was infallible. And if Stalin did stretch Lenin’s principle that Communist parties were not to merge with national-liberation movements, he did not stretch it very far. These broad ideological propositions in which Russian Communists have always loved to clothe their actions have seldom corresponded entirely to the actual situations with which people were faced. As a consequence, they have constantly been stretched for reasons of expedience. Lenin himself stretched them, with a cheerful lack of inhibition, whenever he found it useful to do so. This is how Communist doctrine soon acquired, after the Revolution, that rubbery consistency which it has today and which permits it to be used as an infinitely flexible rationalization for anything whatsoever that the regime finds it advantageous to do.

It is true, of course, that Stalin persisted far too long in a line of policy which was jeopardizing the very existence of the Chinese Communist Party. The reason for this, apparently, was the fact that the matter became a prestige issue between him and his rivals in Russia. He was a man who hated to admit himself wrong, and it would not be the last time that he would sacrifice the interests of foreign Communists rather than confess himself to be in error and thereby yield a point to his opponents at home.

Beyond this, one sees at every hand in the complicated record of this episode the confusion occasioned by the fact that for people in Moscow — not to the same extent, perhaps, as for people in Washington, but also not in negligible degree — China was a different world and not readily intelligible. The ground of China, as Mr. Conrad Brandt said in his excellent book on this subject, was treacherous for this type of long-distance control. Here, again, the semantic confusion was appalling, and it was compounded by the insistence of the Russian Communists on attempting to describe in doctrinal terms things that would have been much better understood if presented in more traditional expressions. One has the impression, in going through this story of Stalin’s difficulties in China, that the happenings there seldom were what they appeared to be or what Moscow took them to be, that the whole semantic baggage of revolutionary Marxism was simply exploited in many instances by the supple Chinese to disguise impulses, necessities, plans, intrigues, and possibilities of the various Chinese factions which in reality had nothing to do with ideology at all. Moscow, in other words, understood very poorly what it was doing. What occurred at that time in China was simply the painful demonstration of a truth which is deeply repugnant to Russian Communism but with which Moscow is being more and more forcefully confronted in our own time: namely, that this is a multiple, complex world, not a simple one; that truth is not unitary but multiple. The differences that divided Russia, a Christianized country which had drawn its cultural influences from Byzantium and later from the Protestant West, and the Oriental world of China were simply too great to be fully bridged even by the attractive stereotypes of Marxism.

IN HIS preoccupation with the anti-imperialist cause in China, in his desire to see British and Japanese and Americans expelled from that country and all the elements of their special privilege and power there destroyed, Stalin was, as the British might say, on a hopeful wicket. This was indeed the pattern of the future. The revolt of nonEurope against Europe was destined to be the dominant political reality of the middle decades of the present century. And Stalin had some reason to feel that he ought, by rights, to be the proprietor of this process. The Russian Revolution had been, in fact, the first great phase of this movement, the inspiration and encouragement to millions of people farther afield who also wanted to shake off European influence or hegemony.

Two decades later, the goal which Stalin pursued in 1927 in China would actually be entirely achieved: the imperialists would be utterly expelled — to the last man, to the last pound sterling, to the last dollar, to the last missionary — but not under Stalin’s leadership. It would not be Stalin who would realize for China the twin ideals of national liberation and social revolution.

It would be someone else.

Why was this? Why did Mao Tse-tung succeed where Stalin failed?

The first reason was that Stalin’s effort was premature. It was, remember, not the force of Marxist ideas or even Communist political activity that finally destroyed the positions of the European powers in Asia in our own mid-century; it was the combined effect of the two great European wars. The first war weakened these positions and undermined them, but it took the second to complete their destruction. It was not, by the same analogy, Communist efforts which destroyed the old order in Europe itself in the thirties and forties and eventually delivered the eastern half of the continent into Communist hands; it was Hitler who did this. It was he who destroyed the powers of resistance of the peoples of Eastern Europe and left them vulnerable to Communist pressures. And, similarly, in East Asia it was not Moscow, and least of all Washington, which really delivered China into the hands of the Communists; it was the Japanese, whose occupation of large parts of the country destroyed the natural powers of resistance in the population and whose final removal at the end of the war created vacuums into which Communists were prepared to flow, whereas Chiang was not. Without World War II, it is hard to believe that Mao’s triumph could ever have occurred.

Had Stalin waited another twenty years, his chances for success would have been better. But even then, I think it doubtful that he could have succeeded. If time was against him in 1927, so was space. He faced the fact that he was five thousand miles from the scene of action and a foreigner, whereas Chiang and Mao were Chinese and were right there.

Many Americans seem unable to recognize the technical difficulties involved in the operation of far-flung lines of power, the difficulty of trying to exert power from any given national center over areas greatly remote from that center. There are, believe me, limits to the effective radius of political power from any center in the world. It is vitally important to remember this, particularly in the lace of the fears one hears constantly expressed today that the Russians want universal power and will be likely to take over the world if we fail to do this or that.

There is no magic by which great nations are brought to obey for any length of time the will of people very far away who understand their problems poorly and with whom they feel no intimacy of origin or understanding. This has to be done by bayonets, or it is not done at all. This is the reason why, despite all that is said about Soviet expansion, the power of the Kremlin extends precisely to those areas which it is able to dominate with its own armed forces without involving impossible lines of communication, and no farther. There are geographic limits to the possibilities of military occupation; and such colonial regimes as can occasionally be successfully established at points remote from the ostensible center soon develop, as has been demonstrated time and time again since the days of the Byzantine Empire, a will and identity of their own and become increasingly ineffective as instruments. In this way, the exercise of centralized power is gradually reduced, once more, to something like its natural limits.

What I am asserting is that universal world dominion is a technical impossibility and that the effectiveness of the power radiated from any one national center decreases in proportion to the distance involved and to the degree of cultural disparity. It was this reality that Stalin, in a very incipient way, was up against in his encounter with Chinese Communism and the Kuomintang in 1927. His lines of political authority were simply overextended. For that reason they were ineffective and dangerous to all concerned. The result was the occurrence, then and there, in the relationship between Moscow and the Chinese Communists of something the nature of which still puzzles many people today. It was not an overt break. Throughout his years in the wilderness and even later, Mao continued to give lip service to his political affinity with Moscow and to pay to Moscow that tribute of outward deference which is required of all foreign Communist parties. But I cannot believe that things were ever the same after 1927.

From this time on, Moscow had in Mao though this had at times to be concealed — an ally, but not a satellite. Chiang’s massacre of the Shanghai workers in 1927 had demonstrated that Chinese Communism could survive and prosper only as an independent force, making its own decisions in the light of its own understanding of Chinese realities, not as a puppet of far-off Moscow. With this event, something snapped in the chain of authority and influence which Stalin had tried to fling to the shores of the Pacific.