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By FREDAUTLEYLANCASHIRE AND THE FAR EAST
JAPAN’S FEET OF CLAY
JAPAN’S GAMBLE IN CHINA
CHINA AT WAR
THE DHEAM WE LOST: SOVIET RUSSIA THEN AND Now

AYFreda Utley
THE

BOBBS-MERRILLINDIANAPOLIS

Publishers

COMPANYNEW

YORIf

1947.

COPYRIGHT,
PRINTED

IN

THE

UNITEDBY

PRBDA
STATES

Pirst Edition

UTLBY
OF

AMERICATuP.M. A.L

Foreword
IT WOULD
be impossible for me to list the names of ail the Chinese andAmericans to whom I am indebted in writing this book. Some ofthem are mentioned in its pages ; others to whom I owe as much are
not referred to since one cannot always quote those from whom one
has learned most.
For interviews
and hospitality
and other kindnesses I wish to
thank Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Dr. H. H. Kung
Foreign Minister Wang Shih-chieh andand Dr. Wang Ch’ung-hui.
Vice-Foreign
Ministers Kan and Liu Chieh, Chen Li-fu, K. C. Wu,
Wu Te-chen and my old friend Francis Yao who was working withhim at Kuomintang
Headquarters,
Chang Kuo-san of the ChineseCentral News Service, Cheng Ming-shu and Ma Yin-Ch’u,
S. Y.
Wu, Secretary of the Executive Yuan, Generals Tang En-po and
Li Tsung-jen,
Dr. Wong Wen-hao,Premier
Chang Chun, Yu
Ta-wei, Wang Yun-wu,
Chu Chia-hua, Fu Ssu-nien, Y. C. Koo,
T. F. Tsiang, K. C. Wu, Carson Chang, Hsu Tao&u, Shu Shen-yu(Lao-shu),
Lo Lung-chi,Wei Tao-ming,
Dr. Robert K. S. Lim,
Mary Chen and Loo Chi-teh; “Sinmay” and other Shanghai friends
too numerous to mention.
I am particularly
indebted to Counselor Chen Chih-maiof theChinese embassy in Washington(a former collaborator of Dr. Hu
Shih’s on the Independent Rcr&w in prewar days), who combines a
profound understandingof China’s political and economic problems
and culture with a Western liberal outlook. My thanks are also due
to Dr. Hu Shih himself, the former Chinese Ambassador
to theUnited States who has been my friend for many years and first
helped me to understand the Chinese attitude toward life. I am also
particularly
indebted to Dr. Fu Ssu-nien, the distinguishedhistorian
who combines the learning of China with that of the West and who,
while fearlessly criticizing
the government of his country, has a deep
understandingof its difficulties.
I wish also to express my gratitude to my Communist hosts inYenan who received me with every courtesy in spite of my prowe are on opposite sides
nounced anti-Communist
views. Althoughof the barricades, so to speak, General Chu Teh, Ching Ling myinterpreter, the editor of the Emancipation
Daily, Chiang Lung-chi,the doctors at the International
Peace Hospital, and many another
Chinese Communist made me welcome in Yenan, showed me everything I asked to see and spent hours talking to me. I am especiallygrateful to Chou En-lai, the Communist representative in Chungking,who made it possible for me to visit the Communist Northwest.
Among the Americans to whom I am indebted for information
and assistance are General Albert C. Wedemeyer, Colonel “Bill”
Mayer and Captain Gates of the Public Relations office, Generals
George E. Stratemeyer and Paul Caraway and George Olmsted,
Colonel Pendleton Hogan, Brigadier Middleton, Colonel Don Scott,Colonel Ivan Yeaton, Admiral Daniel E. Barbey, General Wortonof the U.S.M.C., his aide Captain Tom Watson who died in China,
and other Marine officers, Colonel Kellis of the O.S.S., Dr. Logan
Roots of UNRRA,
Walter Robertson, the United States Charged’Affaires, Bland Calder of the United States Embassy, and John L.
Kullgren of the War Department, Tillman Durdin of the New YorkTimes and Arch Steele of the New York Herald Tribune.
My special thanks are due to Dr. J. Lossing Buck, the foremost
American expert on China’s agrarian problem who gave me invaluable assistance in writing the chapter on “Poverty and the Land.”I have also to thank General Victor Odlum, the Canadian Ambassador and perhaps the best informed and wisest of all the diplomats
I met in China; also Sir George Sansom, British Representative on
the Far Eastern Commission. Finally I must express my gratitude to
Dr. Paul Linebarger of the School for Advanced International
Studiesin Washington for his help in the preparation of this book ; his personal encouragement has been as valuable as his readiness to answer
my inquiries.
My thanks are due to the authors or publishers who have givenme permission to quote from the following books and articles: Random House: Battle for Asia, by Edgar Snow; William Sloane Associates: Thunder Out of China, by Theodore White and Annalee
Jacoby; Doubleday & Company, Inc.: Wrath in Burma by Fred
Eldridge ; The Macmillan
Company : Chiva’s Destilzy, by Chiang

Kai-shek ; Harold Isaacs : The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution;
Lin Yu-tang : The Vigil of a N&ion;
Paul Linebarger, for permission to quote from his books and his article in the Yale Review;
Emily Hahn, for permission to quote from one of her articles ; theAssociated Press, for allowing me to reproduce extracts from thedispatches sent by Richard Cushing and Spenser Davis about Manchuria.
I have not attempted to follow Sinological academic style in therendering of Chinese names into English ; I have used the spelling
employed by the persons referred to or by the American Press.
While I acknowledge
my indebtedness to others the opinions
expressed in this book are my own, unless otherwise clearly indicatedby quotations. My acknowledgments are a record of thanks and in no
way attribute responsibility
for the views I have expressed.
FREDAUTLEY

Martha’sJuly

Vineyard,

25, 1947

Mass.

Tableof Contents
PAGE

CHAPTER
I

“WE

WANT

.........

TO Go HOME”
IN CHINA

15..........

II

GRAYDAWNIII

COU~DIPLOMACYIVSHANGHAIV

LASTDAYSOFCHUNGKINGVI

THEFASCINATIONVII

ARE THEY

VIII

SUCCESSOFTHEDEMOCRATICMASQUERADE.

31............

61..............

84.........

113........

OFYENAN.......

REAL COMMUNISTS?

IX

THE STRUGGLE FORMANCHURIA

X

WHY

XI

GENERAL~EDEMEYERIN

XII

THE DILEMMA

XIII

POVERTYANDTHELAND.

XIVCANCHINAREMAINCHINESE?.

xv

CHINA:XVICONCLUSION:AMERICA'SMARSHALL

Focus

139
170
...

.......

219.........

FAILED.

242.......

CHINA

OF THECHINESE

LIBERALS.

265...

.........

OFCONFLICT.

1%310.......

327........

STAKEIN

282

353
CHINA.

...

382

LAST

CHANCEIN

CHINA

CHAPTER%G

I

Want to Go Home”

T

HE flight traffic clerk asked me in mid-Atlantic
why on earth
It was October 1945 and 1 was
I was flying from America.
on my way to China via India. The giant Air Transport
Command plane carried only three passengers from the United States
to Calcutta.
Why, indeed, was I flying to the Orient now that the war was over?
If I had replied that I wanted to learn who had won the war, thisGI would surely have thought me mad. Like most Americans he no
doubt considered that the war was won once the fighting stopped,
and that after victory one simply went home.
Nor could I have truthfully
told him that I wanted to write an
impartial book on China. The test of a tale is the teller thereof. Everyone’s views are the result of prejudice and experience, and behindcool, so-called neutral books there often lurks a deceitful author whose
real aim is to show that the world ought to be run according to his
own pet ideas or illusions. I am fully aware that my own views are
the result of the life I have led, and that I am not at all impartial in
the world-wide
struggle between Communism and democracy.
I simply replied that I was a writer and earned my living that way.
To have explained further why the fate of China seemed to me soimportant, I would have needed to tell him the story of my life. Thatwould certainly have taken too long. Moreover my past experiencesin Russia, Japan and China would have been as incomprehensible
to this young American as a life lived on another planet. So I did not
mention that I had left behind, in a boarding school in Connecticut,
a son born in MOSCOW, who was all I had left from thewhen 1
lived under the Communist dictatorship with my Soviet husband.
Nor did I tell him that my husband had been carried off one night by
the secret police to disappear without trial into one of Russia’s concentration camps.

days

15

16

Last Chance iva Chino

It is also difficult to explain in a few words why my feeling about
China has remained constant through all my experiences and disillusionments.
In my childhood and youth the Chinese appeared as apeople victimized by Western imperialism in general, and in particular
by England, the country of my birth. Nearly twenty years ago I had
come overland from Russia to China believing that only Communist
leadership could free the oppressed people of Asia and the rest of thecolonial world from exploitation,
oppression and grinding poverty.
The year I had spent in Japan with my husband in 1928-1929
hadgiven me an inside view of Japanese tyranny and conditioned me tochampion China. In Russia where I lived from 1930 to 1936 I had
learned to know a despotism more cruel even than Japan’s. This new“progressive” Soviet imperialism was now menacing China as Japan
had formerly done.
The Chinese seemed fated to be forever the victims of injustice andaggression. For them the Allied victory in World War II had only
opened the door to a new menace. Had the long war of resistanceagainst Japan been fought in vain ?
In 1938 I had come to America for the first time to speak for theAmerican Committee for Non-Participationin Japanese Aggression.
In those days I had spent my energies trying to get America andEngland to stop war supplies. to the Japanese aggressors.
Now
America, my adopted country, was blindly helping Russia by giving
encouragement to the Chinese Communists.
It seemed to me that
history was repeating itself. First Japan had been helped to conquer
China. Now Sovie; Russia, through her agents the Chinese Communists, was being assisted by America to get into position to acquire
dominion over China. One had to start all over again the struggle toawaken American public opinion to the issues at stake in the Far East,
lest a worse Pearl Harbor befall us in the future.
At Casablanca, where we stopped four hours during the night forthe plane to be checked over, the Red Cross hall was filled with soldiers waiting their turn to go home. Most of the other rooms andbuildings were empty. It was like wandering round the stage of anempty theater after the actors had all gone.
Next morning in bright sunlight we breakfasted at Tripoli.
Latethat afternoon, after hours of flying over blue seas and brown deserts,
the green ribbon of the Nile Valley appeared in the distance. On the“WeWant to Go Home”

17

desert’s edge we saw the Pyramids below, and the Sphinx seemingly
no larger than a cat.
Impossible to stop in Egypt even for one day of sight-seeing.
The
plane traveled day and night, never stopping for more than thescheduled forty minutes or four hours.
Everywhere we were asked why we were flying to the Orient andnot away from it. The men one talked to eating a quick meal in the
Army mess halls had only one desire, to get the hell out of Africa orAsia and be home.
American demobilizationand its results were apparent in the springof 1946 when I left China to return to the United States by the
Pacific route. I traveled then by Marine plane to Hawaii.
Neitherthe Marines nor the Navy nor the Air Transport Command could
any longer send their giant transports by day and night over theoceans. The shortage of personnel made it impossible to service theplanes after dark.
From Newfoundlandto the Azores, from Casablanca across North
Africa and the Holy Land, over the burning sands of Arabia, acrossPersia, on to Karachi and Calcutta, across Burma to Kunming andChungking, across Central China to Shanghai, up to Marine territory
in North China, on the islands and atolls of the vast Pacific Oceaneverywhere were the unmistakable signs of American power, American efficiency and American prestige. But everywhere too the visible
power of the United States was fading away as its soldiers and sailors
returned to their homes.
Passing over the Dead Sea in the moonlight,
with the lights ofBethlehem far away to the west, I thought: The devil can take you
to the top of a high mountain and tempt you with dominion over all
the kingdoms of the earth only if you come from a desert or from an
overpopulated, backward and poor or misgoverned land. Not if youcome from a prosperous and free country with an abundance ofresources and little poverty. Americans, sailing in their great ships
high up over the earth, are not even aware of any temptation to dominate the world. They just want to go home. . . .
Empires have been built by merchants and adventurers
leading
paupers, or by tyrants seeking to keep their own people enslaved bydiverting their thoughts away from dreams of liberty to the “glories”
and rewards of foreign conquest.

18

Last Chance in China

Ancient
Rome conquered the MediterraneanWorld
after herpeasants had lost their lands to the rich while fighting for “security.”
Britain began her empire-buildingin the days when freebooters like
Drake plundered the galleons of Spain in the Atlantic.
Next camethe colonizationof America by men and women escaping religious
persecution, or seeking freedom from feudal restraints, longing forliberty, opportunityand enough to eat.
But the greatest expansion of Britain’s
power came in the lateeighteenth and nineteenth centuries when her dispossessed peasantswere impressed into the navy, or enlisted in the army to avoid starvation, while trade followed the flag in Africa and Asia.
Today the British Empire is contracting
and the British people
are too weakened to maintain the world order they established in thenineteenth century. Germany lies in ruins but a new imperialist power
has arisen. Soviet Russia is driven to expand by incentives which
are both new and very old. The Communist ideology is new and theworld order which Moscow seeks to impose is radically different fromthe old British concept. But the economic and political motivation
for Russian expansion is similar to that which drove the Czars or
ancient Persia and Assyria to conquest: the need of tribute fromabroad in order to maintain tyranny at home.
Russia has abundant raw material resources and a starved internalmarket.
But the Soviet economic and political system, which theycall Socialist, is too oppressive and cumbersome, and therefore inefficient, to give the Russian people tolerable material conditions ofexistence. The loss of freedom under the Communist dictatorshiphas therefore not been compensated for by the gain of security.
The Kremlin is driven to a policy of conquest by the permanent’
crisis in the Soviet economy. A complete breakdown can be avoided
only if Russia can obtain goods from abroad without the necessityof paying for them.
Before the war the younger generation of Russians knew nothing
better than their own subsistence scale of living. Today many Red
Army men have had a glimpse of the far higher standard of living in
the “capitalist world.”
Stalin and the Communist bureaucracy cannever sleep easy if outside the confines of the Soviet Union there areprosperity and freedom. Imperialist
expansion offers the only hopeof stilling the longing of the Russian people for liberty and better
material conditions. If the.capitalist world can be first weakened and

/

“We

Want to Go Home”

19

then destroyed, the Communist dictatorship can be made secure. If
other nations can be forced to work for Russia her people may obtainthe necessities of life which the Soviet system fails to produce. If
there is no freedom anywhere the Russian people can be expected toaccept their lot. As Stalin himself has written:
It is inconceivable that the Soviet Republic should continue to exist
interminably
side by side with imperialist states. Ultimately
one orthe other must conquer.*
To the Communists all capitalist states are by their very natureand they regard the United States as the leading “Im“imperialist,”
Yet in the United States, which combines theperialist Power.”
natural resources of Russia with the freedom and efficiency which
can make full use of them, there is no social basis for imperialism nor
much economic need for it-as yet. America’s resources are still greatand her land not overpopulated.
Above all, the American people participate in and control their government.
Foreign trade, which is a question of life and death for Britain as
for Germany, still seems unimportantto the majority of Americans.
American exports for three decades have represented, in the main,
gifts to foreigners in the form of unrepayable loans, Lend-Lease or
UNRRA
contributions.
The fact that the United States tariff has
prevented repayment except in gold is a proof of America’s near selfsufficiency.
Why should the American people accept the responsibilitiesofempire since they neither need nor desire its profits and glory? This
was the basic truth which gave American isolationism its strength.
Today, however, the terrible march of science has created such longrange and devastating weapons of destruction that the United States
has lost the security which geography once afforded her. Today also
there exists a great power determined to extinguish America’s attraction for Europeans and Asiatics, and confident that American policy
can be rendered nugatory by domestic pressures manipulated
fromabroad while her potential allies are dragged one by one into Russia’s
sphere in anticipation of the battle of the giants to come. Each country
by &e C-u&t
unable to resist Russia or weakened from within* Probtcms of Leti&m.
International Publishers, New York City.
dated in thirty languages to millions of people.

This book ig cir-

20

Last Chance irr China

disease is not only a lost ally, it is also a potential ally of the enemiesof democracy.
America is the only country strong enough with her allies to impose
universal peace, and possessing both the resources and the political
freedom not to be tempted to enslave other peoples. But whoever
heard of, or imagined, a country giving peace and security to others
without oppressing and exploiting them ? How is it to be expectedthat any nation will give the world the benefits of imperialism without
its curses? This is the dilemma of our age. Those who want power
want it for bad ends. Those who reject power are the only ones who
could use it for the good of mankind.
In China I saw America’s power and prestige being whittled away
and her hands tied by misunderstandingof the international situationand the strident demand to “bring
the boys home.” America’s
strength was also her weakness. However privileged their position
abroad, Americans long for home. In the nineteenth century the
British Tommy, born in the slums of London or some other city of
the Empire over which the sun never sets, lived better in India or
elsewhere in the Colonial Empire than in England, and he could enjoy
feeling superior to the “natives.”
But the attitude of most Americans
was summed up for me in the words of GI’s I talked to in Kunming.
Parked waiting in the warm sun of lovely Yunnan they said : “China !
Let the Chinese have it ; we want to go home.”
It may be different if mass unemployment
comes following thepostwar boom, and foreign trade seems a solution for economic crisis
and a substitute for the vanished frontier.
America’s lavish use ofher raw material resources has already created some shortages. We
are no longer free of the necessity to import vital strategic materials.
There may soon be an economic basis for American interest in free
trade and a free world obtainable only through the exertion of American power.
Already many demobilized men look back pn their life in the Army,
Navy or Marine Corps with some faint regret. Or so at least 1
was told by some of their buddies in China. Some few reenlist without going home, saying they “never had it so good.” Certainly it isbetter than a civilian job at $25 a week. The soldier, sailor and marine
has no housing difficulties
to contend with. And there is always thetype of man who cannot settle down again to work on the farm, or in“WeWant to Go Home”

21

a factory or office, after a war. But so long as the American people
control their own destiny, so long as neither demagogues nor dictators deprive them of freedom, world power is not likely to attract
them. This is the tragic paradox of the world situation. By rejecting
their historical opportunity
to establish an American world order theAmerican people may leave a free field for those whose every effort
is bent toward the attainment of world hegemony.
You have here a strange situation, a situation without historicalprecedent. While other nations strive, or have striven, for empire orworld domination, the United States refuses the prize which her arms
and her industrial might have won. No one could challenge the UnitedStates if her people desired empire over the earth. Their power ispredominant.
If the eagle felt like screaming the other nations would
listen and obey. Without America there would have been no German
or Japanese defeat. But, having fallen into the war, the American
people hastened only to scramble out of the lands which would gladly
have seen them stay.
It is understandable that every American soldier wants to go home.
It is less comprehensible that the American people, having proclaimed
themselves overwhelmingly
opposed to an isolationist policy, shouldhave demanded that we “bring the boys home” and refrain from using
our power to make secure the aims for which we fought.
Wars are not football matches fought only to be won. They would
be senseless unless an effort were made to achieve an objective andinsure a lasting peace. As Congressman Walter Judd said shortly
after V-J Day, “It is most unfortunate that so many Americans concluded that the war was over and we had won it when as a matter offact all we had done was to defeat the Germans and the Japanese.
Who wins the war depends largely on what we do from here on. It
will be won by whatever forces and ideas dominate in the reconstruction of Europe and the development of Asia.”
The issue of world hegemony is most clearly presented in China.
Here is the arena where a clash could occur which would lead to athird world conflagration
as surely as Japan’s rape of Manchuria in
1931. The Far Eastern policy which the United States has
more or less consistently for decades, here comes into conflict with a
Russian policy as inimical to it as was Japan’s.
Russia today, even more positively than Japan yesterday, threatens

purs

22

Last

Chance in China

the complete extinction of American rights and interests in China.
Not only this. A Russia dominant in Asia with bases in the Kuriles
and in Siberia facing Alaska constitutes a far greater threat to American security than Japan ever did.
Since the end of the nineteenth century the United States has
opposed the domination of China by any one power, has sought topreserve the integrity of China and insisted upon the open door forthe commerce of all nations. This policy has, however, been negatively rather than positively applied. Principle has time and again
been sacrificed to expediency.
Up to Pearl Harbor neither national interest nor security was everthought to be sufficiently involved for the United States to take apositive and strong line of action in defense of either China’s integrity
or American interests in China. Japan’s territorialconquests werenot “recognized”
but Americans continued to do business with her
at China’s expense. The United States, like the British Empire, supplied the Japanese with oil, scrap iron, machinery and anything else
needed for war, confining her protests to the infringement of American rights, not China’s.
For four decades the United States strove to avoid war over China
by giving only lip service to the principle of maintaining
China’s
integrity.
War came nevertheless in December rgq~. This was not
only because Japan had allied herself to Germany. It was also because
there came a moment when principle and self-interest required thesame action, when it was no longer possible to maintain the second
without the first. Thus American insistence on the preservation ofChina’s integrity and national independence was the immediate, atthough not the basic cause for her involvement in World War II. If
the United States had not refused to sanction the territorial
gains ofJapan’s long series of aggressions against China, Japan would never
have joined with Germany and Italy in a military alliance, nor havechallenged the United States in December 1941. On the other hand,
if the United States and Britain had firmly and actively supported
China, there would have been no Pearl Harbor.
The essential weakness in United States Far Eastern policy has
not been inconsistency but vacillation
as regards the means to be
adopted to achieve its aims. Over and over again we have failed to takestrong diplomatic action in time to save the necessity for future mili-

“WeWont to Go Home”

a3tary action. It is obvious now that the war with Japan which costso many American
lives in the bloody battles on the islands andatolls of the Pacific could have been avoided had we applied economic
sanctions against Japan when she first attacked China. We know thatJapan was ready to surrender before the atom bomb was launched
on Hiroshima.
Once cut off from imports of oil and other war
materials she had no chance at all to survive.
Today we are faced with a very similar situation to the one we
failed to cope with in the thirties.
Russia has stepped into Japan’s
shoes. She has inherited the “divine mission” of keeping China disunited and powerless. Russia today, like Japan in the early thirties,
exploits the centrifugal forces in China in order to convert her intoa satellite.
President Roosevelt at Yalta promised Stalin to bring pressure
upon the Chinese Government to force it to give up to Russia theimperialist privileges in Manchuria which China had struggled fifteen
years to deny to Japan. In so doing he not only disregarded China’s
legitimate interests, but he forgot that Japan had originallybeenraised up and supported by his relative Theodore Roosevelt as acounterweightto Russia whose Czars, at the end of the nineteenth
century, threatened to acquire hegemony over the whole of China.
The eliminationof Japan and the unnecessary concessions madeat Yalta to Stalin’s imperialist ambitions have put Russia back into
the position she occupied at the beginning of the century. The great
game begins anew. The conflict between the West and Russia for
predominant power over the body and soul of China has been resumed,
following the episode of Japan’s rise and fall. But today it has become
part of the world struggle between the opposing forces of Communist
Russia and democratic America.
In the nineteenth century Britain and Russia met face to face in
China, but Britain supported by the United States managed to push
Russia back by building up Japan. Today it is America, not the
weakened British Empire, which faces Russia across the huge bodyof China. Today the conflict between the West and Muscovy in the
Far East is primarily
an American-Russian
conflict. The Russians
understand this only too well and act accordingly.
But Americans areloath to see in yesterday’s ally the enemy of today and tomorrow.
Japan never really had a chance to establish control over China.

24

Lmt Chance in China

Her armies could advance and d: untold damage, but too few Chinese
were ready to cooperate with her to establish effective rule over theoccupied areas. Russia enjoys great advantages over Japan in thisrespect. Her resources are much greater, she has a land approach to
China and she has something more than a Fifth Column in the shapeof the Chinese Communists with their own army controllinglarge
territories in the North. Moreover, Soviet Russia, never having goneto war against China, can hope to succeed where Japan failed. She
may be able to revive and exploit the latent anti-imperialistandanti-Westernsentiments of the Chinese people so skillfully used by
Russia from 1924 to 1927 when she almost succeeded in shutting out
the Western Powers from China. Her failure then was due to ChiangKai-shek and the moderate elements in the revolutionary Kuomintang
which he represented. Stalin has never forgotten or forgiven the
Generalissimo for orientating China toward the West. Now, twenty
years after, it is a primary object of his policy to destroy China’s
national leader and National Revolutionary
Party.
How few Americans today remember that only two decades ago
Russia, not Japan, constituted the greatest menace to American, as
well as British, interests in China!
The struggle with the USSR
from Igzz to 1927 was the bitterest that American influence had everfaced in the Far East. If the alliance between the Chinese Nationalists
and Russia which existed in the twenties had been continued, it would
have proved irresistible.
The threat of a Russian hegemony over
China led America, from 1927 onward, to join with Britain instrengthening the non-Communist
majorityin the Kuomintang,
ledby Chiang Kai-shek.
Only eighteen years later General Marshallcame to China to try to revive in the name of unity and democracy
the Kuomintang
Communist coalition which America had been intent on destroying in 1927.
My three visits to China have coincided with three distinct phasesof her history and her relations with the West.
In 1928, when I visited China for the first time, I had come from
Moscow to Shanghai across Siberia bearing secret messages from theCornintern.
It was shortly after the split between the Kuomintang
and the Communists and the establishment of the Nanking Government headed by Chiang Kai-shek.
The Communists who had sur-“WeWant to Go Home”

25

vived the massacre in the spring of 192.7 were either in hiding or with
the Red Army in Kiangsi.
The documents, which I carried “in my bosom” in the style ofold-fashioned
melodrama,
had to be delivered in Shanghai withelaborate precautions.
My instructions were to register at the Palace
Hotel and telephone to a certain “Herr Doktor Haber” saying I had
arrived with “the samples of silk stockings.” When he came I handed
over with relief the sealed and silk-encased package which contained
I know not what secret instructions for the furtherance of Corninternaims in China. I had been chosen to bring them because I wasEnglish and the holders of British and American passports were least
likely to be searched at the border. Nevertheless I was glad my mission was accomplished, for I am not the stuff of which conspirators
are made.
Before sailing for Japan with more secret messages I was allowed
to spend an evening with the leaders of the Shanghai underground.
We met after midnightin a whitewashed cellar somewhere off
Nanking Road. The Cornintern agents plied me with questions about
happenings in Moscow, which in my innocence I was unable toanswer. The men I met, Americans and Germans or German-speaking
Europeans, must have been, if not Trotskyists,
at least extremely unhappy revolutionaries.
They had witnessed Stalin’s sacrifice of theChinese Communists and were watching with dismay the beginningsof his transformationof the Cornintern into a suboffice of the Russianstate.
Exactly ten years later I was to meet two of them again. In
October I[938 when about to leave Shanghai for America, I wasawakened early in the morning by the telephone ringing.
A man’s
voice asked me if he could come up but would give no name. I was
still half-asleep when a white-faced, emaciated and shabbily dressedman entered the room. I did not remember him but he gave me suchfull details of my visit to Shanghai in 1928 that I was convinced. He
was pitifully nervous and begged me to come and visit him and hiswife that evening.
They were the once famous couple called Noulens who had beenarrested as Comintern agents around 1933 and made the headlines
when they went on a hunger strike.

26

Last Chance in China

I agreed to visit them but I was nervous because Noulens had
insisted on my telling no one. For all I knew he might still be MC+
cow’s agent or he might even be working for the Japanese, and bothmight want to have me quietly disappear.
I took Randall Gould, editor of the Shanghai Evening Post, into
my confidence. He offered to wait for me in his car at the end of thestreet and to come and rescue me if I did not rejoin him in an hour’stime.
The Noulens told me they had been released from prison in 1937
and Madame Sun Yat-sen was supplying them with enough money
to exist. But they had been warned to see no one--or so they said
and I believed them. They said they had so longed to speak to someone they had once known and trusted that they had risked asking me
to their home. They were obviously terrified.
They were Austrians
without passports and with nowhere to go, for it was clear that theyfeared to be liquidated if they returned to Russia. They knew too
much. I urged them to meet Randall Gould, who was a liberal anda kindly man and who I knew would try to help them. But theydared not.
Poor devils. I left full of pity for these two white-faced derelictsof an age in Comintern history long past. They had left one prison
only to fear incarcerationin another.
Rejected by everyone, they
were too broken in spirit to save themselves and start a new life. I
had known men and women like them in Moscow, old revolutionaries
whose hopes were dead but who could not break with their past andwaited only for death.
“Dr. Haber” seems to have had better luck and more sense. He hadorganized a real import business as a faqade for his Cornintern activities and developed it into a flourishing enterprise. Some of his employees acted in the double capacity of traveling salesmen and agentsof the Cornintern with their salaries halved between Moscow and
Haber’s business account. According to the account given of him in
Pattern for World Revolution by the former Communist “Ypsilon,”
Haber, whom he calls Comrade L, decided in the early thirties that
the Revolution was dead and he would henceforth become simply abusinessman. His business was by then netting him a hundred thousand dollars a year profit. He calmly returned the amount of theoriginal capital advanced to him by Moscow, arguing that this was

“We

Wa&

to Go Home”

27

all the amintern
had a right to expect since he had all along paid
ten percent interest besides performing
his duties as a Comintcrn
agent.
I had not seen much of the Chinese on my first brief visit in 1928.
Hatred of the “Western Imperialists” was then still so great that myCommunist friends warned me against walking in the streets of thecity. I spent most of my time investigating
the cotton industry as abona fide research student of the London School of Economics.
I
also tasted Shanghai’s gay and opulent social life with Britishers who
were shocked to hear that I was writing articles for “that Red rag,”
the Manchester Guardian.
All values are indeed relative. Five years
later in Moscow in one of the periodic “cleansings of the apparatus”
it was brought up against me as a sign of bad bourgeois connections
that I had once worked for the Manchester Guardian!
The attitude of most white people in Shanghai toward the Chinese
twenty years ago made me understand and sympathize with the burning desire of the Chinese people to throw them out of China. Now as
I write, in 1947, Communist-inspired
anti-American
demonstrations
prove how easy it is to revive latent hatred of the West among theill-fed, ragged masses of the Chinese cities.
On my second visit to China, in 1938, I had come by sea fromEngland.
By that time I was anti-Communist,having lived for six
years in Soviet Russia. The change in China was as great as thechange in me. I had learned that, compared with the tyranny andoppression, misgovernment
and poverty under Russia’s Communist
Government,
Britishimperialism
is enlightened.
The Chinese,
far from wanting to oust the British and Americans, were hoping
against hope that the West would come to her aid to rout the Japanese.
The attitude of the British and Americans in China had undergone
a similar transformation.
The old China hands who had once seen
Japan as a useful junior partner in the business of holding China
down and preserving foreign rights and privileges, were now cheeringon the Chinese. Of course, they still did business with JPpan, butthey recognized and admired the stubborn courage of the Chineseand hoped that China would continue to resist Japan in spite of thematerial help the latter was getting from the United States and theBritish Empire.

28

Last Chance in China

Then as now the Western democracies were backing both sides.
From 1937 to 1941 America and England had tried to avoid antage
nizing Japan while giving China just sufficient aid and encouragement
to keep her fighting.
Following
V-J Day, they tried to conciliate
Russia and the Chinese Communists while giving strictly limited aid
to the Chinese Nationalists.
In spite of all the changes in internationalalignments, China on
my third visit seemed as far as ever from her goal of’national liberation. As so often in the past hundred years she had exchanged one
aggressor for another. Russia instead of Japan held Manchuria andwas seeking to keep China disunited and powerless until she should
submit and *‘co-operate.”
Because the odds against her had been too great, victory had found
China too weak to profit by it. Her people had borne too-heavy
burdens for too long. The “diseases of defeat” had taken too heavy atoll for her to have strength to resist either Russia or the Communist
infection unless aided by Western science, Western supplies and theheartening medicine of American sympathy and support. But America was vacillating once again. She refused wholly to repudiate theCommunists as she had formerly refused to cease all aid to Japan.
At the time of my arrival in China it seemed that the policy of theUnited States might be taking a logical course. The clamor of theLeft coupled with the overriding
desire to “get along with Russia”
had not succeeded in stopping aid to the National Government ofChina in its postwar efforts to re-establish its control over the provinces formerly occupied by Japan.
One of the best-informed diplomats in Chungking, General Victor
Odlum, the Canadian ambassador, told me he was inclined to believethat the United States-had decided upon a courageous and far-sighted
Far Eastern policy.
“There are,” he said, “Russian clouds on the international horizon.
The only sound American policy would be to strengthen China,
dominate the internal armed strife, improve Chinese communications
and help train her army.
“If the United States does not vacillate in its support of the
National Government, economic recovery will be rapid and the Communists will no longer be in a position to disrupt Chinese unity in
Russia’s interests. Time is flowing against the Communists.
It will“WeWant to Go Home”

29

increase their difficulties
and their problems, provided only that
American policy does not switch back to the Stilwell line of favoringand encouraging Communism.”
General Wedemeyer,
whom I interviewed
two months later inShanghai, was convinced that the security of the United States re.
quired a strong China freed from the Communist menace.
In private conversation he said to me :“Were the United States to abandon China now, all our costly
sacrifices in the war against Japan would have been in vain. Boththe honor and the interests of the United States require that we continue to support our most faithful ally and greatest potential friend,
the Republic of China.
“China is the sincerest friend of the United States, for the simple
reason that, whereas American interests and those of her other great
allies are often in conflict, the interests of the United States andChina coincide. It is only natural that other nations should try to get
as much as they can out of America, while at the same time competingwith her. China is the least involved in such an approach.
“Russia’s goal is the establishment of puppet or satellite regimes
along her Asiatic borders as well as in Europe. Stalin wants to havethe psychological as well as the political and military initiativein
Sakhalin, Korea, Manchuria,
Jehol, Chahar, Hupeh, Inner Mongolia and Sinkiang, as well as in Persia. If the Chinese Communists
are not forced to give up their private army and autonomous administration, Russia will get what she wants.”
Both during and since my last visit to China there has been acontinual seesaw in the relations between the National Government ofChina on the one side, and Russia and the Chinese Communists on
the other side, depending on the amount of backing China received
from the United States.
The Chinese Government never knew whether, in a showdown,
America would use her power to prevent Russia from encroaching on
China or whether China would be abandoned to her fate.
When America appeared to be taking a line of strong and uncompromising support of China, Russian pressure on China was relaxed
and the Communists
became less intransigent.
In the summer of
1%~ when General Hurley and General Wedemeyer represented theUnited States Government and armed forces in China ; when Amer-.

30

Last Chance in China

ica’s hands were about to be freed by the collapse of Japan and there
was a prospect that President Truman would not continue the Roosevelt policy of giving Stalin everything he asked for, Moscow ceased
denouncing the Government of China and negotiated the SoongMolotov Treaty of August 18. Thereafter, however, General Hurley’s recall again gave Russia and the Communists hope that America
was vacillating in its support of China. The Chinese Communists
broke off negotiations in Chungking and started to tear up railroad
lines and grab as much territory as they could.
From the Communist point of view, the greater the economic chaos
and misery in China, the better their chance to dominate. Moreover
the worse communications became and the greater the difficulties of
the government in reviving trade and industry, the greater the disillusionment of the Americans with their ally China and the greater
their desire to “leave China to the Chinese.”
The Japanese had comforted themselves all through the war withthe belief that even if they lost, China could not win. In August 1937
The Oriental Economist had written :In any event before Japan could fall in the struggle, China’s movement to mould herself into a modern state and her programme of
economic reconstruction would both go crashing down, leaving littleof such Central Government as there is at present.
The Japanese were a little too optimistic.
This dire prophecy has
not been quite fulfilled. But since V-J Day China has moved perilously close to the abyss of disintegration.
Economically and politicallyshe is far worse off than in 1937, and the Communist menace which ’Japan pretended t o see in the thirties is now a grim reality.
Can the United States, and will the United States, give China thenecessary backing and assistance to prevent her crashing down?
when I first arrived in China it seemed that we should.
When I left China in the spring of 1946, it appeared far more
doubtful that America would pursue a policy to her own and China’s
advantage.

CHAPTER

Gray Dawn

T

If

itz China

HE large
and luxurious
C-54 which had carried
me soquickly from Washington to India terminated its flight at Calcutta. I was not, however, able to stay in India, even for a few
days. The British authorities after keeping me waiting two months
for a visa had given it to me only on condition that I fly straight
through to China. No doubt the fact that I had been a Communist
two decades ago was recorded and I was still a suspicious character.
After a day’s sight-seeing and a much needed night in bed, I left
Calcutta in the early dawn, sitting now on a bucket seat in a smaller
plane filled to capacity with UNRRA
personnel and other civilians.
We had expected to fly over the Hump and were disappointed eat
with the war’s end the Army Transport Command had abandoned thebeautiful if perilous route over the Himalayas.
We flew instead overthe vast green jungles of “liberated” Burma to Yunnan province.
The C-47’s did not travel by night and the traffic in as well as outof China was still heavy, so we were delayed twenty-fourhours inKunming among bored GI’s waiting their turn to go home.
In the evening Dr. Logan Roots, who had been my fellow passenger from Washington and who was a friend from Hankow days, took
me to visit missionary friends who had lived in China through thewhole war. We talked far into the night and then drove back throughthe old city to the army post at the airfield. Here I found the English
doctor who shared my hut asleep with DDT powder liberally scatteredon the blankets and floor. I reflected that she was going to find life
insupportable in the interior of China if she feared vermin even in the
spotlessly clean U. S. Army billets.
Next afternoon we reached Chungking,just seven days out of
Washington, and seven years after I had left China in the second yearof her war against Japan.
31

32

Last Chance in Chino

The road from the Chiulungpo airport to the city was inches deepin mud and rutted. At each hairpin bend up and down the steep hillsides I clung to the jeep with both hands. The rain veiled the beautiful hills of Szechwan in mist. In my tired and melancholy mood I
felt that the heavens themselves might weep for the tragedy of theChinese people. Though they were patient, intelligent, industrious,
tolerant and good-humored,history had not given them a break forover a hundred years.
First Britain and France, and on their heels Germany, Russia andJapan, had taken advantage of China’s military weakness ,to despoil
her; to wrest territories, concessions and privileges by force from apeople who wished only to be left alone.
Now even in victory the Chinese were tasting only the fruits ofdefeat. Russia, instead of Japan, had control of Manchuria.
The
extraterritorial
rights in China given up by the Western Powers had
been revived in Russia’s favor in the unequal Sino-Russian Treatyof August 1945.
The Chinese people seemed never able to acquire a breathing space.
If they quenched the flames on one side of their house, they had
immediately to turn to battle a conflagrationon the other side.
I remembered how, when the Sino-Japanese War began, China’s
optimistsand pessimists had alike believed that China could not
hold on unaided against Japan’s overwhelming
military might unlessshe soon acquired allies. Both had been wrong. China had resisted
alone longer than anyone had believed possible in that long-ago
summer of 1937. Yet help when it came had been too little and toolate. Japan, not Germany, had attacked the United States in December 1941, but America decided that Germany was the greater
menace. Blockaded China was told to go on sticking it out while we
defeated Hitler first. China’s situation had become ever more desperate. The British loss of Malaya and Burma left her completely
blockaded. The flow of Lend-Lease, denied to China, when it could
easily have reached her, was turned over to Russia. Paeans of praise
arose in America for the valiant armies of Stalin, armed by America.
Adding insult to injury, scorn was heaped on the Chinese, the flowerof whose armies had been cut down years before in the three-months’
battle for Shanghai and the nine-months’ struggle to save the Wuhan
cities.

Gray Dawn in Chima

33

It was almost dark when we arrived in the suburbs of Chungking
and I looked down for the first time on the calm clear waters of the
Chialing River far below. We rushed through the narrow streets
miraculously
avoiding accidents. The danger from speeding American trucks and jeeps in the narrow crowded streets was an old story
by now to the people of Chungking.
To me the vehicles and theAmericansoldiers offered a striking contrast to the China I had
known. If only a little of this American aid had been given sooner!
In 1937 and 1938 it could have saved China from the long series of
defeats and retreats which had broken her people’s morale.
I had never before been in Chungking.
In 1938 when I had reported the war for the London News Chronicle, Hankow, or rather
the three Wuhan cities on the Yangtze, had been China’s temporary
capital. I had left them on the eve of their capture by Japan. Canton
had fallen ignominiously
a few days later, adding the terrors of
cowardice and treason to the burdens, already heavy, of the invasion.
The heroic days of China’s long war of resistance had ended when
I sailed to the United States in the fall of 1938. The coastal cities andprovinces were all in Japanese hands. China was settling down to aweary, grim and seemingly hopeless struggle for survival.
The much-bombed city of Chungking came to symbolize the patience and courage of the Chinese people. But it was also a byword forcorruption,
misgovernment
and misery.
I was returning to a China cleared of the “dwarf robbers from theEast,” but a strange nostalgia gripped my heart for the Hankow days
when China had been battered but proud in her determination
to go
on fighting alone at whatever cost. Now although victorious she wasregarded by her allies more as a victim saved than as the oldest
fighter of them all against aggression.
Drained dry both by the Japanese and the demands of the long war
on her primitive economy, the Chinese were still unable to undertake
the gigantic tasks of reconstruction and reform. ‘An undeclared civil
war was raging in eleven provinces. The destruction begun by Japanwas being completed by the Communists, who were busy destroying
railroads, bridges, industrial equipment and mines.
Communist military
strategy required that they thus prevent the
Nationalist Armies from taking over the provinces liberated by Japan.
But it also seemed that they were counting upon economic collapse

34

Last Chance in China

to bring about the fall of the government and the establishment of
their own dictatorship.
Nor was China threatened only by the breakaway of the North
under a Communist administration.
The Russian Army was still in
Moscow was already violating the Sinooccupation of Manchuria.
Soviet Treaty of August 1945, in which Russia had promised not
only to evacuate China’s Northeastern provinces within three months
but also to give moral support and material aid only to the National
Government of China.
China was once again threatened by a choice between partition andsubmission.
Russia and the Communists,
in place of Japan and hercollaborators,
menaced her integrity and independence. The Communists were playing a role which was compared by some Chinese tothat of the war lords in the past, or to that of the Japan-sponsored“autonomous”
regimes in North China in the thirties.
China waseven less united than before the Sino-Japanese War began. As for a
century past, foreigners were taking advantage of her weakness. ‘As
one Chinese newspaper expressed it, China had seen the dawn but
not yet the sun.
My first two weeks in Chungking I felt like a Rip Van Winkle in
the Press Hostel. I had hoped to find a few old friends, for I knewthat some of the “Hankow
Last Ditchers,” as we used to call ourselves in the fall of 1938, were back in China. But no veteran correspondents of China’s war were then in Chungking.
I got involved
in fierce and futile arguments with young men who, in the days
when China fought alone with little besides flesh and blood to oppose
the modern armaments of the invaders, had probably hardly known
there was a war going on in the Far East.
They had forgotten that, whereas the Poles, Danes, Norwegians,
Belgians and even the French had gone down to speedy defeat, theragged, ill-armed, badly led Chinese had c‘ontinued year after year todeny victory to Japan’s military machine.
These correspondents had arrived too late on the scene and theyknew too little history to understand or sympathize with China. Like
most Americans they had not been looking while the Chinese werefighting bravely in the early stages of the war, without adequate arms,
without allies or any hope of outside aid. All they had seen, orjGray Dawn in China

35

knew about, was the exhausted and demoralized China of the last
four years of the eight-year war.
It was, in any case, natural that these young Americans, fresh fromthe most prosperous, free and technologically advanced country in theworld, should attribute all the ills of China to its government.
Theylacked even the smattering of knowledge of medieval history which
Europeans acquire in school. Nor had they ever seen the poverty ofEastern Europe. Their experience and knowledge were in general as
remote from the bitter realities of life for nine-tenths of mankind as
those of an inhabitant of Mars. Seeing for the first time the age-old
poverty of Asia and the corruption which is so much more obvious ina poor country than in a land flowing with milk and honey, they had
concluded that the Chinese people were worthless. Or they belonged
to the Teddy White-Edgar
Snow school which believed that the Communists were the hope of China.
A few months later when I returned to Chungking from Shanghai,
the whole atmosphere of the Press Hostel had changed and I felt as
much at home as with the intelligent,well-informed,
cynical, but
sympathetic and realistic Americans I had known in Hankow.
But
in October of 1945 the American correspondents, with the exceptionof Spencer Moosa of the Associated Press, were the type to whom
the following words of Colonel Linton, published in Stars a& Stripes,
might have been addressed :It is almost tragic that ‘American soldiers have eyes and do not see,ears and do not hear, minds and do not understand.
They see thepoverty, the filth, and humanity serving as beasts of burden, but they
do not see how all these things are inherent in the history of a great
nation struggling to emerge from the days of handicraft to the day ofmodern technology.
They hear a strange language, but they do nothear the voice of a people singing faith and hope for its future. Theirminds tell them that China is different, very different from the life
they know, but they do not understand that, like ourselves, and likeall peoples, China must begin today from where she is.
In the old days before China became our ally by action of Japan,
American correspondents had lived on about the same level as middleclass Chinese or foreign missionaries.
Moreover their attitude had
not been one of lordly superiority.
They had been ashamed that theseLast Chance in China
36
poor, inadequately armed pacific people were fighting to hold off
Japan’s tyranny while Americans aided the aggressors by letting thembuy all they needed in the way of war materials and machines.
Now American correspondents had the privileges, as well as theuniforms, of United States Army officers. They received the samerations and PX privileges and had little contact with ordinary educated Chinese.
Sitting at our all-too-abundant
meals at the Press Hostel, warmed
by a roaring fire in a country where few Chinese even of high rank
had fuel, the correspondents would comment on the venality ofChinese officials and the general rottenness of China. The idea neverstruck them that, possibly, on the salary of a Chinese official inadequate to provide the barest necessities of life for a family, they too
might not have been so pure. As a Chinese official in the Executive
Yuan said to me one day: “The Americans in China are Sons ofHeaven; what can they know of our trials and our temptations ?”Yet I found American officers and men in Chungking, Kunming
and Shanghai who, having served in the interior and being themselves inured to hardships, had a quite different attitude toward theChinese. There were, for instance, the two happy and handsome
young officers I had met at the Red Cross Club in Kunming.
One, aMajor Bohlen from Indiana, had walked two thousand miles along
the Burma road in charge of a convoy of mules. The other, a Texan,
had served as an artillery instructor with the Chinese Army in Hupeh.
Both told me they had started by thinking
the Chinese hopelessly
backward and uncivilized but had soon changed their minds after
living and working with them.
“My God,” said the Texan, Captain Wilson, “I don’t know how
they do it ! Their guts and good humor, the way they smile in pain
and the dreadful conditions they endure so cheerfully-it
makes onefeel ashamed to complain.”
He told me how the soldiers, half-starved themselves, often had
to carry the guns because the animals were too weak through underfeeding to bear their burdens. Yet the Chinese soldiers had been apt
pupils.
Both these officers criticizedthose who thought that theAmerican way of doing things was always the best. They had learned
what the Chinese were up against and had marveled at their ingenuity
in coping with difficulties which had seemed insurmountable
to theAmericans.

Gray Damin China

37

In Shanghai when dining with General Tang En-po, the commander of the area, I met a certain Colonel Don Scott who had been
chief American supply officer in the South in the last year of thewar. An elderly, hard-bitten
regular officer and a former Olympic
champion,
Colonel Scott was certainly no sentimentalist.
But he wasanxious to impress on me that “there are some good Chinese.”“General Tang En-pot” he said, “used our equipment right.
He
corrected many abuses. His soldiers were properly taken care of.
General Tang, he’s a man. He does things right.”
Colonel Scott came to see me next day because he wanted to giveme information to counteract some of the calumny against the Chinese
Army in the American papers. He painted a vivid picture of the difficulties the Chinese had had to contend with. On his way to Kunming
from Chungking
he had seen the starved recruits prodded on withbayonets. In Kweichow he had been impressed by the contrast.
Colonel Scott and General Tang En-po had had “rice sessions”
once a week. Tang did the procuring and the Americans supplied
the transport.
Kweichowwas the poorest province in China andrice had to be brought clear from Chungking.
Seventeen thousand
U. S. Army trucks were used to haul the rice for hundreds of miles.
Tang En-po saw to it that there was no “squeeze”; that all the rice
went to feed the Chinese soldiers.
“I’ve seen what the Chinese have done; how they’re coming along,”
said the colonel. “But how could any Chinese general feed his soldiers until we gave them transport?’
I had met General Tang En-po at the front in 1938 and liked him.
But I also knew that he had got himself a bad name in Honan in the1943 famine. He had roused the violent hostility of the peasantsbecause he forced food out of them to feed his soldiers.
A country such as China, with poor communications or none at all,with a backward peasant economy and her few industrial cities andall her ports in the hands of the enemy, simply did not have the means
to supply her huge armies and her refugee-swollen city population.
It could be done at all only by squeezing the peasants. There weremany Chinese generals who cared nothing either for their soldiersor the common people and used their power only to enrich themselves.
But some of the best generals had sometimes been forced to oppress
the people to secure food for their men.
The foreigners who cried loudly that the government should have

Last Chance in China
38
instituted land reforms in the midst of the war, thereby ensuring thegood will of the peasants and their willing support of the war effort,
ignored economic realities. If the landowners had been expropriatedand the land divided, it would have been impossible to supply China’s
armies and the population of the cities with even the meagerest
rations. Since blockaded Free China could produce few manufactured
goods, the peasants would not voluntarily
have sold their grain to
the government.
China would have been in the same state as Russia
from Igrg to 1922, the period of “WarCommunism”
when thepeasants, after acquiring possession of the land, refused to sell theirproduce for worthless paper and had to be forced to give up theirgrain at the point of the bayonet.
Land reform in China in the years 1938 to 1945 could have led
only to a similar situation. Instead, China kept her old agrarian system and used the landowners as tax collectors. Grain was forced outof the peasants as rent and as taxes through the machinery provided
by the old land system. It was not a pretty process, but no more was
War Communism in Soviet Russia. Since the war in China was alsofinanced by the government’s
printingpresses, mounting inflation
tended to improve the lot of the peasants in some places. Many wereat least freed of their old cash debt burdens.
Of course there was and is a lot of cheating. The landowners passas much as possible of the burden of taxation onto the peasants. But
they themselves could not escape the government’s exactions. China’s
financial system during the war was, and had to be, a so-called “feudal”
one. The government used the landlords to squeeze the peasants andin turn squeezed them.
The Communists place all the emphasis of their propaganda on
redistributionof the land. But an examination of Chinese resourcesshows that expropriationof the landowning class could not afford alasting solution of the agrarian problem. China’s situation is entirely
different from Russia’s. The Soviet Union has vast territories anda comparatively small population. There is no lack of land. China on
the other hand has even less arable land than India and a larger
population.
My first week in Chungking I looked up Dr. Robert Lim withwhom I had visited the front in 1938 when he was head of the Chinese
Red Cross Medical Commission.
In those days he had been working

Gray Dawn in China

39

without government funds and with precious little help from anyone
in authority.
Together with a group of Western-trained
Chinesedoctors and with funds supplied by overseas Chinese and a few foreign
friends he had been trying to create in the midst of war a medical
service to save some of the wounded soldiers.
The grim sights I had seen at the front in the days of Japan’s
offensive against the Wuhan cities were indelibly burned on my mind.
The wounded limping back from the front. The men dying in thehovels called collecting stations. The complete absence of ambulancesor even trucks to move them. The gallant efforts made by Bobby
Lim and his helpers and by his friend, Dr. Loo Chi-teh, the surgeon
general, to provide dressing stations, to train first-aid workers, toacquire a few trucks from abroad to move the wounded.
Bobby Lim had to contend not only against the callous indifference, incompetence and corruption of the old-style Chinese generals
who did not consider it worth while to save the wounded but the International Red Cross had also refused him aid because it had to be“neutral” in the war, and would only help civilian victims of the air
raids.
The New Life Movement under the direction of Colonel (nowGeneral) J. L. Huang and others in Madame Chiang’s confidence
had hindered rather than helped him. They constantly interfered withserious relief work by publicity stunts and had been jealous of Bobby
Lim’s success. Since he is not a Christian he had no contact with
Madame Chiang through foreign missionaries
and I had myself
secured him his first interview with her in 1938, following
which
she had allocated funds to his organization from the foreign donations
she received.
Since Bobby Lim, whenever able, had sent medical supplies anddoctors to all the fronts, his enemies had accused him of Communist
sympathies. He had been regarded as a hero by Agnes Smedley, theAmerican whose heart and soul are with the common people of China
and who believes that the Chinese Communists are China’s hope.
I had always regarded Lim as one of the best Chinese I had evermet, a man with the highest medical qualification who had given up~XI ~SY living abroad or in Shanghai to give all his talents and energies
to his country at the worst period of her fortunes. It was therefore
to me a proof that everything is not now so wrong with the state of

40

Last Chance in China

China as her critics maintain, that such a man as Bobby Lim had
become surgeon general of the National Armies while Dr. Loo Chiteh was now in charge of the training of army medical personnel. The
redoubtable Tai Li, the almost legendary figure who headed the Chinese secret police and co-operated with the American OSS in intelligence work during the war, had cleared Lim of any suspicion of Communist sympathies.
And the Generalissimo himself had recognized
Lim’s worth, talents and devotion to his country, by putting him incharge of the army’s medical services, backing him in his efforts atreform and making him a two-star general.
Bobby Lim came to fetch me at the Press Hostel as soon as he got
my message that I was back in China. !After my first two depressing
days in Chungking it was wonderful to spend a week end at the army
medical headquarters at New Bridge, fifteen miles outside Chungking. With .Bobby I found another old friend, Mary Chen, whose
husband had recently been reunited with her after nearly four years
as a guerrilla fighter in the Philippines.
There was also Dr. Wang,
one of the few survivors of the original Changsha group, who now
also was a general but just the same unassuming, honest doctor I had
known in the old days.
Mary cooked us a Chinese dinner and Bobby opened a bottle of
Scotch whisky which he had been saving for just such an occasion.
Sitting on the terrace, with the flooded rice paddies in the valley
below faintly illuminated by the moonlight,
we talked far into thenight. There was a lot of “do you remember?” but I also learned agood deal about what had happened in the years between. Next day
we talked again, but Bobby was as busy as he had been in Changsha in
1938, when he had not even a secretary or a typist to help him withhis administrative
work and his appeals for medical supplies fromabroad. Now he had a large staff and smart sentries guarded hisheadquarters.
But he still gave his talents and his time and energies
as unstintingly
as before to the service of the Chinese soldiers.
An American Medical Service officer arrived in the morning andspent his day with us. It was, he said, his pleasure and his relaxation
to come out to Lim’s headquarters. Other days he came out on duty;on Sundays he came out to enjoy himself. This Major Puy was oneof the many American officers I met who showed understanding,appreciation and sympathy for the Chinese, and felt completely atGray Daztm in China

41

his ease with them. The Chinese doctors, for their part, were only
too happy to be receiving expert advice and help from the UnitedStates Army.
Bobby told me that many reforms had been carried through in thearmy. He now had authority to reform the formerly hopelessly inefficient and corrupt Army Medical Service. Wounded soldiers in thelater stages of the war had had a far better chance of surviving.
Reforms in the methods of recruiting soldiers and in their treatment
had been inaugurated.
They were now somewhat better fed. Abuses
whereby the commanding officers could profit by misappropriatingthefunds which should have bought food for the rank and file had been
remedied by the direct issue of rations. American officers had helped
a great deal. Above all Lend Lease, scanty as it was, had beenof great help in improving
the Chinese soldier’s lot. For, after all,it was China’s extreme poverty and the loss of resources to Japan
which had been the root cause of the miserable plight of the Chinese
soldier.
Bobby Lim was one among many old Chinese friends and acquaintances with whom I spent my time in Chungking.
I was surprised
and moved to find myself still remembered, after so many years, as
the author of Japan’s Feet of Chy. This book, which attempted to
expose both Japan’s basic weakness and the falsity of her democratic
pretensions, and to awaken the Western world to the need to call her
bluff and stop her aggression, had been translated into Chinese andwidely sold. Even now, nearly ten years after its publication, I was
remembered as a friend by both “reactionaries”
and liberals because
I had been one of the few foreigners who had tried to help China in
the early days of her war of resistance when most Westerners wereindifferent to her fate.
General Chen Ming-shu,
who had commanded the Kuomintang
forces which took Hankow in 1926, who had been a member of the
Wuhan Government the following
year, who had fought with the
Nineteenth Route Army from Fukien against the Japanese in Shanghai in 1932 without Chian, e Kai-shek’s support or encouragement and
who was now an unemployed general and one of the government’s
bitterest critics, often invited me to dine at Chungking’s“Cantonrestaurant” of which he was part owner. Chen Ming-shu himself, nolonger young but slim and handsome with the eyes of a dreamer, had

42LLust Chance in China

been a friend of mine in 1938. He represented to a greater degree
than any other Chinese I knew the hopes, the fire and enthusiasm andthe sincerity which had inspired the Kuomintang
in its early days.
I could not but agree with him that China’s primary need was theseparation of civil and military
power, and that there can be no
democracy until civil liberties are secured. It was obviously true thatas long as the provinces were governed by military men with armies
at their disposal there could be no civil liberty or popularly electedadministrations.
It was perhaps true that Chiang Kai-shek considered
China’s armies as “his” rather than the nation’s. It was undoubtedly
true that many able, experienced and honest men in China were not
employed by the administration
because they failed to give allegianceto Chiang Kai-shek personally while many “blockheads” belonged
to the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang.
I could also
well believe that Chen Ming-shu was right in saying that the National
Government had become a “clique which stands together,” and thatmany Kuomintang
members were dissatisfied and sympathized withthe opposition.
I hoped that he was right in believing that “thedemocratic elements in the Kuomintang”
now out of office and impotent would soon become powerful and “show the world” a real
implementationof the San M&z Chu I.
But it seemed to me that Chen Ming-shu, like other sincere andhonest liberals, ignored the terrible compulsions of the internationalsituation.
How could a civil government be established, the armed
forces drastically reduced and democratic liberties be made a reality
as long as China was threatened with destruction by the internal andexternal enemies of democracy ?
Chen Ming-shu and others like him were not Communists but they
practically ignored the Russian threat to Chinese independence. They
were still living in the world of twenty years earlier.
For all his criticisms of Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorial nature anddesire for personal power, Chen Ming-shu was still not his enemy.
“If only,” he exclaimed, “his attitude were different!
Chinese of
all parties, in particular the able and sincere men of the Kuomintang,
would sympathize and co-operate with him. But Chiang is like Louis
XIV who said ‘I am the state.’ He considers himself to be the law,justice, everything.
He kills men without trial. Even provincial
magistrates may not be appointed without his consent.

Gray Damin China.

43“Chiang Kai-shek,” he continued, “has two natures. The one islawless since he himself transgresses the laws and destroys them. The
other side of his nature is good. He sincerely loves his country anddesires to lead China to independence and good government.
He
could be a great leader if only he would not insist on everyone in thegovernment being a ‘yes man.’ I myself still love Chiang from thebottom of my heart. I wish I could help him to be China’s George
Washington.”
Chen Ming-shu and his friends all lived in the simplest fashion withthe exception of some of the wealthy members of the Democratic
League. But so also did most of the government leaders except for a
few millionaires like T. V. Soong and H. H. Kung and some others
who had inherited or married money.
In few of the Chinese homes I visited did I find what would havebeen considered in America as tolerable conditions of living.
Someof my old acquaintances, even those holding positions in the government or in the Kuomintang
Party organization,
were so poor thatthey had sold almost everything they possessed to buy food for theirchildren.
I was often reminded of Moscow in Chungking because both thesimilarity and the differences were so striking.
The Chinese capital
was as dilapidated as the Russian, and the majorityof the people
lived in the same squalor and poverty. There were the same scarcity
of manufactured
goods and lack of housing except for the leading
members of the bureaucracy.
But, in Chungking, human ingenuity
had free play. Every little bit of everything was used either to repair
the bomb damage or to make something useful. Discarded Americancans and other refuse were manufactured into all sorts of implements
and utensils. Every bit of land outside the town was intensively
cultivated.
The hillsides were green with vegetables almost all theyear round. Nothing was wasted.
In China you are not rated a capitalist or an enemy of the state if
you try to help yourself by hard work and ingenuity. The bureaucracy
might control large-scale enterprise, but at least the dew of freedom
allowed small enterprises to burgeon and grow and hide the scars ofwar.
I dined often in restaurants and private homes with high officials.
Never once did I find anything approaching the luxury and wealth

44

Last Chance in Chinaof the Soviet bureaucracy. Of course, one must reckon with the difference in culture or lack of it. Display, luxury and barbaric ostentation are as alien to Chinese civilization
as they are natural to theRussians. Nevertheless it was obvious that belonging to the top ranksof the ruling Kuomintang
Party in China conferred nothing comparable in the way of privilege and material advantage to the perquisites of the leading members of the Communist Party in Russia.
Nor was the contrast between the living standards of rulers andruled nearly so great. Many people are starving or living on theborder line of starvation in both countries.
But the difference inliving standards between the majority of the people and those of thebureaucracy is far greater in Russia than in China.
No doubt the Chinese bureaucracy is as self-seeking as the Russian.
But its income and its powers are far more limited. A Chinese govemment official can live in comfort only if he takes bribes; can get rich
only throughspeculation and the manipulationof the country’s
finances. In a developed Communist society such as the Soviet Union
the corruption of the ruling class is both of a subtler nature and more
far-reaching.
The Communist big shots simply allocate to themselves
an inordinately large share of the national income. The high Soviet
functionary
is paid a huge salary and also has the right to the freeuse of all kinds of so-called state property:
apartments, country
houses, automobiles, hospitals, special schools for his children andother services. Like an aristocrat or a millionaire he is not subject
to temptation.
In China, which like Russia does not produce enough of the barenecessities of life to go around, the bureaucracy has not been lifted
up into such a high-income bracket that it is above temptation.
The
inflation which was the unavoidable result of the long war, the blockade and the civil war, has reduced the value of an official’s salary so
low that only the most high-principled
and honest men, or those withprivate incomes, abstain from some method or another of supplementing their inadequate salaries.
At the time of writing (June 1947) the salary of a divisional chiefin a Chinese Ministry
is around 6130,ooo CN a month plus a rice
allowance while a skilled worker earns about 8o0,ooo without a rice
allowance.
In Soviet Russia when I lived there the average wage
for the working class was less than 300 rubles a month as against tenGray Dawn in China

45

or more times that sum for the director of a state enterprise, and up
to 10,000 rubles for commissars and other big shots.
During the war years in China only payment of salaries and wages
in kind, rationing and the severest regimentation could have prevented
gross inequalities and have produced uniformity
in poverty. Rationing is well-nigh impossible in a loosely organized and economically
backward country, and price control without rationing has proved
unworkable even in countries where the government exercises far
greater power than in China.
It should be remembered that during the first eight months of the
Sino-Japanese War the value of China’s currency had been maintainedin terms of foreign exchange. This was no mean achievement andbears testimony to the confidence of the Chinese people in the National
Government.
But, following Japan’s occupation of the coastal provinces, the government was deprived of the customs dues, which had
been its main source of revenue. There was no way of preventing
the depreciation of the yuan with foreign trade drying up, military
expenditures increasing and trade and industry stultified.
Once thegovernment could no longer afford to give foreign exchange for thegreat quantity of yuan offered, a flight from the currency began. The
demand for goods as the only stable store of value continually
decreased the value of the currency and pushed the price of the small
available supply of goods to greater and greater heights. The spiralof inflation which no country avoids in wartime naturally proceededat an accelerated tempo in blockaded China whose war lasted so much
longer and was fought with so much less American help than that ofother countries.
The Chinese Government should, no doubt, have made a greater
effort to impose direct taxes on the rich. The political results offorcing the Soongs, Kungs and the other few rich families in China
to disgorge a part of their American-invested
fortunes would havebeen excellent. But it would not have ameliorated materially the basic
causes of inflation, at least so long as China was blockaded. The basic
problem of how to feed the army and the officials out of a diminishingrevenue would have remained.
The National Government might perhaps have been able, if it had
tried harder, to finance the war in part by internal loans. But since
the Chinese middle classes had for the most part lost their sources of46

Last Chance in China

income through Japan’s occupation of the coastal provinces, there
was in fact little possibility of selling war bonds.
Inflation as a method of financing war expenditures has its compensations. At least China faces the future without a huge internal debt,
while the blockade also precluded her burdening herself with futureinterest payments to foreign countries. If the rise in prices had been
uniform and affected all classes equally, the depreciation of the currency would not have been harmful so long as the inflation was kept
within bounds.
During the war years the inflation does not, in fact, appear tohave had generally injurious effects. Some elements in the population
suffered greatly but the workers and a substantial proportion of thepeasants seem to have positively benefited by it.
Collection of the land tax in kind, instituted by Dr. Kung in 1941,
enabled the government to collect a revenue which, if it did not keep
pace with the advance in prices, followed closely behind. But theland tax could not produce sufficient revenue to finance war expenditures so that prices rose continually
through the ever-increasing
quantity of paper currency put into circulation, as well as on accountof the scarcity of commodities.
Naturally
everyone who could “invested” in goods as the only stable store of value, and hoarding andspeculation further intensified the inflation.
Nevertheless Dr. H. H. Kung’s so-called feudal methods kept the
inflation within what were to seem moderate limits a year or so after
he was succeeded in the management of Chinese finances by ChiangKai-shek’s other brother-in-law,
T. V. Soong. Moreover, by supplementing the salaries of government officials with rice payments, themuch maligned Dr. Kung did something toward checking the graft
which riddles the administration.
Not all officials succumbed to temp
tation once they were no longer driven to be venal by the impossibilityof feeding their families on their almost worthless money salaries.
The postwar attempt to adopt Western fiscal policies, at a time
when civil war was wrecking the country and American financial
support was lacking, resulted in far worse inflation and social injustice,less production and more misery. It was after V-J Day that the
Chinese yuan plunged catastrophically.
Taking the period January to June 1937 as 100, the price of allcommodities in Szechwan in terms of Chinese currency stood at I ,950

Gray Damin China

47

by June 1945. But by April 1947 the index of wholesale prices in
Nanking had risen to 18,000.
When I arrived in China in October 1945 one could get only about
1,000 yuan for an American
dollar.
Six months later one could
obtain 2,000 in Shanghai. At the time of writing(May 1%~) the
free or black-market rate has jumped to 23,000. The most spectacular
fall in the exchange value of the yuan followed General Marshall’s
recall at the beginning of 1947 and the subsequent announcement of
the withdrawalof U. S. armed forces from China. There is little
doubt that the many indications of withdrawal of full American support from the Chinese National Government have diminished confidence in the currency equally with growing Chinese distrust of theadministration
Nor should it be forgotten that the cessation of dollar expendituresof American
soldiers, marines and sailors in China constitutedasevere blow to the exchange.
Some foreign experts, notably Dr. J. Lossing Buck, attribute thepresent inflation in large part to the government’s mistaken exchange
policy. According to his view the government’s policy increased theintensity of the blockade during the war years and has created an
artificial blockade since V-J Day. For, because the exchange rate of
the yuan was set artificially high instead of being allowed to find its
natural level, Chinese goods became too dear to export. Thus, heargues, the pegging of the exchange rate, far from curbing the inflation, probably intensified it by cutting off the source of foreign credits.
Exports are naturally discouraged when the foreign buyer can obtaintoo few yuan for his dollars to buy Chinese products at a price atwhich they can be sold abroad. The artificiallyhigh exchange rate
also cut off remittances from Chinese overseas who saw no sense insending dollars to their relatives so long as the dollars could be exchanged for so few yuan as to make the gift almost worthless.
Althoughthe government
insisted on maintaining
the exchange
value of the currency in order to import and in order to maintainconfidence, there is evidence that it actually defeated its own purpose.
In economics as in politics China fell between two stools. It wasneither liberal enough nor sufficiently totalitarian.
Either a policy of
free trade and free exchange, or complete control of the national
f=xmny,could have prevented the present disastrous situation.
TheLast Chance in China
48
mixture of the two has stymied the whole economy. The government
has neither the power nor the machinery nor the will to control anddirect all economic activity in the interests of the state or the rulingparty. But, at the same time, it interferes enough with private business, trade and exchange to hamper and destroy independent private
economic activity.
China hangs suspended between the capitalist
democratic world and the Soviet so-called socialist world of stateadministeredproduction and trade.
Unless China receives American loans and American technical aid
Nor is it possible toshe cannot afford a laissez-faire economy.
imagine that graft can be eliminated until there is a middle class independent of state patronage and free from the dreadful fear of sinking
back into the abysmal poverty of the masses. Insecurity is so widespread and the fear of destitution so strong in China that even thecomparatively
well-to-do are obsessed by it.
Unless outside aid is forthcoming
to help solve China’s economic
problem and set her on her feet, she faces disintegrationor colonization by Russia or regimentationby her own rulers on Communist,
National Socialist or state capitalist lines.
Nothing
could be farther from the truth than to call China’s
National Government a “fascist tyranny.”
If Chiang Kai-shek had
been a dictator and the Kuomintang a totalitarian party, China would
have fought a better war. It would have been possible to force equalityof sacrifice and equal poverty on all except the members of the rulingparty. Everyone would have been compelled to fight or work for thenation.
China has, it is true, a secret police and men are sometimes imprisoned without trial. But speech is comparatively free and everyone is
not terrorized
by fear of condemnation
to forced labor. Even its
worst enemies have never accused the National
Governmentofkeeping millions of political prisoners in concentration camps. Thereis nothing comparable in China to the slave labor which has become
an integral part of the Soviet economy.
I spent a morning at the university with Professor Ma Yin-ch’u,
who is represented by Communist sympathizers as a martyr who spent
two years in a concentration camp for his wartime diatribes against
He told me himself that he had never been ill-treated.
the government.
He had simply been under house arrest in a remote district.
HeGray Dawn in China

49

laughed as he related how he had made his guards climb mountains
with him, and how he had lectured to them on economics and madethem take notes. The young men of the secret police, he said, weredecent fellows and he had proposed that they all be given university
tuition at government expense. This large, robust and happy ex-Yaleman bore no resemblance whatever to the tortured and starved inmatesof a Russian or German concentration camp.
To everyone who has lived under a totalitariantyranny as I did
for six years in Soviet Russia, it is absurd to describe the National
Government of China as such. Of course, China is not yet a democracy. But there is no sign of the all-pervading
terror which bows
down the Russian people. The Chinese criticize the government totheir hearts’ content, meet and talk to foreigners without fear of thesecret police, go about their business without being haunted by dreadof arrest and the concentration camp.
The main defect of the Chinese Government is not its dictatorial
character but its failure to govern, the graft with which it is riddled
and its inability to check abuses and carry out the reforms to which
it is pledged. Its impotence is partly due to the wide variety ofpolitical and economic theories held by the leading members of the
In an administration
where some want to go
Kuomintang
Party.
Right, some Left and some to stay where they are, there is practicalimmobility
or utter confusion.
The principal complaint
I heard from Chungking
businessmen
concerned the uncertainty
caused by the government’s
vacillating
economic policy and the contradictoryorders given by various
branches of the administration.
T. V. Soong, who was Premier andalso controlled the Central Bank of China, was issuing one set of
instructions. while the Legislative
Yuan headed by Sun Fo passed
laws which went directly against them.
Mr. T. A. Ha, managing director of the China Industry Company,
told me that his most difficult problem was not knowing what degreeof freedom of enterprise was to be allowed to private business in the
future.
“Look,” he said, pointing to his company’s sprawling factories
across the river from his downtown
oflice. “During
the war we
produced pig iron, steel, cement and china. When Mr. Donald Nelsoncame to Chungking he congratulated us on our achievement in build-

50

Last Chance in China

ing up an efficient industry here in wartime.
Our steel mill employed
three thousand people and produced ten thousand tons of steel a year.
Now we may have to stop production altogether.”“Your factories are still working, aren’t they?”“Yes, but only to about half their capacity and soon we may haveto shut down”“Why?” I asked. “Is it because you no longer receive orders fromthe government ? Surely there must be a huge peacetime demand foryour products ?”“That’s the whole trouble,” replied Mr. Hu. “We don’t know
where we stand. Not long ago the Executive Yuan passed a resolution that China should in general have a free economy. Subsequently
strong opposition to this policy in certain government circles led toits modification in favor of more government control of industry. An
Executive Yuan decision today may always be countermanded tomorrow. No Chinese industrialist
can be certain that if he invests his
capital in what has been declared a free field for private enterprise,
he may not wake up one morning and find it has been declared agovernment monopoly.”
Other Chungking businessmen told me the same story. They were
all waiting anxiously to know what kind of private undertakings
were to be allowed to survive and develop. There were rumors thatthe textile industry would be nationalized.
The former Japanese or
puppet-owned Shanghai mills were being organized by T. V. Soong
into a state corporation.
Fears were expressed that the native cotton
growing and manufacturing
developed in Szechwan during the war
might be jettisoned in favor of the Eastern mills using imported
cotton.
At a small meeting of Chungking industrialists
arranged for meby the Democratic League I heard bitter complaints concerning T. V.
Soong’s policies. T. V., as the Generalissimo’s
Harvard-educatedbrother-in-law
is called, although well known and liked in America
where he is regarded as a liberal, seemed to be regarded as a Chinese
J. P. Morgan by these Western businessmen.
They all consideredthat the native industry they had built up in the Southwest during
the war was being ruined by the “Eastern financiers.”
Everyoneknew, they said, that T. V. had a tremendous fortune salted away in
America and that his interests lay with the Shanghai bankers andGray Dawn in China

51

merchants allied to foreign financial and merchant interests.
An
executive of the West China Development Company said :“The government has spent three hundred and fifty million Chinese
dollars to send workers home to the East, when only fifty million
would have sufficed to start us up again here following the post-war
depression in Szechwan. T. V. Soong knows how to make money
so he is regarded as a specialist in economics. But it is production
which is important,
not financial speculation.
Here the mines andmills are closing because there is no money to carry on; and thegovernment is trying only to resurrect the industries in the liberated
coastal provinces instead of also preserving those built up here during
the war.”
The attitude of the politically impotent Chinese industrialists toward
the Soongs seemed not unlike that of a Midwestern American toward“New York financiers” or the big corporations operating from theAtlantic seaboard. Most of the Chungking industrialists,
I was told,
would welcome Kung back as the lesser of two evils. In their view,
although unable to curb graft among his subordinates,
Old ManKung was at least not a monopolist who used his power as Ministerof Finance to squeeze the independent businessman out of existence.
He “broke no one’s rice bowl” if he could help it.
The resignation of T. V. Soong in 1947 did not surprise me inview of what I had heard in Chungking.
He was hated even by theLeftists inside and outside the Kuomintang.
This was brought home
to me forcibly one evening when I dined with my old friend S. Y. Wu,
Secretary of the Legislative Yuan and Sun Fo’s “brain truster,” andsome Chungking businessmen.
“We’d rather have the old man back” was their unanimous opinion.
“Kung had his faults but Soong is far worse. Kung at least gavethe small manufacturer
and merchant a chance to live. But T. V. istrying to get into his own hands control over the whole Chinese economy. He is like an American trust magnate ; he is trying to establish
his own monopolies in textiles, shipping and anything else he can lay
his hands on.
“Kung had some regard for China’s interests even while promoting his own. But Soong is concerned primarily with his private interests. Even now while the Political Consultative Council is sitting in
Chungking to decide the political future of China, T. V. Soong who

52

Last Chance in Chinu

is Premier is not participating.
He is not even here. He is too busy
founding his huge personal monopolies in Shanghai.”“Why then,” I said, “does Chiang Kai-shek keep him in office,since it is generally thought that the Generalissimo does not like ortrust T. V. ?”“Soong is America’s favorite. The Americans like and trust him,
so Chiang keeps him in office as the price of American support, hoping
he will get China a big loan.”
Perhaps it was the feeling that H. H. Kung at least adhered tomore traditional and easily understood methods of acquiring wealthwhich made him less unpopular than T. V. Or perhaps it was justthat in China’s wretched situation whoever was responsible for the
public finances was bound to be hated.
This was the picture of “Daddy Kung” given me by a Chinese
newspaperman who had formerly worked under him.
“Kung,”
he said, “is the descendant of generations of Shansi
bankers, which means the only bankers in existence among us before
Western civilization
opened our doors. The bankers of Shansi were
the Jews of China. Shansi is a poor province and many of its sonswent elsewhere to make a living.
They stuck together and pooled
their credit. Eventually they spread over the whole of China, theirbusiness depending upon mutual trust. But they were disinclined totrust anyone but men from Shansi. Kung likewise trusts men fromhis ancestral province first; it is easiest to get a job with him if you
are from Shansi. But he also favors graduates of Oberlin College
and of Yenching University
because he was a student at the former
and is President of the latter.
“Once you get a job with Kung he trusts you. So naturally people
take advantage.
If they make mistakes or are caught in wrong
doing, they know it is their wisest course to confess to the old man.
This impresses him with their honesty and he just says, ‘Don’t do it
again, my boy.’“He treats his own employees very generously; he overpaid his
staff when in office. So he is naturally popular with those who workfor him.
“On the other hand he is henpecked by his wife and is too indulgent
to his children who are spenders. Thus despite his patriotism and his
own personal honesty he was not keen enough or strong enough toGray Dawn in China

53

stop corruption among those near to him or who worked under him.
He was weak too in his dealings with the Generalissimo.
He justcouldn’t say ‘no’ when the latter demanded money, and of course it
had to be raised somehow.”In other words Dr. Kung seems to have both the virtues and vicesof an old-style Chinese in his loyalty to his family, friends and associates and his inability to be as hard in his dealings with individuals
he knows personally as China’s situation demands. His methods ofacquiring wealth may be suspect in Western eyes, but they are oldand well-established in China, and he was always ready to “share thewealth” so to speak, by helping his subordinates and his friends.
T. V. Soong, on the other hand, is hated for his arrogant manner,and his methods of acquiring personal wealth being those of Westernexecutives or trust magnates, not those of an old-style Chinese official,seem more reprehensible in Chinese eyes.
Even Leftist journalists
liked Kung personally while inveighing
against him. Like Emily Hahn I have a warm regard for him, but
perhaps I am prejudiced by the fact that it was Kung who circulated
my Japan’s Feet of Clay among the delegates to the Brussels Conference of the signatories of the Nine Power Treaty, and tried to makeNevil Chamberlain read my book to awaken him to the necessity of
stopping Japan.
Soong is hard and Kung is soft, and China needs hard men now.
If Soong had been successful in his efforts to curb corruption among
his subordinates, his unpopularity
in China would have been proofof his virtue. But he was found to be no more capable than Kungof curing the disease which debilitates the Chinese Government.
He
was accused of showing favoritism to corporations with which he or
his friends were connected and in general of ruining small business.
Nor can Soong be said to have done anything to promote democratic government in China. He showed disdain for the Legislative
Yuan, refusing to account to them later for his actions while Premierof China. Impatient and arrogant, he has few friends and is disliked
in particular for his un-Chinese rudeness of manner. Professor -Fu
Ssu-nien, the distinguished historian, wrote of him, “I would request
the chemists to have his body analyzed and see if there is one moleculethat gives a trace of Chinese culture.”
In his speech to the Legislative Yuan on March I, 1947, following

54

Last Chance in China

his resignation as President of the Executive Yuan (Cabinet), T. V.
made a spirited defense of his actions in a speech which graphicallydescribed the insurmountable difficulties faced by anyone in charge ofthe finances of a country in as desperate a situation as China. He
justly claimed that the managed currency system which he had inaugurated in 1935 had enabled China to stand the eight-year war against
Japan, but that the system also “contained the germs of the poison
that the country is suffering from now.” “When expenditure exceeded receipts,” explained T. V., “the only resource was the printingpresses. On the part of all agencies of the Government the argument
became: Why should the Ministryof Finance limit expenditures
when it has only to print a little more currency ?”Whatever T. V. Soong’s personal faults, no one could deny thetruth of his words when he said :When the war ended, the course of inflation could have been
stopped, that is, if there had been internal peace. Military expenditures could have been cut down, and revenues increased, and withthe assistance of receipts like the Government sales of enemy property and gold, further issue of notes could have been avoided, andprices stabilized.
We know what did happen. Instead of peace and reconstruction
the country was plunged into a state of war and destruction by theCommunists that was even fiercer than during the Japanese occupation. With the Japanese, destruction of property was largely incidental to the war, with the Communists it was deliberate and conscious, and their aim was to destroy the economic system so that theGovernment
would collapse, and they could then introduce theirCommunist system. Hence railways were destroyed, factories dynamited, mines flooded, and where they could hold they erected theirown administration,
set up their economic blockades and issued theirown currency. Instead of the healing process of peace that the people
looked forward to, they were plunged into civil war cumulatively
more exhausting than the war with Japan. Revenues could not increase as rapidly as we hoped, more and more appropriations had to
be given to the repair of railways, mines and industries, and military
expenditures swelled to huge proportions.
This is the answer to the question raised in the beginning of mytalk. Compared to the Communist war, the civil wars in the past
were child’s play. Those were the wars between rival armies, there
was not the deliberate destruction of all means of communications

Gray Dawn in China

55

and production, and the disruptionof the social system which theCommunists have as their conscious aims.
Even more important,as I have already pointed out, in the daysof specie-backed bank notes, there were natural limits to inflationthat were lost when we adopted the managed currency system. From
the resulting unchecked increase in bank note issue came rising prices,
speculation, and high interest rates ; in fact, all the evils that theLegislative Yuan is contemplating
today.
During my years as Minister of Finance, I was the watchdog ofthe treasury, I was the one who stood up against expenditures that
could not be borne by the Treasury.
When I became President of the
Executive Yuan, events unfortunately
made me the first and only lineof resistance to demands for more and more money.
I have nothing but sympathy for our people who have sufferedduring eight years of war, and who ask for some surcease from pain
now that the war with Japan is over. But facts are facts, and when
the Ministry of Finance could not raise the necessary funds it had tobe a struggle with me every time a larger appropriation
was asked
for. I had to help the Ministryof Finance to devise new sources ofreceipts such as the sale of enemy property and the organizationofthe China Textile Industries, Incorporated.
I need only mention inpassing that although there were charges of corruption
in the disposal of enemy property practically every case related to the time
before the Executive Yuan took over the assets and set up the Alien
body made up of
Property Custodian. Last summer an investigation
the Control Yuan, the People’s Political Council and representativesof public organizationsorganized many teams and went over the
Alien Property Custodian operations throughout the country with afine comb. Not a single case of corruption was discovered among the
There were cases of petty
responsible heads of the organization.
larceny, and that was perhaps inevitable, but not a single one of the
responsible men broke his faith with the country.
I shall also mention in passing the China Textile Industries, Incorporated. Had I listened to public clamors and sold the Japanese cotton mills, I would have enriched a few persons at the expense of thenation, I would have secured perhaps 200 or 300 billions sale pricefor the Treasury. Last year the net profit of the China Textile Industries, Incorporated,
was 400 billions, this year it will reach 1,000
billions. If as the Government intends to do so now, the China Textile Industries, Incorporated,
is offered for sale to the public, it will
have an asset worth between 3,500 and 4,000 billions. No, I do nothave to apologize for organizing the China Textile Industries, Incorporated.
I have often been accused of being arbitrary.
I have only striven
to conduct affairs of the state without fear or favor. From my ownl56

Last Chance in China

point of view, indeed I have looked upon myself as the most oppressed
person in the whole country. The Ministryof Finance turns in very
limited amounts of revenues and to meet Government expenditure it
has to resort to the printing press. I know what that adds up to andnight and day my colleagues and I worried over the situation.
I
have striven time and again to limit expenditures because I knew thedanger that confronted us. Nearly all Government agencies, be it
military or civilian, came to look upon me as the man responsible forfrustrating
their wishes for increased appropriations.
When I asked
for reconsideration
on some item of expenditure forthwith there were
inspired articles in the newspapers that while everyone had sanctioned
the increase the President of the Executive Yuan was holding it up.
I have borne this unpopularity because I considered it was in the lineof duty.
The truth can be told in one sentence. The present economic crisis
is the cumulative result of heavily unbalanced budgets carried througheight years of war and one year of illusory peace, accentuated to somedegree by speculative activities.
T. V. Soong used to be well liked by the Communists and is always
classed as a liberal by Western writers antagonistic to the National
Government.
Yet Dr. Lo Lung-chi,
the voluble spokesman of the
Democratic League, described him as a “comprador.”
The explanation undoubtedly lay in the League’s tie-up with the small businessmen of Szechwan and Yunnan left out in the cold since the liberationof Shanghai and the coastal provinces. The Democratic League, for
all its friendship with the Communists, was financed by such men as
Miao Chia-min who owned some forty factories in Yunnan.
Although my first interviews with Chungking industrialists
werearranged by members of the Democratic
League, I found a wide
divergence in the views expressed by the League’s leaders and Chungking’s businessmen.
They had been brought together only by acertain community of interest in opposing the government. The heavy
hand of the administration,
coupled with the inflation and the transfer
back to the East of China’s capital, was ruining the industrialists who
had flourishedin wartime fulfilling
government
orders.
It wasnatural that the Chungking
businessmen and Szechwan bankers
should now consider that government best which governed least, andsupport the opposition.
However, the Democratic League’s alliance with the Communists
was alienating its capitalist supporters. It was also alienating the bestGray Dawn in China

57

elements inside the League. Dr. Carson Chang, leader of the Social
Democratic Party, when I interviewed him in Chungking,made itvery clear that he had no sympathy with the Democratic League’s
policy of trying to ride to power by hanging onto the Communist
Party’s coattails. Carson Chang is an intelligent liberal, an economist
and a patriot, not a politician mainly interested in securing a cushy
job in the government. According to him China had other alternatives
than the present administration
or a coalition with the Communists.
There were, he said, plenty of good men in China and efficientadministrators
who could cleanse and rejuvenate the government.
The Democratic League was making a great mistake in identifying
liberalism with Communism which was antiliberal and totalitarian.
Nor did Carson Chang think that the choice for China in theadministrationof her finances was one between Kung and Soong.
China, he said, had several able and honest bankers who could run
the Finance Ministry
and the Central Bank far better than Kung,
who was incapable of eliminating
corruption, or Soong, whose maininterest was the accumulation of a fortune in U. S. dollars.
It seemed to me after talking to them that the leaders of the Democratic League had no more right to call themselves representatives ofAccording to its own claims thethe people than the Kuomintang.
League’s membership in Yunnan and Szechwan was only five thousand, and elsewhere it had even less support. They appeared to be asmall group of “outs” hoping to force their way into office throughan alliance with the Communists, and equally ready to ally themselves
to old style war lords if this could help them to acquire power.
The Democratic
League was linked up with some of the most“reactionary
feudal” elements in China. It had been protected by“Tiger Lung,” the war lord of Yunnan, who encouraged all dissident
elements in his attempt to remain independent of the Central Government. In Chungking
the League’s meeting place was a large andbeautiful mansion owned by a bearded old gentleman of the old school
who had made a fortune in opium in his younger days as a petty war
lord.
In my first meeting with the Democratic League leaders I had beensurprisedalmost shocked-tohear them describe Tiger Lung as ademocrat whose deposition by Chiang Kai-shek had been an outrage.

58

Last Chance in China

For Lung’s oppressive and corrupt governorship of Yunnan Province
had been responsible for the bad impression of China received by the
many American soldiers and airmen stationed at Kunming, the provincial capital, during the war.
One afternoon in Chungking at a Democratic League press conference after listening to a long dissertation against the government for
its failure to make way for a “democratic”
government, I asked asimple question : “How would you hold an election in China? Thereis not even a reliable estimate of China’s population, let alone anelectoral register. And how could the peasants possibly know who
to vote for, given their ignorance of everything outside their village,
the lack of communications
and newspapers and informed public
opinion ?”My question obviously stumped the leaders of the Democratic
League. They had never considered the practical difficulties. To them,
it is not unfair to say, democracy meant giving them jobs in thegovernment.
During the Political Consultative Council negotiations in January
and February 1946, which proposed to draw up an agreement fora coalition government, it was obvious that the Democratic League,
like the Communist Party, was not interested in anything like a general election. The Communists frankly admitted that they wanted
the coalition government then envisaged to continue, not majority
Hence their opposition to the sumrule by elected representatives.
moning of a National Assembly.
A coalition government is not, in the nature of things, democratic.
If all parties are represented in the government there is no opposition.
Moreover, except in times of grave national emergency such as war,a coalition government can be counted upon to be impotent, since it
must be pulled all ways by the contending parties within it. A coalition government in China, far from giving her better government,
would probably be even worse than the present one.
We should understand China better if we recognized that Chineseparties and factions are little more than organizations of individuals,
not popular movements. China is still too backward, economically,
politically and in social organization, for the mass of the people to playa role in politics. It is not even generally correct to describe the parties,
factions and cliques inside or outside the government as representing

Gray Dawn in China

59

any particular class or interest. To a limited degree they stand forcertain political ideas or economic and social policies but they are far
more representative of powerful individuals
or families.
In China
they don’t usually say, “So and so has such and such political convictions.” They say, “So and so is a Kung man” or a “Soong man,” or
one of “Sun Fo’s group,” or “So and so belongs to the Szechwan
group,”
Various cliques and groups inside and outside the government areconnected with certain banking, merchant and industrial interests, orwith a particular provincial faction and so forth. Other leaders areconnected with the conservative or “feudal” elements in society, suchas the reconditioned war lords or quasi-independent
provincial governors or generals of provincial armies. Some leaders are more representative than others of the old-style literati, the scholar rural gentry.
But one cannot truthfully
say that any faction inside or outside theKuomintang
represents a particular class or a clearly defined vested
interest. Too many government officials act in the interests of theirrelatives and friends but it is hard to point to any who act in theinterests of a cIass.
Individual
loyalties, family connections and personal striving for
power play the predominant roles in Chinese politics.
Even before the long war ruined the young, independent middle
class in China, industry and trade were largely dependent on thegovernment which alone had large capital resources and the possibility of obtaining foreign credits. It depended even then very largely on
government orders and subsidies or on credits from the banks whose
directors were also government officials influential in its councils.
During the war the bureaucrats inevitably acquired both more
power and greater opportunities
for graft. It was perhaps always
easier to acquire wealth through obtaining a high position in thegovernment than by enterprise. Today with the government in control of almost the whole economy the independent capitalists find it
harder than ever to exist. Hence the opposition to the government
and the outwardly curious alliance at times between such reactionary
elements as ex-war lords and “progressive”
capitalists, and between
both and the Communists.
Basically the trouble in China is that the war led to government
control over the national economy, whiIe not at the same time develop-

60

Last Chance in China

ing the democratic techniques for popular control over the administration.
During my first two weeks in Chungking, I heard enough andlearned enough, to realize that the pattern of Chinese politics is too
confused for anyone to be able to pronounce simple judgments concerning right and wrong as between the ins and the outs, and thegood and the bad inside and outside the government.
The views ofProfessor Chen Chih-mai, Counselor of the Chinese Embassy inWashington,
seem sound. Speaking to the Harvard Law School hesaid :It seems to me that many experts have treated the problem of China
much as they would treat a mathematical problem, which is to besolved by arranging
correctly the symbols involved.
They wouldclassify Chinese politicians into reactionaries, progressives, liberals,
democrats, fascists, landlords, Communists, friends of America andfoes of America . . . labels which are just as meaningless in China as
they are in other lands. Having done so, they proceed to propose
solutions by rearranging these individual groups, just as a mathematician would rearrange his symbols. . . .
I may go one step further in saying that I do not consider China asa problem, both in her internal and external relationships.
China is,rather, a mass of problems, just like any other country, problems
which assume ever-varying
shapes and relationships in accordancewith the subtle and complex laws of human character and the everchanging colors of the general world scene. These problems are highly
intricate, and must not under any circumstances be viewed in isolationfrom each other. . . .
We wish that you would pass judgment upon us not with yourown yardstick but with one which fits in with the historical traditionand present conditions of China.

CHAPTERIII

Co& D$domacy
HE late Dr. Co& taught that when sick you could make yourself well by saying over and over, “Every day in every way I
he failed to convince many
feel better and better.” Althoughpeople that will power and optimism are worth more than medical
advice, his theory is constantly applied in international
affairs.
In
the year following
the defeat of Germany and Japan its adherents
practically monopolized the press and radio, and the statesmen of thevictorious
nations seemed convinced that the world’s ills could be
cured by refusing to believe they existed.
The newspapers and statements of public men were full of optimism
and we were continually
reassured that international
relations were
getting better and better. When Russia began to roar like a lion we
insisted that she was cooing like a dove. The more clearly Molotov
and Stalin revealed in their speeches that Russia’s conception ofcollaboration was that of a boa constrictor with the lamb it has eaten,
the more ruthlessly the Soviet Union extinguished the liberties of its
small neighbors in preparation for the war between the Communistand capitalist worlds, which the Kremlin proclaimed to be “inevitable,” the more determinedly cheerful the American press became.
As the red danger signals multiplied the greater became the publicrejoicing at Russia’s “expressed desire” for international
collaboration.
The United States being strong and healthy was able to survive
the CouC treatment. It diminished her influence, lost her friends andallies, and made well-nigh impossible the fulfillmentof her war aims
without another war, but she remained the arbiter of the world’s
destiny.
China, weak and sick, hungry and poor, desperately required ascientific diagnosis of her illness and healing medicine or perhaps
61

T

62

Last Chance in China

a major operation.
But the United States insisted that all China
had to do was to wish herself well. We told her she could become
united and strong by persuading herself that she alone was responsible for the civil war which ravaged her.
In the winter of 1945-1946, not one word was released by the
Chinese or American authorities about Russia’s “preventive wrecking” of China’s industrial base in Manchuria,
or her refusal to get
out of the Chinese Northeast. American diplomatic and intelligence
officers had ample reports, but none of these was allowed to reach the
public. A few columnists of the Right, such as Constantine Brown
and George Sokolsky, hinted at the truth, but for the most part theAmerican press was silent.
By ignoring Russian looting, America gave tacit acquiescence.
The Soviet Government cannot be blamed if it regarded the UnitedStates State Department as both na’ive and silly for failing to protest during the process of robbery, only to bleat a meek “Alas I” uponrevelation of the crime.
It was made clear to me in my conversations with Chinese Govemment leaders in Chungking
and Shanghai that they were hoping
against hope that if China pretended that the Soviet Government wasfriendly, it would in fact become friendly ; that if no word of protest
was uttered against Russia’s breaking of the Sino-Soviet
Treaty,Russia would begin to live up to it; that if it were assumed that the
Chinese Communist
Party did not take orders from Moscow, it
would in fact become a Chinese party and make possible a politicalsettlement and an end to the civil war.
When it had been Japan who filched territory from China, set up
autonomous regimes and said that all she wanted was a “friendly”
Chinese Government which would “co-operate,” no one had believed
her. When Japan said she was not committing acts of aggression but
merely extirpating
Communism in China, everyone realized it was alie. But now that Russia was doing the same sort of things as Japan
had done and making the same kind of excuses, there was a conspiracy of silence.
Even the terminology
used by the Russians was similar to thatformerly employed by the Japanese. The Soviet Union also said she
merely wanted “friendly”
governments on her borders. The Communists did not, of course, claim to be endeavoring to prevent China

Cod

Diplomacy

63

They said instead that they were trying
togoing Communist.
But the underlying purpose was the same
make China “democratic.”
and the hypocrisy equally blatant.
When Japan was the aggressor, China received little help, but atleast she got sympathy.
Now she was deprived even of that. Those
who should have been her allies took Communist professions seriousIy and belabored the Chinese authorities with abuse.
The Chinese Government did its best to make Coueism work. In
November 1945, at the very time when Russia had refused the Chinese National armies the use of the Port of Dairen (which according to the Sino-Soviet
Treaty was to remain Chinese, unlike Port
Arthur which was to be “shared” with Russia), and when the Chinese were being prevented from landing at Yingkow
by Russianequipped Chinese Communist forces in whose favor the Red Army
had vacated the port, Dr. Sun Fo and other members of the Chinese
Government were speaking in the warmest terms of Sino-Soviet
relations. And Shao Li-tze, former Chinese ambassador to Russia,
declared categorically that China’s internal imbroglio was “not influencing Sino-Soviet relations.”
The make-believe was, of course, transparent.
When I returned
to Chungking in mid-January
1946, every correspondent knew moreor less what was happening in Manchuria.
Stories of the Red Army’slooting of the Chinese provinces were rife, and it was no secret that
the Soviet Government was demanding a codominion over all Manchuria as the price of peace in China. Yet even in off-the-recordpress conferences General Marshall,like the Chinese Government
spokesmen, refused to answer questions or comment on what wasgoing on in Manchuria.
The American correspondents in Chungking early in 1946, unlike
those I had met the preceding October, were for the most part menof experience and knowledge who knew the score. But when they
tried to get information
at the press conferences the government
spokesmen had nothing to say. Poor “Wordless Wu,” as the thenMinister of Information
was nicknamed, together with his colleagues
from the Foreign Office and Executive Yuan, had to parry all enquiries and profess complete ignorance of what everyone in Chungking
was talking about privately.
In an interview with the press in Chungking I gave what it seems

64

Last Chance in China

to me is still an accurate description of China’s position. “China,” I
said, “is like a little boy being bullied by a big one. He fears that if
he cries out no one will come to his assistance and the big boy will
just beat him harder.”The Chinese Government issued no word of protest at the Soviet
Government’s
breaches of the terms of the Sino-Soviet Treaty ofAugust 1945. In that treaty the government of the USSR promised
not only to respect the sovereignty of the National Government over
the whole of China, including Manchuria ; not only pledged itself to“noninterferencein China’s internal affairs,” but also agreed :To render to China moral support and aid in military supplies andother material resources, such support and aid to be given entirely to
the National Governmerzt as the Central Government of China.
China had paid a high price for this promise. She had given up
Port Arthur to Russia as a nava1, army and air base; she had agreed
to make Dairen a free port to and from which Russia could movegoods without
inspection or the payment of customs dues, and inwhich Russia would own half the harbor installations and equipment ;and she had also been obliged to give Russia “joint ownership” of
the railways of Manchuria.
Since a Soviet citizen was also to be
manager of the railways, China had in fact given Russia de facto
control of her Northeastern provinces. In addition to all this China
had agreed to recognize Outer Mongolia as an “independent state.“*The wheel had come full circle. In 1905 Lenin had welcomed thedefeat of Russia by Japan and denounced the Czar’s government forlaying “its greedy paws upon China.” In rgrg the Bolshevik government had voluntarily
annulled all the treaties which “through force
and corruption enslaved the Chinese nation.” But in 1945, at Yalta,
Stalin insisted on the restoration of the imperialist privileges on
Chinese territory
which Lenin had denounced.
FollowingWorld
War I the Western Powers had refused to relinquish their special
rights and privileges in China, but in 1943 they released China from* According to the terms of the treaty a plebiscite was to be held in Outer Mongolia.
Since Soviet Russia had been ruling there for years no one, of course, had any illusions
as to the result of the voting. Russia’s MVD (secret police) would attend to any
citizen of Outer Mongolia who would dare vote against “independence” under Soviet
COIltiOl.

’

Cod

DijUomacy65

the unequal treaties. Yet, while abandoning imperialist privileges forthemselves, the British and Americans promised Stalin to wring suchrights from the Chinese Government on Soviet Russia’s behalf. History affords few examples of such complete reversals of policy in soshort a period of time.
The reversed roles of the Western Powers and Russia was not
immediately apparent to the Chinese public, since the government in
its efforts to make CouCism work did its best to keep the Chinese people
unmindfulof the re-establishmentof Russian imperialist
rights on
Chinese soil. This was brought home to me in somewhat amusing
fashion when, together with Tillman Durdin of the New York Timesand George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, I followed a students’demonstrationin Chungking in February 1946.
The marching students had banners protesting against practicallyeverything wrong in China and everywhere else in the world. They
wanted peace, democracy and economic reconstruction at home andThey wanted the British to give up
international
collaboration.
Hong Kong, the Portuguese to give up Macao, and the French toabandon the extraterritorial
rights in Shanghai, which they, alone
among the Western Powers, were trying to retain. But the students
carried no banners demanding the return of Port Arthur and Dairen.
George Weller, with the disarmingly
innocent air which is hisgreatest asset, asked one of the student leaders to explain this omission.
The youth was nonplused. There was a buzz of talk. Finally a young
man from the head of the procession came over to us as we stoodoutside the British Embassy. In halting English he explained, “Russia’s rights in Port Arthur and Dairen were given to her by treaty.”
I remarked softly, “So also were Hong Kong and Kowloon given
to Britain by treaty.”“Ah,” said the boy, “but that was an unequal treaty.”
A few weeks later Chinese students had become aware that the newimperialists
had taken from China far more than the old retained,
and there were huge demonstrations
demanding that Russia “quitManchuria.”
But the National Government was not responsible. It
wzs still trying to make Coueism work and to restrain public protest
at Russia’s breaking of the Sino-Soviet Treaty for fear Stalin would
deliver some new blow at China.
The Chinese Government had had no choice but to sign the Sino--

66

Last Chance in China

Soviet Treaty since President Roosevelt had promised Stalin that
his claims against China would be “unquestionably
fulfilled,” andChina had been in no position to refuse a United States demand. But
by failing to protest at the Soviet Union’s failure to honor its commitments in that treaty, the Chinese Government weakened its position
at home as well as abroad.
This was amply demonstrated in 1947 when huge student demonstrations demanded an end to the civil war. Many of these students,
had they realized that Russia menaced China and that the Communists
were Moscow’s agents, would not have come out against the National
Government.
But the pretense, so unwaveringly
kept up by thegovernment, that China’s civil war was an “internal affair,” had been
all too successful. Naturally if the civil war was simply one between
Chinese factions, the students were justified in believing that it would
be stopped if the government would make concessions. How could
they realize that the price of internal peace was subjection to Russian
domination since the government and most of the press maintained
the fiction that the Soviet Union was not interfering in Chinese internal affairs ?
Although China had been forced to sign the Sino-Soviet Treatyof August 1945, the more optimistic members of the government had
evidently persuaded themselves that the Soviet Government would
honor its promise not to give arms or other support to the Chinese
Communists.
T. V. Soong, who negotiated the treaty, may havebeen primarily
concerned with pleasing America, but he and others
like him seem to have genuinely believed that it guaranteed internal
peace in China.
The so-called Left Wing of the Kuomintang,
led by Sun Yat-sen’sson Sun Fo, had for years been in favor of a Russia-orientatedforeign policy, and there were others who had argued that if China had
to make concessions to Russia she had best make them herself in
return for tangible benefits. “Why,” it had been said in 1944 and1945, “should the United States receive the quid pro quo for Chinesesacrifices ; why should we let the American Government barter ourrights and territories for what Roosevelt wants from Stalin; why notsee if we can get a better deal by negotiating ourselves I”
The members of the National Government who put no trust in
Stalin’s word had to go along with T. V. Soong and Sun Fo andaccept the Sino-Soviet Treaty at its face value. They had no choiceCouk Diplomacy

67

on account of China’s dependence on American support and America’s
insistence on amity with Russia at almost any price. But in private the“reactionaries”
expressed to me their complete disbelief in Russia’s
promises and their conviction that China’s ostrichlike diplomacy wassenseless and self-defeating.
The treaty proved worthless to China. Moscow refused to vacate
Manchuria until it was thoroughly wrecked, and started arming the
Chinese Communists
and fostering disunity in China immediately
after V-J Day. The Red Army prevented the Chinese Government
from getting its troops into Manchuria until the Communists had been
so well ensconced there that Russia could expect them to be able tokeep control and convert it into a Russian “Manchukuo.”
If the United States had continued the realistic support of China
pursued at the time of Japan’s surrender, the National Government
might have regained Manchuria in spite of Russia’s cynical disregardof the terms of the Sino-Soviet Treaty. The Japanese had then beenordered to surrender themselves and their equipment only to the
National forces, and the United States China Theater Commander
had moved these forces rapidly by air to occupy the liberated areasahead of the Communists.
But in the fall and winter of 1945 General
Wedemeyer, who was being attacked in the Communist press, foundhimself restricted in the use of American sea and air transport bycertain officers in the Far Eastern Division of the State Department
who placed their own interpretation
on United States policy to theadvantage of the Communists.
On November 2, 1945, Vice-Admiral
Barbey, in command of‘American
ships transporting
Nationalist
troops to Manchuria,
withdrew from the port of Yingkow after a conference ashore with
Soviet representatives, and after viewing several thousand Chinese
Communists digging trenches under Russian protection, A few days
earlier Barbey had retreated from another Manchurian port, Hulutao,
after Communist riflemen had fired on a launch from his flagship.
Dairen and Port Arthur,
Yingkowand Hulutao were the only
ports in Manchuria;
so the American Navy, retreating before theRussians and the Chinese Communists, finally landed its convoy of
Nationalist
troops at Chingwangtao
in North China, whence they
proceeded overland to capture Yingkow.
A little later Yingkow was
retaken by the Communists with the help of Russian tanks.
Ammunitionand other necessary supplies were also denied to the68

Last Chance iti China

Chinese Government, this embargo continuing until June 1947, when
it was at long last allowed to buy some ammunition
and arms in!America.
The United States, having forced China to sign away vital economic
and strategic rights in Manchuria
in the Sino-Soviet Treaty, didnothing to compel the Soviet Government to honor the treaty and left
China almost defenseless in the face of Russian aggression.
The attitude of the United States was a severe blow to China, but
the greatest disappointment of all to the Chinese people was the factthat all the concessions made to Russia had not brought internal peace.
There is little doubt that a word from Stalin would have caused
the Chinese Communists to come to terms with the National Government, preserving the unity of China. This was apparent following
the December 1945 Moscow conference of the Big Three which issued
a communique pledging Russia as well as Britain and the UnitedStates to promote “a unified and democratic China under the National
At once the Communists, after months of refusal toGovemment.“*
negotiate, came to Chungking to talk peace.
China then as now was up against the problem which the UnitedStates and Britain also face : that of dealing with an aggressor nation
which has two hands to use in international
diplomacy. Stalin’s righthand is the Russian Foreign Office and its diplomatic representatives
abroad. His left hand, the Communist Parties and fellow travelers
in all countries, can always take over the implementation of Moscow’s
policy when it seems advisable that the Soviet state should beat aretreat.
The Chinese Government was itself largely to blame for the predicament in which it found itself. During the war years it had refrained from answering the Communist accusations which had been
given so much publicity in America.
The Chinese Government andthe Kuomintang
Party rarely issue blanket orders to their press andinformation
organs, but throughout the war they adhered with suicidal naivetC to the prohibition of anti-Communist
propaganda. Occa*In the. March 1947 Conference at Moscow, Molotov endeavored to falsify therecord by saying that in December 1945 there had been agreement on the necessity for“the uniiication and democratization of China under (I (instead of the) National GOVernment.”

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sionally the realists at Kuomintang
Party Headquarters would get out
a schedule of Communist outrages, and the government would circulate a top-secret memorandum to its own officials, informing them ofcurrent Communist
provocations.
These were never released for
publication.
The Chinese public heard little of them ; the world public,
nothing. This was at the time when the Communists were ruthlessly
sabotaging the National Government in the midst of its life-and-deathstruggle with Japan, and Communist irregulars were following
Imperial Japanese divisions in occupying National Chinese territory.
The Chinese Communists never actually allied themselves to Japanbut they made Japanese positions secure in many places by preventing
the Generalissimo’s guerrillas from operating behind Japanese lines.
All this occurred behind the silence of Chungking, either self-imposed
or inspired by Washington’sorders.
Either because he believed that it was futile to appeal to the American public over the head of the Roosevelt administration,or because
he was under contrary orders from Chungking, the Chinese ambassador in Washington never tried to counteract the Communist propaganda which gave the American public an erroneous conception of
the situation in the Far East.
One of the Vice-Ministersof Foreign Affairs in Chungking, fromwhom I asked an explanation of China’s inept treatment of the Communist issues, explained it somewhat differently.
“If,” he said, “wewere to admit that the Chinese Communists are Moscow’s subordinates, we might land ourselves in even more trouble. Russia would
have an excuse for interferingin our internal affairs. Since Russia
says she has no interest in the Chinese Communists, she will not be
in a position to protest or interfere when we set out to deal with themin earnest. Moreover, during the war years, we were always in deadly
fear that the Russo-Japanese friendship pact might lead Moscow totake active measures against us. Our Communists were a sufficient
problem as things were. It would have been even worse if they had
actually joined hands with the Japanese against us.”
Perhaps, however, the truest explanation I heard of Chungking’s
inept diplomacy was given me by General Wu Te-chen, former mayorof Shanghai and at that time in charge of the Kuomintang
Party
Headquarters in the capital.
“Our Chinese mentality was the cause of our mistake. We were70

Last Chance in China

ashamed that the world should know of our internal disagreements.
The desire to save face was the primary reason why we never met
Communist propaganda abroad. We thought that if we ignored it
we would be able to cover up the split in China which was such adisgrace to the Chinese people.”
If General Wu Te-then was right, it means only that the Chinese
share the rest of the world’s inclination to deny realities if they areunpleasant and harmful and cause loss of face. The American andBritish people, who for so long went on pretending there was nofundamental disagreement between the democracies and “their gallant
Russian allies,” were behaving just like the Chinese. The falsity ofwartime propaganda would have become too apparent to the votersif it had been recognized that victory meant merely the substitution of
one totalitariantyranny for another.
It was true that since the Chinese Communists were not openly
recognized as Moscow’s allies or subjects, Russia could have no valid
objection to their being crushed in an all-out military campaign. The
Soviet Government itself would not for a moment have tolerated theexistence in Russia of a dissident party complete with its own army,
challenging Stalin’s authority.
It could have had no shadow of an
excuse for coming to the rescue of the Chinese Communists if ChiangKai-shek decided to liquidate them by force. But Moscow had noneed to intervene openly in China for the purpose of saving the Communists from destruction. Americans performed this service for her.
Prior to the appointment of General Marshall as special envoy toChina in December 1945, it had seemed as if the United States might
at long last face up to the realities of the situation in China and decide
on a clear and unequivocal policy.
General Patrick Hurley while ambassador to China had learned byhis experience in trying to bring unity to China that the Communists
could not be trusted to keep their word, that every time he persuaded
Chiang Kai-shek to agree to their demands they asked for more. He
had returned to the United States convinced that the only way tounite China was to back the legitimate government recognized by
Russia as by all the other United Nations.
Like most other Americans who have come into close contact with
the Generalissimo, Hurley believed that Chiang Kai-shek was sin-

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71

cere in his reiterated statements that he was determined to solve f heproblem of Communism by political, not military, means; that he did
not want to be a dictator and was ready to relinquish his powers assoon as a democratic government could function in China. On theother hand, it was clear to Hurley that the problem could never besolved if the United States continued its backhanded encouragementof the Communists.
Naturally,
as long as the Communists believedthat they had the support of many State Department officials as well
as of a large section of the American press, they would continue to be
intransigent.
Chinese hopes that General Hurley would convince America that
she must adopt a strong realistic policy in China were doomed to disappointment.
The fiery general from Oklahoma did not have thehistorical perspective necessary to statesmanship of the long view. He
accused his enemies in the State Department of “sabotaging” UnitedStates policy by privately advising the Communists that “his efforts
to prevent the collapse of the Nationalist Government didn’t represent
the policy of the United States.” But he seems to have taken Stalin
at his word when assured by him in Moscow that the Soviet Government had no interest in the Chinese Communists.
Or he consideredhimself bound to support the general American line of policy, that ofseeing, hearing and speaking no evil of the Soviet Union.
In anycase, when he resigned he said that there was “no question” but that
the Soviet as well as the British Government supported the UnitedStates’ policy of unifying China.
In thus exonerating
the Soviet Government from responsibility
for the intransigence of the Chinese Communists General Hurley left
himself without any strong argument against those who wanted theUnited States to favor neither of what they called “the two factions”
in China, or against those who hoped to make a Mikhailovitch
out ofChiang by the transfer of American support to the Communists.
I
myself in Shanghai had General Hurley’s words quoted against me
by the Russian press to prove I was wrong in blaming the Soviet
Union for the actions of the Chinese Communists.
Clever propaganda in America had convinced a large part of the
public that the Chinese Communists were liberal reformers and thebest men in China, and that the Chinese National Government was abunch of “fascists,” “reactionaries”
and what not. If the Chinese

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Lost Chance in China

Communists were not Moscow’s puppets but sincere democrats, thenGeneral Hurley’s opponents in the State Department had a good casefor urging that the United States abandon Chiang Kai-shek andsupport the Communists instead.
“Love me, love my dog.” General Hurley’s mistake in thinking
that he could be lacking in affection for the Chinese Communists
without incurring the violent opposition of their masters was immediately apparent. The Daily Worker shrieked imprecations and consigned him to the “fascist” limbo to which critics of Russia arecondemned.
Editorial opinion in the American press showed little or no awareness of the issues at stake in China. To judge from the extracts
published by the United States Information
Service in Shanghai, thenewspapers which did not favor the Communists advocated a handsoff policy in order to avoid a clash with Russia. One of the very few
informed comments was made by the Philadelphia
Record which
wrote :
Withdrawalof our support would mean a full-scale civil war in
China. Continued support of Chiang Kai-shek may help China on
her difficult road toward democracy. We don’t want an Asiatic Spainas the prelude to another worId war.
The tide of appeasement was at this time running strong in the
United States. Even those who had no sympathy for Communism
wanted us to let Russia have her way in China. Distinguished “internationalists,”
such as Walter Lippmann, took a similar line in 1945
to the one they had advocated in pre-Pearl Harbor days. Mr. Lippmann had then urged noninterference with Japanese aggression anda settlement of American-Japanese differences at China’s expense. He
now advocated a “united political front” of Russia, Britain and theUnited States to force the reorganizationof the Chinese Government
on a “broader democratic basis” by inclusion of the Communists.
Lest there should be any doubt that what he meant was forcing China
to become a Russian satellite, he wrote that the “formula” for such,a united front “is clearly indicated and is in principle like that madeat Yalta for Poland.” The New York Herald Tribune, among othernewspapers, published editorials suggesting that the “same degree ofsanity” should be shown by the United States in dealing with China

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Diplomacy73

as President Roosevelt had displayed at Yalta with regard to Poland.
Since the first country to take up arms against Nazi Germany had
been sacrificed by Roosevelt and Churchill in their attempt to buy
Stalin’s good will, why should not China, the first country to resist
Japanese aggression, suffer the same fate for the same good cause?
For China the policy favored by Mr. Lippmann and other lessdistinguishedadvocates of Realpolitik
was all too familiar.
For ahundred years the European Powers had settled their differences ather expense. Now with Poland’s unhappy fate to warn them, theChinese saw no course but submission to American-Russian
demands.
Whenever I argued with members of the Chinese Government
inChungking that their policy of silence was disastrous, they answered :“The Polish Government protested and look what happened to Poland.
It is better to be patient and make sacrifices than risk extinction.
We
can’t fight Russia, so our only hope is that the United States will
restrain her if we follow American advice.”
Viewed in historical perspective United States policy in 1945-1946
was a continuation of the line followed not merely for a decade, but
for fifty, even a hundred years. To risk a little but not too much. To
stand for the integrityof China but with reservations.
To accept
compromises at China’s expense, if only the aggressors or imperialists
or disruptors of Chinese unity could be induced to pay lip service tothe principles which the United States supports, and to guarantee thepreservation of American interests.
This was not due to hypocrisy or duplicity or a Machiavellian
purpose. It was simply that Americans were not sufficiently interested
in the Far East to commit themselves to a strong and definite policy
and take the consequences. They would put one foot into the stormy
Chinese sea, but they saw no valid reason why they should plunge
right in and sink or swim with China. Moreover the real issues atstake in the Far East had been confused by the flood of writings infavor of the Communists and lack of understanding of Chinese problems, even on the part of anti-Communists.
The foreign policy of every country is Iargely determined by domestic politics. This is particularly true of the United States because
it has the most democratic form of government of any people. Inevitably the administration
responds to pressure groups at home and74

Last Chance in China

determines its course abroad according to its calculated effect at thenext election. The ambiguity of American policy in China was the direct result of the confusion and misconceptions in the minds of theAmerican public, and the administration’s
efforts to please everybody.
President Truman’s statement of policy on December 15, 1945,
told China that there must be a cessation of hostilities and a broadening of the government to accord “fair and effective representation” toall political elements. He promised that as China “moved toward
peace and unity along these lines, the United States would assist the
National Government in every reasonable way.” China was told that
she had a “clear responsibility to all the United Nations to eliminate
armed conflicts within her territories.”
The whole statement assumed that the Chinese civil war had
nothing to do with Russia’s policy of expansion by revolution.
Italso assumed that the promise of American loans and other aid in thereconstructionof China, once unity was achieved, would act as a
powerful inducement to both sides to come to terms. In a word
America’s Far Eastern policy was based on the idea that the UnitedStates was in a position to mediate by putting pressure on both sides
in the civil war.
In fact we had no means of exerting pressure on the Communists
to come to an agreement or to honor their pledges if an agreement
were worked out. Only Stalin was in a position to do this.
America’s compulsions could be exerted only against the National
Government.
By ignoring the ties which link the Chinese Communists with Moscow and insisting on “unity” by agreement with theCommunists, we immensely strengthened Stalin’s hand. Since unity
could not be achieved unless Moscow willed it, the Chinese Government was put in a position in which it seemed to have no choice but
to make concessions to Russia if it were to retain American sympathy and obtain American economic assistance.
The Soviet Government was thus left free to impose unrestrictedpressure on China. The Communists could keep the central authorities weak and deprived of full American support while Russia sequestered or destroyed all that China had sought to save in the eight-year
war against Japan.
General Marshall’s “veto power” over loans to China was accord-

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75

ingly worse than useless as a means to exert pressure on the Communists. Far from desiring that China receive credits for reconstruction, they were counting on economic decay to bring down the
National Government and enable them to seize power.
By withholding
economic aid from the National Government until
it came to terms with those who profited from China’s economiccrisis, we put the Communists
into a position in which they could
blackmail the government.
One after another America’s representatives in China, civil andmilitary, had learned through experience that there is no middle way
in China between support of the recognized government and supportof the Communists.
General Stilwell had looked with favor on theCommunists ; Generals Hurley and Wedemeyer had become convinced that effective support of the National Government was the only
way to bring peace to China.
Instead of profiting from past experience General Marshall also
had to learn the hard way. For months he tried with extraordinary
patience and energy to mix oil and water into some new element. He
confessed his failure long before he left China.
The Chinese people paid the price for the education of the UnitedStates representatives in China and of the American public.
As might have been expected the Communists welcomed General
Marshall’s assignment to China. A year later they admitted that hewas not partial to Chiang Kai-shek “during the first two months of
his stay in China.”
Immediately following
President Truman’s December 1945 statement, the Communists suddenly, after months of refusal, announced
their readiness to talk peace in Chungking.
This was not because of any change of heart or purpose in theCommunist
Chinese leader, but because it was necessary to convince America of their sincere desire for unity, and because a movetoward reconciliation
with the National Government synchronizedwith Stalin’s policy.
The Red Army had already pretty well completed its dismantlingof the factories in Mukden and Changchun and the removal of thismachinery to Russia, and Moscow had promised to withdraw
its
forces by January 3 and to facilitate the entry of the Chinese Nation-

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Last Chance in China

alist forces. It was not known what further concessions China had
made to Russia but Stalin was demanding joint ownership of all
Manchurian
resources and industries.
He evidently expected to getwhat he wanted, because General Chu Teh, the commander in chiefof the Chinese Communist armies, had announced on December 5that the Communist Party did not dispute the Central Government’s
sovereignty over Manchuria.
The Chinese Communists themselves were in need of a breathing
they had learned that even whenspace. In Southern Manchuria
equipped by the Russians with modem arms they were no match for
Chiang Kai-shek’s soldiers. They needed time to be trained by their
Russian instructors.
In Lenin’s classic phrase, one step backward
would enable them to take two steps forward later on.
The truce arranged by General Marshall, effective from January
13, gave the Communists exactly what they required to consolidate
their gains, extend their power and get ready to play their part if andwhen Russia failed to extort what she wanted in Manchuria from theGovernment of China.
It “froze” the existing positions of the Communist and government
forces in North and Central China. Mixed teams, composed of one
American officer, one Chinese and one Communist representative,
flew out from the Executive
Headquarters
established by General
Marshall in Peiping to stop the civil war.
There was a last-minute hitch in the truce negotiations overcome
This episode is worth relating,by General Marshall’s intervention.
because it demonstrates how the Chinese Government gave way to
American representations, even when the Communists were clearlyin the wrong.
Accordingto the truce agreement Nationalist
forces were to beallowed, without Communist interference, to take over from the Russians as the Red Army vacated the Northeastern
provinces.
On
January g, however, a dispute arose as concerns Jehol, the provinceadjoining Manchuria which had been administered by Japan as partof Manchukuo.
The government insisted that since no Chinese andonly Soviet troops were in Chihfeng, a railway junction city in Jehol,
it should be occupied by the Nationalist armies under the agreement
covering Manchuria.
The Communists insisted on a standstill agreement there as in North China, and claimed that their forces had
already taken over Chihfeng from the Russians.

2Cot& Diplomacy

77

General Chou En-lai that evening, according to Arch Steele of the
New York Herald Tribune, was very depressed. He told the press
that the government was insisting on its right to occupy both Chihfeng
and Tolun-an
importanttrading and communications
center inChahar just outside Jehol’s western boundary.
Occupation of these
two strategic points by the Nationalist
forces would throw a barrier
across the middle of Jehol and effectively block Communist connections with the Red !Army in Manchuria, threaten the Communist
stronghold
at Kalgan, and sandwich Communist-held
Chengteh(capital of Jehol) between government armies north and south of
the Great Wall. The Communists declared they would never agree.
At 10:30 that night General Marshall visited Chiang Kai-shek at
his home and stayed there till midnight.
At 12:30 Chou En-lai had
a telephone call telling him to come to Marshall’s house at 8 :oo A.M.
to meet Chiang Kai-shek.
By IO:OO A.M. a truce draft had been
worked out and given to the press. The Communists had won. Chihfeng, and with it control of Jehol, was theirs.
Soon afterward it was learned that the government’s
contention
had been correct. The Red Army, not the Chinese Communists, hadbeen in Chihfeng when the truce was signed. But the Chinese communists kept the town until driven out in the new phase of the civil
war which began the following summer. As an official of the Chinese
Foreign Office said to me, “General Marshall need not have forced
us to give Jehol to the Communists.
It was not necessary as part of
the appeasement of Russia since it was covered by the Sino-Soviet
agreement.”
When I returned to Chungking a week or two after the truce had
been signed, the Political Consultative Council meetings were in fullswing. The government, Communists, Democratic League, Chinese
Youth Party, and nonparty representatives were trying to hammer
out an agreement for a coalition government.
Marshall’s truce had
been signed as the preliminary
for such an agreement, and everyone
hoped that the civil war had ended.
Maybe it might have if Russia’s policy had not changed, or if theCommunists had not conceived themselves strong enough to try the
military
game again soon after the agreements were signed. The
liberals or Westernizers
were in the ascendant in the Kuomintang
during the period of the Political Consultative Council negotiations.
Chiang Kai-shek showed himself ready to make very great conces-

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Last Chance in China

sions for peace and a chance for reconstruction and reform. Even themost pessimistic Chinese had a little hope in January and February
1946.
Chou En-lai played an important role in this period. He must haveconvinced certain key personages that he represented a section of theCommunist Party which sincerely wanted peace, unity and a democratic development for China. He almost convinced me in the hour
and a half’s conversation I had with him in Chungking.
He avoided
the subject of Russia and at the end he patted me on the shoulder,
told me I might visit Yenan and, looking me straight in the eyes withan expression which made his last words significant, said: “The
Chinese Communist
Party is grown-up now and no longer needs
assistance from anyone.”!A’ day or two later I asked one of the Chinese Ministers who isvery close to Chiang Kai-shek whether he and others believed that
Chou En-lai was actually sincere in wanting collaboration.
After amoment’s thought he replied, “In strict confidence ‘yes.’ That accounts for the weakness and delicacy of his position in his own party.”
It soon became evident that Marshall’s policy was based on theassumption that it was possible to “detach” the Communists fromtheir Russian affiliation; or at least “bring together the Right Wingof the Communists with the Left Wing of the Kuomintang,”and thus
create a real democratic party.
Walter Robertson, the United States charge d’affaires in China,
said to me in Peiping just before I left China: “Make no mistake
about it, Marshall is a great man and he is doing a wonderful job inwhich I think he will succeed.”“Have you changed your mind about the Communists then ?” I
said. “When I talked to you a few months ago in Shanghai, you put
no trust in them at all and believed they were Stalin’s puppets ?”“No, I don’t deny the Russian connection. But, after all, what are
the Chinese Communist leaders but men with an army out for power ?
Why should they not get what they want on our side? Some of themwould prefer it.”
I remembered then how once at a press conference in Chungking,Thou En-lai had replied to a question whether Mao Tse-tung wasabout to visit Russia “for his health,” by saying, “He would preferto visit the United States.”Couk Diplowmcy

79

There were rumors in the capital that Mao had in fact declined aninvitation
to come to Moscow. Soviet Russia’s ex-puppet war lordof Sinkiang, who had gone over to the Kuomintang a few years before
and never went outside his house without a bodyguard, told General
Odium that Mao had once said he would never go to Moscow because
he was afraid he might be kept there. All this rumor and hearsay
may have had some basis in fact. It could as likely have been deliberately encouraged by the Communists for their own ends.
Chou En-lai and others must have thrown out hints to make theAmericans believe that there was a real possibility of KuomintangCommunist collaboration.
We may never know what was said between him and Chiang when they met alone. We shall probably notknow for years what Chou said to Marshall and how much of what
he said General Marshall believed.
Certainly Chou En-lai’s attractive personality, his intelligence andwit and charm played a considerable part in convincing America’s
representatives in China that the Communists meant what they said.
It is impossible to say whether he was sincere or not. Historically
it is of little importance.
The Comintern record shows that it makes
no difference when there is a section of a Communist Party whichwants to follow the democratic path. It can never swing the wholeparty because of Moscow’s control.
In the years preceeding Hitler’s rise to power there was a considerable section of the German Communist
Party which opposed theCornintern policy of regarding the Socialists and liberals as the main
enemy and concentrating
Communist
efforts on the overthrowofGerman democracy to the benefit of the Nazis. All that resulted wastheir excommunication.
Either you toe the Moscow line or you cease
to be a Communist.
When I asked S. J. Wu, secretary of the Legislative Yuan and
Sun Fo’s close friend, whether it was actually believed that the Chinese Communists wanted to break with Russia and collaborate withthe liberals and America in reconstructing
China as a democracy, hereplied without hesitation : “They would like to but they can’t.”
This was an acute observation.
The Chinese Communists haveno particular reason to love the Soviet Union. It disorganized andbetrayed t’hem in 1926 to the exigencies of Russia’s domestic politics.
Their success in later years in establishing a provincial government

’

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Last Chance i+z China

and army of their own was due to their own efforts, to the shortcomings of the National Government and to Moscow’s inability to
subject them to the same tight control as the Comintern exerted overCommunist Parties in other countries. Their strength is undoubtedly
largely due to their past geographical and political isolation.
But
today they are in close contact with their Russian masters throughManchuria,
Kungchantang
representatives
had, I was reliably informed in
Chungking,been cold-shouldered by the Russian Red Army dignitaries in Manchuria following their poor showing against the Nationalist armies in the fall of 1945. The Russians, it was said, had been
disgusted with them for their military failures against the Nationalists
and had favored the ex-Japanese (Manchukuo)
puppet forces. In asense Russia had treated her Chinese as America treated hers. Both
had been expected to accomplish the impossible task of winning battles
without
arms against well-armed
adversaries : the Nationalists
against the Japanese, and the Communists
against the Nationalarmies. After my return to America, in the spring of 1946, Michael
Lindsey, who is one of the warmest foreign friends of the Chinese
Communists
and who lived among them for years and married a
Chinese, told me that his wife feared that the Chinese Communists
were once again being sacrificed by Moscow.
One could almost sympathize with the Chinese Communists
attimes. Moscow was always ready to place them in the forefront of thebattle, and retire and let them be killed if it suited her world strategy.
Intelligent
men like Chou En-lai, possibly Mao Tse-tung himself,
probably understood very well that Russia would no more welcome astrong Communist
China than a strong Kuomintang
China. The
function of the Chinese Communists, in Stalin’s plans for world conquest, was to weaken China, prevent her unification and reconstruction and prepare her for absorption into a’ Russia-centered Soviet
bloc. The last thing that Russia desired was their sincere co-operation with the liberal elements in the Kuomintang
to convert China
into a democracy and a strong united nation.
The Chinese Communists were only pawns and the more intelligent
ones must have known it. In the tragic drama being played out in
China, Chiang Kai-shek was not only the adversary of the Communists but was also the prop which sustained them. If Chiang couldCout Diplomacy

81

have been induced to play an anti-Americanrole, there is little doubtthat Stalin would have embraced him as readily as he had General
Peron. The Soviet Government would not have scrupled to sacrifice
the Chinese Communists if in so doing an advantage could be won
over the United States.
Chiang’s loyalty to the democracies, in the face of all the insults andinjuries they had inflicted upon him, was the Chinese Communist
guarantee of continued existence. Their usefulness to Russia depended on the National Government’s loyalty to the United States.
On the other hand, there was no way out for the Chinese Communists even if they understood the situation. They might not love ortrust Stalin but they dared not give up their army and submit themselves, defenseless, to the government of Chiang Kai-shek. Too muchblood had flowed since 1927 ; too many promises had been broken andtoo much mistrust engendered. How could either side believe that theother would forgive and forget?
The Kuomintang
could not believe in the sincerity of the Chinese
Communist
conversion to the principles of Sun Yat-sen until theybroke with Moscow. The Communists could not prove their sincerityby breaking the tie with Moscow unless convinced that the National
Government would not exterminate them if they did.
Chiang Kai-shek tried hard to break the deadlock, and maybe Chou
En-lai did so too. It was Chou En-lai who had brought about atemporary reconciliation
at Sian in December 1936, when war withJapan had become inevitable.
Chou, who had lived in the national
capital all through the war as the Communist representative, had a
far better understandingof China’s problems and the government’s
difficulties than the Communists far off in the mountain retreat ofYenan. He was an old companion in arms of the Generalissimo andthe two men respected each other, perhaps liked each other.
I found it hard to believe that Chou En-lai, who charmed me as hedid everyone else, is a liar and a cheat. He may have only been carrying out a clever stratagem in Moscow’s interests, but it is barely possible that for a short period of time he saw a possibility, throughAmericansupport, of cutting the umbilical cord which binds theCommunists to Moscow without killing his party.
If, in fact, this was the case, any such outcome was prevented byAmerica’s vacillation
and weakness in her dealings with Russia in

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Last Chance in China

both Europe and Asia, and the fading away of American militarymight.
Whether or not there was in fact ever any possibility of “detaching” the Chinese Communists from Russia, the only hope of successlay in America’s strength and her readiness to use it. Our attraction
would be powerful enough to pull the Chinese Communists into oursphere only if we appeared as stronger than Russia and as willing toprotect our friends.
Otherwise the Chinese Communists
must ofnecessity remain attached to Russia. They must have known thatshould they ever join sincerely in a coalition
government under
American auspices, Russia would repudiate them and denounce them ’dogs of the imperialists.”
as fascists or Trotskyists
or “running
Russia is close to them while America is far away. And it was clearly
demonstrated in Europe in 1945 and 1946 that, whereas Russia protects her own, the United States was willing to sacrifice millions ofpeople on her side in order to avoid a clash with Russia.
There were all the elements of a Greek tragedy in China. Neither
the Kuomintang
nor the Communists could escape their fate. It wasno simple conflict of right and wrong but one between two opposite principles.
Chiang Kai-shek and Chou En-lai might both be
noble men, but the stature of the protagonists on either side could notsolve the irreconcilable conflict. No real compromise was possible. The
past of both Kuomintang
and Communists determined their future.
Neither could escape from the impasse into which their different loyalties, aims and beliefs had brought them. Both sides were equally convinced that the path they desired China to follow was the only way tosalvation, and neither dared trust the other.
The coalition government which America was so anxious theyshould form could not, in the nature of things, be more than an armed
truce, or a “marriage of convenience in which both sides hoped tocheat the other.”
General Marshall had been catapulted into the midst of a situation
with which even Solomon could not have coped. Maybe the Gordianknot could be cut ; it certainly could not be unraveled by an American
general whose experience and knowledge were so far removed fromthe titanic struggle in China. He did his best to understand it, and helabored diligently,
but he never had a chance to succeed. He notCod

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83

only had to try to solve in China alone the world-wide conflict between
the United States and Russia for domination over the earth but healso had to pretend that the problems of China had no connection withthe wider conflict. Coue diplomacy was still the order of the day in
China, even after the United States had begun to face the facts of
the internationalsituation in Europe,

CHAPTERIVHE
Air Transport Command flights to Shanghai from Chungking were being canceled day after day on account of bad
weather, so I decided to try the Chinese line. The pilots of theChinese National Aviation
Corporation,
many of whom are Americans, must be among the best in the world. In the war years they
could only fly when weather conditions precluded the danger ofJapanese attack. So CNAC flights are rarely canceled.
On the other hand traveling by ATC is so simple that I had not
anticipated the complications
involved in traveling by the Chineseline. The Chinese have passport control and customs inspection andthe airport is crowded with all the relatives of all the passengers.
I had undertaken to bring with me some baggage belonging to acorrespondent who had left his possessions in Chungking when rushing to Shanghai for the Japanese surrender.
His bags were locked
and at first the customs would not pass them. This caused a long
delay. The CNAC baggage allowance is much less than the ATC,and I had already wasted time among the crowd at the airport exchanging United States dollars for Chinese currency in order to pay
the excess baggage fee. Now I found my passport missing--someofficial had demanded it from me earlier and not returned it. The
plane was about to depart and I got into a panic. Trying to hurrythrough the crowds carrying my heavy bags, I tripped and fell overan iron weighing machine on the floor which I had not seen in thedim light.
I got up and found that I could not lift my right arm. 1 managed to
explain to the customs people that I was in great pain, and got mystuff lifted into the plane. The passengers were all Chinese so I sat indumb misery for hours, hoping against hope that my arm was only
dislocated. TO the left, to the right and in front of me were women84

TShanghai

85

and children sick most of the way. The smell was unpleasant, there
was no food or water, and I had left the Press Hostel breakfastless at
5 :30 A.M.
Altogether it was an ordeal.
By the time we got to Shanghai after a stopover in Nanking it waslate afternoon and I was dazed with pain and exhaustion.
I could
hardly get out of the plane much less climb up onto the truck to getto the town. One of the pilots, speaking English, came to my rescue
and drove me in his car to the Cathay Hotel.
Here I hoped to find my friend, Cornelius V. Starr, publisher of
the Slznlzghni Evening Post. Thanks to him I was soon in bed at the
Shanghai Country Hospital with a shot of morphine. I had a double
fracture where the arm joins the shoulder.
Next day my arm was set and strapped and for five weeks I was
kept on my back with strict instructions not to move. I was disconsolate at having to waste so much time but Cornelius Starr, for whose
insurance companies I had formerly worked in New York as ECOnomic Adviser, produced a secretary for me and asked me to write aregular column for his newspaper. I had never before had the opportunity to write anything I liked and get it published, and this gave
me a satisfaction which enabled me to forget the pain and the prospect of never again having completely normal use of my arm.
This was in November and December 1945
when the fiction that
the Chinese Communists were just a liberal party unconnected with
MOSCOWwas being maintained in almost all the newspapers. It wasthen still fashionable to pretend that Russia was a democracy and afriend to China, who had no intention of trying either to take over
Manchuria
or establish a puppet government there and in North
China.
I pulled no punches. I showed how Russia’s actions paralleled
Japan’s in the thirties. I wrote of what was happening in Manchuria,
from what I had learned in Chungking and from Chinese friends who
visited me in the hospital.
I demonstrated the connection between
Chinese Communist
acts and Moscow’s policy. 1 insisted that in
helping the Chinese Government to move its troops, guard communications and otherwise prevent anarchy or the partition of China, theUnited States was defending its own interests and seeking to ensurethat the war should not have been fought in vain.
When I was at last able to get up and go out I found myself

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Last Chance in China

warmly received in United States Army and Navy circles for having
written what many officers thought, but about which there was aconspiracy of silence in the American and Chinese press. To myconsiderable satisfaction I found also that I had managed to annoy theCommunists.
My articles brought down on my head the wrath of theRussian press and radio in Shanghai and gave my views greater publicity than they would otherwise have had.
The Soviet Government had captured the formerly “White Rusnewspapers in Shanghai;
they published also ansian” (emi@)
English-language
propaganda sheet; and they had one of the mainradio stations which they had run all through the Japanese occupation. The articles and radio talks in which they denounced me contained little substance and much verbiage and abuse. I was smeared“reactionary,”“childish,”“fascist,” an “enemy ofas “illiterate,”
the toiling masses,” “ an agent of reactionary capitalism,” and “working in the interests of the war provocators.”
I have preserved one
Dnya
of December 12,
typical example, by Lev Grosse in Novosty
which as translated from the Russian under the heading ILLITERATE,INTRANSIGENTMISS UTLEY
read as follows:
Many local newspapers pay much attention
to a certain Miss
Utley, arrived here to carry on anti-Soviet propaganda. This “emanconcerning the
cipated” creature obviously has no understanding
Soviet Union.
But this-to
the foreign reactionary point of viewdoesn’t matter.
The doubly impervious ignorance of this woman can be judged by
the fact that she puts the Soviet Union in the same class with Germany and Japan. Russia, it seems, also is imperialistic
and aggressive as was formerly Japan and Nazi Germany. The USSR wishes to
exploit China, prevent China from becoming a powerful nation, andwishes to get from China all possible concessions and privileges forthe purpose of weakening her (China) and provoking civil war.
It appears that this stranger imagines that the whole world consists of idiots who do not know that the USSR is, first of all, a country of toilers, the country which protects the interest of the working
class. It seems that Miss Utley has overlooked the October revolution, all of Stalin’s s-year plans, and the meaning of Soviet Socialism. It seems that she has not emerged from the kindergartenofelementary political education.
Even elementary
school children
would laugh at the articles she writes about the Soviet Union because they know more about it than she does. For instance, they

Shanghai

87

know that the Soviet Union sacrificed 2o,ooo,ooo
of her sons anddaughters to save the world from the infection Nazi-ism and Samuraiism, that Russia returned Manchuria to China at a cost of 10,000
lives, and that Russia wants to create a stable peace for the wholeworld and for the workers of the whole world, of which, it seems,
Miss Utley does not consider herself a part. It appears that Miss
Utley belongs to the enemies of these toilers and answers to someother interest, but not to the interest of humanity.
She serves worldreaction, provocators of war and the fascist beast. . . .
It is useless work, Miss Utley ! Every honest Chinese as well as
every honest American will say that the Soviet Union cannot be anaggressive country because of its internal structure, because of its
Soviet ideology-the
ideology of the toilers, who do not wish to shed
the blood of their children for the interest of egoistic and extravagant
reactionary capitalists.
I have no doubt that Miss Utley will receive
deserving gratitude for her activity from her masters-in
the formof a proposal (recommendation)
to leave China as soon as possible. . . .
Really isn’t it clear to you, Miss Utley, that it is not Russia which
is a menace to China . . . but you and your brother reactionaries ? Infact it is you, but not Soviet Russia, who wants China to be a backward country and wholly dependent on the capitalists of all nationalities, on the industrial
magnates who are afraid of losing theirmarket in China! China will stand on her own feet and will create
her great industry.
In that the Soviet Union will lend her strong
support.
No, Miss Utley, you are not worth the blood of our people, you
do not merit the respect of humanity!
Having no citizenship and being fearful that the Soviet Government might soon be in a position to force them to return to Russia or
have them thrown out of China, the majorityof Shanghai’s huge
Russian colony were most anxious to do nothing to offend the Soviets.
Some became Moscow’s abject tools prepared to say anything and doanything to please their masters. The more actively anti-Communist
they had been in the past the farther they now felt it necessary to go
in adulation and subservience to Stalin in order to redeem themselves.
Lev Grosse is a son of the former Czarist consul general in Shanghai, and had once been bitterly anti-Bolshevik.
Yet it must have beeneasier for a former loyal servant of the Czar to believe that Stalin can
do no wrong, than for a liberal or Socialist “White Russian.”

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Last Chance in China

Many former reactionaries, conservatives,
even aristocrats, hadbeen enticed or driven to embrace the Soviet Union and act as its
propagandists, spies and informers. The Social Democrats and Social
Revolutionaries
for the most part remained unreconciled and had thecourage to defy the Soviet Government which was trying to force
or persuade all Russians to become Soviet citizens.
There were some young people among the Russians in China whosincerely believed that Soviet Russia was all the propagandists said,
and who having had their patriotic fervor aroused by the war longed
to return to the fatherland.
They had been born in China or having
left Russia as young children had no memories of the Revolution.
The background of their lives was one of hardship, humiliation andRussians” were looked down on by the English,
distress. “White
French and Americans as inferiors, and they had had to struggle in
the labor market and in small business enterprises against their Chinese hosts. It was little wonder that they longed to believe in the
New Russia and to live in their own country instead of as exiles or
refugees in a world in which they belonged nowhere. Others again
found it pleasant to be able to bully the Chinese who were in suchmortal fear of the Soviet Government that the Shanghai police dared
not arrest Soviet citizens when they got drunk and disorderly orcommitted other misdemeanors.
For the most part the former “White Russians” who had fled toChina during or shortly after the Revolution were proving as usefulto the Soviet Government as they had formerly been to Japan. Mostof them had collaborated wholeheartedly with the Japanese and forthat very reason were now ready to save themselves by jumping on
the Soviet band wagon. Today they constitute valuable Communist
auxiliaries.
Most of them speak Chinese and few have any affection
for China. In any case they are all terrorized by fear of being draggedback to Russia.
I was told in Tientsin that some of them were being used as dummies for the acquisition of Chinese properties by the Soviet Government. According to Vincent Torossian, a United States Marine InRussians bothtelligence officer, there was evidence that Tientsin
pumped the marines for military
information
to pass on to theCommunists,and offered them fantastic prices to steal Americanarms, ammunition,
trucks and jeeps.
Farther north, in Harbin and other Manchurian
cities, the large,

Shanghai

89

formerly “White” Russian colony was forced to act as Soviet citizens.
The Chinese who have a facility for apt description called theemigrk Russians radishes-red
outside and white inside.
As Sergeant Dick Wilson, of the Stars and Stripes, reported in
February, 1946, from Mukden, “Once again the threat of railroading
to the Siberian salt mines is haunting Russians in Manchuria
whoyears ago fled the Soviet Union. ” “Hounded residents” of Mukden
and Dairen revealed to this young United States correspondent that
their lives were “shadowed by NKVD
(Soviet secret police), theirevery move noted, recorded, and interpreted by skilled agents who
keep them in line with a program of terror, espionage and intrigue.”
Both the longings and fears of the Russians in China were broughthome to me when Alla, my secretary, told me she did not dare tocontinue working for me, now that I was being attacked in the Russian press. I was sorry to lose her as we had become very friendly,and she was efficient, intelligent and amiable. It was hard to make out
whether she was moved more by fear or by the wish to return to her
native land. She did not want to believe the terrible things she hadread and heard about the Soviet Union. Her mind told her they weretrue; her heart longed to disbelieve. She kept on saying that she
must go and see for herself even if they killed or imprisoned herwhen she got there.
In any case she was fearful of the consequences of incurring
theanger of the Soviet authorities by working for me, their enemy. She
spoke and thought and felt like a character out of Dostoevski, readyfor martyrdom,
deliberately letting her heart instead of her headguide her actions ; longing for love and happiness but believing she
was doomed to sorrow, and feeling an inner compulsion to help thefates destroy her. She was clever and well qualified and quite nicelooking, but so sensitive and proud and self-sacrificing that her whole
life had been spent in letting herself be victimized.
She had for years
supported her mother and her brother and her husband, but the last
was now happily dead after having lived on her earnings without evenbeing faithful to her.
It was a satisfaction to me before I left China to find she had become engaged to an American officer, and had finally decided against
offering herself as a sacrifice to Mother Russia, and for emigration
to the United States.
There could be no greater contrast than that between the mystical

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Last Chance in China

and unpracticalold-style Russians, exemplified
by Alla, and myChinese nurses. The nurses had little to make them happy from aWestern point of view. They worked very hard, they had little freetime and very little money; several of them had been cut off fromtheir families for years by the war and did not know if their parents
were dead or alive. But they thought they were lucky and they werealways smiling, cheerful and ready to go to any amount of trouble to
make one comfortable.
They were extremely fond of the matron, an
exceptional English woman who spoke Chinese fluently and had devoted her life for twenty years to training nurses in China. Miss
Bowerman astonished and pleased them by promoting her nurses
according to their qualifications
and their capacities instead of acRussians, Eurasians or
cording to whether they were English,
Chinese, as had been the custom in Western hospitals in China. I am
sure that one could not have been better nursed anywhere, and in
addition the whole atmosphere of the place was kind and friendly
instead of stiff with discipline.
My favorite nurses were a charming and very pretty girl called
Gloria, who had nursed in an American Army hospital during thewar, and Miss Wu, an older, sadder woman who had worked in
Shanghai all through the Japanese occupation.
Neither of themwished to marry.
Why, said the vivacious Gloria, should she exchange her pleasant useful independent life for that of a Chinese wife?
And she would tell mc what a dreadful life her mother had had withher father who spent his time and money on concubines while his wife
slaved at home.
Without conscious cynicism Gloria told me how her father “beinga patriot” had gone off to Chungking with all the money, and left her
mother to manage anyway she could to support the family inShanghai.
The hospital I was in was being run by a British Red Cross unit
for the sick who had been in Japanese concentration camps, but there
was one floor for paying patients. On the whole, the ex-prisoners
told me, they had not been brutally treated. But they had always been
hungry and had suffered terribly from cold. It was chilly enough inthe hospital, but we were among the lucky few in Shanghai whoseradiators had not been carted off by the Japanese and we had enoughcoal to have heat for three hours every day.

ShanghaiMiss Bowerman had been in the retreat with the Chinese ‘Army
in Kweichow the previous winter.
She had slept on the ground in
the snow and shared all the hardships of the Chinese soldiers. She
had organized a hospital for the children among the starving frozen
refugees and saved many lives with food obtained from Australia by
the Red Cross. She was one of those rare people whose motivating
force in life is healing and helping. She wasted no time condemning
the Chinese for all the misery around her, but at once set out to dosomething about it. She loved the country and the people, understood their philosophy and recognized their qualities as well as theirdefects. Her sane and merciful attitude, her cool competence, senseof humor and kindness made her a most satisfactory person to talk to.
When the time finally came for me to leave the hospital I departed
with regret.
“The Chinese now are in a very suspicious mood after their longordeal. Everybody is suspicious of everybody else. There is suspicionof the capitalists, of the foreigners, of the landowners, of the government; the people who lived through the occupation hate those whocome from Free China ; the Chungking people accuse the people of theliberated areas of having been collaborators.
Hate and jealousy aretoday the driving force of politics.”
This was the melancholy verdict of an old Chinese friend I talked
to in Shanghai.
In formerly Japanese-occupied territory
as in thecountries
which Germany had occupied, liberation
had brought
neither bread nor warmth nor justice and freedom. It was a bitterly
cold winter and coal was almost as precious as gold. The Communists
had destroyed the railways and stopped the mines from working.
Finally the Americans and the British brought fuel to Shanghai byboat but most of it had to be used for light and power. Broadway
Mansions, where the United States Army Air Forces and the press
lived, and where I secured a room when I left the hospital, was about
the only building in Shanghai with regular hot water and heating.
The majority of the Chinese had neither heat nor warm clothing
nor enough to eat. Since organizationand distributionof supplies
was worse than under the Japanese the people were suffering evenmore now than before the liberation.
The most bitter disappointment was the behavior of the liberators.
There was not, it is true,

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Last Chnnce in China

anything in the nature of the wholesale killings and executions whichmarked the return of the emigrk government to France. It was notin the Chinese character to condemn as traitors all who had in any
way “collaborated” with the Japanese in order to earn a living. But
much property was confiscated and there was some outright robberyof the people of Shanghai by the “patriots” or carpetbaggers from
Chungking.
!As always in China, there was more corruption
than persecution.
In Europe, lust for vengeance rather than desire for money motivated the atrocities and injustices perpetrated by the “liberators.”
In
China many were dispossessed of their property or ruined by exactions but few were murdered “legally” or by mob violence. LVhat wasmost shocking was the fact that the representatives of the Chungking
Government used the opportunity
to enrich themselves either by taking possession of or sellin, m to others the property of the “collaborators,” or letting real collaborators or ex-puppets continue to enjoy
their ill-gotten gains in return for fat bribes.
The Chinese, left to themselves, would probably never have had
the idea of confiscating private property. They might also have been
expected to have the common sense to encourage every factory inShanghai to continue working instead of confiscating the Japaneseand puppet-owned ones, thus closing them down. If they had followed their natural rational behavior pattern, they would not havetreated as collaborators, whose property had to be confiscated, those
who had merely bowed to necessity and kept themselves and theirworkers alive through the long hard years of the Japanese occupation. But their allies were continually criticizing
the lack of democracy in China, and vengeance was now held to be a primary democratic virtue. If they had not sealed up enemy and puppet property,
if reconstruction
had been recognized as more immediately important
than retribution,
the factories would have been kept working andthere would not have been such wide unemployment and such a steep
rise in commodity prices. But there would have been a storm of criticism from the Left. Thus the debased standards of Western democracy gave the worst elements in China a good excuse to feather theirown nests to the hurt of the nation.
The best as well as the worst aspects of the Chinese character as of
their government were to be seen in Shanghai. The Chinese are venal,Shanghai93

but they lack the revengeful and self-righteous
spirit of the West.
They showed themselves more humane and rational in their national
and individual behavior toward the vanquished enemy than we, theAmericans, British and French. The Chinese were capable of saying,“There but for the grace of God, go I,” even when they had had attheir mercy the people whose soldiers and government had ravaged
and oppressed China for eight years. To the Chinese, the Japanese andGermans remained individual
people. The conception of collective
guilt which we have taken over from the Nazis and the Communists isforeign to their ethics and their reason.
China’s essentially civilized attitude toward the defeated was often
misconstrued.
There were not wanting American correspondents inShanghai who interpreted it as “sympathy with the fascists” and continually urged the Chinese to adopt the maxim, “Do as you have been
done by,” instead of adhering to the Confucian and Christian saying,“Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you.”
One of the most unpleasant manifestationsof the so-called Christian Western world’s attempt to teach the Chinese how to be civilized
and modern was the reiterated demand that they lock up every
Several of the American correJapanese and German in Shanghai.
spondents seemed to think that the main purpose of a victorious“democratic”
nation was to extract an eye for an eye. They wereindignantwhen they visited the camp for interned Germans andfound that the prisoners had plenty to eat and were not otherwise
ill-treated.
They thought the Chinese very remiss because the Japanese civilian population of Shanghai was allowed freedom of movement in Hongkew, the former Japanese concession. When ChiangKai-shek came to Shanghai in February 1946, the only question the
Scripps-Howardcorrespondent had was one concerning the freedomof some Germans in China. The Generalissimo in his answer showedboth courage and a truly democratic outlook. He said, “The Nazis
who were our enemies are imprisoned.
We do not consider every
German national an enemy.”Thus in spite of their failure as yet to establish a democratic government, in some respects the Chinese have shown a greater regard
than the Western powers for the moral and legal precepts which
are the foundation of democratic government.
We have abandoned
the concept of equality before the law in favor of racial discrimina-

94

Last Chalzce in Chillation in our treatment of the conquered. As Anne O’Hara McCormick reported in the New York Times, there is an “interallied convention that the word of a German shall never be taken against thatof an ally.”
The Chinese, having themselves suffered so long by being treatedas racial inferiors, might be expected to abhor such race distinctions.
But it is not always that a people has the fairness and wisdom torecognize that the precepts it wishes applied to itself must also be adhered to in the treatment of others.
The Chinese are also loyal people. They remembered that in theearly stages of Japan’s war against them Germany had been a main
source of China’s armament imports, and that even when the Nazi
Government withdrew the German military mission in the summer of
1938, some German officers had braved Hitler’s wrath by remaining
in Chiang Kai-shek’s service.
It was more than a little ironical that the same Americans who had
continued for years to help Japan by letting her buy scrap iron, oil andmachinery, now insisted that even Germans who had helped China
should be interned or sent to a ruined Germany.
It was one of thebest traits of the Chinese that, at a time when America held overthem the power to save them from Russia or abandon them, theirgovernment refused to treat all Germans as “war criminals,” and tohand over the individual officers who in 1938 had refused to returnto Germany, sacrificed their careers in the German Army and risked
the loss of their citizenship in order to continue serving China.
One evening in Shanghai I was invited by General Tang En-po,
the commander of the Chinese forces in the area, to a dinner given by
the Japanese interned in Hongkew. There were five American officers
present and a few Chinese. Our Japanese “hosts” served a Japanesedinner in a Japanese room and afterward gave us an excellent concert.
When I arrived and seated myself on the floor with the others, I
felt ill at ease. For years I had inveighed against the Japanese for
their bullying of China, their aggression, the atrocities they had
committed and their hypocrisy.
But now they were defeated, broken
and defenseless. The last thing I wanted to do was to crow over them
now that they were the oppressed instead of the oppressors.
In a very short time I ceased to feel uncomfortablebecause theChinese were so courteous and unconstrained.
As the sake flowedShanghai95

and the geishas sang, the American officers also came to feel at ease.
Brigadier
General Middleton
who was so huge and genial that I
thought he must be a Texan, but who actually came from Connecticut, sang an American ballad following the Japanese songs. Tang
En-po congratulated the Japanese performers, asked about conditionsin the camp and in general behaved as Europeans once did, or aresupposed to have done, in the Age of Chivalry.
Altogether it was aheart-warming
occasion which showed up the best qualities of victors
and vanquished alike.
Left alone, the Chinese would probably have had the common
sense to make use of the technical capacities of the defeated enemy.
One reason why Chinese industry is today in such a parlous conditionis the lack of engineers, mechanics and other qualified personnel. The
factories taken over from the Japanese, or liberated after having been
confiscated by Japan, are of little use without competent people to
run them. And China’s claim to reparations from Japan proper areoften met with the argument that the Chinese could not make muchuse of machinery taken from Japan. Having defeated her, the Chinese
would have done well for themselves to utilize Japanese talent andtraining in Chinese interests. I am not advocating that China shouldhave copied the Russians, French and even the English, who are
keeping millions of German ex-prisoners of war as slave laborers infarms and factories. It would have been easy for the Chinese to hire,on a voluntary basis, thousands of Japanese technicians now joblessand homeless. The Chinese cannot afford to employ Americans or
British on a wide scale, but they could afford to employ Japanese andwas indeed open to China
even Germans. A wonderful opportunity
to reverse the prewar relations with Japan by using the Japanese andexploiting
their talents and training instead of being used and exploited by them.
It seemed to me that what prevented the adoption of such an intelligent and rational policy was mainly the attitude of China’s allies
in the war. An outraged protest would have arisen from Americans,
British and Russians and in particular from the so-called liberals of
the Western world if China had used her ex-enemies to help her reconstruct and rehabilitate her economy. Mr. Clarence E. Gauss, theformer United States ambassador to China, now an official of theExport-Import
Bank, was in fact reported in the Shanghai news-

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Last Chance in China

papers to have given as a reason for refusing a loan to China the possibility that some Japanese and German technicians might be employed to help build up China’s industries.
The cost of vengeance is always high. China was forced to pay it
One result is that some Americanin order to appear “democratic.”
military men now look on Japan as a better bet than China as acounterweightto Russia’s aggressive imperialism in the Far East.
Although extraterritorial
rights had been given up by the Western
powers in 1943 the “Shanghai mind” had not fundamentally changed.
The imperialist-mindedmembers among the foreign communityinShanghai, although they had perforce to accept the new situation inwhich theoretically and legally the white man and the Chinese wereequal, were no more willing than in the past to see China united, fully
mistress in her own house, and helped by American capital and knowhow to develop into a strong and independent nation.
Since the Communists were now the one element in China which
could be counted on to prevent China from becoming united, independent and strong, it was perhaps not really surprising to find thatmany old China hands regarded them favorably.
The situation was ironical to anyone who remembered how, in
1927, the Shanghai taipans had hailed Chiang Kai-shek as their deliverer from the Communist menace. Their changed attitude toward
the Communists and Russia could be understood only if one remembered how the die-hard racists, or simple seekers for easy profits, hadat one time also been benevolently neutral toward the Japanese.
fought the Chinese Nineteenth RouteWhen the Japanese, in 1932,
Army in Shanghai, the prevailin, u sentiment among the foreigners
there had been that it would be a “jolly good thing” if Japan taught
China a lesson. They had made excuses for, or had no objection to,
the rape of Manchuria and Japan’s subsequent setting up of so-calledautonomous regimes in the North, and encouragement of any andevery separatist tendency in China. Their attitude had not changed
until the Japanese started attacking Western interests, privileges andtreaty rights.
Why, therefore, today should one expect them toworry about what Russia and her agents were doing to China?
The really remarkable transformation
which had taken place wasin the attitude of foreign liberals.

Shanghai97

In the twenties all who called themselves liberals had demandedthat China be freed, helped to reconstruct her economy and attain
unity and national independence.
Now, however, many self-styled
liberals voiced strong disapproval of the American Government’s support of China in its efforts to attain precisely these objectives. A decade earlier the liberals had condemned Japan for setting up so-calledautonomous regimes in North China, and for using force and intimidation to encourage every separatist tendency which would prevent
Chinese unity and render Japan’s aggression easy. Now some of thevery same individuals
who had condemned both Japan and the“Shanghai-minded”
foreigners who sympathized with her, were allin favor of the Communists setting up autonomous regimes, maintaining a private army and laying China open to Russian aggression.
They failed even to condemn the manner in which Russia was taking advantage of China’s internal difficulties to try to extort concessions in Manchuria which would have given Russia the same absolute control as Japan had en joyed after I 93 I.
General Hurley had sensed the unity of outlook and aim between
the reactionary foreigners and the Communists when he said in NoAmerican foreign policy sided with thevember 1945 : “Professional
Chinese Communist Party and the imperialist bloc of nations whose
policy it was to keep China divided against herself.”
The Russian newspapers also recognized that there was a limited
short-term
communityof interest in the Far East between the oldand new imperialists.
Hurley had specifically exonerated the British
Government from blame and obviously referred to British, Americanand other foreign die-hard opponents of Chinese unity and independence. The Russian press, however, spoke of “the disquiet inEngland over the intentions of American politicians of General Hurley’s type to take advantage of the American dissatisfaction
with
British behavior in India, Palestine and the Dutch East Indies, inorder to squeeze England out of those places and strengthen theAmerican position there.” (Pravda, December I, ~945)
The curious similarity
in the views of old China hands unreconciled to the loss of their imperialist privileges, and those of the Communist sympathizers who called themselves liberals, was continuallyapparent in conversation and in the foreign press. Like the Japanese
before the war, the die-hard conservatives and the neo-liberals con-

98

Last Chance in China

sidered the Chinese Nationalists
unfit to govern and damned themon all counts. The only difference between them was that the former
thought all Chinese unfit to govern themselves while the latter thoughtthat the Chinese who accepted Russian tutelage would rule wisely,
justly and well. Both were equally convinced that there is somethingso rotten in the state of China, or of her government, that she is undeserving of support and sympathy. Anyone who remembered that
Mr. Gauss had been United States consul general in Shanghai in
1926-27, when the Shanghai taipans had wished to crush the Chinese Revolution by force of arms, could not be but amused to find him
warmly praised by the Left in 1935, when he urged the United Statesto “go slow” in giving loans to China.
If one viewed the situation in historical perspective the amazing
thing was that so few foreigners saw the parallel. One might haveexpected that men without Communist sympathies, some of whom
had themselves suffered years of imprisonment
in Japanese camps,
would by now have realized that they stood to lose as much by theoverthrow of the Chinese Government by Russia’s puppets as by theformer Japanese conquests. Instead they wittingly
or unwittingly
gave aid and comfort to the Communists.
To me it seemed like an old play revived with a new set of actors
under new management.
In the years 1936 to 1940, when one spokein favor of strong diplomatic action and economic measures to stop
Japanese pressure or aggression, one was not only denounced andvilified by the Japanese, one was accused of “wanting war” between
the United States or Britain and Japan. How often had I been told,
both in the United States where I had lectured for the American Committee for Nonparticipationin Japanese Aggression, and in England
where I spoke for the China Campaign Committee, that I ought not to“provoke war” by suggesting that action be taken to stop Japan! Weshould, one was told, continue to be friendly to Japan and continue
to supply her with war materials with which to fight the Chinese,
since any other course would lead to war.* Now it was argued that we* In 1938 the United States supplied Japan with 90.9% of her copper imports, 904%of her scrap iron and steel, 65.6% of ferroalloys, 76.9% of her aircraft and aircraft
parts, 65.6% of vehicles and parts and 45.5% of her lead. Following the outbreak of
the war in Europe the percentages became higher still. Although finally in July 1941
Japanese funds in the United States were frozen, thus precluding further large purchases, no complete embargo had been placed on war-material
exports to Japan when
she attacked Pearl Harbor.

Shanghai

99

must avoid a clash with Russia at all costs and bring about peace in
China by concessions to the Communists.
Cynics say that the only lesson history teaches is that mankind
The reason is, no doubt, that in eachlearns nothing from history.
epoch the roles of “villain” and “hero” are played by different actors.
Moreover human beings are naturally inclined to condone actions
taken by a seemingly friendly power, or an ally, which they condemn
when committed by a hostile or rival country. Only a minority recognizes that in international affairs, as in society, there can be no lasting
peace and security until universal principles of justice and rules ofconduct are established and enforced.
All this is not to say that the American and British community inShanghai did not contain many people who not only welcomed the endof extraterritoriality
and other lost imperialist privileges in China, butalso understood very well that their own and their country’s best interests would be served by the emergence of a strong and independent
China. There were not wanting businessmen, as well as Embassy andConsular officials and army and navy officers, who appreciated the
difficulties of the National Government and sought to give aid in
the solution of its well-nigh insoluble problems.
General Olmsted, Chief of G-5 at United States Army Headquarters, said to me in an interview that he divided foreign businessmen in
China into three categories:
The old China hands who had never put anything into China butjust taken out profits. These would like to have China still in effect(He
a colonial territory, and did not wish to help her reconstruction.
would like to see all these sent home.)
Those who had done business in China in the past but recognizedthat the old privileges and easy profits were of necessity gone forever.
They hoped, however, to be able to enjoy the same profits as in the“good old days” because the venality of Chinese officials might be
expected to enable them to enjoy as privileged a position in postwar
China as in the days of extraterritoriality.
Those whose first approach to China had not been through the
prewar residents in Shanghai and other treaty ports: businessmen
and others who had entered China through the back door, so to speak,in Chungking
during the war years-these,
he said, were ready andwilling to treat the Chinese as equal partners and friends. A good

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Last Chance in China

example was the CNAC which was a profitable undertaking.
The
Pan-American
Airways people had been willing to have Chinese as
chairmen and vice-chairmen but had themselves supplied, or helped
to train, the technicians, and had given the Chinese the know-how
so badly needed. C. V. Starr, although an old China hand, was another example of enlightened foreign business interests since he hadbuilt up a huge insurance business before the war by taking in the
Chinese as equal partners.
It was General Olmsted’s opinion that the Chinese Government
had acted eminently fairly as regards foreign property. It was willing
to restore it in the former Japanese-occupied territory, only insistingthat an end be put to the old privileged status of foreigners in China.
Many Americans did not agree with General Olmsted. There wasin particular much bitterness on the automobile question. The Japanese had taken possession of every automobile they could lay theirhands on. After the surrender these had come into the possession of
the Chinese Army.
The former residents of Shanghai coming out
of internmentor returning
to China from abroad were indignant
when they failed to obtain possession of their property. Most of themeventually got their cars back but it often took a long time, andthere was great indignation
when a certain United States Armycolonel said that the Chinese Army had greater need of the automobiles
than the foreign businessmen and should be allowed to keep them.
Since new cars could not be bought, and transport in the huge cityof Shanghai with its streetcars filled to overflowing was a real problem,the automobile question caused a lot of ill feeling. According to theconception of the rules of war as applied by the Russians in Eastern
and Central Europe the foreigners in Shanghai would have lost much
more than a few old automobiles.
Everything
ever in Japanesepossession, however acquired, would have been accounted Chinese“war booty.” Every building, business and factory formerly owned
by foreigners and taken over by the Japanese during the occupation
would have become Chinese property.
The Chinese, unlike the Russians, were scrupulous in this regard.
Only such properties as, for instance, the towering near-skyscraper
Broadway Mansions sold to Japan by the British before Pearl Harbor, were taken over by the Chinese Government.
Properties seizedby Japan after she was at war with Britain and America were recog-_

Shanghai101

nized as belonging to their former owners. Yet the foreigners inShanghai were far more voluble in their resentment over the loss of
their automobiles than the American investors who have lost factories
and mines, buildings and equipment in Rumania, Bulgaria, Poland
and the Russian zone in Germany. As usual a different standard wasapplied in dealing with China and Russia. The very same journalists
who persisted in adopting a friendly attitude to the Soviet Union and
the Chinese Communists wrote angry diatribes against the Chinese
authorities on the automobile question.
On the bigger question of the administrationof Shanghai, theforeigners had much more serious matters to complain about than
the restitution of a few old automobiles.
It would have been better
for China if the transition from foreign to Chinese control of theInternational
Settlement and French Concession could have been
gradual. Shanghai is one of the largest cities and ports in the world,and China’s main industrial center. It was by no means a simple task
to administer it, and the few Chinese who had the necessary qualifications were not fully made use of. Those who had stayed in Shanghai
through the occupation had little chance of getting jobs in the administration.
And the type of official sent down from Chungking
after
Shanghai’s liberation was too often of the carpetbagger type. Many
regarded their jobs as an opportunity to make up for the lean years in
the interior at the expense of those they considered as having failed
to sacrifice for the nation by their failure to come to Free China.
The better part of Shanghai had formerly been the International
Settlement and the French Concession. Since extraterritoriality
had
been abolished the former international police force was now replaced’ by Chinese police who were inadequately trained, poorly paid, andunable to cope with the gangsters and robbers of the city. Foreign
merchants complained with justice of the serious robbery and pilferingof their goods in warehouses. UNRRA
officials were often dismayed
at seeing stolen supplies in use or on sale in Shanghai.
On the other hand some of the horrible sights one used to see inShanghai were absent. I never saw Chinese policemen beating the
rickshawmen and coolies as the Sikh police of the International
Settlement had been used to do. There seemed to be less bullying of thepoor and favoritism of the rich, even if there were more robbery andthieving than in the past. Many foreigners who complained loudly

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Last Chance in China

concerning conditions in Shanghai were in reality expressing theirresentment at the loss of their former privileged status as men andwomen of the white race. They considered it intolerable to have toride in streetcars together with the Chinese, and they would notwillingly
adapt themselves in any way to the new conditions ofequality of race.
It must, however, be admitted that the transformationof Shanghai
from a foreign city on Chinese soil into a part of China showed up
as under a neon light the shortcomings of the Chinese Government.
In the old days foreigners, secure in the foreign-administered“Treaty
Ports,” had not cared much what went on in the interior of China.
Now the state of China as a whole was their immediate concern since
there were no more foreign enclaves of security, order and good
government.
If China were in disorder the foreigners suffered with
the Chinese. And few foreign businessmen had the tolerance andwisdom to be patient and to take into account the tremendous
problems faced by the Government of China. Instead they gloatedover China’s failures as demonstrating
the unfitness of the Chinese
to govern themselves, and as a proof that the old and dead “unequal
treaties,” giving foreigners special privileges and the right to theirown settlements on Chinese soil had been justified and should never
have been annulled.
As John Kullgren of the United States MilitaryIntelligence said
to me, “The Chinese Government should have realized that Shanghai
is China’s great show window.
Many foreigners judge China entirely by Shanghai. If a great effort had been made to put on a goodshow there, few people would have cared what was happening in theinterior.”
Morally, as in France, the war and foreign occupation had left
deep wounds. A people who have lived long in conditions in which
there is no respect for law because the government is an alien tyranny,naturally take time to come back to law-abiding
habits and regard
for the interests of the community.
Shanghai, which used to sharewith Suez the reputation of being the most immoral city in the world,
had always had more than its share of gangsters and racketeers ; andthe Chinese had never had much respect for government or national
obligations.
Small wonder that speculation, illegal deals, corrupt

Shanghai103

practices, black markets and robbery under the guise of patriotism
flourished even more luxuriantly
than in France.
It had always been a Chinese contention that the foreign concessions
fostered and encouraged gangsters and prostitution,and that thenature of theevil example of the West destroyed “the law-abiding
Chinese.” It would have been more correct to say that the impactof the Western world on China had destroyed the old morality ofher people without giving them a new one in exchange.
It was too much to expect that the Chinese, after having for solong been the underdog in their own country, should suddenly beable to take over and administer a Western-created metropolis, whichranked among the first half-dozen cities of the world in size and as aport and industrial
center. As one of England’s wise old China
hands, Mr. Findlay Stuart of Butterfield and Swire, said to me inShanghai, it would have been far better for the Chinese, as well as
for the foreigners, if the process of abolishing extraterritoriality
had
been gradual, as had been planned before the Sino-Japanese War.
The Western Powers had then been prepared to abandon their special
rights and privileges as the Chinese became ready to administer
Shanghai and other Treaty Ports. Now, instead of a slow transition
from foreign to Chinese control, the difficult problems created bothby liberation and by the change-over from foreign to Chinese administration confronted a government whose main energies were engaged
in seeking for a solution of the Communist problem, and on recovery
of its Northern provinces.
The National Government was also far less capable than in 1937of administering
Shanghai and other former Japanese-occupied areas.
Its cadres of experienced administrators
had been destroyed or dispersed during the war. Those who remained had lost their contacts
and influence, since in some places the Japanese, in others the Communists, had broken the web of governmentby executions andexpulsions of both patriots and “collaborators.”
The Chinese Government would have lost face but it would undoubtedly have gained materially if the foreigners who had formerly
administered
Shanghai and the Chinese Customs Service had beenasked to do SO again until such time as the National Government
was prepared to take over the task. Shanghai might then have become

104

Last Chance in Chinaan enclave of security and good administration
into which capital
could flow instead of seeking shelter abroad or in British-administered
Hong Kong. Trade would also certainly have been easier to revive.
It was no doubt politically impossible for Chiang Kai-shek to leave
Shanghai temporarily
under partial foreign administration.
But hisgovernment
could at least have employed some of the foreigners
emerging from Japanese concentration camps at their old jobs in thecustoms, police and other services until there were enough qualified
Chinese personnel to take their places.
That Chiang Kai-shek realized the difficult tasks created by theabolition of extraterritoriality
was shown by the speech he made inShanghai in February, in which he stressed the responsibilities which
freedom brings equally with his satisfaction that the Kuomintang
had at long last fulfilled the first principle of the San Mifz Chu I:
national independence.
Shanghai was an example of the paradox that the war for China
had lasted both too long and ended too quickly. The well-nigh insoluble economic problems which face China today are the legacy of thelong war which imposed too great burdens and of the Japanese
occupation which weakened the moral fiber of the nation. At thesame time Japan’s sudden collapse so soon after Germany’s defeat
was a disaster for the Chinese.
If the war had ended in a series of victorious campaigns, driving
the Japanese out of China and re-establishing
the authority of theCentral Government over the lost provinces one by one, there would
have been time for gradual recovery under the stimulus of victory.
All the economic and political problems of a great but poor country
suddenly liberated would not have been dumped into the lap of theCentral Government at once.
China, it seemed to me in the winter of 1946-47, was like a man
wounded and starving and long confined to prison who was suddenly
required to stand up and cope with the responsibilities
of a free lifeand faced at the same time with a new enemy seeking to put him inanother prison.
Both politically and economically there was no transition period
from war to peace. Economically
China would have benefited enormously if the breaking of the blockade had come many months before
victory instead of immediately preceding it. For her Lend-Lease of

Shanghai‘05

necessity never constituted more than a trickle of supplies.* It cameto an end at the moment when it was about to turn into a flood.
Consequently the country which fought first and longest against thecommon enemy faced the future with incomparably less accumulated
American supplies than Britain or Russia.
To take only China’s greatest need, transport : She received a mere
fraction of the hundreds of thousands of trucks given to Russia andEngland.
True, she was now getting UNRRA
supplies, but in viewof her huge population they contributed only a drop in the bucket ofher misery. UNRRA
allocations to China amounted to only about$1.25 per capita, as against $20.70 to Poland; $27.50 to Yugoslavia;$6.40 to White Russia, and $4.60 to the Ukraine.
Greece with a population about equal to that of the city of Shanghai
had received a toal of $700,000,000
of UNRRA
and British aid by
the end of 1946 as against China’s total of $535,ooo,ooo.
LittleCzechoslovakia which neither fought in the war nor was devastatedreceived $27o,ooo,ooo
from UNRRA-halfof what was given to
China.
The unexpected manner in which the war ended was also politicallydisastrous. For years China had been leaning all her weight to holdback a pressure now suddenly removed.
Small wonder that she
toppled over and moved perilously close to disintegration!
The expectation of a great land campaign against Japan in the south had
caused the concentration
there of China’s best troops and left theNorth open for the Communists to flood following Japan’s surrender.
Even if the administrationof Shanghai had been all that could bedesired many foreign businessmen would still have been hostile to
the National
Government.
For a hundred years the white man,backed by his governments, his banks and the treaty privileges wrested
from China by force, had reaped the main profits from China’s foreign
trade. Now he had to compete with the Chinese on something less
* Following the Quebec Conference Winston Churchill said in Parliament that “after
all the lavish aid which America has given to China, these defeats in China are mostdisappointing and vexatious.” This singularly unfair and ungracious remark was madeat a time when about 98% of American supplies were going to Europe and the Chinese
were receiving only two-tenths of r% of Lend-Lease. The Chinese could rightly ask
whether the British Isles would not have been conquered by Hitler if England had
rceived as little help as China from America.

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Last Chance in China

than equal terms. Conditions which would have seemed natural inSouth America or Europe were considered an outrage in China.
During 1946, when little control was exerted over trade and exchange and China’s imports rose above the 1936 level, there wasprofitable business for all, but many foreigners already felt the keencompetition of Chinese traders. By the end of the year, when China’s
adverse balance of trade, depletion of foreign-exchange
reserves andever mounting inflation forced the government to ban luxury imports
and institute import quotas and licenses for all imports, many foreign
firms found themselves squeezed to the wall. 1Vhether or not they
were right in saying that licenses to import were unfairly allocated,
there was not nearly enough trade to go around among old and new,foreign and Chinese importers.
Moreover China’s scarcity economy was inevitably leading to increasing state control of her economy. Such controls were in facteven more necessary than they had been in America during the war,
but it was not to be expected that many foreigners would see thematter in that light. Before I left China loud complaints were alreadybeing raised against the unfair competition and “monopolistic
tendencies” of the Chinese Government agencies set up to buy commodities
abroad and distribute them in China. The Chinese Universal Trading
Company in New York was likened by some Americans to Russia’s
Amtorg and accused of supervising and controllingthe whole China
trade. As early as February 1946 the American
National Foreign
Trade Council and the China-American
Chamber of Commerce andIndustry appealed to the State Department
to concern itself with“the drift toward increasing State control of industry and trade in
China.”
Of course, if the Chinese Government
had not instituted suchcontrols and had let Chinese and foreign merchants buy and sellas they pleased, there would have been no less of an outcry from theLeft at home and abroad that the government was doing nothing tocheck profiteering,stabilize exchange and prices, and ensure the useof available foreign exchange for the import of necessities for thepeople and capital goods for reconstruction.
Since China had neither a free economy nor a competently andhonestly administeredcontrolled economy her government was, as
usual, blamed by both conservatives and “progressives,”
capitalists

Shanghai‘07

and Communists, advocates of laissez faire and advocates of a planned
economy. And the least prejudiced observer had to admit that theremedies instituted by the government with the aim of restoring
China’s disintegrating
economy often proved worse than the disease.
The venality of public officials, nepotism and the tremendous power
and influence of the Soongs and Kungs and other financial magnates and their clients, combined with the lack of a competent civil
service, balked even the best meant efforts to revive industry andexports, stabilize prices and ensure that China’s small foreign-exchange resources be used as economically and usefully as possible.
The net effect of stringent exchange controls and the licensing ofimports was not to curb speculation, divert capital into productive
enterprise and halt the rise in prices. Precisely the reverse effect
was accomplished.
Merchants and government
officials, who had
previously speculated in foreign exchange and imported luxury goods,
now speculated instead in the necessities of life, thus pushing prices
ever higher. The insecurity created by the civil war and the runaway
inflation naturally discouraged productive investment and encouraged
the use of capital in hoarding of commodities and speculation. Nor
did the rich and powerful find much difficulty in circumventing
theforeign-exchange
regulations in order to export capital for investmentin the United States or South America instead of in China.
On February 16, 1947, Chiang Kai-shek announced that all individuals and corporations with holdings abroad must report them andat once sell them to the government or to the Chinese banks. But
no one seriously believed that top-ranking government officials would
be forced to obey this order. Chiang Kai-shek might tell them that“the survival of the nation is at stake” and call upon “all patriots” tojoin him in “working
out the salvation of the nation,” but he did not,or could not, give the new Premier Chang Chun the power to compel
them to liquidate their huge foreign holdings and bring their capitalback to China. If he were to do so Chiang would inevitably be forced
to rely more than ever on the Kuomintang“reactionaries,”
since,
generally speaking, it is Westernized“liberals,” not the so-called
reactionaries
and land-owningclasses, who have accumulated fortunes abroad.
Nor could it be expected that confidence in the sect&y of investment in China would be restored by exhortations or decrees promising

108

Last Chance in Chinathat hoarders and profiteers would be “punished as severely as thecrisis requires.” The flight of capital abroad or to Hong Kong, or
its use in harmful speculation, would continue until the civil war
ended, until revenue commensurate with expenditures could be raised,
the printing presses cease to be the main source of government revenue and the government’s credit restored.
While lack of confidence precluded the possibility of raising revenue
through the sale of government bonds, lack of competent and honest
administrative
personnel made it impossible to raise enough throughdirect taxation in the cities. Chiang Kai-shek, when announcing in
February 1947 that “rough and ready justice” would henceforth beapplied in the collection of taxes, admitted that “since we have notdeveloped a modern accounting system, collection of income andother direct taxes has proved very ineffective.”
It seemed to me doubtful whether the disapproval of the Chinese
National Government voiced by the foreign business community, andits opposition to a United States loan to China, was due to its disapproval of the corruption and ineffectiveness of the Chinese administration.
In days gone by foreign businessmen in China had not
worried themselves about the shortcomings of the Chinese Government, provided it left them a clear field for profit-making.
The realgrievance of both old and new China hands was state interference
and participationin trade on the part of both the United States andChinese Governments which cut out the foreign middleman’s profits.
This was evidenced by the attitude of Shanghai businessmen toward
UNRRA.
True that CNRRA, the Chinese distribution
agency for UNRRA
goods, was not without the usual failings of Chinese Government
agencies. But the real complaint of American businessmen was that
UNRRA
was giving away goods to the Chinese which they would
have liked to sell to them. This was demonstrated in April 1946 whenthe American
Chamber of Commerce at Shanghai submitted to
UNRRA
proposals of ways in which nonrelief goods could be marketed through commercial channels. It may also be suspected that thetender solicitude for the Chinese Communists in the distributionof
UNRRA! goods, displayed by many American capitalists in China,
was not unconnected with their desire to see noncommercial imports

Shanghai

109

to China distributed as far away as possible from their own hunting
grounds.
Incidentallyit should be noted that a quite different standard wasapplied by UNRRA
officials themselves in dealing with the Chinese
and with the Russians and their satellites.
No one ever suggested that the Polish Government
should be
required to distribute UNRRA
supplies to the undergroundopposition, or that the Soviet Government should see to it that a due proportion of UNRRA
goods be allocated to the millions of political
opponents of the Soviet regime in Russian concentration camps. But
in China it was insisted that the government should send UNRRA
goods to the Communists who were fighting against it. Moreover,in Yugoslavia
Marshal Tito’s government
was permitted to sell
UNRRA
relief supplies in shops at prices so high that the people,
unaware that they were buying American gifts, complained of thehigh prices charged by the United States. Tito was thus able toaccumulate huge profits to maintain his antidemocratic army as well
as obtaining the use of UNRRA
trucks and construction goods formilitary
purposes.
Similarly
in the Ukraine and White Russia
UNRRA
supplies were sold to the people by the government.
But inChina the practice of selling UNRRA
goods through commercial
channels, followed in other UNRRA
countries, was banned. The
reason given was the impossibilityof establishing a rationing systemand price controls,* but this explanation hardly holds water. Thevery fact that China has no rationing system and effective price control made it the more necessary to allow sales to bring down prices bynatural economic processes. In countries where rationing
was inforce, it would have been both more practicable and fairer to allocate
UNRRA
supplies free.
But when China, in February 1947, asked permission to convert
her remaining UNRRA’ allocation into consumer in place of durable
goods and to be allowed to sell cotton and grain to bring down
prices, rectify the unfavorable trade balance and promote an industrial
revival, an outraged protest was raised in the American press whichaccused the National Government of wanting to sell relief on the* Statementby GeneralLowell W. Rook, Director Generalof UNRRA in China, on
February 19,1947.

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Last Chance in China

And the UNRRA
office in China protested that“black market.”since UNRRA
was a “nonpoliticalagency” it should give no direct
aid to the National Government’s
efforts to bolster China’s shaky
economy.
I have not so far mentioned the British in Shanghai, although I
met more English people than at any time since leaving England to
become an American.
No longer the lords of the universe, now resigned to taking a backseat and to the shrinking of their Empire and their influence, but also
happily absolved from responsibility
in the Far East, the British in
China are not doing so badly. For one thing they are satisfied withsmall profits and no longer expect to make a fortune in a few years assome Americans still do. For another their goods arrive to be sold,while no American can be sure whether strikes or gifts to the world
will hold up his shipments. Lastly old China hands who know theold ways, while ready to adapt themselves to the new, are to be foundmainly among the British.
The British,never having expected the people of China to stop
being Chinese, are less disillusioned than Americans and more realistic
in their dealings. As one of them said to me in Shanghai : “We cansit back and wait for the Americans to break their necks. Some by
now want only to clear out. And the Chinese who expected miraclesfrom America will turn to us when trade ceases to depend on politics
and handouts. Moreover we understand finance and trade much better
than the Americans, and are also less conservative.
“Funny how the Americans who are so up-to-date in industrial
techniques, are rigid conservatives when it comes to finance andbanking. There’s still life in the old British lion, and he is better atlearning new tricks than the American eagle.”
It was perhaps a symptom of the changing times that the British
North China Daily News was more realistic about China’s economic
and political problems, and far less inclined to exonerate the Chinese
Communists, than the American Shanghai Evening Post. My association with the one American daily paper in Shanghai had come toan abrupt end when its former editor, Randall Gould, came back to
China in late December. Although personally friendly he had no lik-

ShanghaiIIIing for the views I had been freely expressing while the paper wasedited by Charles E. Miner. Not that Charlie Miner agreed with me
he wanted to leave China to theeither- like the GI’s in Kunming
Chinese, but he was a Midwestern
American without Communist
sympathies and with old-fashioned ideas about free speech.
I thought that the course of events would soon change Randall
Gould’s tune. He was not a Communist and he would be sure tochange his views once he realized that Russia threatened America.
He was typical of the kind of liberals who consider that to be progressive you must be kind to Communists.
Also he was a good journalist
who went with the tide. Later on, as I relate in a subsequent chapter,
Randall Gould began to take a different line following the revelations
concerning the Red Army’s reign of terror in Manchuria.
The British-owned
North Chilla Daily Alrzrv asked me to write forthem as soon as my column stopped appearing in the Shazghai Eve&g
Post. But I was anxious to get back to Chungking while thePolitical Consultative Council meetings which followed the January
13 truce were proceeding.
Moreover I was by this time the accredited correspondent of Reader’s Digest and could now travel free on
U. S. Army planes to visit the several other places I had in mind.
AlthoughI had enjoyed Shanghai’s cosmopolitan cocktail parties
and excellent Chinese food, and had made some good friends there,
I had had more than enough of the metropolis on the Yangtze.
It
seems to me to combine the worst features of both Chinese andWestern civilization,with an admixture of the less pleasing characteristics of all other cultures.
The massive buildings along theBund, the luxurious hotels, great department stores and elegant shops,
the innumerable prostitutes of all races-thelargest number of any
city in the world, they say- night clubs, dance halls, cafCs andrestaurants, gangsters, pimps and speculators, all side by side with astarving, ragged, overworked or unemployed mass of coolies, workers
and the human flotsam and jetsam which pours in from all over
China as a river flows into the sea, are an ever-present reminder of
man’s inhumanity to man. As my French friend Claude Riviere said :“Shanghai
before, during and after the Japanese occupation
always presented the most terrible combinationof civilization
andbarbarism, culture, cruelty and indifference.
Children die of hunger

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Last Chance in Chifza

in the streets and men work like horses dragging heavy loads, while
the rich, the prostitutes and other hangers-on feast and dance, indifferent to the condition of humanity.”
Although no longer the citadel of Western power and privilege on
Chinese soil, Shanghai is a monument to the white man’s greed,aggressiveness, arrogance and racial pride. And nowhere are theunpleasing characteristics of the Chinese more in evidence. All races
threw off the restraints of their codes of behavior in this city ofcorruption,
which is neither European nor Chinese, and where fortunes were made in a few years by the few while the masses lived insqualor,CHAPTER

La+stDays

V

0fCh~flgkizg

HUNGKING in its last days as China’s capital was not unlike
Hankow before the fall. For a few weeks there was, if not a
united front, at least a free interminglingof all parties and an
ephemeral hope of peace. The truce of January 13 was being observed
and the Political Consultative Council appeared to be hammering out
an agreement for a coalition government.
The atmosphere was charged with optimism, and even the weather,about which I had heard so much ill, had evidently decided to reform
shortly after V-J Day. After Shanghai’s bitter cold the climate ofSzechwan seemed mild and benign. The sun shone on most days in
January and February
1946, and only occasionally was the city
wrapped in damp mist or drenched with rain and its streets deep in
mud. Victory weather they called it and already there was a hint ofspring in the air.
In spite of the lack at the Press Hostel of the usual amenities of amechanized civilization
I felt happy. My arm still pained me a little
but I rested better on my springless bed and rocklike pillow than inShanghai’s luxurious Broadway Mansions.
To my great joy I found two of the “Hankow Last Ditchers” at thePress Hostel. Arch Steele of the NC-W York Tribune and Till Durdinof the New York Times were back in the city whose long agony they
had experienced in the days when the Japanese planes bombed it at
will.
The thin and scholarly Durdin, in whose company I had experienced
my first air raid long ago, was considered by his Chinese friends tobe practically one of them, so well did he understand their thoughtprocesses and their problems.
Oddly enough he was also a greatfavorite with the marines as I discovered later in Peking. In theyears since I had first known him he had been in Burma, India and
113

C

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Last Chance in China

the Pacific and had accompanied the Doolittle fliers in the first bombing of Tokyo. But he had returned to China as to his home.
Steele, with whom I had walked many a weary mile visiting thefront in 1938, had also traveled far and wide in the intervening
years. Since he had spent nine months in Russia our political views
were not dissimilar.
An adventurer and a thinker whose cynicism ismixed with humor and pity, Steele’s respect for truth and energy inseeking it out have justly given him the reputation of being the mostaccurate and best informed correspondent in China.
Renewing old friendships I also made new ones. George Weller,of the Chicago Daily ATe~rs, was probably more responsible than anyone else for the friendliness and good humor which now prevailed
among the Chungking correspondents. A Pulitzer Prize winner for his
Pacific War reporting, 1Veller was not an old China correspondent,
but he had that rare quality of understanding
and sympathy for all
mankind, combined with intelligence and a knowledge of history andphilosophy, which enable a man to get to the heart of a problem andmake fair judgments.
Witty, good-natured,and always ready to share informationoreven to write another correspondent’s dispatches for him if he wanted
to leave Chungking for a few days, Weller made it difficult for anyone
to display a meanly competitive spirit. He also prevented our frequent
political discussions over breakfast, lunch and dinner from degenerating into personal wrangles.
The only woman correspondent, Charlotte Ebner of the I.N.S.,
had acquired a looking glass and a cupboard, but for the most partthe correspondents lived in monastic surroundings.
Each “rabbit
hutch,” as Steele called our rooms furnishedonly with a trestle
bed, a desk and a couple of chairs, had a window onto the connecting
veranda, or covered way, as well as to the outside. So everyone knew,
more or less, what everyone else was doing.
If you wanted a wash you hailed the Chinese “boy” who brought
YOU a tin bowl of water. For a shower you walked, rain or shine,across the central garden courtyard hoping that there might be hotwater, but never certain whether the primitive
apparatus would beworking.
Every bit of water at the Press Hostel, as in most otherplaces in Chungking, had to be carried on men’s shoulders. You saw
the rows of coolies or soldiers with their wooden buckets waiting inLast Days of Cfaungking

II.5

line at the bottom of the hill morning and evening. There were, ofcourse, no flush toilets.
The greatest drawback was the poor electricity supply. Chungking’s power plant had been constructed to service a small backward
provincial town. It could not supply enough current for the swollen
population of the capital. From sundown to about IO P.M. the lights
were so dim one could hardly read or write.
We were all within hailing distance of one another and met regularly for meals and almost as frequently for parties. It was a gregarious life, luxurious
in comparison with that of most Chinese, butprimitive
as compared with Shanghai or Peiping, where the correspondents lived in Western-style
hotels and ate in their rooms or
The camaraderie and good-fellowshipand our close
in restaurants.
and frequent contacts with the Chinese inside and out of the Press
Hostel gave the life there a quality all its own.
Probably not one American in ten thousand had ever heard of the
Political Consultative
Council. But we became so absorbed in theefforts of the Chinese to work out a solution of their political problems
that we tended to forget how little interest there was in them at home.
It was as if we imagined that millions of Americans when they
opened their newspapers at breakfast would anxiously scan the pages
to find out what had happened the day before in the P.C.C. Had thegovernment given way as regards the proportion of votes in the StateCouncil required to override its veto ? Had the independent members
sided with the government or the Communists on this or that particular issue? Had the political barometer risen or fallen in respect tothe prospects for unity in China? “My God,” said the newly arrived
Time correspondent, John Walker, “even when you go to the movies
you talk P.C.C. all the time !”Chungking,in its last days as the capital of China, had become avast forum for the discussion of political and economic theory andconstitutional
principles.
Nowhere else in the world can people of allparties have mingled so freely. One met representatives of every faction at its parties. I even found myself talking to Soviet embassy
officials.
At first I did not accompany the other correspondents when they
visited Communist Party Headquarters
for news, since I feared I
would be turned away or cause embarrassment to my colleagues. But

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Last Chance in China

I soon found that even the Communists were not averse to talking
to me.
I had been on friendly terms with General Chou En-lai in 1938
but in those days I was known only as the author of Japan’s Feet ofClay. The books I had written since had been published in China as
well as in England and America, so I had no doubt that Chou En-lai
was now well aware of my attitude toward Soviet Russia and Communism in general. Moreover, my articles in the Shanghai Evening
Post and the attacks on me by the Soviet press and radio could havemade my views emphatically clear to him. I was therefore astonishedand somewhat embarrassed when at the first press conference I attended at Communist
Headquarters,
he advanced with hand outstretched and a broad smile. His cordial greeting disarmed me andmade it impossible for me to question him in anything but friendly
tones.
I could not but admire Chou En-lai’s masterly conduct of his press
conference. Standing in the middle of the small crowded room heturned to face each questioner, never hesitating in his replies, correcting his interpreter when the latter failed to convey his exact meaning,thrusting here and there in verbal repartee like a skilled fencer.
There could have been no greater contrast between this dynamic
man arguing the Communist
case and the poker-faced government
spokesman who stalled off the reporters with meaningless replies, ora curt “no comment,” at the dreary weekly press conferences at the
Ministry of Information.
“Well, what do you think of him ?” my friends asked after they had
waited while Chou En-lai fixed a time for an interview with me.
“What do you expect?” I replied. “All right, I admit it. Even I
was impressed. It is hard not to believe that he means what he says.
I understand better now why so many foreigners believe that theCommunists mean what they say when they talk about democracy.”“When Chou En-lai came to town,” said George Weller, “I knew
what would happen. It started with tea parties. By now he has us
all eating out of his hand. HOW could it be otherwise since poor
Wordless WU and the other government representatives are so afraidof saying too much that they don’t tell us anything.”
Although Tillman Durdin’s political sympathies are Leftist, it was
he who was least impressed by Chou En-lai. “At the beginning,” heLast Days of Chungking

117

said, “Chou overwhelms you by the force of his personality and his
clever arguments.
But after hearing him month after month andyear after year, you realize you can’t trust what he says. He has
contradicted himself too often.”
Timeo Danaos et dolza ferentes. All that I knew and had experienced had taught me to beware of all Communists, even as Aeneas
distrusted the Greeks. But Chou En-lai is hard to resist. He is witty,
charming and tactful; he avoids Communist clichCs and you find it
hard not to believe in his sincerity and good intentions. His handsome
countenance, intelligent eyes, still youthful figure, well-groomed
appearance, vitality and apparent candor, all predispose you in his favor.
The morning fixed for my interview was cold and raw. Chou
En-lai, dressed in an immaculate white sweater and American-stylebrown leather windbreaker,
was plainly very tired. He had been up
working most of the night and he shivered as we sat down in theunheated, barely furnished reception room at Communist Headquarters. I had an irrational feeling that I ought not to make him waste
his energies on an unconvertible
heathen like me. Soon, however, I
was entirely absorbed taking notes on his replies to my questions. I
was trying at the same time to watch his face and catch the real
meaning behind his words.
I began by asking if he considered that Chiang Kai-shek’s willingness to make concessions to the Communists was, in his opinion, due
to American pressure. In reply he paid a tribute to the Generalissimo
which few men have ever received from a political opponent.
“Partly,
yes ; but Chiang would never have met us halfway on
account of any external pressure if there had not been in his heart areal desire for unity and peace.”
Although he hastened to add that the Communists also had madegreat concessions, this did not detract from the Communist leader’ssubstantial
admission concerning
Chiang Kai-shek’s motives andcharacter.
“What concessions,” I asked, “has the Chinese Communist Party
made ?”“We have compromised on matters of vital importance.
In thefirst place, we have agreed to terminate the civil war, which has &en
going on for eighteen years, and to let our army be nationalized.
Secondly, as regards the reorganizationof the government we have

’

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Last Chance in China

abandoned our original proposal based on our experience in theliberated areas. We no longer insist on the 3 :3 :3 system-a one-third
Knomintang,
one-third Communist and one-third nonparty administration.
We have agreed to let the Kuomintang
have a majority inthe Executive Yuan (Cabinet) of a coalition government.
We haveagreed to a draft constitution
similar to the British and Americansystems. Moreover, we have gone so far as to agree to tolerate thevalidity of the old elections to the National Assembly although thismeans it will be dominated by the Kuomintang.”“Are you really, then,” I asked, “prepared to give up your privatearmy once a coalition government is set up ?”“As a matter of fact,” he replied, “not only the Communist armies
are led by a party, the Kuomintang
Party similarly controls thegovernment armies. Do you agree ?”2%~ the interpreter
finished speaking, and before I could reply,
Chou En-lai broke in to say in his own halting English: “If I werein the government, I also could control armies in a more mellow way.”
Then he spoke again in Chinese, which was translated for me asfollows :“The reorganizationof China’s armed forces must be accomplishedby both sides simultaneously, in order that there may be a complete
separation of army and party on all sides. All armed forces must beplaced under control of civil organs of government.
In order to reachthis aim both parties must do the same. Whatever the Kuomintang
can and will do, we also can do, and will excel.
“The Chinese Army system,” he continued, “should be modeledon the American and British systems. Restrictions should be imposed.
The movement of troops should not be ordered by any individual,
only by the government.
Then no party would be able to promote
civil war. In the interim period of coalition government prior to theconstitutional
period to follow, the Army should be under the controlof the State Council, and thereafter under that of Parliament.
“In this way, which is the American and British way, the utilizationof the troops by any party for purposes of civil war will be prevented.”
General Chou next proceeded to outline the scheme for the amalgamation of the Communist and National armies then being workedout by a special committee presided over by General Marshall. In thefirst stage there was to be a parallel reorganizationof both armies

Last Days of Chulzgking

119

and the Communists had agreed to limit the Red Army to twenty
divisions if the government limited its forces to ninety. In the second
stage, then being discussed, the objective would be the gradual elimination of the “line of separation” between the armies. This, hestressed, “must be done gradually in a unified way so that no difficulties or confusion should arise.” How this was to be accomplished hecould not specify, as the question was still under discussion.
“But,” he added, “in order that the two opposing armies may be
fused together educational work is very important.
The fusion of theeducational plan should begin at once. Both armies should enjoy ademocratic and national education. Once we have introduced a newwhen the old soldiers have been replaced bysystem of enlistmentnew recruits-it
will be possible to wipe out all trace of the present
lines of demarcation.”
All this made it perfectly clear that the Communists were not for a
moment considering the submission of their army to the government.
Chou’s whole argument was based on the assumption that the Nationalist and Communist forces were to be treated as equals. He continually stressed the word “fusion” and regarded the problem as one ofamalgamating
two party armies, not of negotiating
the terms andguarantees on which the Communist Party would give up its privatearmy.
I inquired whether the government had its own reservations about
the desirability of “fusing” the armies.
Chou smiled broadly and said, “The Kuomintang
is in fact just as
averse as we are to immediate fusion; they are afraid of their soldiers being converted into Communists if the armies are immediately
merged into one. The government wants to use the Kuomintang
armies as the cadres of a National Army, fitting in our soldiers as
individuals.
This would be unfair to us. We insist on the fusion of
the armies on an equal basis, maintaining our own units as at present
constituted.
The Kuomintang
does not like this idea at all. It says
there would be confusion on both sides if such a scheme were adopted
before the educational problem had been readjusted.
It is true there
would be a lot of quarrels.
Somehow we have got to work out amethod and decide on the concrete steps which must be taken.”
All this did not sound very promising.
The situation obviously
gave the Communists
the opportunity
to stall indefinitely.
There

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Last Chance in China

could be no unity as long as both sides distrusted each other so muchthat no scheme of amalgamationof the armies would ever be agreed
on. So I asked, “When will you consider the National Government
to have become sufficiently democratic for you to trust it and to giveup your private army?” Chou En-lai’s reply was open to the interpretation that the Communists would postpone recognition of the“democratic”
nature of the government until it agreed with them as
to the meaning of the word. He said, “The reorganized coalition
government which we are now discussing in the Political Consultative Council would constitute only a start in China’s democratic
development.
It would have to be gradually tested in its practicalwork before we should trust it. Nothing can be predicated beforehand and everything would depend on how the democratic process
was implemented after the constitutional
government is set up.
“As regards our army, our attitude and policy would be determined
not only by proof of the government’s truly democratic nature, butalso by the character of the army system in peacetime. I cannot answer your question in a mechanical way. We should need to haveproof that no single individual controlled the National Army in peacetime. A lot would depend also on the kind of education given to thesoldiers.
“China is in a stage of transition and it is of little use to discuss
principles and theories-actions
are what count. But the present rcorganizationof the government and the armies is moving toward
our goal.”“How long,” I asked, “do you think it will take for the nationalization of China’s armies ?”“It may take years,” he replied. And again he repeated, “We shallhave to be satisfied as to the truly democratic nature of the government before we give up our army.”
In spite of all the hopes aroused in China during this period of theP. C. C. negotiations Chou En-lai’s remarks made it abundantly clearthat there was no real prospect of an end to the civil war. “Democratic” in the Communist lexicon, as we have learned in Europe, does
not mean free election, representative government and civil liberties.
It is an adjective used to describe only such governments as are dominated by the Communists or are “friendly”
to the Soviet Union.
Chou En-lai was, in effect, informing me that the nationalizationofLast Days of Chungking

121

the Communist Army would, in all probability,
be postponed until
China has a Communist-dominatedor Russian puppet government.
I tried to draw him out on the subject of Russia, saying, “I wantto understand what you mean by the word democratic. Do you consider that Soviet Russia has a democratic government ?”Chou spoke rapidly and emphatically in Chinese to his interpreter
who then said to me, “General Chou asked me to tell you that wehave not met here to talk about Russia. Please confine your questions
to Chinese affairs.”
I lighted a cigarette and self-consciously sipped my tea. They weremaking me feel that my question had been in bad taste, and that it wasoutside the unwritten terms on which the interview had been given
me to bring up the question of their attitude to the Soviet Government.
Chang Wenching,
who was acting as interpreter,
was a thinscholarly young man dressed in a long Chinese gown. He had an
excellent command of English, perfect manners and an air of studiousdetachment.
He rarely smiled and never raised his voice or gesticulated, unlike Chou En-lai whose expressive hands help him to convey
his meaning. I had met Chang Wen-thing
before, but I don’t think
he knew that his aunt, Mary Chen, was a good friend of mine, andthat I knew all about him and his family. His grandfather Chu Chichien, whom I was to meet a few weeks later in Peking,* had held highoffice at the Manchu court but had joined with Yuan Shih-kai to overthrow the Dragon Throne in 1911. Yuan Shill-kai had become thefirst Premier of the Republic of China, and died when he failed tomake himself Emperor.
The grandfather of Chou En-lai’s young colleague had become Minister of the Interior and had continued to be soloyal a member of the Kuomintang
that when Chiang Kai-shek visited Peking in 1946, he chose the venerable Mr. Chu Chi-chien to sit
at his right hand at the state banquet held to celebrate the liberation ofChina’s ancient capital.
Mr. Chu’s ten daughters had all married well and his grandsonin the Communist camp had relatives in almost every political faction. One of his uncles was a close friend and associate of T. V.
Soong, another was the brother of the “Young
Marshal” Chang* Both names, Peking and Peiping, are used in the text, since, although the city is now
called Peiping, the old name of Peking is more familiar to the Western reader.

122

Last Chance in Chifaa

Hsueh-liang
and another a prosperous Shanghai businessman who
had lived there comfortably all during the Japanese occupation. One
of Chang Wen-thing’s
cousins was the Vice-Ministerof War, Vii Tawei, who in 1947 became Minister of Communications.
Chang Wenching was himself the son of the ex-compradorof the Chase Bank in
Tientsin, now assistant manager of a Chinese bank.
Chou En-lai himself is also the scion of a great Mandarin family,
so it was not surprising that the two aristocratic
Communists I was
talking to were able to make me feel gauche.
Nevertheless I returned to the attack, although not again alluding
to the forbidden subject of Communist
Russia. I asked insteadwhether the Chinese Communist
Party desired that the proposed
coalition government should continue after a new constitution
hadbeen promulgated by a National Assembly and elections held.
His answer made it clear that the Communists had no liking forthe idea of a popularly elected majority
government and sought amore or less permanent coalition govcrnmcnt.
He said, “As the second party in China we are prepared to maintain this status during theinitial period of reconstruction.
\Ve don’t want quarrels or alternative governments according to popular vote. We propose long-term
co-operation in a coalition government. We expect to be in a minority
position for a long time. A coalition government would be the Chinese democratic way.”
When I asked how a coalition government could function in viewof the basic differences between the Kuomintang
and the Communist
Party, Chou said there was no difference in principle and aims sinceboth adhered to Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People. “Thedifference lies in the implementationof these principles.”
Later in our conversation when I asked what economic policy theCommunists
would stand for when they entered a coalition government, Chou En-lai gave me an answer which constituted an admirable exposition of the fallacy of considering state ownership an improvement over capitalist private enterprise so long as there is nopolitical democracy in the Western sense.
“The point is,” he said, “that if the state enterprises were really inthe hands of the nation-of
a democratic government-they
could beeffectively operated by the Chinese people, with perhaps some assistance from foreigners.
We could then get quicker and better results

Last Days of Chungking

123

than through private enterprise.
But, in practice, so-called stateowned enterprise is run by government officials who do as they likeand are usually both inefficient and corrupt. Some consolidate theirown personal economic power under the cloak of state ownership.
Thus in some respects the Communist
Party and the independent
capitalists now make common cause against the practices of the government.
“Even if the state enterprises prove to be a success they should notmonopolize industry.
China is too backward. The government can’t
do everything.
We need competition and free enterprise at this stageof China’s development.
“Besides, I know from experience how stultifying
bureaucratic
management is. Why, I, when I used to be in the government in thedays of the United Front, found myself affected by it. Save us fromgovernment control of everything !”At the end of this interview I could well grasp that many foreigners and some Chinese believed in the sincerity of Chou En-lai’s democratic professions.
I almost believed in them myself after hearing
him dissert upon the evils of bureaucratic administrationof industry,and listening to his kindly sentiment towards capitalists.
But once removed from his presence I remembered that this softspoken, attractive, intelligent Chinese had at one time been a Communist official when dissidents in the Party were shot. I also reflected that whether or not he believed his own arguments madelittle difference.
Let him once arouse suspicions in Moscow that hehad really been converted to democratic principles, and he would beexcommunicated
if not executed.
Whether or not Chou En-lai in fact represented a liberal elementin the Chinese Communist Party, he convinced many foreigners that
he did. It seems probable that General Marshall was thinking of him
when, in January 1947, the Secretary of State announced his conviction that besides the “dyed-in-the-wool
Communists” there “is a liberal group among the Communists which would put the interests of
the Chinese people above ruthless measures to establish a Communist
ideology in the immediate future.”
As stated in an earlier chapter, not only Americans but some Chinese Government representatives believed in Chou En-lai’s sincerity.
Certainly the Nationalist
Government at this time was acting on the124

Last Chance in China

assumption that the Communists were negotiating in good faith andthat unity could be achieved with American aid provided the Kuomintang agreed to a coalition government and made concessions to democratic demands.
The government negotiators in the Political Consultative Council
were almost all liberals. They were led by General Chang Chun, themost prominent member of the Political Science clique, who became
Premier in 1947, and who has always favored the solution of theCommunistproblem by political, not military means. The govemment’s eight representatives in the P. C. C. also included Sun Fo andShao Li-tse, who might be described respectively as China’s Henry
Wallace and Joe Davies. Sun Yat-sen’s son, Sun Fo, like his stepmother Madame Sun, was known for his friendly attitude toward boththe Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists.
Shao Li-tse, who
once attended a Comintern Congress as the Kuomintang’s
fraternaldelegate, and who more recently was China’s ambassador in Moscow,
is so pro-Soviet that he was nicknamed the Russian ambassador to
China.
It was clear that as long as there was any hope of achieving unity
by compromise Chiang Kai-shek was holding the Right Wing members of the Kuomintang
in check. Chen Li-fu was also a delegate in
the Political Consultative Council, but he was outnumbered by those
prepared to make every possible concession to the Communists forthe sake of peace.
The Communists had seven representatives in the Political Consultative Council as against the Kuomintang’s
eight. There were besides: five representatives of the Youth Party, two representatives
each of the Democratic League, the National Socialist (subsequently
rechristenedSocial Democrat)
Party and the National
Salvation
Association, and a representative each for the Vocational Education
Association,
the Rural Reconstructive
Society and the so-called“Third Party.”
The Youth Party, whose members are no longer youthful, butwhich is the third largest party in China, usually, but not always, sided
with the government.
The Democratic League always, and the National Salvation Association usually, sided with the Communists.
The remaining nine members of the P. C. C. were nonparty menof various shades of opinion, drawn in the main from among the most

Last Days of Chungking

125

eminent scholars in China. Among them were Fu Ssu-nien, acting
president of Peking University ; MO Teh-hui, a Manchurian
and afriend of the Democratic League ; Wang Yun-wu, founder and headof the renowned Commercial Press of Shanghai; and Kuo Mo-jo, theLeft Wing dramatist and poet, who had formerly been a Communist.
I had known Kuo Mo-jo in 1938, when as a returned exile fromJapan he was prominent in the National Salvation Association and afriend of Chou En-lai’s. I had once spent a day picnicking with themboth and other Communists and Left Wingers in the halcyon time of
the United Front. The fact that he and MO Teh-hui were representatives in the P. C. C. was a proof that the nonparty representatives had
been picked impartiallyfrom among China’s best-known public figures or learned men.
In an interview he gave me during the negotiations, Chang Chunconvinced me that the government was ready to risk a great deal on
the slender hope for internal peace held out by the Political Consultative Council Agreements.
“There is a chance,” he said, “that theCommunists will now compete only politically and economically.
Webelieve that the truce may be the first stage in the agreement.”
General Chang Chun, who was to become Premier of China earlyin 1947, is a large, amiabIe and patient man with the reputation of
being a “fixer” in domestic politics-a
Chinese Jimmy Bymes.
It
had been his thankless task, as Foreign Minister from 1935-1937, tonegotiate with the Japanese and stall for time; to hold them off fromswallowing all North China while avoiding war, to take the rap when
impatient students called for an end to appeasement before China wasprepared to resist the aggressor.
Like Bymes in his dealings with
Russia, Chang Chun finally took a firm stand and refused to budge,
so that the negotiations collapsed. Later it had been Chang Chun who
prepared the way for Chiang Kai-shek and the National Government
when they were forced to retreat to the southwest following the fall ofHankow.
The semi-independent war lords and landowners of Szechwan had not been at all partial to the establishment of the National
Government’s
authority
over them. Chang Chun, as Governor of
Szechwan from 1940, had been successful in asserting the Central
Government’s control and transforming
this fertile province into themain base of Free China.
Talking to him in Chungking,I realized that his experience in126

Last Chance in China

negotiatingwith the Japanese had fitted him for his present task.
China’s problem now is basically the same as before 1937: that ofholding off their foreign aggressors while bending every effort toward
weaning the Chinese agents or dupes away from their foreign allegiance. From 1935 to 1937 Chang Chun had managed to prevent thecomplete breakaway of the northern provinces under the “autonomous” regimes set up by Japan. Now he had to try to prevent theCommunists,
who held most of North China, from bringing theseprovinces into the Soviet sphere. To achieve this, it was worth while
making great concessions to the Communists, as formerly it had been
worth while treating the northern war lords or puppets with the utmost consideration in order to keep them at least nominally under
the control of the Central Government.
Foreign Minister Wang Shih-chieh, who is also a patient man and
one ready to bear the brunt of popular misunderstandingin carryingout a difficult policy, told me that the government was making “a realand dangerous test of Communist sincerity.”
What he did not say,
but was implied in his conversation, was that the government had had
no choice but to make the test, since the United States had exerted
the necessary pressure by the double threat of withdrawing
Americanforces from China and refusing a loan to China. When I asked him if
he thought that General Marshall would now press the Communists
also to make concessions, he replied :“What pressure can the United States exert ? In General Stilwell’s
day America still had the bargaining power of Lend-Lease, but today
she no longer has it. Today the United States has no means to exertpressure on either the Soviet Union or the Chinese Communists.”
The arguments in the P. C. C. centered around the composition andpowers of the new State Council which was to supersede the National
Defense Council in the proposed coalition government to be set up
pending the convocation of a National Assembly to draw up a new
constitution.
The Communists
and their allies in the Democratic
League fought for the right of a one-third minority in the State Council to veto the actions of the President. After long debate it was finallyagreed that on all important questions the acts of the Executive must
be approved by a three-fifths majority of the State Council.
Since the State Council was to be composed of twenty Kuomintang members and twenty from the other parties, the Kuomintang had

Last Days of Chungking

127

agreed to let itself be overruled by a minority. Chiang Kai-shek’s powers as President would have been severely curtailed. Should the alliance between the Communists and the Democratic League continue
they would together be able to hamstring the Administration.
The final agreements on these and other matters were announced
to the public in a solemn final session over which Chiang Kai-shekpresided. It was an impressive sight, and few of us present will everforget hearing Chou En-lai shout, “Long live the San illin C/W I!”
at the close of the meeting.
Had words meant what they said, the long conflict between those
who had inherited Sun Yat-sen’s mantle, and those who had formerly
repudiated his principles in favor of Lenin’s, had ended. China was,at long last, to know peace. Together they had brought about theannulment of the “unequal treaties” and fulfilled the first of Sun’sprinciples.
Now they had to implement the other two: livelihood of
the people and democracy. For a moment that winter evening, in thedim light of the conference hall, with the rain falling steadily outside,
one could almost believe that it was not a farce played out for America’s benefit, but a solemn buryin, w of hatchets and a true reconciliation.
Unfortunately
for China, nothing fundamental had been settled.
The really knotty problems had not been solved. The Communists
still had their private army and their autonomous area, and the twosides still held entirely different views as to the path which China
ought to tread. The coalition government which it had been agreed to
set up would have been even more impotent than the present one. The
strong minority
position won by the Communists and their allies
would have enabled them to cripple the administration,and the StateCouncil would have resembled a United Nations Assembly. The realliberals, as before, would have been crushed between the upper andnether millstones of reaction and Communism.
The Kuomintang
Government, although ready to let its powers becurtailed, would not relinquish them. So the Communists were not,satisfied. They were uneasy concerning the continuance of their alliance with the Democratic League. They knew that its leaders, once
they had acquired jobs in the government through the alliance with
the Communists,
might abandon their erstwhile allies. Thus theCommunists were not at all confident that they had won a sufficiently

I28

Last Chance in China

strong position from which “to bore from within” a democratic government. It had not even been decided how the twenty non-Kuomintang seats in the State Council were to be allocated. In the months
that followed the P. C. C. paper agreements the Communists accordingly started to insist on a minimum of fourteen seats for themselvesin the State Council, since only thus could they be sure of their vetopower in a coalition government.
Although the Communists were soon to show that they would nothonor the P. C. C. Agreements it was the ruling Kuomintang
Partywhich had made all the real concessions both in the military truce and
The Communists had gained a great deal
in the political negotiations.
and given up nothing.
Previously
Chiang Kai-shek had been adamant in insisting that
the Communists give up their private army before being admitted intoa coalition government.
Now at Marshall’s insistence he had agreed
to let “democratization”
of the government precede the nationalization of the Communist armies.
As one of the Chinese Central News reporters said to me at thetime: “Thanks to the United States, the Communists have won theirgreatest victory to date at negligible cost. After two decades during
which they tried to seize power by armed force they are to be installedin the government without it being required of them that they firstabolish their autonomous ‘Border Governments,’ or their independent
currency, or their private army; or that they cease suppressing civil
liberties and liquidating all opposition in the territories they control.
True that the Generalissimo said at the final meeting that the Communists would be expected to respect the rights of others to the liberties they claim for themselves. But who believes that any such assurance from the Communists is worth a nickel ?‘?
Were the Communists“not real Communists ;” were they the“liberal agrarian reformers” that they are pictured to be in innumerable American articles and books, there is little doubt that they would
have settled down peacefully to exploit their gains and win power in
China through the democratic process. Instead, at the end of February, they broke the truce and made their bid for control of Manchuria
and North China.
In January and February 1946 the Chinese Government passed up
a big chance to put its case before the world and counteract Commu-

-Last Days of Chungking

129

Most of the correspondents wanted to give the facts
nist propaganda.
to the public, and were ready to judge the government’s case on its
merits. But they could get practically no informationfrom the Ministry of Informationor the Foreign Office or the Kuomintang
representatives in the P. C. C. They were thrown back on the opposition
as the only source of news.
The Democratic League, at least insofar as news was concerned,
believed in democracy and did not worry about the supposed secrecyof the P. C. C. negotiations.
Since it was in alliance with the Communists, this meant that the news available came almost entirely fromantigovernment
sources. It is a proof of the fairness of most of theAmerican correspondents at that time that their dispatches were impartial, analytical, and by no means as one-sided as their sources of
information.
On our way back to the Press Hostel after one of our nightly visits
to Democratic League headquarters, George Weller said to me: “We
don’t want to get all our information from Lo Lung-chi and the Communists, but what can we do? The Ministry of Information won’t, or
can’t, tell us anything.”
I repeated this remark a few days later to Foreign Minister Wang
Shih-chieh at a lunch I had with him alone.
“Surely,” I said, “even if you can’t speak out in public either about
the negotiations
with the Communists
or about Manchuria
andwhat the Russians are doing to you, you could give sonle information
off the record. The American correspondents now are not Communist
fellow travelers. They are honest men whose word you could trust.
Wherever their sympathies may lie, they want to get at the truth andgive it to the American public. Why don’t you at least tell them thefacts privately?
That is what any other government would do. There
are at the least half a dozen American correspondents whom you could
trust not to quote you directly, men like Steele, Durdin, Weller, Spencer Moosa, and also Gordon Walker of the Christ&m Science MO&
tar.
Your one hope to withstand Russian aggression is to let theAmerican public know the facts. Why are you passing up this opportunity ?”His answer gave me an inkling of how the Chinese had felt about
the flood of propaganda directed against them in the preceding years.
“Yes,” he said, “I suppose we are making a mistake in thinking thatall American correspondents are biased against us and in favor of

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Last Chance in China

Communism.
But during the past few years it just seemed useless tG
talk to them.”
My little speech had an immediate effect. For shortly afterward
Wordless Wu actually did give out one bit of information to the correspondents. It had been reported a few weeks before that General
Tu Li-ming, commander of the Nationalist forces in Manchuria, had
said that the Russian general had forbidden American correspondents
to come there. The Russian press had at once howled “lies” and“slander,” and the Chinese had been forced to accept the blame for therefusal to let the Americans in. Now, at last, Wu admitted that General Tu Li-ming had spoken the truth.
Wordless 1Vu was a friendly, energetic and amiable man with an
extraordinarily
healthy appetite, as I discovered when I lunched with
him in his office and we went through six courses of European food.
He was a little dynamo who worked hard and always found time totalk to any correspondent who came to see him. Unfortunatelyfor
himself and us he was not allowed to talk about anything that mattered. All the correspondents liked him and sympathized with him
to the extent of avoiding embarrassing him in public with questions
he obviously could not answer. He was physically fearless, as shownby his behavior as mayor of Chungking during the worst bombings
when he dashed around directing the fire fighters and relief workers.
But as a diplomat he found discretion the better part of valor. I found
him of less use as a source of information
than other ministers andKuomintang
officials whom I reached by the simple method of calling
and leaving my card.
K. C. Wu was too afraid of showing favoritism to render me muchassistance. I secured my personal interview with the Generalissimo
through other channels.
On this first occasion, however, I found that K. C. Wu had carefully arranged an “exclusive” interview of ten minutes each for every
correspondent that same afternoon. So we naturally joined up andhad a general press conference.
Two weeks later in Shanghai on my way north, I met the Gimoand Madame for an hour alone. Most of what they said to me wasoff the record, but, at least, it proved to me that Chiang Kai-shek isunder few illusions.
He certainly had not miscalculated the risks
China was taking in throwing in her lot with America, and he is well

Last Days of Chungking

131

aware of the subtlety of Russia’s methods. It seemed to me that hedid not fully appreciate the connection between United States foreign
policy and American domestic politics, but it may be only that his
extraordinary
patience gave him the courage and self-control to wait
for the turn of the tide in American public opinion, and that this explains why he expressed no resentment at American actions harmful to him and his government.
Before meeting her in Chungking
I had feared that Madame
Chiang would not be so friendly to me as she had been in Hankow
when I met her frequently.
For in Chim at War I had frankly criticized her and her closest friends in the New Life Movement.
But,
when I entered the room with the other correspondents, she greeted
me warmly, although her first remark hardly pleased me. “Miss
Utley,” she exclaimed, “I did not recognize you for a moment, youhave grown so much fatter !” In 1938 I had been thin from walking
miles in the summer sun at the pace set by Chinese soldiers ; also I
was not then long out of Russia where food had always been short.
Her remark was only too true and I knew also that in China her words
would not be considered uncomplimentary.
So I answered by telling
her she looked lovelier than ever. It did in fact seem to me that theyears of suffering which she personally, as well as China, had undergone had. given her face a new beauty. Her eyes were kinder andalthough as elegantly dressed as ever she gave less of an impressionof being a fashionable Shanghai lady or the chairman of a woman’s
club in the States.
She kept me behind for a talk after the Generalissimo’s press conference and her conversation gave substance to my impression that
she was now less hard and sure of herself and more like her sister
Madame Sun. Not that she could ever let her heart run away withher, and be blind to political realities. She showed the keen discernment of old concerning both the internationalsituation and Chinesepolitics, but she spoke of the death and suffering she had seen withfeeling and in terms of humanity, not national pride.
She was in a soft mood and talked mainly of the moderating influence women could exert. She thought that men were more acrimonious and prone to suspect political attacks in the acts and words oftheir opponents.
Referring to the P. C. C. negotiations with the Communists,
she

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Last Chance in China

said, “People should believe in one another until insincerity is proved.
I have seen too much war and death not to want to try everything
possible to avoid more bloodshed and suffering.”
In 1938 she had been irreconcilably hostile to the Communists andmore distrustful of them than her husband. Now she was all in favorof seeking an understanding with them on the assumption that they
meant what they said.
I wondered how much her changed views and attitude were due tothe failure of the West, to which she belonged in education and religion, to respond to her eloquent appeals for aid to China until too lateand in too small measure. Or whether it was her personal troubles
which had mellowed her.
Whatever the real reason for her separation from her husband forthe best part of two years- whether it was personal or a political gesture repudiating her Western influence-Madame
Chiang’s illness in
America had been real. Her overstrained nerves had caused physicaldisorders.
She was now quite recovered, but she would never again
be quite the same confident, ebullient First Lady of China I had
known in 1938.
In Hankow days the difference in age between Chiang Kai-shek
and his wife had been hardly apparent. Now he looks elderly besideher. He is as slim and erect as ever and his eyes still give an impression of intense vitality, but he is now almost bald and the bony structure of his face is more pronounced. In Chungking he was in militaryuniform, but the morning I talked to him in Shanghai he wore a blacksilk gown and looked more like a scholar than a soldier.
In his replies in Chungking to questions concerning the P. C. C.
Agreements he emphasized that it was not a question of the degree ofpower to be relinquished by the Kuomintang,but of responsibility.
The Kuomintang
Party had not given up its responsibility
for thereconstructionof China, but henceforth it would share it with otherparties. Asked whether he would be a candidate for President in theelected government to be set up after the convening of the National
Assembly, he replied that “as soon as the power to govern is restored
to the people,” he would have accomplished his task and ended his
responsibility
to China.
Some who heard Chiang that day wondered whether he meant hewould take no responsibility for the situation which would be createdLast Days of Chungking

I33

if the Left opposition had its way and the State Council would be
able to veto the acts of the Executive, or whether he was in factanxious to relinquish the heavy burden of responsibility and duties hehas carried so long. He gave an impression of being tired, as no doubt
he was after the weeks of negotiation and discussion which had justended. It may be that he is tired in a deeper sense: weary of the ungrateful tasks history has assigned to him.
In 1938 when I met Chiang Kai-shek for the first time I had written of his aloofness, his serene confidence and pride and the inscrutability of his lean countenance and firm mouth set in an almost sardonic
half-smile.
His deep black eyes had then seemed to me those of a man
whose human feelings had been completely subordinated to his conception of his destiny; neither cruel nor sympathetic, almost unhumanand completely unrevealing of his personality.
Now, nearly eight years later, his smile was less tight-lipped
and
his manner easier. One no longer felt one ought to stand at attention
in his presence. He seemed both more human and more melancholy.
That dark winter afternoon in Chungking,seated beside Madame
Chiang in their home and talking almost informally, he might havebeen trying to draw closer in understanding to us all.
Perhaps he longed to be able to penetrate the invisible wall between
him and the foreigners who write about him; a wall erected not somuch by the barrier of language as by background, traditions, history
and values.
Very few people have ever become intimate with the Generalissimo,
and it is to be doubted whether even they know the real mind of thisenigmatic personage. But one thing is certain : he sincerely believes in
his mission as Sun Yat-sen’s heir and successor to unite China andmake her strong and free.
Some of the statements which are interpreted by his enemies andcritics to show his overweening arrogance and love of power are infact the reflection of his belief that he is the symbol and the instrument of China’s regeneration.
In Hankow, he had said to me, “Wherever I am, there is the center of national resistance.” Proud words,
but also a correct estimate of what his name had come to symbolize.
Whatever his defects and shortcomings,
Chiang Kai-shek must be
accounted a sincere follower of Sun Yat-sen. His beliefs and actions
are founded on the same belief in China’s ancient traditions and eth-I34

Last Chance in China

ical values. He became a Christian after marrying Mei-ling Soong,but his conversion seems to have been merely a recognition of thesimilarity
between Christian teachings and the traditional
ethics of
the Chinese people. In moments of gravest danger, trouble anddoubt, he turns to Confucius, as when just before the fall of Hankow
he said :The men of old when they wished their virtues to shine throughout
the land, first had to govern their states well. To govern their states
well, they first had to establish harmony in their families. To establish
harmony in their families, they first had to discipline themselves. To
discipline themselves, they first had to set their minds in order. To
set their minds in order, they first had to make their purpose sincere.
To make their purpose sincere, they first had to extend their knowledge to the utmost. Such knowledge is acquired through a careful
investigationof things. For with tlzi~l~qs irzvestigated kfzowledge becomes complete. With knowledge complete the purpose becomes sincere. With the purpose sincere the mind is set in order. With themind set in order there is real self-discipline.
With real self-discipline
the family achieves harmony.
With harmony in the family the state
becomes well governed. With the state well governed there is peace
throughout
the land.
At the same time that he calls upon his people to drink at the ancient
founts of wisdom, Chiang always emphasizes the “revolutionary”
character of the Kuomintang
Party which he leads. In the days of
doubt and despair when Hankow was abandoned he said :We have been resisting in order to complete the task of our revolution, and our fighting power will remain unimpaired if our revolutionary principles are kept intact. Foreign opinion attaches too great importance to the defense of the Wuhan cities; the experiences of thisyear of resistance show that our political and military center is in ourpeople and not in territory.
Although
America is China’s best friend among the Powers,
Americans are least fitted by their own background and history tounderstand China’s situation.
Educated Europeans all know that nonation in the modern world came out of medievalism to national consciousness without strong rulers who were the fulcrum of unity, andallegiance to whom was the earliest form of patriotism.
In EnglandLast Days of Chungking

I35

the national anthem is still “God Save the King.” Although the Kingis powerless and the British Government as democratic at home asthat of the United States, the King is still the symbol of the nationand love of country.
The overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 191 I and the birth of theChinese Republic did not lead China to democracy but to war-lord
rule. Sun Yat-sen knew that a period of “tutelage” was essential before the Chinese people could rule themselves, and also a necessity if
China were to win her independence as a nation. He did not foreseethat endless wars and dangers would prolong the period of party dictatorship so long that the Kuomintang
would lose its reformist savor.
Circumstances, not will, are responsible for Chiang’s unenviable position of being a dictator without the power to dictate; having less real
power than the elected President of the United States, while yet having to bear all responsibility
in a country still medieval in organization, economic development and thought.
Since every American who has become at all intimate with the Generalissimo is convinced of his sincerity, I see no reason to doubt that
he meant what he said to General Hurley :If when I die I. am a dictator I will certainly go down into the
oblivion of all dictators. If on the other hand I succeed in establishinga truly stable foundation for a democratic government, I will live forever in every home in China.
It would nevertheless be difficult for Chiang personally to become
the leader of a democracy.
He is too aloof and austere and cannot
make speeches with human appeal. One of the few foreign diplomats
in Chungking
who had come exceptionallyclose to intimacy withhim, told me how he had urged Chiang to make a few speeches of thekind which would endear him to Americans.
But he cannot act out ofcharacter. His qualities are of the order of the great figures of European medieval history who united their countries and made them into
nations, not those of a popular leader in the modern world. He has
more in common with Edward I or Henry VII of England, oreven with Cardinal Richelieu of France, than with a Roosevelt. On
the other hand, he is not in the least like the European dictators of ourera. His integrity and his inability or unwillingness to make dema-

136

Last Chance in China

gogic appeals to passion, prejudice and stupidity, and the fact that henever rants or boasts, mark him off from Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.
His Puritanism and his emphasis on virtue are more reminiscent of
Cromwell.
The tortuous methods by which Chiang Kai-shek has pursued his
aims, his ability to keep silent even when misunderstood, his unhumanpatience in playing for time against Japan, his simple and unostentatious manner of living, and his loyalty to his friends are all Chinesecharacteristics.
His ability to concentrate on vital issues, his energy
and swiftness of action and his ruthlessness and determination in pursuit of his aims distinguish him from most of his countrymen.
Exceedingly stubborn, he yet knows when he must bow to the popularwill. He has condemned thousands to death, as when he massacred
the Communists and their allies in 1927, but he is also capable of astatesmanlike forbearance, and in his later years has sought to reconcile his enemies instead of killing them.
Chiang’s great weakness as a ruler would appear to be his reluctance to admit persons of individuality
to office unless they are his
personal friends, and his loyalty to old companions of revolutionary
days which he carries to extreme lengths. He keeps them in office not
only after they have outlived their usefulness, but when they themselves wish to retire. He is also too prone to believe that even a corrupt subordinate can be reformed by lectures on virtue.
Private virtues are often public vices. Chiang Kai-shek’s loyalty tofriends and associates leads him to intervene to protect incompetentor corrupt subordinates when it would be far better for him to let
Chinese politics take their own course-to
let obvious faults be corrected through public discussion and “impeachment” of his ministers.
For instance, when in 1947 Dr. T. V. Soong, Wang Shih-chieh andGovernor Chen Yi of Formosa (who had ruled his island abominably) were attacked, Chiang Kai-shek intervened, took personal responsibility
for their acts and so hushed the public outcry. In somecases he may be throwing his mantle over a good man, such as Wang
Shih-chieh, who has in fact merely been carrying out orders. But
even so it would be far better if he let the cleansing wind of public
opinion blow through his administrationand eliminate the men who
have lost public confidence.
Perhaps the truest estimate I heard of Chiang Kai-shek was the one

Last Days of Chungking
pronounced by the learned historian Fu Ssu-nien, who was a nonparty representative in the Political Consultative Council in Chungking.
“Chiang Kai-shek,” he said, “is like the hero of a Greek tragedy.
His strength is also his weakness. The qualities of character whichbrought him to greatness and enabled him to save China in the war
against Japan, are the reverse of those required to set us on the roadto democracy.”
A liberal Chinese editor expressed a similar view. “The Generalissimo,” he said, “has a great iove for China and is eager to bring her
to peace and greatness. But his background,’ his knowledge and his
views
prevent him from achieving his goal.
“Unfortunately
there are few people who can ever convince himthat he is wrong. It is difficult for anyone to convince him because
he is so sure of himself. So he is surrounded by ‘yes men’ who keep
him in ignorance of the true state of affairs.
“Moreover,
Chiang considers that Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principlesof the People are all he needs to know; he believes them to be immutable and perfect. Actually the San illin Chu I are not perfect andshould be revised. But it is heresy to say so.
“Mao Tse-tung,” continued this critic, “is much better educatedpolitically than Chiang Kai-shek but he cares far less about China. If
only Chiang had Mao’s political understanding,or if Mao had
Chiang’s patriotism, China would not now be wasting the best opportunity ever given to her to become free and strong and prosperous.”
The most frequent criticism one hears in China, from both friends
and enemies of the Generalissimo,
is that he is surrounded by badadvisers who shut him off from knowledge of real conditions in China;that he too rarely meets those who are bold enough to speak to him as
an equal; and that it is almost impossible for anyone outside the official hierarchy to approach him.
General Wedemeyer told me how, on the occasion of Chiang’s first
visit to Shanghai after its liberation, he had planned a dinner at which
the Generalissimo
should meet some Chinese whom the Americancommander thought to be among the best men he knew. When his
list of guests was submitted, General J. L. Huang of the New Life
Movement struck out the names of all who were not in Chiang
Kaishek’s inner circle.

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Last Chance in China

Nevertheless General Wedemeyer paid the following high tributeto Chiang Kai-shek in a speech delivered months after he left China.
On October IO, 1946, he said in New York :There are few people who could speak more authoritatively
than Ido this evening, concerning the sincerity, high moral purpose andChristian humility of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. I had frequent,practically daily, contacts with him for approximately
two years. I
can attest to his unselfish devotion to the Chinese people and to hisearnest desire to provide a democratic way of life within China. I am
confident that if he were given our realistic and continued support
during this critical period of postwar readjustment he would evolve asolution to the political and economic problems, and implement a program of political freedom, social reforms, and sound economy.

CHAPTERThe Fascination

TVI

of YenanHEflight from Peking to Yenan in the early morning of a winter’s day was sheer beauty. Passing swiftly over endless rangesof hills and mountains without sign of human habitation, thesky above pale blue and the banks of clouds ahead rosy in the dawn,
one found it easy to imagine oneself flying over the top of the world
to Shangri-la.
Perhaps the fascination of Yenan is partly due to the universal
longing which made James Hilton’s Lost Horizon popular. His vision of a haven of wisdom to the west of China may have prepared themass of Anglo-American
readers for a real-life lost valley of virtuousand happy men in the Chinese hinterland.
Is not the dream of an
El Dorado beyond the oceans or the high mountains as old as civilized man ?
My fellow passengers were all Chinese Communists, returning totheir homes from duty with Executive Headquarters
and its truce
teams. The plane was, of course, a United States Army one, placed at
the disposal of the Communists
as part of America’s effort to bringpeace to China through reconciliationand conciliation.
It was loadedwith bicycles and packing cases containing other products of capitalist civilization.
The man next to me, a smiling broad-faced general, took off his two gold stars and put them in his pocket just before
we landed. In Peking the Communists put on the insignia of militaryrank, but not in Yenan.
With the Communist capital in sight below, I experienced a growing sense of embarrassment.
I was not afraid, but I was nervous. It
was awkward to come as a guest among those whom I had criticizedand denounced as agents of Moscow.
I ought to have known better. I might have guessed that Chinese

I39

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Last Chance in China

courtesy would prove equal to the occasion. Indeed the combinationof Celestial good manners with Communist mastery of the art ofpropaganda, and the visible evidence of good works, might have overwhelmed anyone who had never lived in Russia and learned into what
a valley of despair Communist materialism can lead a people.
I had not been in Yenan twenty-four hours before I began to understand why so many 24merican correspondents have fallen for the Chinese Communists as the hope of unhappy China. Although the city
was to be captured by the Nationalists a year after my visit, it is still
today the symbol, if no longer the capital, of Communist China.
After Chungking Yenan seemed a primitive paradise-thecontrast
was similar to that between the slums of New York and a sunny valley
in Arizona.
In Chungking it is hot in summer, rainy and foggy inwinter and comfortable never. Sweating coolies toil up its steep
streets, bending under endless loads human and inhuman. In Chungking, Nanking and Shanghai there is the ever present contrast between extreme and comparative wealth. The air is shrill with factional controversy.
Men are forever debating, wrangling and railingagainst the government.
In Yenan, in the wild and mountainous northwest, the skies areblue and the air is sweet to breathe. It is a lovely place, a remotevalley set among high hills honeycombed with caves. An ancient pagoda and the crumbling walls of the original city bombed into nothingness by the Japanese in 1938, are the only reminders of the past.
Nearly everyone dresses alike in gray padded cotton or in sheepskin coats. lAl1 live in caves or in huts built of mud and straw. There
are no rickshaws and no automobiles; no ladies dressed in silks or
men in long gowns. Mongol ponies and mules, instead of coolies, carry the loads, or climb the mountain paths with healthy-looking
peasants on their backs.
Smart Red Army men in khaki guard the homes of the Communist leaders, but the latter live almost as sparsely as everyone else.
The austerity of the landscape and the clean dry air fortifies the impression of simple living and high endeavor.
“You have come,” was the sardonic greeting of an American attached to the Yenan Observer Group, “to the largest boy scout areain the world.”
Everyone is doing good or thinks he is. Everyonepraises the government instead of cursing it. Nobody argues. The
structure of life is simple, primitive and seemingly equalitarian.

The Fascinationof Yenan

141

Superficially the comparison seems all in favor of the Chinese Communist area. One has to look deeper before pronouncing a fair judgment.
Yenan was as shut away from the outside world in thought andknowledge as it is geographically.
The circle of hills which surrounds
it is no higher than the political wall which prevented the people ofthis so called “Border Region” from hearing any news or views except those which their rulers wished them to hear. There was one
newspaper ; one radio station; and one party; and they all said thesame thing. If anyone disagreed his voice was extinguished.
In Kuomintang
China there are almost as many factions as inFrance; there are nearly six hundred newspapers, including Communist dailies, and at least half the press opposes the government half thetime. In Communist China there is no opposition.
The reason was
explained to me by Chiang Lung-chi, the president of Yenan University. I had asked him what would happen to a student who questioned
the basic policies of the Chinese Communist Party or argued that it
was betraying China’s interests to Russia.
“Would you put him in a concentration camp or merely expel himfrom the University?”should reason with
Chiang smiled. “We should do neither-we
him and explain to him that his views are incorrect.”“And if he still disagreed ?”“There is only one truth and since youth is always on the side oftruth there can be no disagreement.”
Here I thought is the root of the matter. These people for all theirclaim to be liberals are just the same as the Russian or other Communists. They believe that they, and only they, are in possession ofabsolute truth. From this belief all the subsequent curses of totalitarian tyranny eventually must flow. In Communist China there is
fraternity
but no liberty. Anyone who opposes Communist policy on
major issues, or denies its fundamental tenets, rejects “Truth.”A
heretic is ipso facto a “fascist” or an “enemy of the people.”No doubt President Chiang Lung-chi is a good man and a sincereman, but so, I suppose, was Torquemada.
So also was Charles theFirst of England who preferred to be beheaded rather than to deny
the Divine Right of Kings to order what is best for the people,
whether the people liked it or not.
Some of my friends back in Chungking and Shanghai had thought

142

Last Chance in Chinathat I would never be allowed to visit Communist China. Others hadfeared for my safety. As it turned out the Communists made great
capital out of my visit. At once they went on the radio to proclaimthat in contrast to Chungking which had refused to let the Left Wing
Edgar Snow back into China*, they were welcoming the anti-cornmunist Freda Utley.
In Chungking a little while before, when there had been a last-minute hitch in my securing a permit from the Communists to visit Yenan, George Weller had remarked, “No.
I can’t believe it. If theyrefuse to let you in, Freda, I shall begin to be as sorry for the Communists as I am for K. C. Wu. But I just can’t believe they will bethat stupid; I am sure you will find there has been some mistake andyou will be allowed to go.”As regards my safety, I was treated like a piece of porcelain. Everytime I climbed the steep hillside to visit one or another cluster of the
cave dwellings in which most institutions were housed, my guide andinterpreter would take me by the arm lest I stumble and fall. One day
I protested that after all I was not so very old; that I really needed nohelp.
“But,” was the reply, “we have to take special care of you.”“You mean,” I said, “that you are afraid that if I slip I might accuse the Communists of trying to make away with me?”My relationship with my Communist hosts was by this time established on such personally friendly terms that we both laughed.
On this occasion we were leaving Yenan University on a gray andchilly afternoon. The path was muddy and very slippery and I was infact a little tired after the long climb up to the “battlements” where
the students’ dormitories opened on a ledge high up on the hillside. I
had inspected many rows of caves, whitewashed and clean, each with
its six or eight plank beds set close together. The bedding was clean
and neat, and there was no sign of personal possessions save a shirtor two hung on the walls. Students reading.
Students writing.
Students playing cards. Boys and girls hardly to be distinguishedfrom one another since they all wore the same trousers and tunics.
The girls had bobbed hair and their faces were rosy and happy. In* Edgar Snow was readmitted

to China a few weeks later.

The Fascinutionof YenanI43

one cave there was an old man with a beard-not
a teacher-apeasant come from his village to study accounting. The caves were very
cold and rather dark although their flimsy wood and paper doors
stood open.
As I walked along, the whole student body left its books or its
games to follow me. They talked but I could not understand.
Feeling a little shy I stopped to ask my interpreter to tell me what was
written on the big blackboard at the end of the row of caves. It was
the text of the truce agreement with the National Government signed
the previous month. There followed an exhortation to the students tostudy all the harder now that the Communists must prove their superior worth in a new and united democratic China. In the past, it
was written, most Communists had been engaged in armed struggle.
Now they must learn peaceful methods for advancing their cause-as
for instance how to make speeches in the National Assembly.
Yet the university
was half empty because many students, I wastold, were “at the front.” This meant that they were either still fighting the National Government forces or helping to organize new Communist regimes by military occupation.
Next day I visited a nursery school given over to some seventy
tots, aged two to seven, sons and daughters of Red Army men at thefront and of party officials. All were warmly clad, well fed and happy.
They were also very bright and very charming. They put on quite ashow for me and for the United States Army sergeant who had driven
me over. They dressed up and fought mock battles with wooden
guns. They danced, and they sang:
Today we are only children.
Tomorrow
we shall be the masters of China.
They

sang:
We are little Eighth Routers.
We love liberty from birth.
To anyone who oppresses us
We show a fist.

And they all shook their little fists with a sweet belligerency
They sang also a song about a poor little boy who could not study

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Last Chance in China

because he was so starved in Kuomintang
China ; and of how he cameto Yenan and is now happy with the other children and well up in his
grade.
Afterward
the children clustered around their teacher. They loved
her and they would obviously have been just as happy singing songs
about flowers and fairies. I photographed them together with Sergeant Brooks, who was enchanted by their performance.
For himthere were no shades of the Russian prison house to mar the fascination exerted by a group of happy, clean and clever, well-cared-forbabes, whose condition contrasted so sharply with that of the waifs
and beggars of China’s big cities. Yet I had seen children just as
happy and well cared for in Madame Chiang’s orphanages. With mymemories of the Soviet Union, I also realized that show places in theCommunist world are only for a minority of favored children.
It was in this children’s home that I first heard of Hollywood’s contribution to Yenan. Above the gates were the letters “L. A.” Thehead teacher explained to me that since 1943
the school had received
clothing and a substantial annual money contribution
from Los Angeles. This was the source of the pretty pale-pink flannelette underwear which had been used for fancy dresses in the children’s play.
Later I was to learn that the donations of Hollywood’s wealthy Communist sympathizers
constituted a considerable item on the credit
side in Yenan’s over-all budget.
Most authors and correspondents who have visited Yenan say little or nothing about Communist finances. It had puzzled me how theCommunists had maintained an army which they claimed to be fighting the Japanese more vigorously than anyone else was doing, without burdening the peasantry with its upkeep. The afternoon and evening I spent shivering in Yenan’s Guest House talking to an officialof the Finance Bureau, the mystery was explained. He frankly admitted that prior to 1941 seventy percent of the revenue of the Chinese
Communist
administration
had been contributed“fromoutside.”“From foreign friends, in particular in Los Angeles ; and from the
National Government which supplied the pay of the Eighth Route(Communist)
Army.”. It should be noted here that the impact of a single American dollar
was tremendous in the bankrupt pauperized chaos of the wartime
Chinese economy. One United States dollar provided exchange between Nationalist, puppet, Communist, Russian, Manchukuoan, andJapanese
The Fascinationof Yenan

14.5

territory
far beyond its purchasing value in the UnitedStates. At the low point of the war, in the fall of 1944, the UnitedStates dollar was equivalent to zoo C. N. (Nationalist
currency)
dollars, and one C. N. dollar was exchangeable for eight Communist
Hence an American
contributionof(Shan-kan-ning)
dollars.
$~o,ooo--amere bagatelle in Hollywood-meant
I~,OOO,OOO Chinese
Communist dollars and was a huge contribution
in the rustic, policed
economy of Yenan.
It had always been obvious to the impartial observer that the heavy
burdens placed on the people of Free China by Chiang Kai-shek’s government were due to the huge expense of maintaining large armies in
the field against Japan. Here I found the Communists themselves admitting, by inference, that their agrarian reforms and the better condition of the peasantry in their areas had been made possible for several years because the people in Kuomintang
China were paying for
the upkeep of the Communist Army. The admission was all the moresignificant if one remembers that the Japanese never launched a major
offensive against the Communist Northwest after 1939.
On other occasions I had been glad to see my little interpreter, Ling
Ching, enjoying the sweets, peanuts and fruit provided for visitors.
Evidently he did not belong to one of the higher categories in foodallocation and he had a healthy, youthful appetite. That afternoon I
was so interested that I got irritated at his halting translation between
mouthfuls.
My informant,
who spoke no foreign language, was amine of information,
and was too absorbed in his subject to realize thepolitical implications of what he told me.
1941,"
he said, “it had not been necessary to tax the peas“Until
ants heavily. The ‘Public Salvation
Grain Levy’ in 1938
had
amounted to a mere IO,OOO piculs and in 1940 to go,ooo. But in 1941
with no further aid from outside of any kind, on account of the blockade, we had to double the grain levy. That year it was set at 2oo,ooo
piculs. But this was too heavy a burden on the peasantry.”
Evidently the peasants had objected very strongly indeed. For theCommunist Party had “listened to the voice of the
duced the levy to 100,000
the following year. The Communist administration could not rely on taxation. It had to expand production.
At this critical time Mao Tse-tung had issued a new slogan:“Everyone work with his hands.”
The army, the schools and all other institutions
were put underpeople
and
re-

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Last Chance in China

the necessity of working to supply at least a part of the food they consumed.
Every possible inducement was offered to the peasants to increase
production.
Much wasteland was utilized.
Cotton was planted andhousehold spinning and weaving encouraged.
Salt was “exported”
and cloth “imported” through the blockade into and out of Kuomintang China.
The falsity of the picture of an “inhuman blockade” of the Communists by the Nationalist forces painted by Communist sympathizers in
New York was here being admitted to me in Yenan itself. Actually
there was so much trade that the National Government customs stations all along reported quite heavy revenues on a wide variety ofgoods passing between Nationalist
and Communist
China. The“blockade” pertained only to weapons, military
supplies including
machinery and radios, and subversive literature.
But, of course, those
who were shouting loudest about the wickedness of the Kuomintang
could not read enough Chinese to follow the financial news in Chinese
economic journals or daily papers, and would not have troubled to doso if they could.
When I inquired whether trade was also carried on with the Japanese-occupied areas to the east of the Border Region, I received anastonishing reply : “Very little, because the army of Yen Hsi-shan
was between us and the Japanese.”
Here again was a curious side light on Yenan whose soldiers were
supposed by many Americans to have done nearly all the fighting
against Japan in North China. Actually the army to the east, which
recognized allegiance to the National Government, had constituted abuffer between the Communists and the Japanese.
Today, I was told, only fifty per cent of revenue is derived from taxation. The rest is supplied by the army’s production and that of othergovernment institutions.
“The army is seventy per cent self-sufficientand some brigades have even produced a surplus for the government.”
From the detailed account I was given of the economy of the Border Region I got a picture of a small self-sufficient community, left
very much to its own devices while the Japanese and the governmentof Chiang Kai-shek fought their big war. Here was a little country
which had turned in on itself and won a “battle of production” while
its soldier farmers, like the Scottish border raiders of medieval Brit-.

The Fa.winutionof Yenan

I47ain, had engaged, in the period between planting and harvesting, inforays into enemy territory
which netted them arms and booty.
During the years 1941 to 1945 the greatest efforts were also madeto win over the peasants, artisans and merchants of the Communistcontrolled areas. Mao Tse-tung told the party members that theymust on no account antagonize nonparty people and must be patientwith them when they opposed the orders of the government.
There
had apparently been a great deal of honest self-criticism and fair dealing with the peasants. As one of the Yenan Communists said to me:“A political party which seeks to win over the whole nation cannot
adopt dirty methods or tricks. It is impossible to deceive the people
for long.”
If he had added, “unless you have control of the radio and the press
and have placed an iron curtain between yourselves and the rest of theworld,” I should have agreed with him.
Even as things are there was some truth in his statement.
The
Chinese Communists, being a minority in China battling to win power
against the established government, have in fact been forced to seek
and retain popular support by reforms and a clean administration.
The “margin of corruption”
compatible with survival is very narrowin their case ; very wide in that of the legitimate government.
It was clear from all I learned in Yenan that the Communists had
never been confronted with any such insoluble economic and social
problems as the National Government.
Having neither a large standing army nor city populations to feed, their land-reform program had
been easy to carry through.
They created a chain of primitive economic areas run on autarchiclines and used all surplus production for local needs. Since the Japanese held most of the cities, the cutting off of supplies to the urban
population could be regarded as a patriotic duty. Nor did the Communists, of course, offer to feed the starving Nationalist professionalarmies fighting the Japanese in or near Communist-controlledareas.
As Dr. Paul Linebarger has written* : “The resulting surplus gave
the Communists local prosperity, while such segmentation broughtbankruptcy to the Nationalist
economy, wherever it operated at or
behind the Japanese front lines, because the Nationalist
mercantile* ‘The Complex Problem of Cbina~’ Yale Review, Spring, 1947.

148

Last Chance in China

and urban system was predicated on China-wide relationships.
And
the Communists, unlike the Nationalists,
had no non-Japanese foreign trade or credit to maintain.”
Alternating
long conversations and the search for knowledge of theinner workings of the regime with sight-seeing, next day I visited theInternational
Peace Hospital.
At this hospital, where I spent an entire day, I had the impressionof being among men wholeheartedly devoted to a humanitarian ideal.
I also felt that the doctors there longed for contact with the outside
world. Their warm welcome, the almost pathetic efforts they madeto show me how sanitary and up-to-date were their methods, their interest and sympathy when I spoke of Bobby Lim and his helpers in
Kuomintang
China, their desire for books from outside, all moved me
profoundly.
Most of them were Western-trained
and spoke German
or French or English, so I could converse with them without an interpreter. With one of them, in particular, I felt completely at ease.
A slight, vivacious man, with one of those almost classically beautiful
faces one sometimes sees in China, he won me completely with his
ready wit, his warm smile and his intense absorption in his work andthe well-being of his patients. He had been educated at the Sorbonnein Paris and since I also speak French fluently we could really talk toeach other. Moreover he seemed to know me only as the author ofJapan’s Feet of Clay and to be unaware, or not to care greatly, about
my political views.
I was reminded of the best men and women I had known in Russia-those
who, whatever their inward opinions concerning Soviet
tyranny, devoted themselves to their immediate tasks and hoped bytheir selfless labor for the common good to deny, or compensate for,the evil deeds of the regime they served. I was aware that day, as I
had also been in Moscow in years before, that the strength of theCommunists lies largely in their ability, even today, to hold the allegiance of men who hate their tyranny but regard it as a passing phaseand spend their individual lives laboring to create the good society
Lenin dreamed of.
The sun shone brightly that day. The caves where the patients layon their wooden plank beds were dark and cold but outside it wasalmost warm in the sun and the sky was blue and cloudless. The wallsof the “wards” were whitewashed and clean, and the up-to-date appa-

The Fa.r&ationof Yman149

ratus, supplied by friends abroad, contrasted with the primitive surroundings.
There were a number of visitors inside the caves and on
the paths all along the steep hillside.
I remember the babies in a row in the maternity caves, and a woman
in bed with her baby at her breast and her soldier husband sitting beside her, both of them radiant with happiness. Here was a hospitalrun entirely by Chinese where the people of this remote mountainregion were receiving if not the best care that modern science could
give them, at least as good nursing as could possibly be provided insuch primitive surroundings.
I climbed up and down and saw everything.
It was late afternoon
before we had finished the inspection.
Before I left, it had been arranged that a nurse would ride over to massage my arm, which I had
neglected since leaving Shanghai and which was still far from capableof normal movement. I was also presented with a bottle of liquor, thefirst I had seen in Yenan. It was pretty awful stuff, probably the samekind of alcohol as specimens are kept in, and a small glass or two produced a terrible headache. But it was a symbol of good cheer andfriendship in the austere atmosphere of Yenan.
At sunset I was fetched home in a jeep. “Home” for the time being
was the United States Army post where Colonel Ivan Yeaton commanded the American
Observer Group composed of three officers
and eight enlisted men. Either the personality of the colonel, or theatmosphere of Yenan, or a combination of the two, had dispelled any“morale” problems here. Soldiers enjoying the comforts, amusements
and temptations of Shanghai clamored to go home. In Yenan where
there were no dance halls, cafes, theaters or shops worthy of the name,there had been two re-enlistments, and everyone seemed happy. Officers and men ate the same simple food side by side in the same messhall ; hunted wild pheasants or climbed mountains together in theirliberty hours; and every evening sat down with any Chinese whocared to come to see a movie in “Whittlesea Hall.” When the planebringing mail and supplies twice a month from Shanghai failed toarrive on account of bad weather, they saw the same movies over andover again.
Inside the post compound lived a number of Chinese either working
for the United States Army and being trained as mechanics, drivers
and radio operators, or acting as interpreters and liaison men between

*soLast Chance in China

the Americans and the Communist Government.
The conditions ofliving were the same for everyone and hardly differed from those outside. Whitewashed cabins made of mud and straw, trestle beds, and ofcourse, no running water. But we had electricity and showers andour diet included such luxuries as coffee, cocoa and canned fruit, bacon and occasionally meat.
I was told when I arrived that I was the only woman who had everstayed at the United States Army post. I was in fact the first woman
correspondent to come to Yenan since Anna Louise Strong in 1938.
Agnes Smedley had gone to stay with the Communist New Fourth
Army in Central China when Hankow fell, but had not been in Yenan
since the first year of the Sino-Japanese War.
I was afraid I should be a nuisance, but except for the necessity ofstationing a sentry outside the bathhouse when I took a shower, there
was no inconvenience.
It was very much like the Press Hostel in
Chungking except that bugles called us to meals and one had to get up
early in the morning.
The rooms or cabins were smaller, newer,
cleaner, and somewhat better furnished than in Chungking.
Onemight better call our habitations cells, for this word conveys something of the monastic atmosphere of Yenan, both in the town and inside the United States Army compound.
Ling Ching, guide and interpreter to visitors, lived next door to me.
He was the son of a landowner in Chahar and had studied at Peking
University, but he had joined up with the Communists when the Japanese invaders came. Short, thin, with large glasses, and not particularly intelligent, he was a nice earnest conscientious boy, happy andrather naive. His room contained only a bed, a charcoal brazier, alarge desk and some bookshelves.
These were filled with Chinese
Marxist literature and a very large quantity of American publications.
He had accumulated piles of Life magazines and many novels in the
United States armed forces pocket editions. Maybe he was in processof being corrupted by this “bourgeois literature” and by his nightly
attendance at the movie together with the members of the Englishlanguage school.
I think I puzzled Ling Ching. He had, no doubt, been told that I
was a wicked reactionary and an enemy of progress and peace. Perhaps I did not quite tally with his conception of a fascist warmonger,
for I often found him looking at me curiously but not unamiably, andThe Fascinationof Yenan151

sometimes he asked me questions which displayed a real interest in
my opinions. He was obviously not happy about Manchuria for thiswas the one subject in which he displayed interest after my many
interviews.
Ivan Yeaton, who had formerly been United States military attachein Moscow, was just the right man for his job, which required an expert on Communism, not on China. He was determined that under
him the United States Army Observer Group should not show any
political sympathies or prejudices one way or another. He forbade allpolitical discussion in the mess and never expressed his political views.
Discipline on the post and relations between his men and the local
population were alike excellent, but under his command there was nosuch political fraternizationas under his predecessor in General Stilwell’s day.
I had known Ivan Yeaton and his wife in Washington but I nevertried to ascertain his views on Chinese Communism.
I understoodthat it would embarrass him even to be seen talking to me alone andthat the performance of his duties required that he take no one into his
self-control of this excepconfidence. I respected the extraordinary
tional soldier and intelligence officer, whose sole recreation was theten-mile walk he took alone every morning.
It was, however, clear that apart from the other duties, Ivan Yeaton
considered that it was a function of his small command to “sell” American democracy to the people of Communist China. Every man on thepost was taught to treat the Chinese with respect and courtesy. There
was no drunkenness and no whistling after women. After having
witnessed the brutal disregard of pedestrians shown by American
jeep and truck drivers in Shanghai, I was pleased to find the GI’s inYenan stopping to let the wild Mongolian ponies pass and gettingout to walk rather than drive through the narrow main street of the“town.”
It must have been hard for the Communist leadership to convince
any of the inhabitants of the “Shensi-Kansu-Ningsia
Border Region”
that the American Army is an instrument of reactionary imperialism.
Whatever the radio and the newspaper may be telling them today,
they have seen the comradely relations between officers and men andthe polite and considerate behavior of the Americans toward the people of Yenan.

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Last Chance in China

Ling Ching was very conscientious and did not like me to waste asingle afternoon or evening without its quota of sight-seeing or conversation.
True, there seemed to be certain matters difficult to arrange. When I asked to see factories I was told they were all too far
away outside the town, and had to be content with visiting some handicraft shops. Another excuse was made when I wanted to visit theprison. The day I was to have driven over to visit Wu Men-yu, Yenan’s “labor hero” of agriculture,
the weather was so bad and thesnow so thick, everyone said the roads were impassable. On thewhole, however, I was given plenty of opportunity
to observe andquestion and look for any rotten wood there might be beneath thesocialist veneer.
I saw the Red ‘Army soldiers drilling on the sunlit plain beside thefrozen River Yen. I attended a mass meeting of women where, after
a report had been given of the party’s success in establishing Communist administrations
in formerly Japanese-occupied areas, a bespectacled and earnest woman gave a lecture on socialism in the home.
Each member of the family, she said, should have his due shareof the family income justly apportioned.
The hundreds of women
present, young and old, ugly and pretty, but all dressed alike in graypadded tunics and trousers, listened attentively, made notes and applauded.
At the end of a week the pattern had become a trifle monotonous.
I already knew what I would see and hear at every institution.
I hadinspected countless identical cave dwellings and heard how everyone,
whether he were doctor, nurse, teacher or party worker, received food,clothing and lodging, but no salary. Money was for the undedicatedfor the peasants and artisans and shopkeepers.
‘Americans like Gunther Stein* have commented on the American
soldier’s surprise at finding Chinese who “ain’t interested in money.”This seems a remarkable phenomenon until one reflects that in a society where there is almost nothing to be bought, it is natural not tobother about money. How could the average American properly
understand a society in which the ruling class got what it needed without paying for it?
Only when I walked through the little town which has sprung up+ The Chdlengeof Red China.

The Fascinutiolzof YemnI53

outside the walls of the ruined city did I sense unease. In Chungking
even the most miserable coolies and street vendors smile. There arecolor and noise, laughter, quarreling and bargaining, misery and comparative opulence; all the infinite variety of unregimented life and an
atmosphere of freedom in spite of all the poverty.
Yenan was like an iceberg in comparison, simple in structure, silent
and cold. The storekeepers and the peasants who passed you bylooked dour and grim. There was little conversation among the people in the streets. In the shops stocked only with the simplest necessities, and in the huts where artisans ply their trades as in days goneby, one received the barest answer to questions. This could be due tothe difference in temperament as between the people of the warm, fertile but overpopulated South and those of the barren Northwest.
But
perhaps it also reflects the fear which always abides in men’s hearts
under an authoritarianregime. Having lived in the Soviet Union I
know that no foreigner can get to know what people are really thinking under a Communist
Government.
Where dissatisfaction
is regarded as treason who will complain to a stranger? Everyone knows
about the “traitors’ camps” in the Border Region where so-called“enemies of the people” are imprisoned.
This was the shadow overYenan which otherwise seemed so bright and hopeful.
Tillman Durdin who speaks Chinese, and who is far from being an
apologist for the Kuomintang,after he visited Yenan remarked on
the contrast between “the frightened people and the confident commissars” in Communist China.
In 1938 I had met that gallant old lady, Mrs. Chao, nicknamed“grandmotherof the guerrillas” for the resistance movement against
Japan she had led in Manchuria.
Her son, who had fought the Japanese ever since 193 I, had been shot by the Communists.
I had heardof Wang Shih-wei, the Communist writer condemned as a Trotskyist because he had written some articles critical of the Yenan regime,
saying that the youth of lower rank were dissatisfied and complained
about such matters as “the five categories of food” between the various grades of Communist elite and the mass of the people.
I remembered Lao-sh2, author of Rickshaw Boy, whom Durdin
had taken me to visit in Chungking.
In his little earth-floored shack,piled with books and cold as a tomb, he had said, “It’s just about thesame for a liberal writer in Chungking and in Yenan; maybe a little

I54

Last Chance in China

worse in Yenan. Both sides just want you to do propaganda and obscure realities.”
I thought also of Chang Kuo-san, the young Chinese Central News
reporter who was a friend of Till Durclin’s and with whom I had had
long conversations in Chungking.
He had graduated a little time before from the Northwestern
University,
exiled in Kunming.
His
English was excellent and he had a knowledge of politics and economics which was both theoretical and practical.
His qualifications andintelligence in any other country would have assured him a comfortable living. In China he was barely able to support his wife and childand their second baby whose arrival we celebrated just before I left
Chungking. Nevertheless he was as anti-Communist
as I was, and hetold me the contents of letters received by his classmates from theirrelatives in Communist China. To them Communism was far fromsignifying the do-good, be-good atmosphere of Yenan. It meant murder and pillage and terror. When I suggested to Chang Kuo-san thathe accompany me to Yenan as my interpreter, he had said he would
be glad to, but first he must have some guarantee that he would be
able to return to Chungking.
“Few who have gone there,” he said,“ever got out again. A message is sent to your family saying you likeit so much in Communist China that you intend to stay. I just daren’trisk being held there because of my wife and children.”In Yenan I wished I could speak to the people, alone and in theirown language. Not that it would have helped much to understand
Chinese. I knew from my Russian experience that no one dares to
speak freely under a police regime. Even if the terror in Communist
China is far less acute than in Russia, even if the Chinese Communist
regime had become comparatively liberal in recent years, the peasantsand merchants could not have forgotten the executions and expropriations which marked the arrival of the Red Army in the Northwest.
Already from beyond the “model state” centered in Yenan reports
must have come of the forced grain deliveries, executions, and impressment of villagers into the Communist armies fighting the National Government for the control of North China and Manchuria.
Even if the Communists had improved the lot of the peasants of the
Yenan area, they were vastly increasing the misery of the great massof the Chinese people by their refusal to stop the civil war.
Many a naive foreign journalist has accepted as genuine the Cl-&The Fa&nutiomof YenanI.55

nese Communist claim to have established a democratic governmentand “free” elections. Two thirds of those elected to public office, they
point out, must not be Communists.
What they have failed to see isthat where only one party is allowed to exist, the electors have nochance to oppose the ruling minority.
The power of the people iseven weaker than that of unorganized workers trying to bargain witha big corporation.
For in Communist China, as in the Communistdominated states of Eastern Europe, anyone who opposes the Comor fascist and loses his liberty or
munists is called “antidemocratic,”
his head.
When I argued with the Communists in Yenan that theirs was a
spurious democracy, since neither the Kuomintang
nor any other
non-Communist
party was allowed to function, they replied, “We do
not forbid other parties to exist, but, of course, we don’t allow Kuomintang ‘spies’ to come to Yenan.”“In 1944,”
I was told by the editor of the Emancipation Daily, “wehad a cleanup of spies of the Japs and the Kuomintang who had tried
to corrupt our program.”“Did you shoot them,” I inquired, “or give them a trial ?”“No we didn’t kill them. Sometimes we gave them a trial.”
How simple it is to call a dictatorship a democracy when all who
disagree are labeled enemies of the people, spies, traitors, fascists orotherwise undeserving of rights or liberty!
It was impossible for me to judge how great a part was played byfear, and how great a part by faith, in the regimentationof life inCommunist China. But it is certain that the individualist
Chinese,with their hatred of government interference in their private affairs, IIcannot easily have adapted themselves to the Communist regime.
The correspondents who have been fascinated by Yenan have accepted the popular, but false, assumption that liberty andtwins. Human society is not naturally equalitarian, and without compulsion it cannot be made SO. Nor do human beings all think alikeand desire the same things, or believe that there is only one Truthone certain way to create the good and just society which men
throughaut the ages have longed for.
Few people would themselves like to live regimented, frugal lives
possessing nothing that their neighbors do not also possess and striving always for what the government tells them is the common good.

equal
are

peopleLast Chance in China
156
think such a society admirable. This is particularly
But manytrue not of the worst, but of the best, Americans who have a vivid
sense of guilt in foreign lands because they are so much better off andlive so much more comfortably than other peoples. In Kuomintang
China they feel better after they have denounced the government for
the ills which are in fact mainly due to China’s scarcity economy andthe laissez-faire prejudices of the Chinese people. In Yenan they canreverence a way of life they would find intolerable if they were participants instead of visitors. The temptation to ascribe all the misery in
China to the National Government is all the greater because of theWestern world’s large share of responsibility
for China’s plight.
Emotional young correspondents are glad to forget, if they ever knew,
the lasting effects of former European and American oppression andexploitationof China.
In an earlier chapter I have referred to the insidious and wholesale ’forms which corruption takes in a developed Communist society, inwhich the ruling class through its monopoly of political power owns
everything in the country and can allocate to itself any share it pleasesof the national income. In Communist China, however, society is stillin too primitive a stage for the weeds of corruption to have stifled theflowers of original intention.
Until Japan’s surrender the Communists controlled no cities, had practically no industry and were so isolated that money had little value. The members of the Party still set
an example of hard work and frugal living. They have not yet beencorrupted by power because of their precarious situation and the necessity of retaining popular support. Seeking to win control over thewhole country, they are still at the stage of advocating democracy inorder to destroy it.
The rank and file have no idea of what the rest of the world is doing
and saying and thinking.
They never get the chance to read a bookor a newspaper or hear a voice on the air, other than thoseof by the Communist Party. They know nothing of the terror, theconcentration
camps and the gross inequalities of Stalin’s Russia.
They are unaware that they themselves are but pawns in Soviet
Russia’s game of power politics.
The sincerity and decency of many of the Chinese Communists wereunmistakable.
I liked them and respected them all the while that I was
conscious of their tragic destiny and the use made of their self-sacri-appThe Fascinationof Yenun

I57

ticing lives by forces of whose existence they were completely ignorant. They put me in mind of the unwordly monks of Mount Athos
who in the years of grossest corruption in Rome and Byzantium,
when Popes fought Emperors for domination over the earth, continued to render an allegiance long since betrayed by the Church itself.
Here in Communist China was the embryo of what Russia might
have become had not external opposition, hunger, lust for power andthe frailty of man, unsupported by anything but a materialist philosophy, led the Bolsheviks and the people they dominated to the gatesof hell instead of to paradise on earth.
Because I was once a Communist who believed that the overthrowof capitalism and imperialism would enable the human race to create
the good society of the free and equal, I could not hate the Chinese
Communists.
I could only pity them. Here in the primitive Northwest, where Chinese civilization
began in the dawn of history, theCommunists had been trying to re-create in a modern pattern the lifeof primitive
innocence which may, or may not, have existed before“man’s first disobedience” condemned humanity to strive foreveragainst one tyranny only to create another. As Goethe once said,
Humanity is like a man on a sickbed turning continually from right toleft and finding no ease on either side.
When I asked what guarantees there were against future abuses ofpower, it was suggested that I read a pamphlet by Wang Yen-pei ofthe Democratic League. The author had been told by Mao Tse-tungthat he was confident of the “ability of the people to control the
Party.” “ The Party,” said Mao, “was always willing to listen to thecriticisms of the masses.”
I was told how undisciplined Communist soldiers had been reported
by non-Party
peasants and taught thereafter to behave themselves,also that when officials had been found “too hasty” or dictatorial
in
their dealings with the peasants they had been removed or reprimanded. “The difference between us and the Kuomintang,”said oneof the Moscow-trainedand American-educatedelite of Yenan, “is that
we never squeeze the people in order to enrich ourselves. When weuse compulsion it is because some comrades are too eager for thecommon good.”This statement unfortunately
echoed all too loudly in my ears what
1 had heard in Russia years before. The peasants sent to Siberian

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Last Chance in China

concentration
camps for resisting collectivization
had not been victims of self-seeking corrupt landowners, capitalists or officials. They
were supposed to have been sacrificed on the altar of the welfare of
the Common Man although in reality they toiled and died to satisfy
the insensate ambitions of a man and his party.
When I visited Yenan in February 1946 it was in process of becoming, like Chungking, only a secondary capital. The main activities of the Communists were already directed elsewhere. Their armies
and their administrative
personnel were spread out through North
China setting up other “border governments”
in other “liberated
areas.” They admitted that the control of large cities was producing
new problems and required new methods. It was expected that salary
payments would soon be substituted for payments in kind. The simple egalitariansociety of Yenan seemed doomed to become only amemory even before it fell to the Nationalist
Army in 1947.
But
Yenan remained the symbol of man’s hope and man’s illusions.
It is a profound mistake to assume that because the Communists ofrecent years have advocated agrarian reform, free enterprise and “democracy” they are not “real Communists.”
As the editor of theirnewspaper in Yenan said to me. * “We Communists know how to maketurns to reach our goal.”
We were sitting talking by candlelight in his small mud cabin, huddled around a charcoal brazier after having dined adequately but not
too well. My host, Chien Chun-su, was a small, vivacious, bespectacled intellectual who had been educated in America and spoke excellent English. He welcomed the “new era” about to begin. “The habitof keeping time,” he exulted, would be enforced, and “interminablediscussions” curtailed.
From now on he thought it would be easier
to “maintaina united will” than in the years “when the Communist
forces were split off from one another.”and 1942 was precarious,” he said. “We“our situation in 1941
were blockaded and the Chungking Government no longer supplied
the pay of our army. We had not previously produced enough foodin the Border Region to be self-sufficient.
It was imperative to increase production.
Speeches and theoretical arguments were of nouse. We had to teach the people practical things, such as how to increase the yield of the land, how to weave and how to make chickens

The Fascinationof Yenan159

lay eggs. Comrade Mao Tse-tung told us we must not antagonize thenon-Party people. That we should be patient with them even when
they disagreed with us. That we must give the masses some rein andconvert them by democratic methods. He told us that when you go
away from the people, however excellent your intentions, you will
lose.”
It was clear from his conversation that it was circumstances, notconviction, which had led the Chinese Communists to adopt a moreor less liberal policy.
Chien himself had little patience with the people who disagreed.
“Sometimes,”
he said, “we had meetings lasting two months. In thein cities, hours, and even minutes,
future that will be impractical;
count. We have got to learn the habit of keeping time. Very few ofus here even have watches. When we make an appointment, we justsay ‘after breakfast’ or ‘in the forenoon.’ We have only one newsWe are not worried about getting
paper so there is no competition.
out the news on time. All this has got to be changed. Also these past
eighteen years most of us have been engaged in armed struggle either
in the army or in underground
activity.
Now we must learn new
methods of advancing our cause.”
As I stumbled down the hillside in the dark on my way back to myown mud hut at the United States Army post, I recalled Mussolini’s
boast about the trains running on time. I also remembered that in
Russia there had been a period when the peasants were encouraged toincrease production for their own profit and allowed, together withthe artisans and small industrialists,
to trade on a free market. This
N.E.P. (New Economic Policy) period was ended by Stalin in 1929
when the Bolshevik Party considered itself strong enough to crush allinternal opposition, force the peasants into so-called collective farms,
liquidate all “capitalist elements” and suppress all opposition.
After
1929, also, the Russian Communist Party completed its metamorphosis from a group of intellectuals vowed to poverty into a ruling classenjoying not only power but riches. So true it is that without liberty
equality soon also disappears.
Lenin wrote of the unequal development of capitalism, contrasting
the differences between the young period of free enterprise and liberty and the later period of monopolies and imperialism.
The unequal development of Communism has been insufficiently recognized.

’

160

Last Chance in China

In Russia you already have a society of privilege and great inequalities in standards of living. In Communist China you find a society
whose rulers have not yet been corrupted by power. Although the
Chinese Communists have their own army and since Japan’s surrender have begun to rule over large territories, they are still a minority
party in China. They could not have existed without popular support
and without making concessions to the desires of the people. But
there is no guarantee and no likelihood that they, unlike other men,would not be corrupted by power.
All this was in my mind the day I dined with General Chu Teh,commander in chief of the Communist armies. W e had spent the forenoon on a set of questions which he answered from a written text inthe correct Marxist-Stalinist
manner. I had been told to submit myquestions in writing, and I was helpless when he skirted around thetrue content of the awkward ones. In particular he would not be
drawn out on Manchuria.
I wondered what he really thought but
knew there was no chance of finding out and there was no sense inbadgering him. Moscow’s eagle eye was on him, and there were several high party officials present.
I sensed his relief once the ideological formalities had been disposedof. Now at last we could speak of Yenan, his bailiwick, his domain.
Had he and his people not done well? And he eyed me with curiosity,as, with Chinese courtesy, he used his chopsticks to place a few choicemorsels on my plate.
I said, “I have been much impressed by what I have seen in Yenan.
If only you would cease to play Moscow’s game by disrupting Chineseunity, and be Chinese, you would be able to give a lead to all China inthe matter of agrarian reform. I cannot forget that Lenin too hoped
to establish a society of the free and equal, but look at Russia now-acountry of tyranny and terror and concentration camps, bent on imperialistic expansion; with the Communist Party living in luxury
while the masses are desperately poor. How can one not fear that you
too will take the Moscow road?”
Chu Teh did not argue. He simply stated that the Chinese Communist Party is Chinese and China would follow her own path. But
the editor Chien was very angry and said with a sneer, “That’s what
you think !” I said it was what I had seen and experienced. “Someof us too have been to Moscow,” he replied. The concluding remark
was unnecessary. It was all too obvious in his case.

The Fascinationof Yenan161

I then asked Chu Teh to define the meaning of democracy. He said
that it meant free elections, free speech, no secret police or arbitraryarrests.
“How then,” I asked, “can you call Russia democratic ? There isno free speech ; the press is one hundred per cent government-owned;
there is an all-powerfulsecret police; no freedom from arbitrary arrest, and no party besides the Communist Party allowed to exist.”
The general was not a good Sophist. The argument was taken overby Yung Hsiung-kuanof the Political Bureau:“In the Soviet Union all other parties have been liquidated because
they were enemies of the people, and the people wanted them to be
destroyed. No other party is required because the Communist Party
represents the will of the people.”
This unequivocal definition of the “New Democracy” shows it tobe simply old tyranny writ large. Instead of a king you have the Communist Party claiming to represent the will of the people. Instead of
the belief that “the king can do no wrong” you have the axiom that
the Soviet Union is always right.
The answer I had been given showed all too clearly that whatever
the intentions of battle-scarred veterans like Chu Teh and Mao Tsetung, their party was headed along the same bloodstained path as
Russia and all her satellites. I would have been only too glad to findthat the Chinese Communists are democrats, but obviously, like allother Communists, they had merely usurped the word and reversed
its meaning.
The road to hell is usually paved with good intentions.
My likingfor some of the Yenan Communists could not change the fact that
Moscow’s ideology ruled their thoughts and actions. Once in powerin China there was every likelihood that they would become a brutal,tyrannical ruling class. Those who kept their primitive faith would beliquidated as Russia’s old Bolsheviks had been.
Those who take to the sword may not always perish by the sword,
but after my six years in Soviet Russia I am convinced that social justice cannot be insured by violence, injustice, lawlessness and dictatorship. Not only is there abundant evidence that the Chinese Communist Party leaders have wholeheartedly
adopted the same philosophy
as the rulers of Soviet Russia ; not only do they believe that the end
justifies the means and that lying, cheating, political chicanery, cruelty, even murder are the means which must be adopted to win and162

Last Chance in China

retain power for the Communist Party, they have already advanced
some distance along the same road to tyranny as the Russian Communist Party trod long ago.
In the closing months of 1946 the Chinese Communists started tothrow off the democratic mask and to withdraw the iron hand of terror from the velvet glove worn in Yenan. They now no longer appear
as reformers or seek to win popuIar support by moderate policies. As
Tillman Durdin reported on February 3, 1947, the Communist land
policy in its latest phase represents a sharp departure from the principles which were being propagated by the Yenan leaders during theJapanese War and for a period afterward. This land policy, says the
New York Times correspondent, “has been carried out with the accompaniment of cruelties and other excesses such as the ‘Settle Accounts’ trials, executions and some cases of slaughter such as the recent massacre of the residents of the little Catholic village of Tsungli
in Chahar.”
In a later dispatch, sent from Yenan on March 8, 1947, Durdin
reported that in the one third of China they claimed to control, theCommunists were proceeding relentlessly with their program of land
division, and that they expect to eliminate tenantry completely. “Information available here,” he wrote, “indicates that the Communists
are effecting the most extensive change of landownershipbrought
about anywhere in the world since the early years of Bolshevik rulein Russia.”
The editor of the Yelzan Ema~zci~ation News, my old friend Chien
Chun-su, gave Durdin a detailed account of how the process of liquidating landowners is being carried out. It is evidently done bymeans of the same process as in Eastern Europe. The landlords are“hauled before ‘People’s Courts’ ” and charged with some past action
harmful to a tenant or a small landholding neighbor.
“When found guilty-andthere is no record that any landlord has
ever been found innocent-thelandlord has properties taken awayfrom him sufficient to meet the demands of his accusers and of theland-division
regime.”However, “if a landlord has been ‘good,’ if he has co-operated with
the Communist regime,” he gets a “favored status.” The mayor of
Yenan gave Durdin, as an example, the relatives of Professor Chang
Shen-fu of the Democratic League. Since the League is pro-Commu-

The Fascinationof Yewlz

nist this family had been allowed to retain a large estate of between
200
and 300 acres.
In other words you can ensure yourself possession of your wealth
if only you toe the Party line.
Accordingto the claims of the Communists 60,000,000 peasantsin North China and Manchuria
have acquired farms through theforcible expropriation
without compensation of a multitude of small
landowners and richer peasants. The Chinese Communists, like theBolsheviks before them, have already started to solve the agrarian
problem by the mass murder of “kulaks.”
Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Communist-heldareas,
the majority of whom are peasants, have flocked into Nationalist territory.
For instance the Reverend Wilfred McLaughlin,an American mission worker from Haichow in Kiangsi, when visiting Siichow inJune 1947 reported that ~oo,ooo refugees from near-by Communist
territory
had come to his district where famine conditions alreadyprevailed largely as a result of confiscation of food stocks by theCommunists when they occupied the area.
Many correspondents and authors have stated that they saw no evidence of any link between the Chinese Communists and Moscow. Of
course you do not see couriers running back and forth between Moscow and Yenan. But it is glaringly obvious that the Chinese Communists, like Communists everywhere else in the world, steer theircourse by Moscow’s star.
It was while I was in Yenan that the storm broke in China about
Russia’s looting of Manchuria and failure to hand the territory backto the National Government of China, as she had undertaken to do in
the Sino-Soviet Treaty of August 1945. Chungking had for months
kept silent concerning Russia’s breaking of the treaty, knowing that
China was too weak to force the Russians out. Hoping against hopethat eventually the Red Army would go home, the Chinese National
Government had not even protested Russia’s refusal to let its troops
land in the port of Dairen.
In February came the breaking point with great student demonstrations in Chungking
and Shanghai demanding that Russia giveback Manchuria.

164

Last Chance in China

This was the first clear test for the Chinese Communists.
So long
as it was Japan who bullied China, despoiled her and fostered disunity, it was possible to appear to be both a Communist and a patriot.
Now with Russia stepping into Japan’s shoes, it would be easy to see
whose estimate of the Chinese Communists was correct. Were theyor were they not Moscow’s quislings?
The Yenan newspaper and radio left one with no doubts. The student demonstrations
were described as “fascist-inspired”
and no single word of censure or complaint was uttered concerning Russia’s removal of machinery, rolling stock and food from Manchuria.
One quickly remarked the difference in reaction to the subject ofManchuria as between the “social workers” or “Boy Scout” leaders
and the Communist
elite. The former were embarrassed, tried tochange the subject or showed that they were completely ignorant ofwhat was going on. Not so Chien Chun-su, the editor. Here wasa perfectly trained Moscow-orientatedtwister of words and confuserof issues. One can meet his like in all the Communist Parties of theworld. They believe that you can fool a large number of people, for a
sufficiently long time to gain your ends, so long as you can confuse
your listeners by using words they like for things they hate.
Whenever I tried to pin him down with a clear question on a specific issue, he always eluded me.
“Do you approve,” I said, “of the Yalta agreement which enabled
Russia to regain all the Czarist privileges in Manchuria lost in the
Russo-Japanese War, or voluntarily given up by Lenin?”“Ah,” he said, waving his thin scholar’s hand, “you cannot consider something up in the air like that; you must not distort facts byconsidering them in isolation ; you should always grasp what is theessence of a situation, its historical setting and its content. The essence of the Yalta agreement was that it paved the way for the SinoSoviet Pact. Without Yalta there might have been no pact. Without
the pact perhaps no victory. Leave aside meaningless talk of ‘Czarist
privileges.’ That is nonsense. Your whole premise is wrong since theSoviet Union is not an Imperialist Power but a workers’ state and has
always been our friend. China and Russia must stand together against
the danger of Japan’s revival. That is the essence of the matter. It
was very good of President Roosevelt as middleman to promote
friendshipbetween China and Russia. Chiang Kai-shek knew at

The Fascinationof Yenan

165

Cairo that Roosevelt was going to discuss Manchuria at Yalta, andhe is not honest when he afterward expresses surprise.”“We had nothing to do with the pact. We
He added significantly,
are not in a position to negotiate.”
From the final sentence in this jumble of words one might perhaps
conclude he meant that only a Communist-controlled
China would be
China must submit
in a position to hold its own. A non-Communist
to Russia lest worse befall her.
I pressed him to commit himself as to whether or not he also approved of Russia pressing China for even greater concessions thanthose provided for in the Sino-Soviet Treaty. He would only reiterate, “I don’t believe Russia will do anything against what she
signed.”When I remarked that Russia had already broken the treaty by
not withdrawing
her troops from Manchuria and by trying to blackmail China into giving Russia possession of half the resources there,
he said, “We are for the withdrawal of all foreign forces from China.”
As regards the looting of Manchuria by the Red Army, he simply
said he had no informationthat this had occurred. If consideration of
the “essence” of a fact cannot transmute it into something different,
your true Communist will deny the fact’s existence.
I was not surprised, two months later, to read that the Yenan radio
was categorically denying that the Russians had removed any machinery from Mukden. In the face of all the evidence given by Americanand other correspondents this was a barefaced lie. But since the inhabitants of Communist China get no news other than that which
their rulers wish them to hear they would have no means of ascertaining the truth.
However loyally the Communists might cover up for Soviet Russia
it was impossible to believe that men like Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh
They must
did not, in their hearts, resent the wrecking of Manchuria.
have hoped to inherit its industries as good soldiers of the Red Czar,and have come to suspect that Stalin was no more anxious to see astrong Communist China than a strong Kuomintang,or any otherkind of China.
I had no opportunity
to form a personal estimate of Mao Tse-tungsince an interview was denied me. But as I sat with the burly andamiable Chu Teh, whose name signifies Red Virtue, and whose kindly

166

Last Chance in Chinaeyes regarded me with what seemed a questioning, even sympathetic
and certainly not hostile regard, I could not believe him to be without
inner doubts concerning Moscow’s leadership.
Here was a man ofsuch strength of character that he had not only given up a life of powerand ease and pensioned off his wives and concubines when he joined
the Communist Party, but had also cured himself of the opium habit
when already in his forties ; a man who had come to be a Communist
through his sympathy for the downtrodden
and by way of Marxist
study in Germany and Russia in the early twenties. He belonged to
the now almost extinct generation of old-vintage Communists.
In
Soviet Russia he would undoubtedly have long since been liquidated
along with almost all Lenin’s old Comrades. Chu Teh, it seemed tome, could not easily accept the role of a Stalin yes man however subservient his replies to questions might sound.
I would have given a great deal to know his real thoughts. Did hethink that he had no choice ? That he was committed and could not
draw back? The Moving Finger had long since written and moved
on. The hopes and ideals of twenty years before were dead on bothsides. Chu Teh and Mao Tse-tung, even if they wished it, could neverbe reconciled with Chiang Kai-shek to join with him to save China.
Too much blood had been shed, too much hatred and mistrust created.
The Kuomintang
as well as the Comintern had degenerated, andChiang Kai-shek was committed to alliance with the Western Powers who still appear to the Chinese Communists as the implacable andcruel imperialists of the past.
AlthoughI realized it was hopeless to expect Chu Teh to reveal
his true thoughts, I questioned him closely on Manchuria, asking him
to explain how the Chinese Communists, who had always stood forthe first of Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles, the integrity and independence of China, could approve of the revival of Czarist Russia’s
imperialist privileges.
His answers were as stereotyped and unconvincing as I had expected. He said that it was “insulting” to speak of
the Sino-Soviet Treaty “in the same breath” as Czarist demands on
China. Not only was it a vilification of the Soviet Union, but it wasalso a vilificationof America since President Roosevelt had himself
sponsored the Sino-Soviet Treaty. He also, no doubt with an innerchuckle, said that he remembered that the world’s press had acclaimed
the treaty as a “defeat for the Chinese Communist Party.” His party,

The Fascinationof Yenarz167

he continued, “had not had the slightest knowledge about the negotiations” but had approved because the treaty was ‘<a safeguard against
the recurrence of Japanese aggression and for the promotion of thecommon welfare of China and the Soviet Union. . . .
“If we compare the close relationship between China and distantAmerica with the provisions of the Sino-Soviet Pact the latter does
not seem at all extraordinary.”“You mean,” I said, “that the Chinese Communist Party no longer
disapproves of exclusive rights in any part of China for any Power ?”Chu Teh dodged the question and replied only that if negotiations
were on the “basis of equality” China should sign commercial pacts
with other nations.
When, during lunch, I taxed Yung Hsiung-kuan,a leading Communist theoretician, with the fact that the Communists had broken
the January truce in which they promised not to contest the occupation of Manchuria
by the Nationalist
forces, he slipped out fromunder with more “dialectical” arguments.
“We do not object,” he said, “to National troops coming to
Manchuria to take over. But the settlement of the method of reoccupation is a matter of internal poiitics. The National Government’s
idea is to do away with all the people’s forces and popular administrations set up there. The local popular forces in Manchuria recognize
the Central Government
but the latter must also recognize theirstatus.”In effect this meant that, so long as the Communist forces arrived
in Manchuria out of uniform (as they had in fact done) to organize
local Communist administrations,they had not broken the truce.
The Emanci@tion
Daily and the Communist News Service, as
might be expected, did a good job of confusing the issue. Reading theexcerpts translated into English and circulated among us in Yenan, I
realized that it must be well-nigh impossible for the inhabitants of the
Border Region ever to get at the truth. Their knowledge of eventsand facts is comparable to what an American would know if he neverread anything but the Daily Worker.
The great student demonstrationsin Chungking and other cities
were represented as a wicked plot by “fascist elements in the Kuomintang” to “stir up keling against the Soviet Union in order to sabotage the P. C. C. Agreements.” The students were warned that one

168

Last Chance in China

day they would appreciate “that they had been duped by these fascist
elements, and come to understand that real love of country lies not inbeing anti-Soviet or anti-Communist
but in joining hands with theSoviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party.”
The general argument ran something like this : to oppose Russia is
to be a fascist because the Soviet Union is the “main antifascist force
in the world.” There would be no question of the Red Army not vacating Manchuria
if Chinese “democratic,”i.e., Communist, forceswere in control there. (“If democracy were realized there would be
no problem.“)
Chungking should therefore let the Communists run e
Manchuria.
“This kind of demonstration,”
said the Yenan News Agency, “is ahundred per cent antinational
and antidemocratic
in character. In
other words it is counterrevolutionary,and is no different from Hitlerite demonstrations,although the motives of the bulk of the student
demonstrators may be patriotic in intention.”
Another day it circulated an ingenious and equally illogical argument to the effect that, since the National Government had not fought
Japan when the latter took possession of Manchuria and had suppressed those who clamored for war against Japan in 1931, it had noright now to appeal to Chinese patriotism in seeking to regain Manchuria.
A week later in Peiping I met George Weller just out of Chungking. He told me that neither he nor the other foreign correspondents
had ever seen the like of these demonstrations.
They were terrific andcould not possibly have been staged ; it was a real mass popular protest. Moreover the government leaders clearly had not wanted them ;they were far too frightened of Russia. The demonstrations were asembarrassing to them as the similar ones against Japan in the early
thirties.
All in all Yenan’s reaction to the popular outburst in China, which
followed the American revelations of Russia’s looting of Manchuria,
was sufficient proof that the Chinese Communists are no different
from Communists everywhere else in the world. They are as certainly the puppets of Moscow as Marshal Tito, or the Polish Government, or the American Communist Party.
The day I left Yenan the Red Army was lined up at the airfield rehearsing its reception for General Marshall who was at that time held

The Fascinutionof YenaH

169

in the highest esteem in Communist China. The general was not thenaware that the truce he had arranged was enabling the Communists
to hold their gains in the Northwest provinces while moving theirbest forces into Manchuria to take over as the Russians withdrew. He
was royally received in Yenan. Not till many months later did theCommunists start including him in their diatribes against “American
imperialism.”
Marshall plodded on believing he could unite China by fusing thebest elements in the Kuomintang
with the moderates, or Right Wing,of the Chinese Communist
Party.
Had he studied the history ofother Communist
Parties, he might have realized that whether
or not such elements exist among the Chinese Communist
Party,
makes little difference. The German Communist Party, before Hitler,when it held the proud position now occupied by the Chinese-thatofbeing the largest and most influential Communist Party outside RusThe German Communists who
sia-hadalso had its “conciliators.”
disagreed with the Cornintern
line of silent collaboration
with theNazis to overthrow the Weimar Republic were either thrown out ofthe party by order of Moscow, or disciplined into impotence. So, in
China, there can be no hope that those who take the present democratic pretensions of the Communists seriously, can ever swing theParty as a whole.
I flew back to Peking fully conscious of the reasons why so many
liberal, sincere and decent, but politically naive or ignorant Americans
have been fascinated by Yenan. I reflected on my journey out how inthe old medieval legends the Devil knew that to tempt mankind hemust assume a disguise; his success was assured only if he appearedin the guise of a beautiful woman or a fair youth. The totalitarians
who, like Hitler, plainly display their tail and horns, have no chanceof succeeding. It is the totalitariantyranny which, like the Communist, appears in democratic trappings and appeals to the best and mostgenerous instincts of mankind-itis this that can.destroy US. Men
are often led to perdition by their best, not their worst, instincts anddesires.

CHAPTERAre

VII

They Real Commmists?

HE
popularityof the Chinese Communistsin America is no
doubt largely due to the unpopularity of China’s National Government. Yet it is quite illogical to assume that because ChiangKai-shek’s
government is not democratic, its enemies of necessity
must be. The choice before us is not one between black and white.
The real question we have to decide is which side in the civil war
might, conceivably, with American aid, create a strong, independentand democratic China.
Unless the Chinese Communists are in fact a totally different species from all others-unless
it can be proved that they have no political affinity with the Russian, European, American and other “real”
Communist
Parties, are not inspired by the same philosophy and do
not follow Moscow’s dictates-weknow that they neither can nor
will establish a democratic government in China. If they are “real”
Communists we know that the kind of government they would establish in China would be the same type of totalitarian
dictatorship as
the ones which have been clamped down on Poland, Yugoslavia,
Rumania and other countries within the Soviet sphere. On the other
hand we know that however reactionary and corrupt the Chinese
National Government may be, no regime constitutes so great a threat
to liberty and progress as a Communist
regime backed by Soviet
Russia.
The slogans and immediate policies or pretensions of the Communists do not affect the issue. We know well enough from ourexperience at home and in Europe that “democracy” in the Communist lexicon has an entirely different meaning from the usuallyaccepted one. The “democratic”
governments
set up in Eastern
Europe by Moscow’s agents allow neither freedom of speech nor
freedom of the press, nor free elections, nor freedom from arbitrary
170

TAre They Red Communists?

171

arrest, nor respect for minority
rights, nor the right to strike ororganize in trade unions to protect or improve the workers’ standardof living, nor any of the other liberties which our forefathers fought
to win.
We also know that what the admirers of the Soviet Union call economic democracy is not only the opposite of free enterprise, but also
has little in common with democratic socialism.
We are not confronted with a problem of language or historicalbackgroundas writers like Edgar Snow have argued, but with adetiberate effort on the part of the Communists to confuse us by using
words we like for practices we hate.
I am not concerned here to argue with those who consider Russia’s
economic and political system the best in the world, and who represent it as a higher and better form of democracy than our own. Unlessand until they themselves experience the “blessings” of the Soviet
system it is hopeless to argue with them. What seems to me of vital
importance is that the great mass of Americans who have alreadyseen the true face of Communism in Europe and turned away from it,should also cease to be deluded by the democratic masquerade which
the Communists have carried on so successfully in China.
It must be determined, by studying the record, whether or not the
Chinese Communist Party has changed its policy over the last quarterof a century according to Moscow’s orders. Does the history of theChinese Communist Party prove that it has been a loyal and obedientmember of the Communist International ? Are the basic beliefs andphilosophy of the Chinese Communists the same as those of the rulersof Soviet Russia? Does the word democracy mean the same thing tothem as to Stalin, Tito and the Moscow-sponsored
governmentofPoland ?
In order to judge whether or not the Chinese Communists haveconsistently followed the Party line as laid down in Moscow, we must
be clear what that line has been. For there is a popular misconceptionthat a Communist is a man or woman whose primary aim is socialism, and who works always for revolution everywhere to establish it.
This has not been true for at least two decades. The basic thesis onwhich Communist policy has Ion g been based is that, since Soviet
Russia is the only socialist state in the world, Communists the world
over must subordinate themselves, their party, the working class of172

Last Chance in China

their own country and the world’s welfare to the interests of theSoviet Government.
Those who do not agree that Soviet Russia is the hope of the world,those who are convinced that social justice cannot be obtained by violence, the abolition of civil liberties, government without law and thesubordinationof the individual conscience to an all-powerfulstate,
reject the Communist thesis once they come to understand it. But one
must always remember that sincere Communists, however abhorrent
their methods and philosophy may seem to us, believe that a11means
and every means are justified by their aim, which they still conceive
as the emancipation of mankind from capitalist “tyranny,” inequality,
poverty and imperialist war.
Communist aims, having been identified with the interests of theSoviet Government,
may, at different times and in various places,
require the support of Hitler or of Roosevelt, of Peron or ChiangKai-shek, of Henry Wallace or Kemal Ataturk,of Zionism or of
Arab nationalism, of fascism or democracy. The only test is “friendlexicon means subservience toliness,” which in the Communist
Russia or willingness to give her what she wants.
In Finland Moscow allows a “capitalist” economy to function provided the people continue to work desperately hard supplying enormous reparations to Russia. In Rumania a king is allowed to continue on the throne so long as he remains obedient to Moscow. In
Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, Communist or Communist-dominatedgovernments
are required by the Kremlin,
sincethese satellites are required to play an active role in Russia’s interest.
Thus in its international relations the Kremlin’s world aims may
necessitate good will either toward a conservative or a fascist or asocialist government.
The only criterion is the advantage of theSoviet State. Were Stalin to embrace Franc0 for the sake of a Spanish alliance, it would be no more surprisingthan Molotov’s
1939
statement to Ribbentrop that Nazi-Communist
friendship had been
“cemented with blood” in the Russo-German
partition of Poland.
Nor is there much doubt that Stalin would sacrifice the Chinese Communists today, as he did from 1925 to 1927, if only he could induce
Chiang Kai-shek to cut China’s ties with America and become theSoviet Union’s ally. The present National
Government of China
would undoubtedly find itself washed clean in the eyes of Commu-

Are They Red Communists?

I73

nists all over the world, if only it would team up with the USSR.
Put in religious terms, in Communism’s secular religion the sinner
who belongs to the true church is welcome, but the upright and just
man who is an unbeliever can never be forgiven.
Today there should be no difficulty at a11 in recognizing Communists anywhere in the world. People who are always ready to reverse
themselves on any issue according to what is the immediate interestof the Soviet Union are Communists whether or not they go under
their true colors.
It was not always so. In the first years of the existence of theSoviet Government and the Communist
International
the aim wasworld revolution, and the criterion the supposed interests of the “toiling masses” in all countries. The Communists were originally internationalists, and Lenin denounced patriotism and nationalism as incompatible with Communism.
But gradually, after Lenin’s death, theCornintern ceased to pursue the ever receding chimera of world revolution.
It abandoned the concept of the international
community ofinterest of the workers of the world for a Russian nationalist policy,
or rather for one whose primary aim is the maintenance in power ofStalin and his party. Thereafter any Communist who questioned thecorrectness of the Moscow-dictatedpolicy of the Comintern was liquidated or excluded from the Communist Party in every country. The
Communist Parties everywhere became mere adjuncts of the Soviet
Foreign Office.
The history of the Chinese Communist Party is of particular interest since the turning point in Comintern history was its failure in
China in 1927.
Following
the destruction in China of the last hope of spreading
Communism by revolutionary
upheavals in other lands, Russia turnedin on herself. Stalin’s slogan of “socialism in one country” came intime to signify that Communists in all countries should work only topreserve the Soviet Union and extend its power. Once this thesis was
accepted it followed as night the day that Communists should become
the greatest opportunists the world knows, with no fixed principles
other than the advantage of the Soviet Union.
Today the Kremlin aims at world conquest, not primarily throughCommunist revolutions, but by the military strength of Russia aided
by her satellites. The role of the foreign Communists in countries not

174

Last Chance in China

yet subject to Soviet Russia is that of quislings or Fifth Columnists
boring from within to weaken Russia’s opponents before the battle isjoined.
Socialism in one country naturally became National Socialism andthe Soviet Union has even to some extent adopted racial concepts.
The people of Germany whom Lenin viewed as political allies, once
they should have been emancipated by the destruction of their government, have been treated by Stalin as collectively guilty for the sins of
their rulers and punished accordingly by murder, rape, pillage andenslavement. Even within the Soviet Union, minorities such as theVolga Germans and the Tartars of the Crimea have been collectively
punished by banishment to Siberia or condemnation to forced labor.
Nothing
more clearly reveals the complete abandonment by the
Bolsheviks of their original ideals than the contrast between Lenin’s
and Stalin’s attitude toward Germany and the other defeated nations.
Lenin said that he would risk all the gains of the Russian Revolution
for the sake even of the hope of revolution in Germany. Reparations
from the vanquished are the chief aim of Stalin’s policy. Far frombelieving in the “Unityof the Workers of the World” which Lenin
proclaimed, Stalin keeps millions of German prisoners of war working
as slave laborers in Russia, and demands that the whole German people should toil for the profit of the Russian state. Whereas Lenin
worked for the emancipation of a11 colonial peoples, Stalin refuses tothe Koreans the independence which the United States wishes to givethem, demands imperialist privileges in China, and, if not prevented
by the United States, would force the Japanese as well as the Germans
to spend their lives producing reparations for the enrichment of theSoviet Union.
Unfortunately
the metamorphosis of Communism, and the Comintern’s abandonment, not only of its original aims, but of the honesty
with which it once proclaimed its purposes, has deluded many simple
people whose Christian or liberal upbringing
and environment have
unfitted them to understand the depths of perfidy and deceit to which
men can descend, in what they believe to be a good cause, once they
accept the thesis that the end justifies the means.
The disguise assumed by all the Communist Parties of the world
since 1935 has already worn so thin in Europe that most Americans
are no longer deceived by it. But camouflage is naturally more suc-

Are They Red Communists?

175

cessful at a distance and the Communist democratic masquerade has
therefore been most successful in China.
The explanation
lies not only in Xrnerica’s disgusted reaction
against the National Government of China. The Chinese Communist Party, although it is a spearhead of the expanding Russian Empire, also leads a peasant revolutionary
movement endemic in Chinese
history. The Chinese Communist Party retains more of the original
spirit of Communism than other Communist Parties. It includes ahigh proportion of men and women who, in the words of a Belgian
Catholic priest I met in Tientsin, “are really Communists in the sim.
plicity of their lives and their personal disinterestedness in riches.”
It is indeed China’s tragedy that what should have been a native
revolutionaryor reformist movement-a
cleansing fire to destroy allthat is corrupt, decayed and rotten in Chinese society-has
degenerated into a tool manipulated by a foreign Power. What might havebeen a progressive force invigorating
the Kuomintang and pushing it
forward became instead a brake on China’s development, a Fifth Column preventing unity and helping to keep her backward, miserable
and in constant disorder.
In General Marshall’s words, the Chinese Communists “do not hesitate at the most drastic measures to gain their end as, for instance,
the destruction of communications
in order to wreck the economy ofChina and produce a situation that would facilitate the overthrow orcollapse of the government, without any regard to the immediate suffering of the people involved.”
The Chinese Communists not only contribute positively to preThe fact that they have been able to represent
venting reconstruction.
themselves as the champions of agrarian and administrativereformweakens the real liberal forces in China. The reactionaries are able toidentify reform with Communism
and treason, and the real liberals
are rendered impotent.
To understand the present situation as well as in order to judge
whether or not the Chinese Communists are real Communists who
have followed every turn and twist in the party line laid down in
Moscow, one must study the history of the past twenty-five years in
China. Unfortunately,
few American writers on international affairs
ever trouble to do so.

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Last Chance in China

Even eminent statesmen, such as Sumner Welles, have written that
the Chinese Communist Party “commenced its independent politicallife when the Kuomintang
party, as it had been created by Sun Yatsen, split in 1927 into two parts.” The fact is that the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921, along with others all over theworld, as a branch of the Cornintern and was not allowed by Sun
Yat-scn to afiliatc with the Kztomintang.
Dr. Sun permitted Communists to join the Kuomintang
only as individuals, and only if theypledged themselves to be loyal to its aims.
It should be remembered that Sun Yat-sen did not accept Russia’s
aid in the emancipation of China until after he had despaired of help
from the West. The liberal concepts of the West were not applied intheir relations with Asiatic peoples. The European Powers and America showed themselves unwilling to free China from the shackles they
had placed on her sovereignty and they treated the Chinese as an inferior race. It seemed therefore to Sun. Yat-sen that military force
alone could enable the Chinese to escape the ugly reality of Western
privilege and power, and the only powerful ally available was theSoviet Government, which had voluntarily
renounced all imperialist
privileges in China.
In accepting Russian aid Sun Yat-sen nevertheless rejected Communism and continued to be influenced by the liberal philosophy of theWestern Powers even while fighting against them for China’s liberation. As one of the best of his Marxist critics has written : “He hoped
to evolve means of transforming
Chinese society peacefully and without convulsions after securing power for himself and his followers by
purely military means. Tltere was nothing in common between Sun
Yat-sen’s concept of democracy ajzd the idea of the direct conquest ofpolitical rights and liberties by the people.“*In the joint statement issued by Sun Yat-sen and Russia’s emissary
fi. Joffe, in January 1923, Communism was specifically rejected for
China. The alliance between the Kuomintang
and Russia was clearlystated to be one only for the achievement of national unification andindependence.
Sun Yat-sen was under the illusion shared by many Americans* Harold Isaacs in The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution.
This is the best, indeed
the only detailed historical account of the Communist-Kuomintang
partnership andbreak in the twenties. Isaacs was a Trotskyist when he wrote his book, but it is sowell and thoroughly documented that no student of Far Eastern history can dispensewith it.

Are They Red Communists?

177

twenty years later: that you can ally yourselves militarily with Russia
without danger of Communism seeking to destroy you from within.
Like the United States in the Second World War he ignored the oldadage that when you sup with the devil you need a very long spoon.
By the alliance with Russia the Kuomintang
received not only thehelp of Russian military and political advisers, but also the powerfulsupport of the Chinese Communists and the unions of workers andpeasants they had begun to organize. Hitherto a small party of intellectuals and patriotic military men, the Kuomintang now squired thebacking of a great mass movement of “common men” who believed
they would both free China as a nation and emancipate themselvesfrom servitude to landlord usurers and foreign exploiters. The almost
bloodless victories which the Kuomintang
under Chiang Kai-shek
won from 1925 to 1927 would have been impossible without the support of the millions of Chinese peasants, workers and coolies, in faceof whose mass pressure the armies of the war lords melted away, andeven the Western Imperialists trembled,
There was Kuomintang-Communist
unity as regards the primary
aim of freeing China from the domination of the Western Powers.
There was unity against the war lords who then ruled most of China.
But there could be no unity as regards what should be done when face
to face with the power of the West, or following success in uniting
and freeing China.
Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People although egalitarian
were not Marxist and he had abjured class war. The Kuomintang
Party included capitalist and landowning elements as well as liberal
intellectuals and other radical elements.
The split was inevitable. It came as soon as the triumphant armiesof the Kuomintang-Communist
Coalition, sweeping up from Canton,reached Shanghai, the citadel of Western financial and political influences in China, and also of Chinese banking and merchant interests
linked up with the Western “exploiters.”
The Right Wing of theKuomintang,
led by Chiang Kai-shek, hoped to avoid a head-on clash
with Britain, the United States and France and to obtain treaty revisions by negotiation.
The Communists wanted to chase the foreigners out of China by violence and feared that Chiang might compromise with the Imperialists, as he did, and “stabilize the revolution ona bourgeois basis.”
Realizing that the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists

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Last Chance in China

wanted war, the British Government, followed by the United States,
cut the ground from under the feet of the extremists by offering treaty
revision and recognition to the Kuomintang
moderates, or, if one prefers, to the Western-oriented
elements in the Chinese Nationalist
movement.
Before the arrival of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang Army, the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce had offered to admit
Chinese to participationin the administrationof the International
Settlement.
The British had agreed to give up their concession in
Hankow. A promise of tariff autonomy had been made. On its arrivalin Shanghai, the alliance with Russia was broken by the Kuomintang
in favor of compromise with the West and gradual negotiated annulment of the unequal treaties.
If it is impossible to say how far Chiang Kai-shek, and the majority of the Kuomintang
which followed him, were influenced by fear of
Britain and America and hopes of Western support, and to what
extent by fear of a /uperie
and anarchy, it is equally difficult to estimate whether external or internal causes were mainly responsible for
Moscow’s contradictory
policies.
What Trotskyists
call with some justice the betrayal of the Chinese
Revolution
by MOSCOW was almost certainly due partly to fear of
British and French retaliation in Europe to the Chinese NationalistCommunist assault on their Asiatic position.
But the available evidence suggests that the Comintern’s blunders in China were mainly
the result of the internal Stalin-Trotsky
struggle to which the Chinese
Communists were sacrificed.
Battles fought long ago and ancient controversies have little interestfor the present-day reader unless they can throw light on modern
problems. It would be wearisome to recount in detail the involved
and tragic story of Kuomintang-Communist
collaboration in,the middie twenties. It is however important today to remember that for abrief period the Soviet Government ordered the Chinese Communists
to submit themselves entirely to the Kuomintang,in the hope that thelatter under Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership would expel the British,
Americans, French and other Westerners from China for all time.
Bolshevik
Russia by 1923 had abandoned hope of revolutioninEurope in general and in Germany in particular, but still retained thehope of weakening the “capitalist imperialism”
of the West by anAre Thy

Real Communists?

=79

attack on its flanks: colonial and semicolonial Asia. Hence the aid
given to Nationalist“bourgeois” China, and the orders given by theComintern to the Chinese Communists to submit themselves entirely
to the Kuomintang.
Those were the days when Shao Li-tze (who was to become a Chinese Joe Davis following his appointment as ambassador to Moscow
from 1939 to 1942)
was received with enthusiasm in Russia, andcould shout “Long live the Comintern and the World Revolution !”in Moscow where he came as a “fraternal delegate.” Stalin at thattime said publicly that the “bourgeois” character of the Kuomintang
was unimportant.
The only thin, v that mattered was that its forceswere directed against “world imperialism.”
But in the same period
he made it clear that this community of interest between Nationalist
China and Soviet Russia would be short-lived, that it was purely atemporary expedient and that the Nationalists
were doomed to extermination
when they had ceased to be useful to the Comintern.
No one should have been surprised that Chiang Kai-shek turned
against the Communists in view of Stalin’s speeches, as for instancethat of April 5, 1927, delivered to the Communist Academy in Moscow in which he said :Chiang Kai-shek is submitting to discipline. . . .
The peasant needs an old worn-out jade as long as she is necessary.
He does not drive her away. So it is with us. When the Right is of
no more use to us, we will drive it away. At present we need the Right.
It has capable people, who still direct the army and lead it against imperialists.
Besides this, the people of the Right have relations withthe generals of Chang Tso-lin and understand very well how to demoralize them and to induce them to pass over to the side of the revolution, bag and baggage without striking a blow. Also, they haveconnections with the rich merchants and can raise money from them.
So they have to be utilized to the end, squeezed out like a lemon, andthen flung away.*
Chiang Kai-shek, apart from all his other claims to fame, can go
down in history as the one man who ever bested Stalin. He became
the squeezer instead of the lemon. Stalin’s scheme to use the Chinese
Nationalists
against Britain, America and France while at the sametime preparing to deny them the fruits of victory by a subsequent*Quotedby Harold Isaacs in The Tragedy of the Ckinese Revolrrtiorr, page 185.

180

Last Chance in China

backfired. He had hoped to use Chiang“proletarian
revolution,”Kai-shek and then discard him. Instead, Chiang used the mass movement of peasants and workers organized for him by the Communists
to sweep victoriously
from Canton to Shanghai.
Once in sight ofsupreme power, he turned round and destroyed his allies. Having
utilized the mass movement led by the Communists to frighten theWestern Powers sufficiently to force them to come to terms, hechecked its revolutionary
momentum.
In view of Stalin’s announced intention of destroying him when
he had served Russia’s purpose, it is absurd to accuse Chiang Kaishek of having “betrayed” the Chinese Revolution.
The betraying
was done by Moscow which wanted both to eat its cake and have it.
The Chinese Communists were sacrificed to Russia’s self-defeating
policy of trying to be the ally of the Chinese Nationalists,
led bywhile at the same time directing
a CommuChiang Kai-shek,
nist revolutionary
movement against him. The Communists,ofcourse, have a word for this kind of double-dealing.
Whenever in
Moscow I pointed out contradictions and inconsistencies in Comintern policy, I was adjured to think “dialectically.”
The price for Moscow’s inept attempt to double-cross Chiang Kaishek was paid by the workers, the peasants and the sincerest, mostidealistic Communists in China. When Chiang Kai-shek, at the gatesof Shanghai, ordered the Communists and their working-class supporters within the city to surrender their arms, the Comintern representatives told them to bury them. Having been forbidden either tosurrender or to fight, they were massacred in thousands, first in
Shanghai, then in Wuhan, and subsequently in Canton. The tradeunions were smashed for a generation, to the acclaim of the foreigners
who were ready to compromise with the rising force of Chinese
nationalism,
if only Chiang Kai-shek would stamp out the Communist-inspired revolt of the working classes.
Chiang Kai-shek, in those days, had not developed the qualities ofstatesmanship and restraint which in his later years have led him totry to conciliate his enemies instead of exterminatingthem. The
whole history of China in our era might have been different if, in
1927, he had been less brutal and had not alienated many true liberals
as well as the Communists. But he may have had no choice. One has
to remember that the young Nationalist Movement was menaced bypowerful foreign foes who could, and would, have drowned the Kuo-

Are They Red Commdsts?

181

mintang Revolution in blood and fire, in the same manner as they had
crushed the Taipings and the Boxers, if Chiang had not compromised
with them. And he could not compromise unless he destroyed theCommunists and their influence over a section of the Kuomintang.
Whether or not the foreign imperialists could have been driven out
if the Kuomintang-Communist
alliance had continued, is a mootpoint. Certainly Russia, in those days, had insufficient industrial andmilitary strength to save China if she had become involved in a war
with Britain and America.
The fundamental issue was whether China was to take the MOSCOW
road of autarchic economic development under a dictatorship which
would transform her into a replica of Soviet Russia, with peasants,
workers and everyone else sacrificed to the need of capital accumulation, industrial development and military strength; or whether she
would seek friendship and credits and technical aid from WesternPowers convinced that she could not, and should not, any longer betreated as a colony.
Chiang Kai-shek chose the latter course. Had it not been for Japan,
he might have been able to fulfill the aims and pledges of the Kuomintang by lifting China out of poverty and disunity with Western aid
and gradual reforms carried through without violence and expropriation.
Chiang Kai-shek may have been wrong in thinking that the Imperialist Powers were too strong to be defeated in 1927. He may havebeen too strongly influenced by fear that the Communists would unleash a civil war which would deliver China to Russian hegemony.
But to say with Teddy White and Annalee Jacoby that “the allianceof Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists . . . had broken over thebasic question of the peasant and his land*‘* is to ignore the international situation at the time. Had the Kuomintang
stood for agrarian revolution, there would have been a civil war which would havelaid China wide open to further foreign encroachment. The Nationalist Revolution would almost certainly have been crushed by the GreatPowers andall hopes of Chinese unity and independence destroyed.
For a few months in 1927 Left Wingers in the Kuomintang and theChinese Communists maintained their own government in the Wuhan
cities (Hankow,
Wuchang and Hanyang)
under the presidency of* Thunder Out of China, page sq..+.

x82

Last Chance in China

Wang Ching-wei(who twelve years later was to become Japan’s
puppet in Nanking).
This government controlled the provinces of
Hupeh and Hunan where peasant revolts against the landowners
broke out which the Communists, under Moscow’s orders, refused
either to lead or suppress. Similarly the Communists restrained the
Wuhan trade unions, then a powerful revolutionary
force. Moscow
at that time hoped that the Wuhan Government could make an alliance with the “Christian
General” Feng, the most powerful of thenorthern war lords. Hence the orders given by the Comintern forbidding the alienation of landowners and capitalists.
The Cornintern had not even now learned its lesson; it still hoped
to get the best of both worlds by bein g and not being the leader of asocial revolution in China. Again it fell between two stools: Feng
went over to Chiang and barred the way to Peking.
In July 1927 the Wuhan Government capitulated to the government established by Chiang Kai-shek at Nanking.
Borodin fled backto Russia across the Mongolian desert, and a reign of terror blotted
out the peasant rebellions together with the majority of the Communists. Henceforth the “Nanking Government” was recognized by thePowers as the National Government of China, and the Communists
became an isolated dissident group without a mass movement behindthem.
Now when all was lost, when the ranks of the Chinese Communists
had been decimated and they had lost the confidence both of the workers and the peasants, Moscow reversed its policy and called on themto start all-out civil war against the Kuomintang.
To confuse themfurther the Chinese Communists were at first instructed to continue
membership inside the Kuomintang, by now intent on exterminatingthem. Moscow demanded that they sacrifice their lives to no otherpurpose than the maintenance of Stalin’s reputation as a true Bolshevik revolutionary.
Chen Tu-hsiu, the founder and leader of the Chinese Communist
Party, resigned the chairmanship, saying that he saw no way out ina situation in which “the International wishes us to carry out our own
policy on the one hand and does not allow us to withdraw from theKuomintang
on the other.” Two years later he was expelled fromthe Communist Party when he broke a long silence by appealing for a
Chinese united front against Japan, just beginning her encroachments
in Manchuria.

Are They Real Communists?

183

Tn 1938, when I was in Hankow, Chen Tu-hsiu was dying in poverty in a remote village, and the Chinese Communists were demanding that he be executed by Chiang Kai-shek
Chen Tu-hsiu was replaced as leader of the Chinese Communist
Party by Li Li-san who was more Trotskyist than Trotsky and envisaged the Russian Army marching in from Mongolia to support theUnder his leadership and that ofresurgent Chinese Revolution.
Stalin’s two favorites, the German Heinz Neumann and the Georgian
Besso Lominadze, a futile insurrection was staged in Canton in December 1927. It had no prospect at all of success since the Communists had lost their trade-union support and become a small isolated
minority.
But the Chinese were by now no more than cannon fodderin the battle between Stalin and Trotsky.
The Canton insurrection
was drowned in blood after three days. But Heinz Neumann was able
to send a telegram to the Russian Communist Party Congress in Moscow, announcing a “glorious revolutionary
uprising” of the Chinese
proletariat at the moment when Stalin needed ammunition against the
opposition who blamed him for the fiasco of the Chinese Revolution.
Trotsky and his followers were sent into exile as the Chinese Communists died to help Stalin.
No one who studies the history of the Russian Communist Party
and the Comintern can doubt that the Chinese Communists were sacrificed all along to the exigencies of Stalin’s fight for supremacy inRussia. Nor is it ever possible to understand the Comintern’s swings
from Left to Right and back again without reference to Soviet Russia’s internal situation as well as Stalin’s foreign policy.
Prior to 1928, in trying both to collaborate with Chiang Kai-shek
and prepare to overthrow him, Stalin was endeavoring to gain the
support of the right wing of the Bolshevik Party while not alienating
all those who were inclined to follow Trotsky.
Trotsky had been
against the policy of collaboration with the Chinese Nationalists andhad wanted Russia and the Comintern to go all out for a Communist
revolution in China. Bucharin and the right wing of the party were
for the policy of collaboration
with Chiang Kai-shek.
Stalin, intent
on establishing his personal supremacy, rode in both directions.
By 1928, having got rid of Trotsky, he turned on his opponents of
the Right. This necessitated a sharp turn to the Left, which at homemeant the agrarian policy of forced collectivization
and Five-Year
Plans, and for the Comintern a distorted version of Trotsky’s revolu-

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Last Chance in China

tionary policies. In France, Germany and England, the Communist
Parties were ordered to cease collaborating with Social Democrats or
the Labor Party; in China they were told to fight the Kuomintang.
Li Li-san lasted until 1931 when he in his turn was made the scapegoat for the Cornintern’s failures.
It was not only the Chinese Communist Party which suffered disaster as a result of Stalin’s personal ambitions.
The Chinese nation
lost heavily in the Kuomintang-Communist
split. The youth who
died, or lost heart, or became timeservers or cynics or nonpoliticals
in the days of wrath and vengeance, torture and death, were the flowerof the nation. Never again would there be such high hopes, such selfsacrifice and patriotic fervor as had been displayed in the brief period
when men of all parties and classes had joined to raise China from theabject state into which she had fallen in the nineteenth century.
Twenty years after, in Shanghai in 1946, my friend Aying Yung,daughter of a famous scholar and herself renowned for her learning,talked to me of those days of China’s awakening with profound sadness. She knew as well as I did the harm the Communists are now
doing to China. But she mourned for the fine men and women she
had known in her youth who had been masascred in those terrible
months of 1927.
To understand the strength of the Comintern in China, one must
recognize the power of attraction of its anti-imperialist
professions
and its pretensions to seek the welfare of the poor and oppressed. Even
today the ideals and slogans which created so mighty a popular movement in China in the twenties still attract the youth of the nation.
They know little or nothing of the realities of Stalin’s Russia and are
bitterly disillusioned by the self-seeking Kuomintang
officials and theseemingly hopeless inefficiency or stupidity of the National Government. Having myself seen the inept diplomacy and lack of patriotismof many of the wealthy or well-connected Chinese appointed to represent her abroad, having also seen the incapacity of many government
officials in China, I cannot but sympathize with the impatience of theChinese youth who turn Communist. Disastrous as I know this reaction must be to all the hopes which now and in the past inspired thebest of the Chinese intellectuals, I can understand why, once again,
some of them listen to the siren voices bidding them take the Moscow
road.

CHAPTERVIII

Skzess of the Democratic

Masperade

OLLOWING
the 1927 debacle, the remnants of the Chinese Communist Party, and of the few soldiers in the Kuomintang
Army
who followed them, established themselves in the south of
Kiangsi province and in eastern Honan where they were joined byrevolting peasants. In time these mixed forces, held together by Communist discipline and ideology, became the “Red Army.”
From thepoint of view of the peasants into whose villages they came, the “Redpartisans” were little distinguishable
from the bandits who from time
immemorial
have troubled China. The poor tenant farmers might atfirst welcome them when they killed off the landowners and redistributed the land, but the Red Army had to be fed by the peasants and thisnaturally made it unpopular.
The borderline between “rich” and “poor” is too close in China for
the Communist armies to be able to remain popular by burdening only
the “rich.”
The real problem in China is always the scarcity of land,
and general poverty, and cannot be solved by shooting the few comparatively
rich landowners and kulaks. Controllingno cities, theCommunists
could give the peasants nothing in return for the foodthey had to take from them. Thus the Red Army remained as greata burden on the people as any other army.
After years of fighting against the National Government, during
which they retreated from one district to another, the Communists
were finally driven out of Central China in 1934, The ensuing “Long
March” of the remnants of the Red Army to the Northwest is better
known to American
readers than the Chinese Communist
Party’s
earlier or later history, thanks to the graphic description in Edgar
Snow’s Red Star over China.
After their arrival in what was to become the Shensi-Kansu-Ningsia Border Region, the policy of executing or driving out all land-

F

18.5

186

Last Chance in China

owners, gentry and missionaries was abandoned for a reformist policy.
In these remote, unfertile and thinly populated regions there were inany case few people who could be called rich even according to Communist standards. Mao Tse-tung, who had become the leader of theparty following Li Li-San’s disgrace in 193 I, seems never to havefavored the indiscriminate massacres which alienated the peasantry as
a whole. And the Chinese Communist Party’s geographical isolationfrom Moscow, and its possession of a territorial
base and army of its
own, rendered it a little less subservient to Stalin than the Communist
Parties of Europe and America. Nevertheless the switch over to apolicy which conciliated the peasants did not occur until the volte-faceof the Cornintern which followed Hitler’s acquisition of power in Gcrmany.
Events in China cannot be understood without reference to Europe,since the switches in the Communist Party line during the last twenty
years were determined in the main by Moscow’s European policy.
From 1928 onward the Cornintern “line” had been ultra-Left. The
Social Democrats in Europe had been denounced as “social fascists,”
as the main support of capitalism and imperialism and as more dangerous enemies of the working class than either fascists or Nazis orconservatives. In England in 1929 and 1930, when I was a memberof the British Communist Party, we were instructed to “explain” tothe workers that democracy was nothing but the disguised dictatorship of the capitalist class, kept in power by the “social fascist” Labor
Party.
I can still remember the pitying glances of a crowd of unemployedoutside a North London Labor Exchange when I told them this fromthe top of a soapbox. They evidently thought I was touched in thehead, and walked away.
In England the Communists merely lost what little influence they
had by this line of talk. In Germany, with its huge and influential
Communist
Party, the results were tragic. Here it was the official
Cornintern policy to tell the workers that if Hitler came to power it
would be the turn of the Communists next. Their task was therefore
primarily
the overthrow of German democracy, and to accomplish it
the Communists did not scruple to collaborate with the Nazis on morethan one occasion.
Stalin was convinced that if Hitler came to power he would direct.

Success of the Democratic

Masquerade187

his hostility against France, then regarded as Soviet Russia’s main
enemy. Since the German Social Democrats wanted a reconciliation
with France Stalin desired to destroy them at all costs. Hence his
cynical but miscalculated refusal to allow the German Communists tojoin hands with the Social Democrats to save Germany and the worldfrom Hitler.
The German Communists and the whole German people were to pay the price of Stalin’s and the Cornintern’s stupidities inthis phase, as the Chinese had paid in the previous period.
Had the French Communist Party been as strong as the German it
too might have brought fascism to power. As late as February 1934
the French Communists called for demonstrations against democracy
at the same hour and place as the Action Franqaise and, together withthe fascists, forced the resignation of the government.
Moscow came to its senses just in time to reverse the Cornintern
line in France and call for unity with the socialists and radicals instead of continuing the fight against them.
For months after Hitler came to power the Soviet Government had*gone on hoping for an understanding
with Nazi Germany against
France and England.
I remember Jack Chen (son of the Eugene
Chen who had been the Kuomintang’s
Foreign Minister in 1926 and
1927) complaining to me in Moscow, where he earned a living as an
artist, that the publication of anti-Nazi cartoons in the Russian press
was forbidden.
Only after Hitler had made it abundantly clear that he was intent,
not only on destroying the German Communist and socialist parties,
but also on an anti-Soviet policy, did Russia join the League of Nations, make an alliance with France, and order the Comintern
toabandon its antidemocraticline and make a sharp turn to the Right.
The Seventh Congress of the Cornintern in 1935 finally announced
the new line called for by Russia’s precarious internationalsituation.
The hitherto hated and reviled socialist, labor and liberal forces in
Europe and America were now to be sought as allies. Dimitrov,
appointed secretary of the Comintem
following the Reichstag fire trial,
told the delegates they must henceforth seek to establish alliances withall anti-Nazi forces. The Communists were not to give up their ultimate aims. But they were to don sheep’s clothing for the duration of
the German-Japanese menace to the Soviet fatherland, or until suchtime as opportunity
offered to seize power in their own countries.

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Last Chance in China

They were reminded by Dimitrov of the legend of the Trojan Horseand instructed to make their way within the wall of the capitalist citadel by means of the same tactics. They were ordered to get into key
positions within the democratic governments
by pretending to beliberal democrats, in preparation for the days of economic crisis tocome when they would throw aside their disguise and seize the state
power.
Of all the many changes in the Cornintern line none proved more
successful than the one inaugurated in 1935. Lenin’s honesty in admitting that the Communists
stood for dictatorship,and despised
democracy, had got the Cornintern nowhere. But since Communists,
everywhere in the world, have taken possession of the magic word
democracy and equated it with Communist dictatorshipthey havegone from strength to strength. Although in England and America
they were unable to get into key positions in the government, they
have been able by posing as democrats and liberals to exert enormous
influence over the press and radio. In the United States their influence over the government was obviously considerable in the Roosevelt era.
In China the change in the Comintern line brought about by theGerman-Japanese menace to Russia called for a cessation of the civil
war and an anti-Japanese united front. Mao Tse-tung, hitherto notregarded too favorably by Moscow, was appointed a member of theCornintern’s Executive Committee in 1935. That same year the Chinese Communists began to represent themselves as liberal reformers
as well as modifying their agrarian policy.
The change in the Cornintern line from ultra-Left to Right was mosteasily effected in China, where the Communists had long since losttheir working-class
support and been transformed by the logic of history into a party whose only hope was leadership of a movement forpeasant emancipation.
In fact the Chinese Communists had become
little more than the dissident rulers of sections of three remote provinces near the Russian border. Had it not been for the Japanese
threat, to Russia as well as to China, they would have remained an
insignificant
and powerless minority.
1935 the Chinese Communist Party announced that it
In Augustwould no longer liquidate any but “parasitic” landowners; that merchants, artisans, and even priests would not have their lands confis-

Success of the Democratic

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cated; that rich farmers would be allowed to keep a portion of theirholdings; that “commercial and industrial development by individual
capital” would be encouraged; that “excessive demands on the partof workmen and hired peasants that cannot be fulfilled or that increase
would be stopped ; and finally thatbankruptcy and unemployment”
non-Communist
political parties and organizations
would be given“democratic
rights and freedom” provided they “struggled
againstimperialism” or participated in the “racial revolutionary
movement.”
Following
the conclusion of the German-Japanese “Anti-Comintern” alliance in 1936 the Chinese Communists redoubled their efforts to induce the National Government to call off the civil war. They
offered more and more concessions, denied that they wanted a social
revolution,
recognized Chiang Kai-shek as the only man to lead thenation in repulsing Japan, and offered to subordinate themselves andtheir armies to the National Government.
The Communists were back where they had been a decade earlier.
Once again they wanted to collaborate with the Kuomintang
while
preparing to destroy it after victory over the common enemies ofChina and Russia.
The imprisonment of Chiang Kai-shek at Sian in December 1936
was the dramatic incident which marked the temporary cessation ofa decade of Kuomintang-Communist
civil war. Junior officers of theManchurian
forces exiled from their homeland by Japan and sent by
Chiang Kai-shek to fight the Communists under the “Young Marshal” Chang Hsueh-liang had instead fraternized with the Red Army.
Upon the Generalissimo’s
arrival in Sian to quell the mutiny they
took him prisoner, threatened him with death and endeavored to force
him to promise to stop the civil war and fight Japan. The Communists, realizing that only under Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership could
China hope to resist Japan, exerted their influence to have the Generalissimo released. Chiang promised nothing and showed his readiness to die rather than submit for fear of death. But the incident
apparently convinced him of the sincerity of the Communist offer ofcollaboration
against Japan. At the February 1936 meetings of theKuomintang
resistance to Japanese aggression took the place of theold slogan of “unification
first” as the program of the government.
The Communist’s proposals laid before the Executive Committeeof the Kuomintang
at this time, and accepted, were as follows :190

Last Chance in ChinaI.

The Chinese Soviet Government shall henceforth be known as theGovernment of the Special Area of the Republic of China, whichshall be under the control of the National Government and of the
National Military
Council.
2.
In the territory of the Government of the Special Xrea a democratic system of Government shall obtain.
3. All activities designed to overthrow the National Government
shall cease throughout the country.
4. The policy of land confiscation shall be discontinued.
In the late spring of 1937 the Red Army assumed the Kuomintang
uniform and, under the name of the Eighth Route Army, became
nominally at least part of the National Army.
From that time until
the United Front was broken in 1940 the Communist forces received
pay from the Central Government.
As late as 1946 when I visited
Yenan the soldiers still wore the Kuomintang
insignia on their caps.
However, the Communists never intended to honor their agreementwith the National Government.
In a series of lectures for party workers entitled Present Strategy ajrd Tactics of the Chinese Communist
Party, printed in Yenan in 1937 and marked “very confidential,” it
was clearly stated that the agreement was only a maneuver and that
Communist
aims had not changed. The following
passages fromof the original are given from the translation made bypages 49-51
Dr. H. T. Chu.
To establish a democratic Republic is the present strategy of theCommunist Party and its tactic is to cease civil wars and cooperatewith the Kuomintang.
. . . Many of the Communist Party members
seeing the abandonment of agrarian revolution, class struggle, and theChinese Soviet, and the change of the Red Army’s insignia began to
doubt the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party. These attitudes
are erroneous for the present circumstances require a temporary compromise with the Kuomintang.
Such a compromise is not capitulation; nor is it to sell the proletariat down the river. . . . Only by cooperation with the Kuomintang
can we resist Japanese aggression. . . _In the minds of the Communist members there should be no doubt as
to the wisdom of this policy which has the following bases :I. It is politic to give up a dead-end policy for a passable roadwhich will enable us to reach proletarian dictatorship.
3. The present tactic adopted by our Communist Party is really arevolutionary
one. It is to be the weapon for destroying the power ofSuccess of tIte Democratic

Masquerade=9=

the capitalists and for consolidating
and strengthening
the revolutionary forces.
4. Our present tactics are for the very purpose of protectifzg the
growth of our secret programs, and of co-ordinating
the secret withthe open work in order to win the support of the masses for the future
overthrow of capitalism.
5. Our present retreat is to provide a period of recuperation for theproletariat
so that we can prepare for their future tasks with morevigor.
6. To give up the policy of direct attack temporarily for retreatingtactics is really adopting deviating tactics of attack.
8. To change the name of the Red Army to the National Army is
not reorganization
but merely a change of insignia. Actually the independent status of the Red Army will not only be maintained but also
its strength will be consolidated and increased.
For the present the organizationof the Communist Party shouldstill be kept secret while the members of the party should openly participate in all patriotic organizations,forming a nucleus in them. It is
importantto assign certain Communist Party members to work as
representatives of the party, but they should be under the direction of
the secret organs of the Communist Party in that place.
The same booklet (pages 63-66) analyzes the lessons of the Russian Revolution for the benefit of the doubting Thomases in the Communist Party who objected to the temporary cessation of civil war.
They are told how after 1907 the Bolsheviks entered the Duma inorder to bore from within and finally overthrow the Czarist government, and that similarly “our present compromise is for the purposeof winning a legal status for the Communist Party. . . to weaken the
Kuomintang
and to overthrow the National Government . . . by utilizing the name of a Democratic Republic. . . . All these {compromises]
are aiming at the goal of proletarian revolution. . . . The success of
the Democratic Republic will mark the beginning of the second proletarian revolution and the realization of proletarian dictatorship.”These lectures on Communist
strategy and tactics contain otherfrank admissions (as valuable today as when they were first written)
that the Communists demand democracy in China only in order toestablish their own dictatorship :For our benefit in the near future as well as for the realization of
the socialist society, it is necessary to have political freedom. . . .
Under the present circumstances, in order to establish the Chinese

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Last Chance in China

Soviet it is necessary first to create a capitalist Democratic Republicwhich will be the foundation of, and key to, proletarian dictatorship.
. . . Under such conditions the Chinese Communist Party can send
its delegates to the National Assembly and carry out its program inand out of the Assembly. Thus the Chinese Communist Party can be
sure of success. One of the factors of success is the loose organization of the Kuomintang. . . . The Chinese Communist Party can eventually destroy the Kuomintang.
It is only by supporting the creation of a Democratic Republic that
the Chinese Communist Party can . . . sharpen the conflict of classinterests and quickly bring about a Soviet regime in China.
Although so many innocents abroad have concluded that the Chinese Communists are not “real” Communists, you can find no Communist Party anywhere in the world which has better understood andapplied the Trojan Horse tactics laid down by Dimitrov
at the lastCongress of the Comintern.
Nor can you find any party which has
more faithfully carried out Moscow’s orders. Yet, in face of all theevidence, even the authors of the Book-of-the-Month
Club’s choice,Thufzder Out of Chijza, assert that by 1935 the ties between the Chinese Communists and Moscow had become “nominal.”
Having worked in Moscow up to the summer of 1936 in the Pacific
Ocean Cabinet of the Institute of World Economy and Politics, I
know that the Chinese Communists never ceased to be under Moscow’s orders. It was our task, in conjuuction with the Comintern, tostudy the economic and political situation in the Far Eastern countries and lay the theoretical foundations for policy decisions. Of course
these decisions were not really made with reference to the objective
situation in China, Japan or elsewhere. Emphasis would be laid on
Japan’s wickedness, or the Kuomintang’s,
or on the “revolutionary
situation”
engendered by the misgovernmentof their colonies by
Britain, France or Holland, according to the degree of hostility orfriendliness displayed toward Soviet Russia by the various governments concerned. There was never any question but that the Communist Parties would do what they were told.
The Kremlin was in a better position to help its friends and discomfit its enemies in the Far East than anywhere else, thanks to the Institute of Pacific Relations. The Institute where I worked was a branchof the Communist Academy (now the Academy of Sciences) and wasSuccess of the Democratic

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193

also the Russian branch of the I.P.R.
It was we who received its
American delegates when they came to Moscow for help and advice.
To hear these Americans submit themselves to our dictates on theory
and policy was amusing, if sad. In the spring of 1936 one of them,
Owen Lattimore,
attempted to argue with the theoreticians of ourInstitute on questions concerned with Mongolia but he was overborneby the prestige of these high priests of Communism.
Mr. E. C. Carter, the Chairman of the I.P.R., did not seem to be troubled by theoretical questions but made a friendly speech in the evening to the“party actives,” as the leading members of the Russian Communist
Party were called.
There were few Chinese left at the Institute of World Economy
and Politics by the time I left Russia shortly after the visit of theAmerican I.P.R. delegates. Some had “escaped over the frontier”
and joined up with the Kuomintang.
Others had disappeared into
concentration
camps or obscure employment in the provinces. The
most zealous Chinese Communists
were those who never came to
Moscow or learned anything about the Soviet Union.
The Chinese Communist
Party, although comparatively
immunefrom the purge which decimated the servile parties of the West in
the last year of my residence in Moscow, never denied that it took its
orders from Moscow. Indeed it affirmed and glorified the fact. Its
secretary, Wang Ming, wrote in the Commz&st
International,in
December 1937, how the Communist Party of China, in its appeal in1935 for a united national front against Japan, was “guided by the
new line of tactics of the Seventh Congress of the Cornintern and thehistoric report made by Comrade Dimitrov.”
In the same article Wang Ming made it clear that in “abandoning
the policy of the violent overthrow of the Kuomintang
Government”
and embracing the Three Principles of the People of Sun Yat-sen, theChinese Communists had not “ceased to be true disciples of scientific
Communism-Marxism-Leninism.
. . . The cessation of the movementfor Red China,” he continued, “was only a tactic since, when the
Chinese people should have conquered the Japanese aggressors
through a united front, the slogan of ‘Sovietizing
China’ would be
revived.”To warn any backsliders who might imagine that the
Chinese Communist Party had really changed its spots, Wang Ming
wrote : “Any other interpretationof this formula of the Communist

194

Last Chance in China

Party of China, as meaning that the Chinese Communists give up
their political and organizational
independence, or give up the propaganda of Communist principles, is the deliberate intriguing of proJapanese and other elements, or else, at best, a complete misunderHe concluded his article with a paean of praise to thestanding.”
Soviet Union and the words: ’They [the people of China] regard the USSR as the country which inactual practice has shown China how it can and must transform thecountry . . . into one mighty and capable of defending itself, from acountry poor and backward into one rich and cultural . . . into themost democratic country in the world under the banner of the Stalinist Constitution.
In 1937 and 1938 the Chinese Red Army fought bravely and effectively against the Japanese defending both China and the Soviet
fatherland.
In spite of their secret aims the united front was a reality
when I was in China in 1938. Indeed in those days the Communists
had seemed to be leaning over backward to avoid giving offense or
arousing the misgivings of the Kuomintang.
As I wrote in 1938 in
China at ZVar, the Communists seemed ready to accept every rebuff
and restriction of their activity, considering that only thus could theunited front be maintained and China kept fighting Japan.
How misleading my impression, like that of others, was at thetime is shown by the directive given by Mao Tse-tung to politicalworkers of the Eighth Route Army when, in October 1937, it left
Yenan to fight in North Shansi :The Sino- Japanese war affords our party an excellent opportunity for
expansion.
Our fixed policy should be seventy per cent expansion,twenty per cent dealing with the Kuomintang,
and ten per cent resisting Japan. There are three stages in carrying out this fixed policy:
the first is a compromising
stage, in which self-sacrifice should bemade to show our outward obedience to the Central Government andadherence to the Three Principles of the People [nationality,
democracy and livelihood, as outlined by Dr. Sun Yat-sen], but in reality
this will serve as camouflage for the existence and development of ourparty.
The second is a contending stage, in which two or three years
should be spent in laying the foundation of our party’s political andmilitary powers, and developing these until we can match and breakSuccess of the Democratic

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I95

the Kuomintang,and eliminate the influence of the latter north of the’Yellow River. While waiting for an unusual turn of events, we should
give the Japanese invader certain concessions.
The third is an offensive stage, in which our forces should penetrate
deeply into Central China, sever the communicationsof the Central
Government troops in various sectors, isolate and disperse them until
we are ready for the counteroffensive
and wrest the leadership fromthe hands of the Kuomintang.*
Following the Stalin-Hitler
Pact of August 1939, the Chinese, likeevery other Communist
Party, reversed itself. Mao Tse-tung announced that Russia’s understanding
with Nazi Germany “strengthened the confidence of the whole of mankind in the possibility of winning freedom.” Lend-Lease was denounced in Yenan as in Union
the United States in the
Square as a wicked device for “embroiling”“Second Imperialist War.”The Chinese Communists now began to refuse to take orders fromthe National Government, started calling Chiang Kai-shek a fascist
and declared that the Chinese Communists “are always social revoluIn 1940 the united front in China wastionaries, never reformists.”
broken when the “New Fourth” Communist Army tried to occupy
the triangular area between Nanking, Shanghai and Hangchow andcame into head-on conflict with the Nationalist forces.
By the end of 1939 Mao Tse-tung had also begun to prepare theminds of his followers for the possibility of a Russo-Japanese understanding on the model of the Russo-German Pact. In an interview
with Edgar Snow in December 1939, he stated that it was “not inconceivable” Russia might decide to save part of China in the same
fashion as she had “saved” half of Poland when she partitioned it withGermany.
The days when foreign writers friendly to the Communists paid
glowing tributes to the valor of China’s National armies led by ChiangKai-shek were gone forever.
In his account of his interview,
published in the China Weekly
Review on January 13 and 20, 1940, Snow quotes Mao as saying that“with the liquidation of the Nazi anti-Soviet, anti-Corninternpolicy,*Documents
0% the Problem of the Chinese Communist Party. Presented to thePeople’s Political Council, March, 1941. Published in Chungking, 1944, by the Supreme
National Defense Council.

196

Lust Chance in China

the distinction formerly drawn between fascist and democratic countries lost its validity; the period of attempting to win over the capitalist class and their governments” had become a thing of the past. Mao
further stated that “the center of the anti-Soviet
movement is nolonger Nazi Germany. It is among the so-called democratic countries
with Britain in the lead.”
Asked by Snow whether he meant that he saw no difference between fascism and the cause of the democracies, Mao replied, “No,there is no difference in their positions in this war.” Snow also reported Mao as havin, 0 said that President Roosevelt was hoping “towin the leadership of the capitalist world and wants Chamberlain for
a Secretary and Japan as his rear guard, with I-Iitler and hlussolini
his vanguard.”
When Russia and Japan signed their first pact in April 1931, theCommunists announced that since “it strengthens peace on the eastern
frontiers of the USSR and guarantees the security of the developmentof socialist construction,” this treaty “is in keeping with the interestsof the working people and oppressed nations of the whole %vorld.”
True to their principle of Russia first the Chinese Communist denounced as “craven tricksters” all Chinese who expressed dismay at
Russia’s recognition of Japan’s puppet state of “Manchukuo.”
After Germany attacked Russia in June 1941, the Chinese Communists as suddenly as every other Communist Party discovered thatthe war in Europe was, after all, not an imperialist war but one inwhich England and America were the children of light. Roosevelt
was no longer called a “warmonger,”
Willkie no longer figured as “afascist” ; even Winston Churchill received some Communist bouquets.
However, in China, the breakup of the Nazi-Soviet alliance was notfollowed by the re-establishmentof a popular front against the national enemy. For Japan was not at war with Russia. The Chinese
Communists could direct their main war effort against the Chungking
Government instead of against the Japanese, without immediate fearfor Russia’s safety.
For their part the Japanese naturally continued to exert most of
their strength against Chiang Kai-shek’s armies. The Chinese Communists were both Russia’s protCg& and a thorn in the flesh of theChinese National
Government.
Throughout
the durationof theRusso- Japanese Pact the Japanese refrained from launching an offen-

Success of the Democratic

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I97

sive against the Communist capital although Yenan was only about ahundred miles away from their lines.
Accordingto the testimony of General Okamura, the Japanesecommander in China, in his report to America after V-J Day, theJapanese during the whole course of the Sino-Japanese War lost only
50,ooo men to the guerrillas-and
not all the guerrillas were Communists by any means.
Germany’s attack on Russia did not even necessitate the withdrawal from circulation of The New IIeHtocracy in which Mao Tsetung described Americans as the “sons-of-bitches
Western Imperialists.”
This book was written originallyin 1940, when Critain, France
and the United States, not National Socialist Germany, were regarded
by Communists the whole world over as the enemies of mankind. But
it has continued until now to be the bible of the Chinese Communists,
only slight text revisions bein g found necessary through the years.
By the middle of 1936, when the Communists were announcing on
the Yenan radio that there was no difference between Japanese andAmerican imperialism except that the latter was stronger and more
hypocritical,
the unexpurgated original edition again became entirely
suitable as the statement of basic Communist views, since, as in the
period when Stalin and Hitler were allies, the Western democracies
were once more the villains on the international stage.
The English translation of TJze Nczv Democracy, issued in 1944
with an introduction
by Earl Browder, was carefully edited to expunge or obscure its anti-American
thesis. But the complete subservience of the Chinese Communist Party to Moscow’s dictates could not
be hidden. Indeed one must do the Chinese Communists the justiceto admit that they have been far franker, and considerably more honest, than other Communists in announcing their aims and their views.
Again and again in his book the venerable leader* of the Chinese
Communist
Party states that “China’s revolution
is a part of theworld proletarian-socialist
revolution,” that it depends on the assistance of the Soviet State, that its aim is the “overthrowof capitalism”*Mao Tse-tung is chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Chinese
Communist Party ; chairman of the Party’s secretariat and of the Presidium of the
Polithureau.
From 1935 until its ostensible liquidation in 1943, he was a member ofthe Executive Committee of the Comintern.

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Last Chance in China

and “the establishment of a New-DemocraticSociety,” which will not
be “democracy in its general sense,” but “the dictatorship of revolutionary classes.”
The following quotations are taken from Lin Yutang’s direct rendering from the Chinese text of the fifth edition, published in Yenan
in 1944. The words in italics are those omitted by the American
Communist
Party editors in their endeavor to draw wool over theeyes of the American public and keep alive the legend that the Chinese
Communists are simply agrarian liberal reformers.
This [Chinese] Republic of New Democracy is different on the one
hand from the old IVestern-style capitalist republics under the dictatorship of* the capitalists zeGcJt are already out of date. On tJw other
hand, it is also difereut from the uczucst, So-,&t-style, Soviet Socialist Republic under tlze dictatorship of the proletariat.
TJlis kind of
republic has already arism and grozcw strong in the Soz&t Unionand furthermore
z&Y1 yet be cstablishrd in the difiermt
capitalist
comatries, and zc~ill undoubtedly become the type of govcrnmwt
of allprogressive countries through tke Uniou of Nntiom aud of politicalpower. . . .
According to their social character, the formsof goverumeut of all
the countries of the world fall fundawwntally &to tlzree categories: a)republics ~~~a&~tke dictatorshipof the capitalist class, b) republics
uuder the dictatorslrip of the proletariat, aud c) republics uudcr thejoint dictatorship of scvrral
revolutionaryclasses.
The jirst category con1priscs
the couutrirs of the old democracy.
Today after the outbreak of tJle second imperialist zvar, the breath of
democracy Jzas already disappeared from all capita.list countries. All
have become, or are about to become, blood-smelling,
military dictatorships of the capitalist classes. Certain countries under tlze joint dictatorship of the landlords aud the capitalist classes can be grouped
under this heading.
Thus while their American admirers have been representing the
Chinese Communists as democrats in the Western sense, they themselves have all along proclaimed that capitalist democracy is a sham,that Russia is ruled by a dictatorship, and that the Second World War
was not a conflict of “peace-loving” democratic peoples against the* The American Communist
ship throughout the text.

Party’s translation

substitutes“ruled by” for dictator-

Success of the Democratic

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I99

wicked war-loving
dictatorships,
but an “imperialist
struggle forpower.”The New Democracy is equally explicit concerning the Chinese
Communist refusal to become allies of America and “go the road of acapitalist society.” “Such a way,” writes Mao, “is a dead alley” because “the present-day international
environment is that of a struggle
between capitalism and socialism, one in which capitalism is going
down and socialism going up.”
He continues :In this wovld all imperialists
are OUT enemies. We cannot be separated from the Socialist State (Russia) . . . if we wish to seek forindependence. That is to say we cannot separate ourselves from theassistance of the Soviet Union or from the victory of the anti-capitalist struggles of the proletariat
of Japan, Great Britain, the UnitedStates, Germany and France. Their victories help us. . . . This is especially true of the aid of the Soviet Union, an indispensable condition
for the final victory of China’s war of resistance. . . .
The world now depends on Communism as its star of salvation,and so does China. . . . Zf -we do not adopt the policy of allying ourselves with the Soviet Union, then we have to adopt a pro-imperialist
policy, have to ally ourselves with imperialist powers, and . . . GreatBritain and the United States might ask us to join alp against theSoviet Union. If we go alofzg with them, we shall at once line up OUYselves in the counterrevolutionary
camps of the imperialist
powers,and our national independence will be over.
In another passage Mao clearly and unmistakably refutes the thesis
propagated by many American writers who believe the Chinese Communists could be America’s friends and allies. He writes :YOU may say, “There is a difference between Eastern and Western
Imperialists.
I z&l ally myself with the sons-of-bitches, the Western Imperialists.
That sounds indeed brave!
UnfortunatelytheWestern Imperialists
zvill be anti-Soviet
and anti-Commuxists.
Zf
you join them, they will ask you to strike northward.
Then good-by
to your revolution.”
If we forsake the policy of allying with the Soviet Union and cooperate with the Imperialists the San Min Chu I will become a reactionary doctrine.
Here we have the thesis clearly stated: any Chinese who wants toco-operate with the United States is a reactionary.
Chiang Kai-shek’s

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Last Chance in China

government is friendly to the United States, therefore it is reactionary. “The genuine San Min Cllu I,” says Mao, “has to be one allying
itself with the Soviet Union” and can never be one that allies itself
with those who “oppose the Soviet Union.”“No matter whom you
follow, so long as you are anti-Communistic,
you are traitors.”
Mao Tse-tung does not even trouble to hide his contempt for theWestern liberals whose propaganda on behalf of the Chinese Communists has been so useful to him. In his book, Battle for Asia, Edgar
Snow, who is better acquainted with the Chinese Communist leadersthan any other Western writer, admits that it is impossible to reconcile the popular view of the Chinese Communists as “only a peasantreform party” with its loyal adherence to the Cornintern and says :Mao Tse-tung . . . would not be bothered about these aspersions
He would chuckle and say that if it would
cast upon his Marxism.
solve the contradictionin the sentiments of liberals who want to be
known as pro-China but anti-Stalin they might call him anything they
liked.
It is true that Edgar Snow at other times has written precisely thecontrary, telling his readers that “there has never been any Communism in China, even in Communist areas”; and that “long before it
became defunct, the Cornintern ceased to have much direct contact
with the Chinese Communist Party.”
These contradictions
in his testimony could no doubt be “dialectically” explained, or attributed to semantics, by the author whose articles and books on China are so widely known. However, both thehistorical record and the sacred writings of the Chinese Communists
afford sufficient proof that they are “real” Communists.
There is no
reason to doubt that their conception of democracy is the same as thatof Stalin and his stooges in Eastern Europe. Given the chance theChinese Communists would undoubtedly establish the same kind of
new democracy as that at present enjoyed by the people of Poland,
Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Rumania.
The apparent discrepancy between tributes to the Communist exploits against Japan on the one hand, and the charges on the otherside that they did not fight Japan, is partly to be explained by a confusion of dates. Men like Congressman Judd, who himself lived forSuccess of the Democratic

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201

a time in the Communist areas as a medical missionary, testify that
the Communists were all out against Japan for the first two years of
the war, but not after 1939. Snow’s personal knowledge also relates
to this early period and this gives greater weight to the admission in
his earlier books that they are real Communists under Moscow’sorders than to his recent attempts to represent them as independent
Chinese liberal reformers. Agnes Smedley last visited the Communist
area eight or nine years ago, during the period when Japan was Public
Enemy Number One to the Communists throughout the world, andrepeated Russo-Japanese clashes along the frontier of Manchuria were
occurring.
Most of the foreign correspondents who visited Yenan during the
war had no means of ascertaining the truth of the statements made tothem. Few of them spoke Chinese and few, if any, had the necessary
experience of totalitarian
techniques to understand the setup there.
Anyone who has seen how foreign correspondents in Moscow are deceived need not have been surprised when Brooks Atkinson, Harrison
Forman, Teddy White, Gunther Stein and others came home to write
glowingaccounts of Chinese Communist
democracy and Chinese
Communist military prowess.
It was not the Japanese, but the Chinese, who suffered wherever theCommunist guerrillas operated. The Japanese retaliated for Communist depredations by burning whole villages, and the Communists
killed all those not willing to help them and labeled them “collaborators.” The Communist forces could not defend the people against theJapanese, and the Japanese had no particular interest in defending
them against the Communists.
Caught between two fires the Chinese
people often had no choice but that of who was to be their executioner.
One of the few Christian missionaries who remained in the Northern occupied areas from 1937 to 1942, the Reverend Wallace C. Merwin, wrote in the Christian Century that the Chinese Communists
had undoubtedly killed far more Chinese than they had Japanese. He
said :
The common method of dealing with a traitor was burial alive, anda traitor was anyone who remained in occupied territory or was caught
coming out of a town with Japanese-sponsored puppet money on his
person, even so little as ten cents.

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Last Chance in China

Another missionary, the Reverend Reinbold,
the province of Shensi :wrote in 1940 that in. . . the Japanese invasion was short and the population did not suffermuch, but many have been killed since by the Communists for nothaving evacuated the place.
The testimony of this Norwegian is particularly
valuable since he
was highly praised in Twin Stars over China by the late Colonel
Evans Carlson of the United States Marine Corps, who was a warm
admirer of the Chinese Communists.
The great advantage of the Communists, both during the war andfollowing V-J Day, consisted in their irresponsibility
for the fate of
the Chinese people. The National Government was trying, however
ineffectually,
to defend what was left of Free China. The Communists were engaged simply in raiding into Japanese-occupiedor
Kuomintang-controlledareas.
There were no Chinese Communists fighting in any of the major
engagements of the Sino-Japanese or World War ; neither at Shanghai in 1937, or at Taierchwang
in the north in 1938, nor defending
the Wuhan cities, nor in the four battles of Changhsha, nor at theTungting Lake, nor in the battles on the Salween and Burma fronts.
Accordingto the testimony even of those kindly disposed toward
the Chinese Communists, they could not and did not challenge any
important
Japanese garrison post or Japan’s control of the North
China railway system. Theodore White says that Communists fought
only “when they had an opportunity to surprise a very small group of
the enemy. . . . During the significant campaigns it was the weary
soldiers of the Central Government who took the shock, gnawed at
the enemy and died.”
The many engagements the Communists
boast of having fought
against Japan were in reality minor guerrilla skirmishes. They fought
only when they came across small isolated Japanese detachments, andmany of their “victories”
were won against Chinese puppet forces
who never wanted to fight their countrymen but were just earning aliving as Japanese mercenaries.
Communist“victories”
were often won against small Nationalist
forces already weakened by fighting the Japanese. The Communists

Success of the Democratic

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203

adhered to the line laid down by Mao ; seventy percent of their efforts
were expended in extending the area of Communist control.
They
took over regions abandoned by the Japanese when the latter withdrew their forces to launch attacks on the National Government
armies. Since the main efforts of the Japanese were always directedagainst the Chinese National armies, the Chinese Communists could
wait and attack one side or the other when it was exhausted. Lin Yutang, who was sympathetic to the Communists in the early years of
the war, has written: “For every Japanese they claim to have killed,
the Communists have killed at least five Chinese. For every town
they have captured from the Japanese they have captured fifty towns
from other Chinese. Of the hundreds of ‘clashes’ per year they claim
to their credit, a fair percentage must include those with the Chinese‘enemy’-halfof their weapons have been robbed from other Chinese
guerrillas and regular units.*”
Perhaps this is an exaggeration.
We may never know the truth ofwhat went on in North China during the war. One cannot deny thebravery of the Chinese Red Army and partisans, or their readiness tofight, to starve, to march in the cold of winter and heat of summer, tosacrifice and to die. The tragedy is that all their courage and conquests were not utilized in China’s interests or to advance the ideals
the rank and file of the Communists believe in. Knowingly
or unknowingly
they were but pawns in Stalin’s game of power politics.
Of them it might be said as Tennyson said of Lancelot :The shackles of an old love straitened him,
His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.
There is little doubt that the prevailing sentiment in America encouraged the Chinese Communists
to direct their main war effort
against the National Government during the last year of the war withJapan. The Comintcrn’s democratic masquerade was more successful
in China than anywhere else. Many an American editorial writer,columnist and radio commentator was to continue repeating the old
refrain, “The Chinese are not real Communists, merely liberal agrar* The Vigil of a Nation, p. 125. Many instances with namea and dates are given by
Lin Yutang to prove the truth of this assertion.

c2w

Last Chance in China

ian reformers,” long after the falsity of Communist pretensions in
Europe was plain enough to dispel all illusions.
The long-current
misapprehensions
as to the nature of Chinese
Communism
resulted partly from America’s
disgusted reaction
against the National Government of China. But it also arose fromthe reputation achieved by Communist-sympathizing
journalists posing as “experts” on China. During the early years of the Sino-Japanese War it had been the Communists and fellow travelers who had
been most concerned, because Japan then appeared as a close and dangerous menace to the Soviet Union. Except for a few missionaries
and one or two far-sighted Republicans like Mr. Stimson, few other
Americans had cared what happened to China. Mr. Grew, as ambassador to Japan, had shown concern only for American interests in
China and had favored the continuance of friendly American-Japaneserelations until the Japanese menace to the United States became clear.
President Roosevelt had never considered Japanese aggression against
China as on a par of wickedness with German aggression in Europe
and had not applied the Neutrality Act in the Far East.
Consequently, when the American public started to become interested in China, following
Pearl Harbor, the writers already established as popular experts were for the most part inclined to the Communist point of view. Others got on the Communist band wagon
once Russia became America’s “gallant ally.”
In the early stages of the Sino-Japanese War the influence of Communist-sympathizing
journalists
and “experts”
in the Americanpress was not harmful to China, since Russia’s fears of Japan, andthe existence of a united front in China, led them to represent the
Chinese Government in a favorable light and pay tribute to the valorof the armies of Chiang Kai-shek. During the period of the StalinHitler Pact, however, and in particular following the Russo-Japanese
Treaty of April 1940, strong criticism of the Kuomintang was voiced
in so-called liberal journals in America, and in such publications as
the Far Eastem Survey and Pacific Afairs,
published by the Instituteof Pacific Relations.
Following
Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, China once again
enjoyed a comparatively favorable press, but, following the Russian
repulse of Germany at Stalingrad in February
1943, increasingly
strong criticism of the Chinese Government began to be heard. Once

Success of the Democratic

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205

it was clear that Russia was released from all fear of a Japanese attack
the Government of China was belabored with abuse and her war
effort minimized,
not only in Communist publications
but also in
American magazines with a mass circulation.
This was the time when Edgar Snow wrote in The Saturday Evening Post that the situation in China was similar to that in Yugoslavia “with the Chinese partisans led by Generals Chu Teh and Mao
Tse-tung corresponding
to Marshal Tito and his following, and thepolicy of Chungking toward them being about the same as that which
Mikhailovitch
and King Peter tried to enforce toward the Yugoslav
Snow, of course, urged us to transfer our support to theguerrillas.”Communists,
or at least threaten to treat Chiang Kai-sheklikeMikhailovitch
unless he knuckled under to the Communists.
The Institute of Pacific Relations followed the same line. Mr.
Lawrence Salisbury, who had left the State Department to edit Far
Eastern Survey, wrote an article on April 25, 1945 in which he also
urged America to treat China like Yugoslavia, called the Communists“liberty-loving”
and argued at one and the same time that unless
Chiang Kai-shek would embrace the Communists, Russia would arm
them against the National Government,
and that America was indanger of “thrusting
the Communists
into the arms of the Soviet
Union.”All in all, it is not the fault of the I.P.R., Edgar Snow et hocgenus
omne that we are not today confronted with a bigger and more menacing Tito in the Far East than at Trieste.
At least three out of four books published on China were favorable
to the Communists.
Even the War Department was not immune
from such influence.
It issued a special Armed Forces edition of
Edgar Snow’s People opt Our Side. When I visited Communist
China, I was struck by the fact that the United States Army post
library at Yenan contained not one of the books critical of the Chinese
Communists, but every single one written by their protagonists.
The distorted view of China given to the American public by friendsof the Chinese Communists was remarked upon by the unpolitical but
intelligent Emily Hahn whose articles in the New Yorker gave a far
more realistic picture of China. On her repatriation
to the UnitedStates from Japanese-occupied Hong Kong, she remarked on the factthat everyone asked her only about three things in China : Commu-

206

nists, guerrillas
rgLJL+:*

Last Chance in China
and industrial

co-operatives.

Miss

Hahn

wrote in

The average American is full of hooey through no fault of his own.
He thinks guerrillas are the only soldiers who do any fighting at all in
China. He thinks the woods are full of them. Actually, the great burden of resistance has rested on the regular army. The situation is dueto the peculiarity of most American newspapermen in China, who arenearly all of them inclined to be Leftist, out of a frustrated sense of
guilt, a superior viewpoint of things as they are, and a tendency tofollow the crowd---of
newspapermen.
Most newspapermen don’tknow any more about the Communists in China than you do. They
hear rumors . . . but the chances of seeing what goes on among the
Chinese Communists are even less than those of seeing the inside of
Russia. If you live in Chungking, you can always interview Chou
En-lai. That is what he is there for. But if you think he is going togive you all the answers you are as innocent as an American newspaperman.
The Communist
inspiration
for China’s bad press in the UnitedStates was demonstrated with peculiar force following
the RussoJapanese Pact of March 1944. China’s fortunes were at their nadir.
She had ample reasons to fear that Russia had become benevolently
neutral toward Japan. Not only had the Moscow radio followed up
the pact by starting a verbal campaign against the Chinese National
Government, but reports were coming in that Japan had taken sevendivisions of her famous Kwanting
Army from Manchuria to help
launch a new offensive against China designed to get control of thewhole Peiping-Hankow-Cantonrailroad and cut China vertically inhalf.
It was obvious that without the reassurance given her by Russia,
Japan would not have dared to deplete her forces along the Russian
frontier in order to launch her first big offensive in years against aFree China. Yet, one might have imagined from reading most of thenewspaper reports and magazine articles published in America that
Russia, not China, was our ally in the war against Japan.
Instead of reassuring the Chinese as to our future intentions at this* From China to Me, by Emily Hahn. Copyright,
permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.

1944,

by Emily Hahn, reprinted bySuccess of the Democratic

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207

period of the lowest ebb in their fortunes and of their greatest fears ofRussia as well as of Japan, it became fashionable in America to excoriate China, denounce the alleged fascist features of her government,
and scorn her war effort. The fact that China had had to fight alone
and unaided for many years before we entered the war was ignored.
The maintenance of Central Government troops in the Northwest wasrepresented as a proof of the “antidemocratic”
character of theChungking Government, without regard to the fact that the Communists were devoting a large part of their energies to fighting the National Government forces. Also, there was always a possibility that
the Communists might open Free China’s back door to the Japanese.
The West had forgotten the Stalin-Hitler
partition of Poland in 1939,
but the Chinese Government naturally feared that the Russo-Japanese
Pact of 1944 might lead to similar collaboration.
The accusation, so widely disseminated in the ‘American press, that
Lend-Lease supplies brought into China by the gallant United States
Air Force flying over the Hump, were “hoarded” by Chiang Kai-shek
for use against the Communists, was in any case a libel. An inquiry
conducted by the United States Army Headquarters in China established the fact that none of the arms of the Chinese National armies
around the Communist zone were of American origin. It was established that although these forces were well equipped according to
China’s low standards, their complement of arms was the normal one
and resembled a military junk pile collected from all Europe.
General Stilwell appears to have been responsible for more “hoarding” of Lend-Lease supplies than the Chinese. General Chennault toldme, in an interview in Shanghai, that in 1944 Stilwell had 100,ooo
tons of United States arms and equipment uselessly stored at Kunming while the Chinese were fighting desperately without benefit ofLend-Lease a short distance away from Kweilin to stem the Japaneseonslaught.
The very same journalists and authors who denounced China fornot being a democracy praised Russia to the skies and were silent concerning the totalitarianfeatures of her regime. The fact that the Russians, armed and equipped with vast quantities of Lend-Lease supplies, were winning victories, while the unaided Chinese were unable
to fight, was somehow held to prove Russia a “democracy” and China

208

Last Chance in China“fascist.“*Never was so illogical a conclusion reached. If ability towage war and fight bravely were a proof of democracy, Germany andJapan must surely have been full-fledged democratic states.
Our blindness to the help Russia and the Communists were giving
to Japan was the more inexplicable in that both America and Britain
had had experience of Communist aid to Germany in the period of theStalin-Hitler
Pact, when national defense measures were opposed,
and the war in Europe denounced as an imperialistic
struggle forwhich Germany was no more to blame than England, France and theUnited States. We ought to have understood why the leaders of theChinese Government were suspicious of the Chinese Communists andinsisted upon keeping blockaded in the Northwest
those who took
their orders from a foreign power which maintained
seemingly
friendly relations with Japan and adopted a far-from-friendly
attitudetoward the Chinese Government.
Instead, we praised the Chinese
Communists
and nearly went alon, u with General Stilwell in what
would have been the suicidal policy of arming them, without any
guarantee that they would not fight the Chinese Government insteadof the Japanese with whom their masters were on friendly terms.
The Stilwell incident in 1944, which led to his recall, illuminatedlike a searchlight the deadlock in China which almost led to her being
knocked out of the war half a year before Japan’s total defeat. It highlighted the decay in Chinese morale, the effects of the Russo-JapanesePact, and the influence of Communist sympathizers in the State Department on General Stilwell himself. It also illustrated the unfortunate convergence in view of American soldiers who neither knew nor
cared what the war was about and hated serving in China where wine,
women, good food and the amenities of a mechanized civilization were
woefully lacking; of the imperialist-minded
British who were happy tofind “proof” in American disgust with China that no *Asiatic peoples
were fit for self-government and who wanted China’s best troops to be
used to defend British imperial interests in Southeast Asia; and of* According to Donald Nelson’s statement to the China-American Council of Commerce and Industry in January 1945, Free China had only 6,000 trucks running andthey were from 3 to 12 years old. He also stated that the Chinese kept them runninglong after they had reached a state of disrepair in which Americans would have abandoned them. Russia, meanwhile, had received hundreds of thousands of trucks fromthe United States.

Success of th4 Democratic

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209

the Communist-sympathizing“liberals” who adored Stilwell, hated
the Chungking Government and made no allowances for its need todefend itself from its internal, as well as its external, enemies. As
General Li Tsung-jen, the Kwangsi general, said to me in Peiping in
February :The ‘American Army under General Stilwell concentrated all its
efforts and ours on reopening the Burma Road and on building up
forces south of the Yangtze for an offensive against Japan from thatquarter. Thus North China was depleted of troops and the Chinese
Communists had a field day. When the Burma Road was finally reopened it was too late to be of any use.
Japan’s ultimate
defeat owed nothing to the much-publicized
Burma-Salween
campaign to which General Stilwell sacrificed allother considerations.
But it resulted in China’s National Government
finding itself on V-J Day with its main forces concentrated in theSouthwest and unable to reoccupy, at short notice, all the Chinese territories liberated by Japan’s sudden surrender. In other words, General Stilwell’s strategy, while contributing
little or nothing to Japan’s
defeat, materiallyaided the Chinese Communist
postwar bid for
power.
Chiang Kai-shek and his generals had not been alone in their opposition to the Stilwell strategy which utilized China’s only properly
equipped and Western-trained
divisions for a campaign of greater
benefit to the British Empire than to China. General Chennault, anadvocate of air power and commander of the Fourteenth Air Forcewhich had performed miracles with the little it had, considered theBurma campaign a waste and wanted to concentrate available supplies on severing Japan’s sea communications,thus starving out her
forces in Burma and South China. He told me in Shanghai that Stilwell had refused to allocate to Chiang Kai-shek enough American
equipment to defend even the airfields in China. As Dr. Walter Judd
told Congress in March 1945, he had been informed by Americans in
China that “we did not give the Chinese infantry who had to defend
those bases one rifle, or one machine gun, or even one bullet for thejob.” Yet Stilwell and his friends and protagonists damned ChiangKai-shek and his government for China’s defeats, ascribed her mili-

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Last Chance in China

tary reverses to the undemocratic
nature of his government andwanted to arm the Chinese Communists instead.
General Wedemeyer, as Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten’s chiefof staff in Southeastern Asia, had also opposed the Burma campaign;
he favored a strategy which would have served both American andChinese interests better. As he said to me, fighting the Japanese in
the jungle gave them every advantage and prevented America’s technological superiority from being brought to bear against the enemy.
He had argued in favor of amphibious landings to recapture first Rangoon and then a southern Chinese port. Japan’s forces could thenhave been cut off from their supply bases with less, or no greater, expenditure of lives than those sacrificed in the futile Burma campaign
and in flying supplies to China over the Hump. Moreover, the opening up of such a port as Canton would have been of inestimably
greater value to China than the trickle of supplies which could be carried over the Burma Road.
When I asked General Wedemeyer whether it was not the lack oflanding craft which prevented the adoption of the strategy he favored,
he replied that in wartime supplies become available when the need is
obvious and a commander is using all he has. The Southeast Asia
command, he said, had been deprived of what it had and also denied
more ships in favor of the European theater, because it was not in any
case making use of its naval forces.
Until the history of the war is written by those who have the necessary inside knowledge and military competence, it is impossible forthe layman to pronounce judgment.
It is at least certain that the
Chinese had reason to distrust Stilwell’s military judgment as well as
his motives.
“Vinegar Joe” made no secret of his dislike and contempt for Chiang Kai-shek and his government.
He surrounded himself with Communist sympathizers.
Any proposals made by Stilwell
were naturally suspect in the eyes of the Chinese Command, since hehad made it all too clear that he preferred the Communists and would
not be at all sorry to see the National Government overthrown.
Stilwell, for his part, accused the Generalissimo
of keeping manyof his best divisions immobilized
in the Northwest,
blockading the
Chinese Communists.
In his judgment the disastrous defeats in 1944
were all due to Chiang’s fear of the Chinese Communists, his inability
or unwillingness
to institute reforms in Free China and his generalSuccess of the Democratic

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211

incompetence. The American commander freely expressed his viewsof the head of the Chinese State, calling him a “coolie,” a dishonest
man and a ruthless dictator. He carried his personal hatred of Chiang
to such lengths that he avoided meeting him and communicated with
him through Madame Chiang, whom he liked, or at least did not dislike so much.
The net result of mutual dislikes and suspicion was a total lack of
co-operation which Japan turned to her advantage.
General Stilwell’s own friends admitted that he was obsessed by
the desire to return as a conqueror to the territory in which he had“taken a hell of a beating” in 1942. His warmest admirers also statethat he was a “forthrightsoldier” for whom there was only one consideration : “to fight the Japanese with everything available.” Whatmight happen afterward apparently did not concern him. His typically American contempt for “politicalconsiderations”
in wartime ;his personal courage, endurance and readiness to share all the hardships of the men he commanded; his hatred of caste divisions-all
constituted excellent qualities for a commander in the field and endeared him to newspapermen, but they were not the requirements of astatesman or a diplomat, or of a strategist in global warfare.
Nor were General Stilwell’s virtues and qualities as a soldier of akind to render him immune to Communist influence and intrigues.
His lack of patience, tact and self-control prevented his even trying to
make the best of things. He would curse and swear and pour out thevials of his wrath and contempt over the heads of Chiang Kai-shek
and his generals, instead of endeavoring to establish a working partnership between allies.
According to the testimony of all his friends and admirers, he hated“paper work,” was a poor administrator
and was badly served by themen who did his staff work. Officers who served under both Stilwelland his successor told me that Stilwell had never worked out an overall strategic plan for China. His tactics were opportunist and haphazard, and his feud with General Claire Chennault, combined with hishatred of Chiang Kai-shek, resulted in the lack of a common purpose
even among the Americans,much less an American-Chinese
plan
either for defense or attack.
Stilwell, as George Taylor of the Office of War Information
once
remarked, treated Chiang Kai-shek like a tribal chieftain. Although

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.

Last Chance in China

a liberal, and although he spoke Chinese fluently, Stilwell had neither
respect nor liking for those who represented a culture and a civilization alien to his own. The Chinese had damn well got to learn to do
the right thing as represented by American desires and American
judgments as to what was good for China.
As Fred Eldridge reports in Wmth is Burma, Stilwell was “psychologically incapable of humbling himself before a man he considered
to have the mentality of a peasant, and grew to hate the Generalissimo.“*On the other hand, Stilwell loved the Chinese soldiers and vouched
that, properly trained, equipped and led, they were second to none.
In spite of his hatred of the British and all other imperialists, Vinegar
Joe reminded me of the best type of British Indian Army officer who
damned the Indian Nationalists but loved his Indian soldiers, just as
Stilwell despised and hated the Chinese Nationalists
but loved theChinese “common man.”
I had known General (then Colonel) Stilwell in 1938 in Hankow
and had been friendly with the men and women who were to have somuch influence with him when he became commander of the UnitedStates forces in China and Burma: Agnes Smedley, the faithful andsinglehearted champion of the Chinese Communists;
John Davies, ofthe State Department, who in spite of his intelligence and skepticaloutlook came to believe that the Chinese Communists were liberals ;and Evans Carlson, the gallant Marine colonel whose faith in theCommunists was that of a little child-a
man of religious temperament who stated that the Chinese Communists were true Christians ;Jack Belden and other correspondents who “fell for” the Communists’ democratic masquerade.
In 1946 in Chungking, I asked Jack Belden’s old friend, Tillman
Durdin, what had happened to turn Jack’s sympathies toward theCommunists, since in Hankow he had been a bitter misanthrope with
Trotskyist inclinations but as anti-Communist
as I. How had he beentransformed from the unbelieving, sad and skeptical Belden of rgsg?
“Chou En-lai,” laconically replied Durdin.
“Like so many otherpeople, he came under his spell in Chungking.
And, Freda, you must
understand that it was easy to believe in the Communists in those* Published by Doubleday

and Company,

1946.

Success of the Democratic

Masquerade

213

days. It was so utterly hopeless in ‘Free China.’ The graft, the misery, the lack of will to fight any more. Even I felt that it could not beworse, and must be better in Communist China.
“You missed the depressing hopeless years in China following thefall of Hankow.
You have to get the feel of them, in order to understand why so many Americans fell for the Communists.”
The incident which led to General Stilwell’s recall in the fall of
194
resulted in part from his own character and the open contempt
he showed for Chiang Kai-shek, and in part from the influence inWashingtonof the friends of the Chinese Communists.
According to the account given me by a top-ranking civilian representative of the United States Government in China, a telegram wassent from Quebec to General Stilwell by President Roosevelt, instructing him to demand that the civil government as well as all
China’s armed forces be put under his orders, so that Stilwell should
control all China’s resources. Chiang Kai-shek had already agreed
to put General Stilwell in command of the Chmese armies; now he
was expected to let China be administered like an American colony.
The telegram stated that in the event of Chiang Kai-shek’s refusal, heshould be threatened with the withdrawalof all American forces from
China and the complete cessation of Lend-Lease.
Stilwell went off at once to the Generalissimo’s house where Chiang
was dining with Ambassador Hurley.
When Hurley read President
Roosevelt’s telegram, he said to Stilwell that the substance of what
was demanded could probably be obtained diplomatically if no threats
were made. Stilwell, however, insisted on showing the telegram to
Chiang Kai-shek.
Chiang, after it had been translated to him, said :Tell your President that I cannot abdicate the leadership of mypeople or the Presidency of my country. If he insists on withdrawing
American forces and Lend-Lease, we will have to do the best we can.
We have been fighting for seven years and except for Chennault’s airforce, we have received no aid from America to date. We will continue to fight to the end without any if we have to, but now I insist
that General Stilwell leave China.
Chiang added : “I will accept another American
but Stilwell cannot remain.”general in his place

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Last Chance in China

Chiang Kai-shek’s boldness won the day-at
least temporarily.
General Stilwell was recalled and replaced by General A. C. Wedemeyer. Ambassador Gauss, who had also shown a partiality for the
Chinese Communists and had been urging Chiang Kai-shek to cometo “a friendly agreement” with Russia, thereupon resigned. General
Hurley, who had been the President’s special envoy, and who had
become Chiang Kai-shek’s supporter, was made ambassador to China.
Althoughrebuffed, the State Department advocates of all-out aid
to the Chinese Communists continued to influence United States policy and were to win the next round when, a year after Stilwell’s recall, Ambassador Hurley was compelled to resign.
At the time of Stilwell’s recall, it appeared that Chungking itself
would be captured and China’s long war of resistance practicallyended at the very time when American forces were advancing fromtriumph to triumph in the Pacific. Japan’s advance, which reached its
high-watermark in December 1944, was halted by bitter cold, herlack of supplies, and General Wedemeyer’s intelligent strategy andsuccess in infusing a new spirit into Chinese-American
relationships
and the Chinese Command.
The eleventh-hour
repulse of Japan in the winter of 1944-1945
thus synchronizedwith the weakening of the pro-Communist
elements which had come to dominate American policy. With the recallof General Stilwell and Ambassador Gauss, Chinese-American
relations became sufficiently healthy for General Wedemeyer to establish
a workable pattern of collaboration and to start building up a militaryforce in China capable of taking the offensive against Japan. !Almost
everything which Stilwell had failed to do by bludgeoning, threatening and abusing the Chinese Government, Wedemeyer accomplishedby his tact, his sincerity, his fair-mindedness and lack of personal vanity, his readiness to treat the Chinese as equals and his freedom from
Communist influence.

As long as Russia was in danger, as long as America’s defeat ofJapan was not certain, the Chinese Communists
did not launch an
open full-scale attack on the Chinese National Government forces defending what was left of Free China against Japan.
The turn toward all-out hostility against democracy’s battered,Success of the Democratic

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215

weak and corrupt ally, the National Government of China, began in
the winter of Ig&-1945.
The Communists had refrained from offering any resistance to theJapanese when the latter in 1944 moved their forces south from Manchuria and North China to launch their last and greatest offensive
against China. Not a single troop train passing through Communist
territory was derailed; no move at all was made by the Communists
to stem the Japanese onslaught. But, in the hour of China’s greatest
disaster, when the Japanese were almost at the gates of Chungking,
the Communists took the offensive against their own countrymen.
Foreseeing Japan’s early collapse at the hands of the American Navyand Air Force in the Pacific, the Communists came out of retirement
to deprive China’s National Government of the fruits of victory. Fromtheir bases in the North they launched their campaign for dominanceof Central and North China.
When V-J Day came the Communists had great hopes of success.
The best-equipped and trained Nationalist forces were in the Southwest preparing to launch an offensive to the southern coast. The sudden Japanese surrender seemed to afford the Communists a chance to
win control of all North China and the Yangtze Valley.
They were checkmated by the United States, at this time represented by Ambassador Hurley and General A. C. Wedemeyer, who,
as Commander in Chief of the China Theater, flew and transported byship sufficient Chinese Government troops to occupy Shanghai, Nanking, Peking and other important liberated cities. The U. S. Marines
arrived in North China; and the Japanese were ordered to surrender
only to the National Government’s representatives.
In the months preceding V-J Day Chiang Kai-shek had again andagain invited Mao Tse-tung to come to Chungking to confer. The
invitations had been rejected with vile abuse ; but, following the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of August 1945, when it seemed that
Russia and China were to become “friendly,” Mao came to the capitalto negotiate an agreement.
The subsequent story of Kuomintang-Communist
negotiations,truces and recurrent armed conflict has been told in other chapters.
Here sufficient details have been given to prove that the Chinese
Communist
record shows beyond any reasonable doubt that theCommunist Party of China is just as loyal and obedient a branch of

216

Last Chance in China

the Cornintern as any other. Indeed, it does not deny it except inspeeches, interviews and articles intended only for a gullible American
public.
Some well-known writers who admit that the Chinese Communists
are real Communists nevertheless argue that the United States ought
to support them.
It would be impossible for the United States to lead a Communist
Revolution abroad while retaining a capitalist organization of society
and a democratic government at home. The historical monstrosityof a Chinese Communist Revolution made in America would in factmean imperialist
intervention
on the grand scale. The assumptionthat if America should proceed on such a course “we should not clash
with Russia” is naive. Moscow would most certainly object violently
to seeing the Chinese Communists transfer their allegiance to America. Stalin would not hesitate to denounce them as Trotskyists,
fasdogs of American imperialism”-theterm now
cists and “runningapplied by the Communists to the National Government of China.
Nor would Stalin scruple to switch over to support of Chiang Kaishek. He would undoubtedly be as ready to kiss and make friends
with Chiang as he was in 1946 to embrace Peron. He would be able
to come forward as the champion of Asiatic liberty against America
in the same manner as he did against “Yankee imperialism” in Latin
America.
Chiang Kai-shek, who has known all along that he could get Moscow to curb the Chinese Communists if he were ready to break his ties
with the Western democracies and bring China into Russia’s sphere,
would have no alternative but to call on Moscow for aid against an
American-led
Communist Revolution.
All in all, it was hardly surprising that when Major Robert B. Rigg
and Captain John W. Collins of the U. S. Army were imprisoned by
the Communists in Manchuria early in 1947 they were given Thzmdev
Out of Chifza to read while threatened by physical tortures.
The whole idea of American sponsorship of a Communist Revolution in China would be too fantastic to deserve consideration were it
not advocated by some of the best-known and most influential ‘American “experts” on China. Mr. E. C. Carter, until recently secretary
general of the Institute of Pacific Relations, said in a speech in Cleveland in 1946 that the United States should shift its support from theSuccess of the Democratic

Masquerade

217

National Government to the Communists, both because the latter’s
way of life was closer to the American and in order that the Chinese
Communists should take our side if we become involved in war with
Russia. As Edgar Ansel Mowrer commented in the New York Post,“There is no more chance of the United States supplanting Russia
as the first love of the Chinese Communists than there would be of
the American Catholics taking Russia’s side in a war between Stalin
and the Pope of Rome.”
Whether or not General Marshall originally believed that the Chinese Communists are not real Communists, he certainly had no suchillusion when he left China. In his public statement on January 7,
1947, he said :The Communists frankly state that they are Marxists and intend towork toward establishing a Communistic
form of governmentin
China, though first advancing through the medium of a democratic
form of government of the American or British type.
Nor did General Marshall fail to express his resentment at theand lying propagandaof the Chinese Communists“provactive”
against America.
Althoughhe also accused the Nationalist
Government publicity
agent of numerous misrepresentations,
he added that they were “notof the vicious nature of the Communist propaganda.”
Unfortunately
General Marshall still clung to his belief that itshould be possible to give China a better government by uniting theliberals in the Kuomintang
with the liberal elements which form asubstantial element among the Communists.
(See Chapter X.)
While agreeing with General Marshall that many young people
have joined the Communists in disgust at the corruption of the existing government, and that the Chinese Communist
Party contains
some people whose impulses and aims are liberal, this fact is not likely
to affect the issue. The history of the Cornintern affords many examples, in various countries, of Communists who joined the Party
without understanding
its aims and methods and subsequently rejected them. Such “liberal elements” never had any influence. They
were always expelled from the Party if they failed to submit to therigorous discipline imposed by Moscow. Usually they were also given
whatever nasty label happened to be popular at the time in Moscow to218

Last Chance in China

designate the enemies of Communism-“rotten
liberal,” “social fascist, ” “fascist” or what not.
Moscow may have feared that General Marshall was correct in believing that the Chinese Communist Party contained truly liberal elements for, in 1946, the notorious Li Li-san returned to China.
After his fifteen years in Moscow Li Li-san was no doubt regarded
as a more obedient and pliant tool than Mao Tse-tung and the other
Chinese Communist leaders who had long commanded an army of
their own and been governors of large areas. Li Li-san could be expected to instill a proper Stalinist spirit into the Chinese Communist
Party should it show any signs of backsliding by taking its democratic
pretensions seriously. The arrival of a man, long trained in Moscow,
to share authority with Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh and to spy uponthem would ensure their continuing
obedience to the Kremlin’s
orders, should they disagree with the line of policy laid down by their
Russian masters.
If there ever was a chance of detaching the Chinese Communist
Party from its Russian allegiance, it depended upon the degree ofstrength and firmness displayed by the United States in international
affairs and in China. The greater the evidence of American appeasement of Russia, the more unlikely the Chinese Communists would be
to break away from Moscow.
If, in fact, as Marshall believed, a substantial proportionof theChinese Communists were really liberals driven into the Party by thecorruption and misgovernmentof the Kuomintang
Government, how
could they trust the United States ? Russia is near and America far
away. Russia protects her own while we have sacrificed millions ofpeople on our side for the sake of “good relations” with Moscow. Ourabandonment of the democrats ii Poland and the rest of Western
Europe, our signing away of Italian and other territory in order to
get an agreement with Russia-allof America’s futile and unnecessary sacrifices of principle and interest to Soviet demands in 1945
and 1946, must have convinced all Chinese Communists that if theybroke with Moscow they could not rely on American aid.

CHAPTERThe Struggle for

IX

Manchvria

Russia obtained from China the concessions demanded
over and above those agreed to in the Sino-Soviet Treaty,
the Chinese Communists would probably have honored fora time the Political Consultative Council Agreements reached in January and February 1945. In the truce effective January I 3 they had
specifically agreed that :HAD

The cessation of hostilities order does not prejudice militaryments of forces of the National Army into or within Manchuria
are for the purpose of restoring Chinese sovereignty.

movewhich

Russia had for months been demanding that China “co-operate”
exclusively with her in Manchuria,
this “co-operation”
to take theform of joint ownership of all the natural resources and industries.
Stalin must have calculated that China would not dare to refuse, however long she protracted the negotiations.
The silence of the Chinese
Government concerning the Red Army’s looting of Manchuria;
thelack of public protest at Russia’s refusal to let Chinese forces land in
Dairen and her other breaches of the Sino-Soviet Treaty ; America’srole in helping the Chinese Communists to win concessions from the
Chinese Government -allindicated to Russia that she would be asItsuccessful in raping Manchuria as the Japanese had been in 1931.
seemed that Russia’s Left hand, the Chinese Communists, could be
withdrawn.
Hence the Chinese Communists pledged not to interferewith the occupation of Manchuria by Nationalist forces.
The Chinese Government for its part may have had the illusion
that, in coming to terms with the Communists and agreeing to sharepower with them in a coalition government, it had sufficiently appeased Russia and would be allowed to regain actual, as distinct from
219

*

220

Last Chagzce in China

nominal, possession of Manchuria.
Or it may have hoped that by
doing exactly what the United States wanted, it could calculate on
sufficient American backing to cause the Russians to vacate Manchuria. However, my conversations with Chinese Government leaders at the time led me to believe that they might have given way to
Russia’s demands in the new “economic talks” with the Soviet Government, which followed the conclusion of the P.C.C. Agreements,
had it not been for an unforeseen occurrence.
In the middle of February the first group of American correspondents entered Manchuria.
They practically forced their way in, determined to see for themselves in spite of the embargo imposed by the
Chinese Government at Russia’s insistence. Without permission fromanybody these eight American newspapermen, one of them a woman(Charlotte
Ebner of I.N.S.) and one English correspondent, took
the train from Chinchow to Mukden. After a long and uncomfortablejourney in unheated coaches, they were immediately taken into custody by the Red Army, and locked up for fifty-two hours in the
Yamato Hotel, renamed “Intourist”
by the Russian “liberators.”
I was in Peiping at the time and there was a certain amount of discreet amusement at the idea of the U.P. correspondent, Reynolds
Packard, who was distinctly anti-Communist,
being incarcerated together with such others as Pepper Martin of the New York Post,
Lieberman of the Nmu York Times, Potter of the Baltimore Sun, andFritz Opper of the Mutual Broadcasting Company, all of whom weremore than a little inclined to sympathize with the Chinese Communists, blame the National Government for everything and believe in
Stalin’s good intentions. Lieberman and Potter had steadfastly refused to believe that the Soviet Government was responsible for theban on American correspondents in Manchuria.
Lieberman a monthor so earlier had joined with McGaffin, of the Chicago Daily News,
Spencer Davis, of the A.P., and Pulitzer-prize-winningphotographer
Frank Filan, in asking their home offices to protest to President Truman and General Marshall on the assumption that the refusal toadmit foreign correspondents into Manchuria
was the fault of theChinese Government.
If it had not been for the detention of otherswith them one could have rejoiced at an example of poetic justicewhen the Russians locked them up.
Eventually this first group of foreign correspondents was allowed

The Struggle

for Manchuria

221

out of the hotel and told they would be permitted to move around.
Touring the desolate industrial section of the city they saw American
Lend-Lease trucks loaded with looted machinery being taken away
for transshipment
to Russia. The Chinese manager of the biggest
aluminum plant showed them a penciled receipt given him by theSoviets after the place had been stripped bare. Everywhere they saw
broken walls and debris and were told by the Chinese that the Russians had taken delight in setting off demolition charges after carrying off what they wanted.
Not only had all Mukden’s heavy industries been dismantled or
destroyed, but its weaving and dyeing plants were found stripped ofall spindles, motors and dye vats. When questioned as to whether theRussians were responsible for all the ruin, the Chinese told the -\mericans that the Red :\rmy was responsible for 80 or 90 percent of thelooting but that, later on, when the Russians had taken everything
they wanted, Chinese Communists and local residents had been let in
to glean what was left.
Although
the Russians had announced a month previously thatthey were handing Mukden back to China the correspondents found
Chinese Army headquarters“like a haunted house” while Soviet
headquarters were packed with soldiers and officers and were humming with activity.
Before leaving Mukclen the American correspondents were fired atby Russian soldiers because they were not quick enough in getting
off a truck in which they thought they would be permitted to ride.
Fritz Opper said to me after he got out, “I have been through thewhole war as a correspondent, but I have never felt so nervous as I
He had been appalled at the reign of terror in Mandid in Mukden.”churia. He said to me: “What Russia is doing to China is as beastly
as the raping of a child.”
In spite of their considerably less-than-friendly
reception by the
Russians in Mukden, some Atnerican correspondents dared to go on
to Changchun and another small group went to Dairen. Meanwhile
there had been a second invasion of Manchuria by the Americanpress, and the total number there was now doubled.
The following are extracts from what they said when they got outof Manchuria into the safe haven of Nationalist China.
Since newspapers in the States published only short versions of222

Last Chance in China

the dispatches written by the Associated Press correspondents at thetime, I quote here from the fuller versions published in the Shanghai
English language press.
Richard Cushing of the A.P. reported from Tientsin on March 4:
The Soviets in Manchuria, caught off balance by the audacious
invasion of 22 news correspondents, must think the Americans havemore crust than a homemade pie.
Only the element of surprise could have enabled the coup. . . .
The Russians were startled that the Americans could enter the
Red Army-controlled
territory merely by stepping off the train. They
were still suffering from the first shock when another group of adozen correspondents arrived by the same method, bringing the total
in Mukden to ZI. A French newsman turned up later.
The Soviets must have been still frozen by surprise at the fastworking, joking Americans, when they boldly managed to slip onto
Soviet trains to drive the invasion spearheads north to Changchun
and south to Dairen.
But by now the surprise has worn off, and undoubtedly any more
foreigners showing up in Soviet territory will be in for a rough time
unless they have proper Russian papers, especially when word getsback of what the boys have been writing about.
The first wave of eight Americans including a woman, and one
British writer, had been waiting weeks to get into Manchuria to coverwhat was considered a legitimate news story within the jurisdictionof Lt. General A. C. Wedemeyer, commandmg general of the China
Theater, which includes Manchuria,
Angry at being stalled by Chinese and American red-tape, they
took the simple expedient of boarding a train bound for Mukden. . . .
The correspondents tried to sound out the Mukden commandanton whether he would permit them to travel to Changchun, the capitalof Manchuria.
He obviously was unhappy at the prospect, especiallysince his boss, Marshal Rodion Malinovsky,
Soviet Far East commandant, is there. He strongly urged them not to go, but the firstwave, spurred by a renewed wanderlust, climbed aboard a train by
night, and somehow reached the capital, where they were promptlyas happened to them at Mulcdenaetained.
...
While the first wave is still in Changchun, the second wave, sensing that the Soviets were unhappy over their presence in Mukden,
entrained for the long cold ride to Chinchow.
They were given a rousing send-off in the form of a trigger-happy
Soviet guard and his henchmen, who stopped the Chinese truck andordered all off at the point of submachineguns, firing one burst of fourshots over their heads to show that they meant business.

The Struggle
The Soviets are now stopping
for foreigners.

JOY

Manchuria

trains south of Mukden,

223
searchingOn arrival in Changchun the A.P., U.P., I.N. S., New York Times,
New York Post, Chicago Sun, Baltimore Sun and London Daily
Express correspondents received the same “frigid”
reception as in
Mukden.
A Soviet officer and eight soldiers with Tommy guns
escorted them to the “Intourist”
Hotel and interned them. This timethey spent 53 hours in captivity before being released with “limited
freedom” and a warning not to try to see or write about the Red Armyin Manchuria.
Although Manchuria was supposed to have been given
back to China, the correspondents were told that Changchun was “thefrontier” and permission to go north to Harbin could be obtained only
in Moscow.
Spencer Davis, of the A.P., wrote :Throughout
the interview with Major General Karlov, we weretreated with cold formality and forbidden to smoke in the General’spresence. We were denied use of Soviet machines for return to ourquarters, some two miles distant through snow-banked streets. For
the remainder of our stay we walked or rode “droshkies” throughthe streets where the sight of American Lend-Lease jeeps, weapon
carriers and six-by-six trucks was only too common.
The correspondents were themselves told by General Karlov that the
Red Army would quit Manchuria
no later than the Americans left
North China. What they heard in Changchun convinced them that
Russia regarded China as a Russian-American
battleground.
A few
days before their arrival at a Red Army banquet before high Soviet
officials, Marshal Malinovsky,
Commander in Chief of the Russianarmies in Manchuria, had made a speech in which he warned theUnited States that there must be no interference with Russia’s “friendship” for China, and Russia’s “efforts to help China in Manchuria.”
He had also said :China and Russia are real friends. We don’t want any country toharm this friendship, especially those people wearing white gloves andcarrying gold in their pockets. If anybody puts out a hand to interfere we will cut it off.
The Russians have come to Manchuria not for money nor banking

224

Last Chance iiz China

interests but because of ideals and friendship.
Russia helped China
early in the war while others only came in later when their own interests became involved.
The few Chirtese officials who had come to Changchun to take overthe city from the Russians were virtual prisoners. They hardly daredventure in the streets since the Soviet occupation forces warned themthat they could not guarantee their “protection.”
A short while before
Chang Hsin-fu and six other representatives of the National Government had been brutally murdered when they went to the Fushun collieries to take them over.
One of the bitterest critics of the Chinese National Government
said to me later in Shanghai that he had to admire the guts of theChinese officials in Changchun who preserved their equanimity andstayed there in spite of the constant danger of assassination by the
Red Army.
No Chinese planes could leave without Russian permission and,
when the Americans left for Peiping, Russian fighter planes “made apass” over them when engine trouble caused their return to Changchun. They spent the night at the municipal hospital under Chineseauspices to avoid being imprisoned again by the Russians, whothought they planned to “sneak into IIarbin”;
next day they took thetrain south “to avoid further misunderstanding.”
Sung Chu-hsieng,manager of the British-American
Tobacco Company in Mukden, who
had dared to speak freely to the Americans, was murdered by the
Russians a few days later.
The three American correspondents who went off to Dairen had
an even worse reception. They were given “the bum’s rush” out on
February 27 after first being locked up in the hotel and then told that
if they ventured abroad their “health” might be endangered. When,in spite of this warning, they walked in the city, a Red Army colonel
accompanied them wherever they went to make sure they didn’t see
anything that shouldn’t be seen, and didn’t talk to the wrong persons.
When they produced their China Theater credentials the Americans were told that they were no good because “Dairen is the sameas Russian soil”-thisin spite of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1945 inwhich it was specifically stated that Dairen, unlike Port Arthur, wasto remain a Chinese city and a free port.
Richard Cushing wrote :The Struggle

forManchuria

225

The Soviets finding I had vanished sent a carload of secret police
after me, and in a surprisingly
short time knocked on the door of afrightened Scandinavian family which was serving me tea. Whisked
back to headquarters, the Commandant,
beet red with rage, said he
was sorry we would have to leave; that we were going on the 2 P.M.
train, just two hours off. . . . In the train three tough guards sat facing
us and permitted no one to talk to us.
The Stars and Stn’pes correspondent had also managed to elude
his guards for a short while, so a little knowledge was gleaned concerning conditions in “liberated”
Dairen.
“Worse than under theJapanese” was what he was told by the frightened inhabitants. Someforeigners there who had been in Europe said the Russian Secret
Police were more efficient than the Gestapo, and they were mortallyafraid of being seen talking to Americans.
Soviet notes with a stamp
saying they must be accepted “under pain of punishment” were “legal
tender.”
It was also noted by the Americans that Japanese civilians werebeing treated more courteously than the Chinese in Dairen, as elsewhere in Manchuria.
Wives of Red Army men had arrived to set up
permanent housekeeping, and Dairen had not been stripped of its
The vast quantities of machineryindustrial
and port equipment.
being shipped thence to Vladivostok
had been looted from otherparts of Manchuria.
Evidently Russia intended to hold on to Dairen.
Korean ports were also used to transport the machinery, food andother goods looted from the Chinese by the Russians. It was estimated that in the short period of September to November 1945 northbound trains carried a daily average of five hundred loaded freightcars to Dairen and North Korean ports to be conveyed by Lend-Lease
Liberty Ships to Russia.
Edwin S. Pauley, the United States Reparations Commissioner,cooled his heels for weeks in Southern Korea waiting in vain for perFinally he returned
mission from the Russians to enter Manchuria.
to America.
After the damage had all been done, Mr. Pauley was permitted by
the Russians to enter Manchuria and the Russian zone in Korea. His
report on Russia’s “preventative
wrecking” has not at this date been
made public, but sufficient details were given to the press to establish
the fact that Manchuria
today contains little of the great industry

226

Last Chance in China

built up by the Japanese with Chinese labor. Russia succeeded in depriving China of the only valuable compensation she might have received for her huge losses in her eight-year war against Japan.
The treatment given them by the Russians led even the most proCommunist correspondents to change their minds and join with theothers in telling the world what was going on in Manchuria.
As
Reynolds Packard said, it was quite illogical for them to be so prejudiced by their personal experience, but it was all to the good nevertheless.
Fritz Opper gave a series of broadcasts from Shanghai and wrote
some articles so convincing and horrifyingthat even the Shmzghai
Evening Post changed its tune. The editor, Randall Gould, had previously soft-pedaled all reports and rumors about the goings-on in
Manchuria.
Just a few days before the first correspondents got to
Mukden he had written a soothing editorial saying there was nothing
to get excited about in Manchuria, * that Russia would of course honor
the treaty with China and that the Yalta agreements (made public
a little while before) were just dandy. ‘A little later he had tried tomake a joke of the treatment of the American correspondents in an
editorial, “Another Manchurian Mystery,” in which he wrote :Nine foreign newsmen now visiting Manchuria are reported enstoned in Mukden’s de luxe Yamato hotel, “under thorough Russian
protection,” but going out very little. Their seclusion is said to bedisappointing
to curious residents of the city. Just why they venture
forth so seldom is not precisely stated and there is an underlying suggestion that they are being restrained by their Soviet hosts. Yet atthe same time it is stated that they are “consuming a considerable
amount of Japanese beer to kill the long hours.”
Here we have another Manchuria mystery which ought to be gone
into. Are the correspondents actually in durance vile, forced to a desperate swilling of ex-enemy beer as their sole recourse? If so there
should be prompt action by the W.C.T.U.
or some similar temperanceorgan. Maybe it is a case for the U.N.O.
It is intolerable that ninemen of normally abstemious habits should be so literally driven to
drink.
But perhaps it is the beer which is the attraction after all. Theremay be correspondents from Chungking, whose whistles have been
dry for many a long month. Perhaps it is the availabilityof beerwhich is detaining the newshawks (or newsducks) indoors. Maybe
it is not the correspondents who are desperate, but the victimized

The Struggle

for Manchuria

227

Russians whose stock of seized Japanese property must by now berunning low.
Anyway the whole matter should be exhaustively gone into. We
suggest a rescue and investigation party. If necessary, we’re preparedto volunteer in person.
On March 6, 1946, however, the Shwzghai Evmzing Post completely reversed itself saying there was an “outrageous” situation in
Manchuria and there was “nothing funny” at all about it. “Mukden,”it quoted the Stars aped Stripes correspondent as saying, “is the victim
of one of the most scientific and thorough looting and stripping operations in history. . . and is living in a state of constant lawlessness andterror.”At long last recognizing the truth of the reports and rumors it hadformerly disregarded as merely anti-Russian propaganda the Shanghai Eve&g
Post continued :We are told that the Soviet authorities have cleaned out Mukden’svast industrial establishment, shipping hundreds of thousands of tons
Acts of violence are daily occurrences.
of machinery to Siberia.
Soviet authorities are charged with giving direct aid to the Chinese
Communists as against the National Government with whom they
are in treaty relatron. 1Znd that the National Government, whose sovereignty over Manchuria has been confirmed by Soviet Russia, is held
off from exercising any real authority whatever in Mukden.
It is a grim picture.
Neither Chinese nor any friends of China,
such as Americans, can view it without dismay. The Stars and Stripes
correspondent
additionallyportrays “tough,arrogant Red Army
troops, flushed with victory in a war they do not consider ended,”busy building a mighty arsenal in Manchuria and tightening a military and political stronghold on a vital portion of Asia. . . .
Nothing like this was contemplated by the United States at any
stage of relations with the Soviet Union. Of that we are sure. . . .
The question is, what to do? Someone had better take a strong position in more than a merely verbal way soon, unless we are willing to
put our tacit seal of approval upon a clearly outrageous situation.
This reaction was typical. For a few weeks the American press
was shocked into awareness of the real situation in the Far East. The
National Government of China ceased temporarily to be the villain of
the piece. The futile policy of silence concerning the Red Army’s looting and the Soviet Government’s
brazen disregard of the pledges it

228

Last Chance in China

had given in the Sino-Soviet Treaty was brought to an end by American correspondents, who, even if they had formerly been prejudicedin favor of Russia or the Chinese Communists, were honest reporters
who described what they had seen.
Fritz Opper, whose long residence in the disheartening atmosphereof Chungking had formerly inclined him to give the Communists thebenefit of the doubt, was now completely disillusioned and hot withindignation
at China’s treatment by Russia. “To think,” he kept on
saying back in the comparatively
free atmosphere of Nationalist
China, “to think that I used to call for a second front.”
In talking to Fritz Opper and to Phil Potter of the Baltimore Sun
in Shanghai I reflected how different a course history might havetaken if more correspondents had known the truth about the Soviet
Union sooner. For the influence of the fourth estate on i\merican
public opinion and government policy is incalculably great.
The following are extracts from what Opper wrote at the time andsaid over the radio :A five day stay here brings these conclusions :I)
The Soviet authorities have cleaned out Mukden’s vast industrial establishment and have shipped hundreds of thousands of tonsof machinery to Siberia.
2)
Mukden’s citizens are fearful of almost daily acts of violence.
3) The Soviet autlcorities have g.ive~z great irtdirect assistame to
the Chinese Cow~munists
axd trxstworthy
witnesses declare tllcy havecooperated directly, as well.
4) The Chinese Central Government has no more real authority in
M&den than it has in Moscow.
Shops are boarded up here on every street and what business isbeing conducted is chiefly confined to tiny sidewalk stalls, in mostcases handling looted Japanese knicknacks while the 8 P.~I.-6 A.M.
curfew makes Mukden’s nighttime streets deserted and dangerous.
Gunfire is heard nightly and lootinp,w theft and murder are common.
The Japanese built up a great mdustrial section on the westernoutskirts of Mukden, containing an estimated 60 percent of all Manchuria’s industries but today this is a deserted, looted area. The destruction in Tokyo and Osnku is dramatic; the destructiort isa Mukden
is more thorozlgiz
and eficierzt.
For mile after mile, factories have been denuded of machinery andtoday stand bare and gaunt. Window frames, telephones and light
fixtures went first-to
Chinese mobs that got out of hand after the
Jap surrender.

The Struggle

for Manchuria

229

Then the Soviet authorities came with trucks and Japanese prisoners of war as coolies, tore out the equipment, knocked holes in thewalls to permit the removal of bulky machines and shipped the equipment to the Soviet Union.
In some cases, demolition charges were
set off in the empty buildings;
in other cases they stand with theirfour walls and roofs only.
An engineer who was forced to participate told me the Russians
have done the same elsewhere. He said that 70-80 percent of the great
Anshan steel works have been stripped, taken to Port Arthur, Dairen
and I&-can ports and shipped to Vladivostok, some of the shipments
being carried in Russian-manned American Liberty ships.
The extent of the Soviet strippin, v is shown in the fact that some
generators have been removed from the power plant on the Yalu
River that supplied most of southern Manchuria and that today Mukden is frequently without electric lights and running water.
This latter fact also presents possibly serious complicationsforrefuse and filth is piling up in the streets here and if the present cold
weather should break and warm weather set in there is real dangerof wide-scale epidemics. Already tens of thousands of persons arereported to have died from disease in Manchuria, chiefly from typhus,and city authorities are worried.
Opper told me that he had been moved by the affection shown for
the American uniform by Chinese under the Red Terror who “halted
us to pat the China Theater shoulder emblem, and to enquire anxiously when Americans would bring Chinese forces here.” He wrote :Even the Japanese seemed glad to see us, asking when they would
be repatriated.
People speak guardedly in hlukden and are careful to ask that theirnames are not used in stories. Many refuse to be interviewed at all
and one report says that a Chinese who talked with correspondents
was later shot at his own doorstep.
This sense of uneasiness, if not outright terror, seems to affect theWhite Russian emigrants as well as the Chinese and Japanese. Infact the Nazi Germans appear to be as little affected by the Soviet
entry as any group. They are living unmolested and one eyewitness
told me he saw the Nazi flag flying over the German club for two
weeks after the Red Army arrived here.
Sergeant Dick Wilson, a young and intelligent soldier without
political prejudices, gave a vivid account in the Stars and Stripes of230

Last Chance in China

the looting and terror, and went on to supply evidence of Russia’s
co-operation with the Chinese Communists :Tough, arrogant Red Army troops, flushed with victory in a war
they do not consider ended, today are building a mighty arsenal in
Manchuria
and tightening a military and political stranglehold on avital portion of Asia.
While Russia’s dreaded secret police spreads terror throughout thisnew Soviet occupation zone, battle maneuvers are under way in thestrategic Dairen-Port
Arthur area.
From Harbin to Dairen the Russians have virtuallycompletedstripping of factories to build up Russian war industry strength and,according to the fears of competent observers, to leave no plants that
could be utilized by potential enemies should China’s northland become a battleground.
“Worse than Germany under the Nazis” and “terror rule as bad as
the Nips” are expressions used by non-party residents of this once richindustrial area in describing their life under the Russians.

1Vriting behind doors locked against imminent Russian intrusion,
we correspondents are convinced we have seen and heard enough evidence to support these conclusions :I ) The so-called Kwangtung
leased territory-the
Dairen-Port
Arthur sector of the Liaotung Peninsula-is
being transformed into
the Red Army’s Manchuria arsenal.
2) The Russians have $10 intcntiolt of Icavittg the areas they wow
hold in Manchuria u~zlcss they get costly economic and military cmcessions from Chirzn. The convictiolt is growbtg that they do not plan
to relinquish cowtrol of Dairen afld Port Arthur for any price. [Italics
in this and following paragraphs of this account are mine.]

4) The all-seeing NKVD which has held a tight rein of fear on the
Russian people since the revolution, has moved into Manchuria with
the Red Army to launch a program of espionage, intrigue and intimidation of anybody who does not see eye-to-eye with the party.
5) The Russians are completing a systematic stripping of Manchuria’s heavy industries. They are shipping materials to Russia via
Vladivostok,
using, according to reliable sources, some American
Lend-Lease Liberty ships to haul away the booty. Japanese soldiers
were forced to help in the stripping job, after which they mysteriously

The Struggle

for Manchuria

231

a damning tongue-slip by Maj.
disappeared. In&cations -including
General Andre Kovtun-Stankevitch,
Mukden commandant-arethatthey are being sent to Siberia and Russia to work for the Soviets.
6) The Russians nre cooperating with the Chinese Communists,arming thcnt and using thc~r as propaganda tools. The Russians also
are runzored to bc enlisting Jap Army oficers and technicians to create
friction between the Japs and the Chinese.
Each of these conclusions is supported by eyewitness observations
or statements from authentic sources who cannot be identified while
they live under Russian rule.
In another dispatch written
reported :in Mukden

and also published later, he

The Red Army has supplied the Eighth Route Army with weapons
and anzrnu;tition and is using the Chinese Communists as a propaganda agency and as an occupation and administrative
force in areas
already stripped by the Russians.
This was rcvralcd by capi Itred Conllllunist oficcrs and residents ofareas turn&d over to the Eighth Route Arnty after the Russians moved
on to greener pastures.
In Anshan, Fushan, Yinkou and reportedly Dairen, administrationof the cities now is in the hands of a civil government set up by theCommunists.
In all except Dairen, the cities are garrisoned by Eighth
Routers, residents revealed. . . .
Even the Chinese Commzaists
appear to be enlisting the aid of
Ja.panese. On January 10th a technical commission of the Eighth
Route Army arrived in Anshan to ask Japanese engineers to come to
Honkeiko, on the Korean border, to help the Communists build up
war industries for their own use there.
Some former .Tapa.ncse armZt oficers held in a camp north of Dnire~z
are allowed to visit their famdies over week ends, reportedly becnuse
they had promised to cooperate wSa the Russians in spreading antiChinese and anti-American
propaganda.
In Eighth Route army-held areas, anti-American
posters and slogans are appearing, and residents are convinced the Communists were
urged to spread such propaganda because the Russians-alliesof theAmericans-could
not do so. English no longer may be taught andmatter may not be printed in English.
Evidence that the Russians have armed Eighth Route army units
came from captured Communists.
In one a captain said Russian interpreters z&h his unit contacted the Soviets to secure the arms. No
Russian ever visited his unit, he said, but through interpreters
the

.

232

Last Chance in China

Russians sent them Japanese rifles, machine guns, mortars
specially-made Eighth Route uniforms.

and even

It has seemed necessary to quote at some length from these eyewitness reports, not only because the ;lmerican
public’s memory is
short concerning happenings far away, but because so many writers
ignore the evidence concerning Russia’s aggressively expansionist
policy in China.
In March on arrival back in Peking from Yenan I tried to get to
Mukden but the Marines would not permit it. General \Vorton, Chiefof Staff to General Rockey, having read some of my writings andknowing about the Russian radio and press attacks on me in Peiping
as well as Shanghai, told me I would be mad to go and that he would
not take the responsibility of giving me air transport to Chinchow.
I feared that I might be liquidated or quietly bumped off, since I
was not yet an American citizen and the Russians might think up theexcuse that since I had been married to a Soviet citizen they had theright to send me to a concentration camp or otherwise dispose of me.
I could have gambled on the local Russian commander not bothering
to find out my name or never havin, m heard it, but I knew I would betaking a chance. George 1Veller offered to come and rescue me if I
should not return in a week’s time, but I told him I had a healthy fearof the Russians and that although I wanted to see for myself what
they had done in Manchuria
I was not too sorry the Marines had
refused to let me go there.
I may have been cowardly but I have a son and, having once escapedwith him from Russia, I did not want to tempt Providence by putting
my head back into the noose.
A few weeks later, while waiting in Tientsin for the Marine plane
which was to fly me to Hawaii, I got the chance to pay a flying visit
to South Manchuria already liberated by the retreat of the Red Army.
Dr. Logan Roots, who was head of the UNRRA
medical services inNorth China, told me one evening that three Lg’s belonging to the
Army Liaison group (OSS) were leaving next morning for Chinchow. I secured permission from Colonel Kellis to be taken as a passenger, together with an English UNRRA
worker called Menzies,
who was going to Manchuria to investigate the reports of plague inthe cities evacuated by the Russians.

The Struggle

for Manchuria

233

Flying in an Lg was a thrilling experience, not to be compared totraveling in large planes. There is room for just one passenger andthe pilot and there are only a cellophane hood and windows you can
open if you wish. It was bitter cold but Colonel Kellis had lent me his
flying boots and I had a navy parka. The pilots of these “flying jeeps”
were all young volunteers who loved their work and had been specially trained to land almost anywhere and in all weathers. We flew
low over the Great Wall of China where it comes down to the sea, andI learned what it means to “buzz the town” when we arrived at ourdestination.
I felt I was really flying for the first time in my life. I
enjoyed it immensely but I hadn’t the nerve to lean ‘way out of theplane window to take photographs as Menzies did.
I spent the evening at Chinchow with the Chinese Chief of Staff,
General Chao, who took me home to dine. From him I heard further
details of what the Red Army had done, and of the difficult situationof the Chinese National forces in an area supposed to have been returned to China, but still controlled by Russia. In the morningI
walked round the town with Colonel Stewart, an Australian volunteer
in the Chinese Air Force, whom I had met earlier in Shanghai.
Heshowed me the gutted buildings left behind by the Russians as themonuments of their liberation of this Southern Manchurian town.
To me, however, the story of the Red Army in Manchuria
wasalready an old one. I had heard months before from the Chinese what
was happening.
I had old friends among the Chinese generals andministers who had taken me into their confidence and given me thedetails while the hush-hush policy was still in force. And I did notneed to learn what terror means since I had lived under it for nearly
six years in Russia.
Of course, other correspondents whom the Chinese trusted had also
known the facts long before their revelation burst like a bombshell in
the foreign press. But silence had been the official policy and silence
had been kept.
One of China’s leading generals whom I had known at the front in1938 had come to visit me in the hospital in Shanghai early in November and, trusting me as an old friend of China’s, had told me the facts
about the Manchurian situation, which were only now being revealed
to the world. Not only were the Russians removing all the machinery, they had taken away foodstuffs, cotton and even livestock. (This234

Last Chance in China

fact was subsequently confirmed to me by the UNRRA
official who
flew with me to Chinchow.)
Locomotives and rolling stock and motor vehicles had also been seized by the Red Army. There was norolling stock left for the Chinese Nationalist forces to use. Supplies
and transport
constituted the main difficulty
for the government
forces. Supplies had all to be brought from Shanghai and Tientsin byHence
ships since the Communists
had destroyed the railways.
China’s dependence on the r\merican Navy. Chinese officials who hadgone to Changchun had been confined to their quarters like prisoners
and had therefore left.
When I asked him why China kept all this a secret, he replied that
it was because they hoped to “maintain peace and have friendship”
with Russia. Diplomaticnegotiations \vere proceeding and it was
hoped that eventually Russia would honor her pledged word.
When I insisted that China gained nothing by keeping the facts
hidden, since she had no other hope than American backing, he evaded
a direct answer and said he hoped I would recover soon and go to
Peiping and Manchuria.
This I took to be tantamount to saying that
he personally agreed with me.
He went on to speak of the Communist problem which “looks likean internal one but is really external politics on account of Russia.”“Have the Russians given arms to the Communists ?” I asked.
“The Communists certainly must have received arms. There wereno Communist troops in Manchuria when the war ended. Now there
They now have some heavy artillery which they could
are 100,000.
have got only from the Russians. They are not yet powerful.
They
are organizing
and training but our progress against them is easy
because they have not yet learned how to use the arms supplied to themby the Red Army.”“But,” I said, “they can continue destroying communications andmaking reconstruction
impossible.”
He agreed and said it would be easier if the Communists met the
National forces in pitched battle.
“Do you,” I queried, “hope that Russia will order the Chinese
Communists to stop fighting?”“Do you,” he replied, “think it probable or possible? We don’t
hope for the impossible.”“Why then do you make concessions to Russia; what good can it
do you ?”The Struggle

for Manchuria

235“Well, we were obliged to make concessions to Russia in the SinoSoviet Treaty, because America had already made them at Yalta without consulting us.”
“But Russia has already broken that treaty.”“China is like a poor man. Finally there is nothing more we cangive and still live.”“Russia is acting just as Japan used to !” I exclaimed.
“Maybe even worse” was his laconic reply.
“If Manchuria is lost to us,” he went on, “the eight-year war will
have been fought for nothing.
But we still hope to regain possessionof her by peaceful means.”
He was confident that ;\merica would supply transport to enable
the Chinese Nationalist
forces to regain Manchuria.
In this he was
mistaken. America denied sea passage for the Nationalist forces into
contested ports that November, and by January it was too late since
Hulutao was frozen and Yingkow had been captured by the Chinese
Communists with the aid of Soviet tanks and artillery.
If the American
policy implementedby Generals Hurley
and\Vedemeyer at the time of Japan’s surrender had been continued the
Nationalist
forces would have been able to regain control of Manchuria. In those decisive weeks the National Government’s troops
had been rapidly moved in American planes and ships to occupy andcontrol the areas formerly in Japanese hands and to facilitate the surrender of all Japanese forces to Central Government authorities.
But
General Wedemeyer was now being attacked by the Communists inthe press and on the radio. Communist-contrived
incidents were resulting in the ambushing of United States forces and the killing ofsome Americans.
Certain officers in the State Department were placing obstacles in General Wedemeyer’s way. He found himself restricted in the use of American ships to aid the National Government,
Shipments of ammunitionand other supplies to China were soon to
be cut off by the refusal of the State Department to O.K. them. The
net result was that America gave tacit acquiescence to the Communist
occupation of Manchuria.
In Chungking, the Minister of Economics, Dr. Wong Wen-hao,whom I knew from Hankow days, had discussed the situation withme more frankly than anyone else. A man of science with a reputation for absolute honesty, he is one of the best administratorsin thegovernment.
He also had a particularly
thankless and difficult task,

,

236

Last Chance ifz China

and was typical of the unfortunate liberals caught between two fires.
He detested and distrusted Communism but he had no love for the
Chinese tycoons who made fortunes during China’s difficulties.
Henever said anything against T. V. Soong but I sensed his distrust
when he told me that he had not agreed to the “nationalization”
ofex-Japanese and puppet cotton mills in Shanghai, until he had received T.V.2 personal promise that they would be given back into
private ha+after two years. Having heard in Shanghai that one of
T.V.‘s henchmen was running the mills, I thought I understood thisIIe told me, that evening inminister’s troubles and misgivings.
Chungking, how he longed to get out of it all and once again becomea geologist.
Diminutive
in stature, very energetic, fearless, with brilliant eyes
and a plain but intensively expressive face, and even more expressive
hands, Wong Wen-hao’s gestures were eloquent of his despair in thesituation China faced. IIe said :Not only have the Russians carried off from Manchuria every bitof machinery they could move and destroyed the rest of its productive
capacity, but they are now demanding that we pay back 30,000,000
gold dollars for the arms they supplied us at the beginning of the war.
According to the contracts Sun Fo signed in 1937-1938 payment has
to be made this year in minerals and other raw materials. Of course
we calculated that we would have Manchuria back and could pay outof its resources. But Russia still occupies Manchuria and has stripped
it bare.
“Stealing ?” No, of course not, say the Russians. All property in
Manchuria
is “war booty” and theirs by right. But, they say, theSoviet Government is so friendly to China, that she wants to “sacrifice” some of her legitimate war booty for the sake of “co-operation !”Abandoning

sarcasm he continued :Malinovsky
has told us frankly that Russia is preparing for the
next war and will brook no “foreign interference” in Manchuriameaning, of course, America.
The Russians have indicated all too
plainly that they will never let us develop Manchuria into an industrial base until we break our ties with the United States. They haveactually said that until Siberia is well developed into a strong industrial and military base Manchuria must remain backward and undeveloped. That is the reason why they not only looted it but destroyed
what they could not remove.

The Struggle

for Manchuria

237“But,” they say, “if you will co-operate with us, it is the policy of
the Soviet Government to help us reconstruct China. Manchuriaisthe first field for such co-operation.”
It is the Japanese all over again; the same hypocritical talk about“co-operation” when domination is what is really meant.
But what can we do? We are poor, weak, disorganized.
We cannot fight another war. Stalin knows we cannot resist alone, that wedare not even protest. And the United States is only halfhearted inhelping us to resist Russia’s demands that we abandon the American
connection. The United States tells us to “unite” with the Communists Tvhose aim is to force China to abandon her friendshipwithAmerica and come into the Russian orbit.
The terrifying thing in the world today is this awful accumulationof power in the hands of one man. Stalin’s one aim seems to be theaccumulation of more and more force at the expense of his own people and other nations. All his policies, all his moves and actions, aim
at one thing only: the accumulation of overwhelming material force.
It is inhuman, terrible, terrifying,
not only for us but for the wholeworld.
And he threw

up his hands in a gesture of despair.

In Peiping a few weeks later General Li Tsung-jen,
one of thefamous Kwangsi generals whose agrarian and administrativereformsin their province had been as far-reaching as those of the Communists, but far less bloody, said to me :The Russians have told us, in effect, that so long as they are
hungry, we must starve, that we must wait to be fed until they aresatisfied. They have told us that they removed or destroyed all themachinery in Manchuria for the express purpose of keeping us weak.
That they will not allow us to develop Manchuria until after they
have developed Siberia. They don’t say in so many words that what
they are afraid of is the United States. It is not clear whether theymean they will not allow us to develop Manchuria under any condition
or whether they will not permit it while we are friendly with America,
whom they fear.
Russia is insatiable; she is never satisfied. This too is barbaric anduncivilized.
China has been thinking that if she herself were very
restrained Russia would begin to behave better. This has been a false
assumption. The more Stalin gets the more he wants.
Of course, Russia is bluffing, trying to get away with all she can in
preparation for the war with America which she envisages.
On the surface the Soviet Union pretends to be friendly with us.

238

Last Chance in China

She invites our officials to come to Manchuria, then interns them as“confined guests”. They just have to listen to what the Russians tellthem. If they don’t do what they are told there is a lot of unpleasantness. We have absolutely no power, even in the cities which our officials are supposed to be allowed to take over. While they stall us, theRussians are trying to create a Communist Army in Manchuria andthey have told us we had better not come to Harbin.
The brutal murder of Chang IIsiu-fu at the Ashan mines was intended as a warning to other Chinese officials. We had negotiatedwith the Russians and they had agreed to let us take over the mines.
But when our officials got there from Mukden and tried to assumeauthority they were rebuffed and had to leave. On the way back they
were brutally murdered in the train. The only ones who escaped were
two who had been so happy and excited that they got out of the train
at a wayside station on the way to Anshan to buy a Chinese flag. It
took them so long to find one that they missed the train. So theyescaped being killed with the others. The Russians pretended they
had been murdered by “300 armed bandits.” This was absurd since
the only armed forces in the vicinity were Russian, and Russianguards were on the train in which they were killed.
Of course, we want American correspondents in Manchuria, butthey create a grave problem for us. They will not be allowed full liberty and Russia will only increase her pressure on China if we letthem in. American officials have all along known what was happening in Manchuria even if the American public had no information.
So
it can’t help LIS much for the American public to be informed andRussia will only make it harder for us.
Of what use is it to protest, since we are weak? Some incidents of
the Russian outrages on the common people of Manchuria have beenreported in our press. Protests are unavailing.
When we protested
at the wholesale raping and robbing by the Red Army, the Soviet
Commander replied that his troops were “very tired”; that they had
worked and fought so hard that they were entitled to “a little relaxation.” Thus, in Russian eyes they should not properly be blamed
for taking our women off the streets, raping them and, when they
were through with them, forcing their families to pay a ransom to
get them back !
As regards the looting, the Russians would first go to a factory or
warehouse and remove everything of real value. Then they would
spread rumors to encourage the mob to come in and take what wasleft. Russian photographers would be at hand to take pictures so thatthey could say afterward that it was the Chinese who had done thelooting.
The Russians regard everything in Manchuria as “war booty” belonging to them. Yet Russia risked little or nothing in the PacificThe Struggle

for Manchuria

239

war. She entered it when it was already over. And Russia defeated
Germany only because of the Second Front and Lend-Lease.
Without this she would not have been so successful. By what right can she
claim priority in seizing everything as her war booty? We fought
Japan for eight years.
The idea of letting sleeping dogs lie is not good. Look at what happened in the past. In 1931 Japan was not strong, nor was Italy when
she attacked Abyssinia.
Now Russia is following the same path. Will
the world again wait until it is too late to avoid war?
Equally, the American correspondents’ “invasion” of Manchuria
was an advantage to China. It was instrumental in causing the Communists to renew the civil war, but it led to at least a temporary stiffening in the United States’ attitude toward Russia. The UnitedStates continued to strengthen Stalin’s Left hand by insistingon“unity” in China, but at least Russia was unable any longer to bludgeon China with both hands, once the United States had protested heractions in Manchuria.
An incautious remark made by Major General Kovtoun-Stankevitch to the American correspondents who got to Changchun put thefat in the fire. He had said that the Russian “evacuation” of industrial equipment from Manchuria had been agreed to by the Big Three.
Coming on the heels of the revelation to the Chinese public on February that President Roosevelt had agreed at Yalta to give concessions to Russia in Manchuria -a disclosure which had caused much
popular indignation-thisRussian assertion had to be squashed,if even the patient Chinese were not to lose all faith in the UnitedStates.
On March I the State Department made a declaration denying that
Russia had any right under any allied agreement to remove machineryfrom Manchuria ; and saying that the U. S. Government “does not
accept any interpretationof ‘war booty’ to include industrial enterprises or components thereof such as Japanese industry and equipment
in Manchuria.”
The U. S. Navy at the same time protested the Soviet
Union’s attacks on its planes which had occurred ten days before but
had not been revealed to the American public. A few days earlier
Byrnes in a speech to the Overseas Press Club in New York had given
the first indications that the United States was abandoning its appeasement of Russia, and had given China some comfort by stating

240

Last Chance in Chinathat “no power has a right to help itself to alleged enemy properties
in liberated or ex-satellite communities before a reparation settlement
has been agreed upon by the allies.”
The Chinese Government
could no longer prevent an “official
crisis.” Even if it had wanted to give Russia what she asked for in
Manchuria in order to prevent a recurrence of civil war this was nolonger politically possible. The Chinese public had been roused tobitter protest. Vast student demonstrations
occurred in Chungking,Shanghai and other large cities demanding that Russia quit Manchuria. The Communists, of course, said that these demonstrations
This was manifestly untrue. The
were organized by the government.
demonstrations were the largest any correspondent had seen since theold days before the Sino-Japanese War, too large to be so inspired,
and the government did its best to allay popular indignationon account of its fear of Russia. It was caught in much the same dilemma
as in the years 1931 to 1937 when public opinion demanded strong
action against Japan’s continual aggressive acts which those in responsible positions dared not take. The situation now was even moredifficult for the unhappy Chinese Government.
How could it either
resist Russia or tell its people that after eight years of war with Japanfull sovereignty and control over Manchuria could not be regained?
K. C. Wu, the Minister of Information,
was found almost in tears
in his office by one of the American correspondents on the clay of thebig demonstration.
I-Ie was fearful that it would only cause Russia to
hit China harder. As he had said to me privately a month before:“We casz’t face another war. We can’t again fight for years alone.
We must give way to Russia unless the United States is ready to fightor take a strong stand against her.” He had hastened to add that hedid not blame President Truman and understood his position. The
American people were not ready to take a stand against Russia. The
American soldiers all wanted to go home.
The weak can least afford to be meek and turn the other cheek wheninjured.
China’s one hope was to let the American people know thefacts. She benefited not at all from “behind-the-curtain”
diplomacy
and some of us strongly suspected that the United States was largely
responsible for the hush-hush about Russia.
General Marshall certainly gave this impression, for he always refused to say a word when questioned about Manchuria even in off-the-The Struggle

for Manchuria

241

record press conferences. Once, when Steele, and George Moorad of
C.B.S. had both pressed him hard for an answer, he went into a long
dissertation concerning Russia’s peculiar conception of what constituted “spoils of war,” but said nothing which could have offended theRussians if they had been there.
‘Averill Harriman,
passing through Chungking
on his way to
Washington
from Moscow, assumed such a mask of ignorance that
he denied even knowing anything about the grant of the Kuriles to
Russia, two days after the Moscow radio had announced this additional secret Yalta concession. To see, hear and speak no evil was
still American policy.
The perfect synchronizationof Russia’s moves and those of theChinese Communists was displayed when the Communists at the endof February broke the truce and tried to take and hold possession ofManchuria.
America’s protests had made it advisable for Stalin towithdraw the Red Army without having succeeded in extorting from
China the concessions which would have concerted Manchuria into an
exclusive Russian sphere. But in withdrawing
his Right hand, Stalincalled upon his Left, the Chinese Communists, to take on the job of
keeping Manchuria safe for Communism.

CHAPTER

Why MarshallX

Failedit became clear that the Political
Consultative Council
Agreements were not worth the paper they were written on,
it was the liberals who reaped the whirlwind.
Although0
many of them had doubted the good faith of the Communists and thewisdom of the concessions made to them in the hope of peace, the liberals were America’s friends, and it was America who had insisted on
concessions to the Communists and to Russia.
The Right Wing of the Kuomintang,which had never believedthat the Communist problem could be settled by political means, now
assumed the ascendancy in the government’s
councils. “Look,” theconservatives said in effect, “we let you go ahead and try to win internal peace by concessions to Russia and to the Chinese Communists
according to American advice. Your policy is utterly discredited.
The civil war has been resumed, Manchuria is still not regained, andyou have not even got an American loan.”
The revelation concerning Russia’s looting of Manchuria, and thesimultaneous
publication of the terms of the secret Yalta deal at
China’s expense further discredited the liberals. As the New York
Tinzcs justly remarked on February 28, 1946, “the net result ofRussia’s current actions in Manchuria
is to strengthen the reactionaries in Chungking and to reduce the prospect that there will be internal peace in China.” It failed, however, to recognize that this was
also the effect of American policy.
On February 25, 1946, eight members of the Control Yuan, thehighest supervisory organ of the Chinese Government, publicly declared that the Yalta agreements “violated China’s sovereignty andterritorial
integrity to a greater extent than Japan’s demands clamped
down on China after the Mukden incident ( 1931 ).”Prior to 1937, it had been the Left which cried “traitor”
at themembers of the government responsible for trying to avoid or post242
NCE

Why Marshall

Failed243

pone war with Japan. Now the Right cried “traitor”
at those who
had tried to make a deal with the Russian aggressor. At the Plenary
Session of the Central Executive Committee held in March 1946,
Right Wing members of the Kuomintang
proposed expulsion fromthe Party of four of the negotiators in the “unity talks.” Foreign Minister Wang Shill-chieh, Chang Chun, Governor of Szechwan who had
led the Government team in the P.C.C. negotiations,Shao Li-tse,
secretary-generalof the Kuomintang,
and the “Christian
General”
Feng Yu-hsiang, were all accused of “disloyalty.”
Wang Shill-chieh
was also under fire for his secret diplomacy regarding Manchuria.
The attack was led by veteran Kuomintang
diplomatic, military andpolitical members, who said that to keep foreign relations secret was a“gross mistake.” The men who held this view were by no means all
reactionaries or conservatives.
They were a miscellaneous groupunited by their concern with the Russian menace to China’s sovereignty, and the belief that silence and appeasement would not remove it.
Bitter attacks on the financial and economic policies of the government also tended to discredit the liberals, since T. V. Soong as President of the Executive Yuan was held responsible for the inflation,
graft, misgovernment
and ever worsening economic conditions.
Thefact that T. V. Soong was as much disliked by the reformist and liberal “Political Science group” as by the conservatives did not help theformer. T.V. had signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty; T.V. was responsible for the nation’s finances; T.V. was highly regarded in the UnitedStates and considered a liberal.
The liberals or Westernizers were
therefore held responsible for his failures and bore the onus of his
unpopularity in all camps.
Chiang Kai-shek, in his address on March I, did his best to prevent
his party from responding to the Communist breaking of pledges byrefusing to implement the P.C.C. Agreements.
“Let us of the Party
first be sincere and have trust,” he said. “I feel sure that such qualities will exert an influence on other parties and encourage growth ofmutual trust, thus facilitating
the task of National reconstruction.”
The tide was too strong for him. The belief was growing that it
was futile to honor agreements continually broken by the Communists. The latter had asked for war; they should have it, despite
American pressure for peace at any price in China.

244

Last Chance in China

By April 1946 the civil war was again in full swing. While truce
teams still flew out to various battlefields in North China from the
Executive Headquarters established by General Marshall in Peiping,
the armed struggle for possession of Manchuria raged unchecked.
The Chinese Communists, who are apt at confusing issues, and
who for so long enjoyed priority in the American press in stating theircase, have represented the renewal of civil war as the government’s
responsibility.
They say that the Communists broke the truce only
after the Kuomintang
Congress had refused to implement the P.C.C.
Agreements.
The facts of the case are against them as a little consideration of dates will show.
The Communists
had started taking over Manchuria before the
Plenary Session of the Kuomintang
Central Committee which temporarily established the ascendance of the “reactionaries.”
They had,in fact, been busy infiltrating
their armed forces into the Northeast
before the Red Army evacuated Mukden and Changchun at the endof February.
(See Chapters III and IX.)
Russia, as we have seen, completely ignored the Sino-Soviet Treaty
in which she had promised to give “moral support and military supplies” only to the National Government in China. It had long beenan open secret that she was supplyin, w the Communists with captured
Japanese, Russian and American Lend-Lease arms. The Americancorrespondents who penetrated the Iron Curtain to enter Manchuria
in February 1946 had brought back informationthat advance guardsof the Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army had reached Mukden
as early as September 1945, and that there were thousands of Chinese
Communists in the city performing police duties.
As Russia’s armies finally withdrew
northward
from the lands
they had ravished, they handed over the towns to the Chinese Communists.
The Chinese garrisons installed by the Russians were reinforced by “Union Communists” -Korean,
Japanese and Chinese
exiles trained in Russia-by
Russian “volunteers” and a considerable
force of Japanese given the chance of fighting as an alternative to a
Russian concentration camp.
The Chinese Government, still adhering to its futile policy of hiding
the evidence of Russia’s support of the Chinese Communists, kept
silent. Some of the Nationalist generals were both more indiscreet
and more intelligent than the Chinese Foreign Office. George Weller

Why Marshall

Failed24.5

reported from Mukden on May 6, 1946, that he had been shown acaptured document revealing a secret agreement between the SovietHigh Command and the Chinese Communists.
Accordingto this agreement, the Soviets had pledged to assign
5,000 men and officers to help the Eighth Route (Communists)
Armywith technical aid and also to leave a few army technicians behinddisguised as White Russians. These technicians were to supply explosives and train the Communists how best to smash up the TientsinShanhaikwan railroad guarded by U. S. Marines. The Soviets had
also undertaken to supply twenty armed patrol boats to “monitor”
ship traffic entering the sea between Chefoo and Dairen “with especialreference to American Navy transports bringing Chinese Nationalist
forces” en route to Manchuria.
The date on which Chinese Communists pledged to begin “the joint
defense of Manchuria”
and to “subordinate the Eighth Route Armyto the Russian Command during the period of their joint occupation”
was January r9-ninedays after they had signed the truce agreementin Chungking, and at the very time when the Communists in Chungking had evidently persuaded General Marshall of their current desire
to end the civil war and help establish a united, “democratic China.”
Apocryphal
or not, the course of events demonstrated that somesuch agreement undoubtedly
existed. The Russians evidently gavea great deal more military aid to the Chinese Communists than thatprovided for in the agreement which the Chinese Government claims
to have found. According to Alsop’s column of May 20, 1946, intelligence had reached Washington
that ten percent of all casualties on
the Communist side in Manchuria were Russian soldiers.
For a few weeks after they broke the truce in February 1946, it
seemed that the Communists would be able to hold Manchuria against
the National Government forces. They had every advantage of position and numbers, and their enemies were hampered by Russia’s ban
on China’s use of her own port at Dairen and the railway leadingfrom it. As it turned out, the Communists had vastly overestimatedtheir own military capacities. The high-pressure advertisingin theAmerican press of the Communist armies’ prowess against the Japanese may have distorted even the Kremlin’s judgment, but it could
not stop the victorious advance of China’s National ‘Army in Manchuria.

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Last Chance in China

When the devil is sick the devil a monk would be. As soon as theyfound that they would be crushed unless saved by yet another “truce,”
the Communists once again proclaimed their desire for “peace andunity.” Once again they reverted to the tactics of advocating democthey wantedracy in order to destroy it. Having failed militarily
another breathing space; another opportunity
to get in a position tobore from within a coalition government or time to be trained by their
Russian instructors in the use of the arms given them by the Red
Army.
Confident that if they cried “Uncle,” America would once
the Communists in Manchuria
again save them from annihilation,
announced in May: “It is up to Chiang Kai-shek to yield to Marshalland negotiate.”
They did not appeal in vain. The worthlessness of Communist
or truces, and the Commupromises, agreements, “compromises”
nists’ co-operation with Moscow had been amply demonstrated by
the course of events. Their tactics and the purpose behind them were
perfectly obvious. Yet the United States was still ready to do business at the old stand.
As soon as General Marshall returned from Washington
in MayHe did not
he began urging both sides to “cease fire” in Manchuria.
denounce the Communists for wrecking the truce according to which
they had agreed to the National Government taking over Manchuria
unopposed.
Instead he blamed both sides and urged the National
Government to let the Communists keep the parts of Manchuria they
held, by agreeing to let the truce teams operate there as well as inNorth China. Although the Communists refused even to discuss conditions until after an “unconditional
truce,” although they rejected a
National Government proposal that the American officer on each truce
team should have the power to break deadlocks, General Marshallcontinued to exert pressure on Chiang Kai-shek to halt his offensive.
The United States was still, in effect, favoring the Communists bybeing “impartial”
between the National Government which had observed the terms of the truce, and the Communists who had openly
violated them. As usual, pressure was exerted on America’s friends
instead of on Russia’s agents.
China desperately needed our credits and technical aid to halt theprocess of economic decay which breeds Communism.
We continued
to refuse her such aid until such time as her government should cometo terms with those who profited by her distress.

Why Marshall

Failed247

The “veto” credits to China still held. The Communists who had
publicly announced that they did not want an American loan made toChina, were still to be assisted by America to blackmail the National
Government in the interests of Soviet Russia.
On June 28, 1746, Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson madea statement on China in which he said that America was “impartial”
and stated that “too much stress cannot be laid on the hope of thisGovernment that our economic assistance be carried out in China
through the medium of a government fully and fairly representativeof all important
Chinese political elements, including
the Chinese
Communists.”
Acting as if the truce had never been broken and the plan for theamalgamationof the Nationalist
and Communist armies was stillpracticable, General Marshall next agreed to a Communist request to
have American officers assigned to train this army. Sixty-nine UnitedStates officers were actually detailed for this duty although most ofthem were marooned in Shanghai waiting for a lull in the civil war
to enable them to get to their stations. Four hundred tons of American equipment were earmarked for this training program.
One recalls Stalin’s words in 1939 concerning Anglo-Frenchappeasement of Nazi Germany and Japan: “Incredible but true.”
The projected American aid to the Chinese Communists was themore difficult to understand in view of the fact that by this time
Communisthostility
to the United States was no longer hidden.
Formerly they had relied on America to exert sufficient pressure on
the National Government to establish them in as strong a position in
China as the Communists hold in France. Once it became clear that
America either would not, or could not, give them the degree ofpower they demanded, they started anti-American
demonstrations ;they accused the United States of “propagating
civil war” and demanded the withdrawalof all American armed forces from China.
After refusing the National Government’s
proposal to let General
Marshall have the supreme arbitration
power to settle the basic issues in dispute, the Communists let loose a virulent campaign to discredit America and arouse popular hatred against her. On July 7,
1746, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party statedthat “the only difference between American and Japanese imperialismis that American imperialism is stronger and its aggressive methods
appear civilized and legal on the surface.”

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Last Chance in China

Nor did the Communists confine their anti-American
campaign towords. Some marines were shot and wounded and others temporarily imprisoned in North China.
Nevertheless, the United States continued to advise the Chinese toadmit the Communists to a share of power. True that Dean Acheson
intimated on June 28 that aid to China “to forestall a financial andeconomic breakdown might have to be given prior to the achievementof unity,” but he also reaffirmed President Truman’s December declaration of policy.
When the November 1946 Commercial Treaty between the UnitedStates and China was signed, a spokesman of the State Department
hastened to assure the American public that this did not signify support for the Government of Chiang Kai-shek.
Had Chiang Kai-shek given way to American pressure for anothertruce prior to June 6, the Communists might well have succeeded at
this early date in establishing a “Northeast
Liberated Area” : aRussian puppet state to replace Japan’s Manchukuo, and to be similarly used as an industrial and military base from which to launch new
attacks on China and, when the time came, on us.
Chiang had the courage and independence to disregard American“advice” and go ahead until he had re-established Chinese soverHe saw that the potential
eignty over the greater part of Manchuria.
half-billion-dollar
loan from the United States, denied to him unlesshe came to terms with Moscow’s agents, was nothing compared to thevast resources of China’s own Northeast, which would be lost if heacceded to General Marshall’s demands.
Chiang agreed to give the Communists another chance “to demonstrate the good faith of their intentions to carry out the agreement
they signed” only after the National forces had arrived at the gates ofthe part-Russian city of Harbin.
There is little doubt that what the
New York I’imes correspondent in Nanking called “the threat of a
sharper clash of international
interests” was the factor which General
Marshall stressed when he finally persuaded Chiang Kai-shek to agree
to another armistice on June 6, 1946.
On July 20, 1946, Chiang Kai-shek once again announced his desire to settle the Communist problem by political means, and said thatin spite of the fact that the Communists had broken the Political Consultative Council Agreements the government was still

prep
to

Why Marsha& Failed

249

carry them out. The National Government would be broadened by
the inclusion of men from all walks of life, and a National Congress
would be convened on November 12, 1946, to draft a new constitution, if, this time, the Communists would observe the terms of thetruce.
The second truce was even less effective than the first. Fighting
never stopped and Executive Headquarters in Peiping served mainly
to provide free and convenient air transport to both Communists
and Nationalists to the various “fronts.”
The truce teams occasionally quenched the fires in one place only to see them break out in
another. By August they were beginning to find themselves caught
between two fires and several Americans were killed or wounded.
The successive “truces” arranged by General Marshall were like
patches on running sores. New abscesses were continually appearing
on the ravaged body of China. The civil war ceased temporarily
inone place only to break out in another. The Communists continued
to destroy railways, mines and industries.
Inflation proceeded unchecked. Channels of trade continued blocked. The number of thedestitute and starving increased. Economic decay and despair drove
more and more bewildered souls into the ranks of the Communists.
In the fall of 1946 the Nationalist forces seemed to be well on their
way to crush the Communists and reunite China. Everywhere theywent the Communists broke or faded away, thus finally dispelling theold myth of their fighting prowess against the Japanese. Some of the
Nationalist forces had been armed and trained by the ‘Americans, but
by no means all. Generally speaking, they cannot have been as formidable an army as the Japanese. Yet the Communists hardly everstood to fight even though in possession of the arms Russia had supplied them with.
In the fall of 1946 when the Communists had been driven to thenorth of Manchuria and government forces had recaptured Kalganand other strategic points in North China, Chiang Kai-shek once
again halted military operations in a final effort to settle the conflictby political concessions. In October he welcomed Chou En-lai arriving in Nanking for peace talks ; and on November 8, following a twoday series of conferences with General Marshall and United States
Ambassador Leighton Stuart, the Generalissimo ordered all government troops to cease fire at the height of almost year-long government

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Last Chance B China

successes. Once again the Communists
were invited to attend the
National
Assembly about to open in Nanking.
Once again they
were offered positions in a coalition government.
And once again they
were given the opportunity to show that their democratic pretensions
were sincere.
The Communists refused the offer with abuse and the civil war continued. Nevertheless, Chiang Kai-shek threw his weight behind theliberals in the National Assembly to insure approval of a democratic
constitution.
Although America had done little to help him acquire
the necessary strength to oppose the reactionaries, the Nationalist
victories over the Communists had strengthened Chiang Kai-shek’s
hands sufficiently to allow him at least to start trying to establish ademocratic form of government.
The routing of the Communists in 1946 could not, however, give
China peace. They remained to harass communications,wage guerrilla warfare and render reconstruction
impossible, until such timeas they could once again mount a military
offensive. Time was on
their side since Russia was behind them, and America’s support of the
National Government was grudging and uncertain.
Of what use to advance into one province to crush the Communist
forces since they never stayed to fight but faded away and began
their depredations in another place ? And the cost of maintaining andmoving Nationalist
armies to chase after them is so high that theovertaxed
and ruined peasantry finds relief only by joining theCommunist
forces, while the whole economy is stagnant or decays
under the strain of continual civil war. Unless and until the Government of China should become “friendly” to Russia the Chinese Communists would continue to tear the country to pieces.
Destruction is easy and reconstruction difficult. The Communists,
caring nothing for the welfare of China as a whole, are in the happy
position of being able to increase their strength through destroying
the livelihood of the people. But the government’s very existence depends on its ability to restore law and order, rebuild communications
and get the economy in working order.
Chiang Kai-shek continued to offer peace, but now only on condition that the Communists evacuate the railway lines and strategic centers. Chiang had not completely given way to the members of his
government who had all along advocated solution of the Communist
problem by force. But he was determined to clear the railways andWhy Marshall

Failed251

make possible some economic rehabilitation.
He had no choice forthe economic situation had become so desperate that his government
would lose all authority and China lapse into complete anarchy unless some order were restored.
Moreover, even though American
public opinion was still confused or indifferent about China, the conflict between America and Russia was by now openly displayed before the eyes of the world at the Paris Conferences and in the United
Nations meetings. Whereas in the years preceding the Sino-Japanese IVar the most inveterate optimist in China could see no hope ofAmerican support being forthcoming in the near future, in 1946 there
was hope that the United States might give aid to resist Russian
domination of the world in time to save China.
Chiang Kai-shek could believe that if he and his exhausted people
held on just a little longer, they would not have to submit to Communist or Russian domination.
The Marines remained in North China “because of the predatory
policy of Soviet Russia,” as the Army and Navy Bulletin expressed
it on August 24, 1946. Surplus army stores were sold cheaply to theChinese Government.
Just enough help and encouragement were still
given to China to keep her from following the line of least resistanceand entering Russia’s sphere in despair.
By the late summer of 1946 General Marshall was already beginning to admit the failure of his mission. But neither he nor theUnited States administration
could admit they had wrongly diagnosed the disease which was wasting China away. Dr. Marshall continued to prescribe more of the same mixture as before. In December
1946 President Truman issued another statement on China practically identical with the one he had issued a year previously.
China
was still told she must be cured of her disease before we would help
her. “Unity” was still insisted upon as the sine qua nolz of American
financial aid long after it was apparent that submission to Moscow
was the price of internal peace.
Although the American people had begun to wake up from their
dream of one world, happy and peaceful, to be established by “trusting” the Soviet Union and allowing it to wreak its will on its weakneighbors ; although in Europe we had begun to say, “thus far and nofarther,” in the Far East the same self-defeating, face-saving policy
was not only continued but intensified.
From European experiences we had observed that coalitions which

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Last Chance in China

include Communists can never establish ‘democratic government ; thatsuch coalitions simply enable Moscow’s agents to insert the wedge forsecuring their own despotic power. But this lesson, learned by what
the Chinese call the hardship of error, was not applied in China. In
China we continued to believe, or to pretend, that the Communists
are liberals anxious only to reform China along democratic lines andowing no allegiance to Moscow.
General Marshall continued to insist that “unity” could be achieved
long after it was demonstrated that the Communists would never besatisfied short of a predominant position in China. He himself cannot be blamed unless one considers that it was his duty to resign inprotest of the dangerous futility of the policy he was ordered to implement. Had he done so there is little doubt that his enormous prestige
in America would have caused a change in United States policy. But
he seems to have believed that the Chinese Communists could be“weaned away” from Russia. Either Chou En-lai’s blandishmentsor the influence of the Stilwell school in the State and War Departments, or his own loyalty to the late President Roosevelt’s peculiar
view of Communism, prevented General Marshall from facing up to
the realities of the situation.
Like the State Department’s Far Eastern Division headed by John
Carter Vincent, General Marshall continued to act on the assumption
either that the Chinese Communists were not under Moscow’s orders,or that they could be detached from their Russian allegiance.
One of General Marshall’s aides in Chungking assured me withcharming naivete that the Chinese Communists, being Chinese, andtherefore individualists,
were “different”
and could be relied upon
never to establish a totalitarian tyranny on the Soviet model.
One also heard the argument that the stronger their position in
China, the less the Communists needed to depend on outside support ;the more responsibility
they acquired within China, the less theywould be inclined to put Russia’s interests above China’s national
interest.
The more extreme form of the argument used by the protagonistsof the Chinese Communists in the State Department ran something
like this :A Chinese Communist-dominatedto America for capital and would

government would have to turntherefore not disturb capitalist

Why Marshall

Failed253

property relations. The Russians would have to accept a certain degree of orientation
toward the United States on the part of theChinese Communists since this would inevitably result from the aid
and influence flowing to China from the United States.
The State Department“experts,” who argued that the Russians
would have much to gain if the situation in China were stabilized,
since they would have an opportunity
to compete on equal terms,
showed an equal ignorance of the nature of Communism, East or
West.
When General Marshall finally left China and drew the remaining
United States forces out after him, America’s Far Eastern policy wasleft suspended in the air while the new Secretary of State concentrated his attentions on Europe. The alarms and excursions, discussions, negotiations,accusations and counteraccusationsof the warof words with Russia in Europe caused most Americans to forget allabout Marshall’s signal failure in China.
It is as yet too soon to say whether his China experience taught
General Marshall a lesson in Communist strategy and aims which willsave him from a similar failure in Europe. Certainly in Moscow it
took him only weeks, as against months in China, to learn that you
can’t get an agreement with Communists by just talking to them. But
it is too soon to say that the United States has definitely abandoned
appeasement even in Europe.
As regards China, General Marshall continued to act either as if
he had learned little from the course of events in Europe and from histhirteen months of futile endeavor to mediate the civil war; or as if
America had decided to put no obstacles in the way of China’s being
dragged behind the Iron Curtain.
On leaving China he did not admit that his failure was due to a mistaken policy. His parting statement, issued on January 7, 1947, waspredicated on two premises which events all over the world have disproved : that a coalition government including Communists is the way
to establish democracy and peace, and that those who oppose the appeasement of Communists at home or abroad are “reactionaries.”
Explaining his failure he said :On the side of the National Government . . . there is a dou&mnt
group of reactionaries who have been opposed, in my o/%zion, to almost every eflort I have made to ilzfluence the formation of a genuine
coalition Government.

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Last Chance in China

These “reactionaries,” complained the present United States Secretary of State, “were quite frank in publicly stating their belief that cooperation by the Chinese Communist Party in the government wasinconceivable and that only a policy of force could definitely settle theissue.”
One wonders whether, a few months later, in his negotiations with
Molotov in Moscow, Secretary Marshall still believed that only “reactionaries” find it impossible to “co-operate” with Communists.
Marshall admitted in this same statement that the “dyed-in-thewool Communists” were equally to blame for the continuing civil war
and went so far as to admit that :. . . they do not hesitate at the most drastic measures to gain theirend as, for instance, the destruction of communications
in order towreck the economy of China and produce a situation that would facilitate the overthrow or collapse of the government, without any regard
to the immediate suffering of the people involved.
He further complained of the “provocative”
Communists, saying that :propagandaof thein the deliberate misrepresentation
and abuse of the actionpoii&
and purposes of our government this propaganda has bee;
without regard for the truth, without any regard whatsoever for thefacts, and has given plain evidence of a determined purpose to mislead
the Chinese people and the world and to arouse a bitter hatred ofAmericans.
Lastly Marshall testified to the fact that the National
had honored the P.C.C. Agreements.
He said:Government

In fact, the National Assembly has adopted a democratic constitution which in all major respects is in accordance with the principles
laid down by the all-party Political Consultative Council. . . . It is unfortunate that the Communists did not see fit to participate in the Assembly, since the constitution that has been adopted seems to include
every major point that they wanted.
Secretary of State Marshall, however, failed to draw any lesson
from the facts he stated. He apparently still clung to the illusion that
the Communist Party is just an ordinary political party composed ofWhy Marshall

Failedmen of varying views. The rest of his statement was obviouslyon this fallacy and his consequent belief that the Communists
be detached from their allegiance to Stalin. For he said :

25.5
based
could

On the side of the Chinese Communist party, are, I believe, liberals
as well as radicals, though this view is vigorously opposed by many
who believe that the Chinese Communist Party discipline is too rigidly
enforced to admit of such differences of viewpoint.
Nevertheless, it
has appeared to me that there is a definite liberal group among theCommunists, especially of youn, = men who have turned to the Communists in disgust at the corruption
evident in the local governwho would put the interest of the Chinese people abovements -menruthless measures to establish a Communist ideology in the immediate future.
Since he refused to listen to those whose experience or study had
taught them that Communist Parties allow no opposition or liberal
backsliding, it was not surprising that General Marshall still “hoped”
that “the door will remain open” for the Communists to participate
in a coalition government.
Shortly after my return to the United States, Chen Chill-mai at the
Chinese Embassy, who had returned from a visit to Switzerland andFrance, said to me :Well, bad as things are in China it is worse in France. In France
the Communists
have obtained a dominant position in the whole
economy of the country through their control of the trade unions,and they also have the whip hand over the government through theministries they occupy. They have veto power over the whole ofFrance. It seems to me a little better in China since the Communists
are not in the Government.
Better to let them control some territories in China than admit them into a coalition governmentasAmerica desires.
Yet it seemed that the United States was determined to force China
to become a second France if not a second Poland.
Had it not been for the extraordinary
patience of Chiang Kai-shek
and his unswerving loyalty to the United States and the WesternWorld, China would long since have been driven, in despair, to enter
Russia’s totalitarian
orbit. The odds against China’s development on
democratic lines, and against her ever being able to become united,

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Last Chance in China

strong, free and independent, were rendered impossibly long by
America’s policy of giving aid and comfort to the Communists andof rescuing them by a new truce each time they broke the previous one
and subsequently found themselves in danger of liquidation.
It wasin fact something of a miracle that the Chinese Government did notsay, “What’s the use? Even our American friends are pushing us
into Russia’s arms. The only way we can get peace is to give in to
Stalin and be friendly.”
The tragedy of the situation lay also in the fact that the UnitedStates could have used its influence and its pressures to aid the liberals
Instead of insisting on a unity
in China instead of the Communists.
which could never be achieved without Stalin’s permission, America
could have urged and assisted Chaing Kai-shek to replace the corrupt
and reactionary elements in his government by liberals and efficientadministrators.
Loans and technical assistance could have been given
or withheld, not as a lever to hoist the Communists into a coalition
government, but to bring about democratic administrativereforms
and to cure abuses. We could have helped the liberal-minded
elements in the Kuomintang
to win the ascendancy, instead of ruining
them through their identification with our own discredited policy. Ina word, our criterion for a democrat should not have been the degreeof his friendliness to Communists or willingness to yield ground toan armed Communist.
It should have been opposition to all forms of
totalitarianism,
a willingness and ability to reform China along democratic lines.
Like the die-hard isolationists in the United States, the reactionaries in China gained strength through the barrenness of a victory
which had merely substituted one totalitarian
menace for another.
They themselves might not go so far as to say that it would have been
better for China never to have fought than to come out devastated,torn by civil war , threatened by Russian, in place of Japanese, domination. The people of Manchuria had no doubt that Russian tyranny
would be even worse than Japanese, and said so.
It could be argued that China’s loyalty to the Western democracies
had been but poorly rewarded.
At Yalta President Roosevelt had
given away Chinese resources to Russia without consulting China andput Russia into a strategic position in Manchuria from which to conquer the whole of China. Since V-J Day the United States had bent
its efforts to make of China what John Carter Vincent, Director of theWhy Marshall

Failed257

Far Eastern office in the State Department, called “a buffer, or abridge, in America’s
relations with the Soviet Union in the Far
East.” To be a buffer between two express trains is not an enviable
position. Although the “reactionaries”
in China and the former socalled pro-Japanese elements had not joined hands with the “liberals”
of the Sun Fo school, they very well might have if America refused
sufficient support to China to enable her to resist Russia.
Sun Fo and his group had always argued that China could makea better bargain for herself by being friendly with Russia than byclinging to the American connection. Wang Ching-wei, who became
Japan’s puppet in 1939, had once been the main ally of the Corn- ’munists inside the Kuomintang,siding with them against ChiangKai-shek in the stormy year of 1927. He had changed sides always
according to his calculation of relative strength. Why should not atleast some of the reactionaries who had opposed war with Japan in1937 similarly advocate appeasement of Russia? It would be only
logical since now, as then, China was too weak to fight, and the support of the West was uncertain.
Even Japan’s collaborators would have no need to fear that Stalinwould refuse to clasp their hands if he got the chance. Was not Soviet
Russia in Europe taking the line that anyone who was anti-American
was a friend, whatever his past, and did she not welcome even exNazis into the Communist Party ? Stalin was obviously willing toaccept the most reactionary elements as friends against the liberals
and socialists in Europe. In Manchuria the Communists were enlisting Japanese to fight the Chinese Nationalists.
Obviously the Chineseconservatives would have nothing to fear if they switched over to apolicy of Sino-Soviet collaboration.
Americans were left in unawareness of the danger because ChiangKai-shek’s influence, combined with the basically antitotalitarian
attitude of nearly all the Chinese, including conservatives and reactionaries, prevented any such course being taken.
Chiang Kai-shek was reported to be bitterly resentful at General
Marshall’s failure to see that the Communist problem could be settled
only by American backing of the National Government with ammunition and credits, and at America’s continued insistence on “unity”
through concessions to the Communists,
but he continued his endeavors to keep China on our side of the Iron Curtain.
Kuomintang
leaders, such as Chen Li-fu and others popularly

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Last Chance in China

known in America as “reactionaries,”
helped the Generalissimo tokeep China in the Western democratic camp, while Sun Fo, Madame
Sun Yat-sen and others labeled as liberals by General Marshall andthe State Department’s Far Eastern Division tried in vain to pull her
into the Soviet sphere.
In the final outcome, however, Sun Fo, whom I have described ina former chapter as the Chinese Henry Wallace, showed himself possessed of deeper insight and intelligencethan the former VicePresident of the United States.
In his interview with Tillman Durdin, of the New York Times,
Miles Vaughn, of the United Press, and others in Nanking on June
20,
1947, Sun Fo, Vice-Presidentof the Executive Yuan, spoke out
as boldly against Soviet Russia’s aggression as he had formerly done
against Japan, saying :That the Chinese Communists were “absolute instruments”
ofSoviet policy.
That Communist control of Manchuria would be the same thing as
control by the Russians.
That Russia was directly helping the Chinese Communists.
That Korean troops from Russian-controlled
North Korea werefighting with the Communists, and that the government had unconfirmed informationthat the latter were being trained by the Russiansin a school in Eastern Siberia.
That China, having paid her price for the Sino-Soviet Treaty, had
obtained no benefit, since the Soviet Government had violated thetreaty by obstructing China’s taking over of Manchuria, by helping
the Communists and by “snatching away” Chinese sovereignty over
Dairen.
That, with the Communists ruling Manchuria, the Soviet Union
would have access to areas so rich in material resources that with its
40,000,000
inhabitants, it would be built up in conjunction
withSiberia into a major military base.
That the only difference between Japan and Russia is that while
the Japanese placed large amounts of industrial equipment in Manchuria, the Soviet removed them totally therefrom.
That, if Manchuria is lost to the Chinese Government, it will become “an appendage of the Soviet power and in five or ten years
could be built up as a base from which to conquer the rest of China.
“Who doubts,” said Sun Fo in the same interview, “that Dairen
has been maintained for the benefit of the Communists?
The port

Why Marshall

Failed259

has served as a supply base for them. The Russian refusal of entry to
our troops there is tantamount to a denial of sovereignty to the recognized government of the country.”
Finally, Sun Fo charged the Soviet Union with being “more imperialist than Czarist Russia” and urged America to give immediate
large-scale economic aid and military supplies to his government tohalt the march of Communism and Soviet aggression. “If this is notdone,” he concluded, “the ultimate outcome might be a Communist
China and subsequently a Communist India.”
Unfortunately
General Marshall took longer to learn his lesson than
Sun Fo. Immediately
following
his appointment
as Secretary ofState, China ceased to receive even the limited amount of backing
given her in 1946. Before he went to Moscow, General Marshall ordered the return of all United States forces from China. On April 2,
1947, in Moscow, he assured Molotov that American forces werebeing removed from China “as rapidly as shipping becomes available”
and that by June I only 6,180 United States military and naval personnel would remain in China. General Marshall was apparently still
under the spell of President Roosevelt’s illusion that Stalin could bemollified by unconditional
Americanconcessions. Even if, as it
seemed at the time, the United States Secretary of State had decided
to anbandon China and save Europe, he should at least have used thesacrifice of China to obtain Russian concessions in Europe. Instead
he laid China wide open to Soviet aggression without obtaining eithera quid pro quo in Europe or the withdrawal of Russian forces from
Manchuria.
*
It was a little surprising, except to those without any belief in therationalityof mankind, that in spite of all the fashionable talk about“one world,” and although the United States had been brought into
the Second World War by attack across the Pacific, General Marshalland most Americans still cared little about China’s fate. Stalin’s highhanded disregard of his treaty commitmentsin Germany, Austria,
Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria seemed to Americans worth at least
a protest. But they regarded Russia’s acquisition of Manchuria
ashardly worth a thought.
Just as formerly the United States had
helped and encouraged those who fought Nazi Germany while continuing to supply Japan with war materials, so now, in 1947, theUnited States poured out her wealth to save Europe from Soviet dom-

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Last Chance in China

ination while refusing to help the enemies of Communism in China.
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, said the ancient Greeks, theyfirst make mad. In the spring of Ig4.7, the United States gave Greece$4oo,oo0,ooo to keep the Communists out while refusing the Chinese
Government a similar sum until she would take the Communists in.
Since the new United States Secretary of State was evidently far
more benevolently inclined toward the Communists
in China than
toward Communism in Europe, it was hardly surprising that in thespring and early summer of 1947 the Soviet Government was emboldened to give more open support to the Chinese Communists andthat the latter launched a new and far more successful offensive inManchuria.
The Chinese Communist forces were now reinforced by large numbers of battle-wise Japanese and Russian-trained
Korean forces with aconvenient base in Russia’s Korean zone. Moreover, since the UnitedStates Government was “neutral” now, as in the thirties when Japan
attacked China, we refused to let the National Government buy arms
The Nationalist
forces were becoming weaker in firein America.
power as the Communists, generously supplied by Russia, became
stronger.
The guns of the New First Army, originally trained andequipped in Burma by the United States and sent to Manchuria in
1946, were reported in June 1947 to be worn out, with the barrels ofsome machine guns so burned that “bullets fell through them to theground.“*But the Communist forces could count on continual replenishment of their equipment from Lend-Lease stores supplied to
Russia for the war against Japan which she never fought.
The Communists by this time seemed to have been so well suppliedwith everything they required that they refused UNRRA
relief andmedical supplies, rather than allow American personnel to enter theirterritory.
According to a Nezw York Times dispatch from Peiping
dated June 21, 1947, .Cornelius Bodine, of Philadelphia, the UNRRA
director for the Changchun area, was twice refused entry to Communist-controlledareas of Manchuria.
The Communists evidently desired to prevent at all costs foreign observers from learning how much ’help Russia was giving them.
Had American or United Nations investigators been able to con,
* New York Times, June 2a, 1947.

Why Marshall

Failed261

duct the same type of investigationin Manchuria as in Greece, theymight have become convinced of the truth of Chinese reports.
According to the Chinese Central News Agency, 30,000 Japanese“prisoners” and ninety tanks were backing the Communist offensive
in Manchuria.
Its M&den correspondent reported early in June that“a special bureau” of “a certain nation” had supplied the Communists
with equipment for twenty divisions, and that citizens of that “certain
nation”-theusual designation for Russia in the Chinese press-or
Japanese manned the tanks spearheading the Communist offensive.
The eventuality feared all through the Sino-Japanese War had become a reality : the Communists were fighting together with the Japanese against China under Russia’s orders.
In March 1947, General John R. Hodge, United States commander in Korea, had stated that Chinese Communist troops were participating in the training of a Korean Army of ~OO,OOO in Russian-held
North Korea. The Chinese Central News Agency stated in June that
more than a ~oo,ooo Russjan-trained
Koreans plus a cavalry divisionfrom Outer Mongolia were in action against the Chinese National
forces, As General Wang Yao-wu, the government commandant in
the Tsinan area, said in April 1947, the Shantung War could beshortened by six months if the government had control of Dairen.
Nor was the help given to the Communists in Manchuria and North
China the only example of overt hostility which the Soviet Union
displayed. In June 1947, troops from Outer Mongolia (which is asintegral a part of the Soviet Union as the Ukraine or White Russia)
supported by planes marked with the Soviet emblem, attacked theAltai district of Chinese Turkestan.
In June 1947, it seemed that there was little or no hope that the
Nationalist forces would be able to save Manchuria from becoming a
Russian puppet state. The odds seemed too heavy against them.
A U.P. dispatch from Nanking
on June 22 stated that neutral
sources estimated that 200,000 Nationalist
troops were up against
300,000
armed Communists, and that the Communists already had
control of more than three-quartersof Manchuria.
Chiang Kai-shek’s persistent attempts to “solve the Communist
problem by political means” had not only been unavailing, but by halting its military offensive time and again to negotiate, the government
had denied itself victory while the Communists were weak and enabled262

Last Chance in China

them to grow strong enough with Russian help to attack in greater
force than ever before.
As General Pai Chung-hsi, the Minister of Defense, stated on May
I, x947, the government’s military progress had been blocked by thetruces and peace talks of the preceding year. “Immediately
after therecovery of Kalgan [October 19461,” said the Kwangsi general, who
is regarded as China’s foremost strategist, “we could have blasted
open the whole Peiping-Hankow
Railway, but our actions were deThe government has suffered fromferred by intervals of negotiation.
an irresolute policy.”
By June 1947, when prophecies were already being made in theAmerican press that Manchuria would be lost to China, the National
Government at last realized that its long silence concerning Russia’s
hostile acts had merely emboldened the Soviet Government to increase
its aid to the Chinese Communists and that United States help was
unlikely to be forthcoming until the American people were informedof the true facts of the Far Eastern situation.
On June zj, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign ‘Affairs issued a communiquC detailing for the first time the long record of Soviet obstruction to China’s attainment of her rights under the Sino-Soviet Treaty.
“Sources close to the Generalissimo” were reported by Americancorrespondents to be saying that Chiang Kai-shek and his advisers
were framing a new policy calling for a stronger stand against Russian
aggression. The policy of appeasement was being abandoned, but theextent to which China would go toward a diplomatic showdown with
Russia would depend upon United States support.
General Chen Cheng, the Chinese Chief of Staff, charged on June
24 that at least thirty-one Russian advisers were known to be with theCommunist forces fighting at Szepingkai, the important railroad point
seventy miles from Mukden.
The Chinese Nationalist
commander in besieged Szepingkai said
that the Communists had battered the city with IOO,OOO artillery shells(which they obviously had not manufactured themselves), and that
Russian-trained
Koreans manned the Communist guns.
Following the lifting of the siege by Nationalist forces at the end ofJune, the Chinese Central News Agency accused Russia of having
shipped 56,635 tons of military supplies to the Chinese Communists
in June, twelve Soviet ships having unloaded supplies for them atWhy Marshall

Failed263

Dairen, while others ran a shuttle service between the Manchurian
port and Cheefoo, the Shantung port occupied by the Communists.
Even those who chose to disbelieve Chinese reports of Russian
assistance to the Communists could not deny that the Soviet Government was giving aid and comfort to the Chinese Communists by its
continued refusal almost two years after V-J Day to evacuate Dairen
according to the terms of the Sino-Soviet Treaty. The denial to theChinese Government of the use of Manchuria’s principal port and therailway leading from it not only created a difficult supply problem for
the National forces in Manchuria ; it also put the Chinese Communists in an advantageous strategic position. As in the days when they
had to fight the Japanese operating from an untouchable base in theInternational
Settlement at Shanghai, so in 1946 and 1947 the Chinese Nationalist
commanders found themselves unable to crack theCommunist line north of Dairen for fear of encroaching on Russia’s
newly established extraterritorial
rights on Chinese soil. In the fallof 1946, according to Christopher Rand of the Hernld Tribune, two
Communist regiments had taken refuge at Port Arthur from Nationalist attack, and sheltered there until they emerged in the spring of1947 to take part in the Communists’ greatest offensive.
As Tillman Durdin reported in April 1947, the Communist forceswere backed up against the Russian “defense zone” running fromPort Arthur in back of Dairen, and the Chinese Government feared
the “complications”
which would arise if the Communists retreatedinto Russian-occupied
territory.
On July 4, the National Government, after rallying its forces for a
successful counteroffensive
in Manchuria,
announced its abandonment of all hope for a political solution of the Communist problem
and denounced the Communists as “armed rebels” who could be dealt
with only by force.
Vice-President
Sun Fo, so long the darling of Communist sympathizers in America, was reported to be one of the leading advocatesof this resolution, which marked the end of China’s Co& diplomacy
and placed her unequivocally in the world anti-Communist
camp.
Meanwhile some small encouragement had been given to the antiCommunist forces in China. A loan was still denied to the National
Government, but on June 27 it was announced in Washington
that
We were permitting China to buy 13o,ooo,ooo
rounds of surplus rifle

264

Last Chance in China

ammunition.
True that it was also stated that this ammunition had
been released partly because it was of a special caliber used only by
the Chinese, and the United States could therefore find no otherbuyer. True that the embargo on Chinese purchases of arms had
probably been lifted too late to affect the course of battle and Manchuria might still be lost to Russia. True also that General Marshallon July 2 denied that the United States Government was now supporting the Chinese Government.
True that according to Washington dispatches, China could expect no economic help until the civil
war ended-inother words, until her need for it became less desperate.
But the Chinese are a rational as well as a patient people. They
could hope that eventually the logic of facts would cause the UnitedStates to recognize that there is no sense in stalling Soviet aggression
at the front door, in Europe, while leaving America’s back door,
across the Pacific, wide open.

CHAPTER

Gelzeral

XI

Wedemeyer iv CIltilza

I not broken my arm and been forced to spend two months
in Shanghai I would not have had the opportunity
to know
the man who did more than anyone else to counteract theeffect of the State Department’s
muddleheaded meddling in China.
General Albert C. Wedemeyer constituted for a time a counterweightto the forces impelling China toward chaos or Communism.
Even
after the Communists had succeeded in getting him withdrawn
fromChina,* his influence remained in the cordial, sincere and mutuallyadvantageous relations he and his staff had established with ChiangKai-shek and the best elements in the Chinese Army.
Arriving
in China to succeed General Stilwell in October 1944,
when it seemed that nothing could stop Japan’s last and greatest
offensive against Chungking, General Wedemeyer had achieved what
seemed a miracle at the time. By re-establishing Sino-American
relations on a basis of mutual trust, and by his masterly strategy, he had
prevented China’s being knocked out of the war on the very eve ofJapan’s defeat in the Pacific.
The evacuation of Chungking had begun. Wedemeyer wanted toconcentrate on the defense of the nearest supply point. Chiang said
he would stay and die in Chungking.
Wedemeyer cabled to Marshallto ask whether he, too, should stay and die. Happily, the choice never
had to be made. Not only did bitter cold and lack of supplies force Japanto stop and recuperate on the Liuchow-Tushan
line, but Wedemeyer
flew in two Chinese divisions from Burma to defend Kweiyang, andthe Chinese agreed to let him bring several divisions from the Northwest to reinforce the hard-pressed forces fighting at Kweilin.
The Chinese had originally demanded that all the Chinese divisions

H

AD* General Wedemeyer was to have been appointed ambassador after his return in1946 on sick leave from command of the China Theater. But his appointment was canceled at the last moment.

265

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Last Chance in China

in Burma should be brought home to stem the Japanese offensive.
Wedemeyer persuaded them to agree to only two, instead of five, being
withdrawn
from Burma, but compensated for this by a master strokeof psychological warfare. He arranged for the Chinese Secret Service (under the much-maligned
Tai Li) to sell to the Japanese thefalse informationthat four, not two, American-trainedand equipped
Chinese divisions had been brought from Burma. Wedemeyer thenposted the two divisions at a point whence they could block Japan’s
advance if she took one road, or cut her forces off from their supply
base if she took the other. Thus Chungking was saved and Japan’s
last great offensive rendered abortive.
The Japanese, instead of advancing, fell back. Free China wassaved. Wedemeyer’s relations with the British became less friendly,
since the latter were furious at his removal of two Chinese divisions
from the Burma front, but American-Chinese
relations were established on a new basis of trust and collaboration.
I was told by United States officers, who served under both Stilwell
and Wedemeyer, that when the latter took over, relations with the
Chinese Command were so bad that his first and one of his mostdifficult tasks had been to break down the wall of mistrust and dislike. The Chinese generals at Chungking Headquarters had not only
been treated with open contempt by General Stilwell and his aides, butthey had never been allowed to know what the Americans were doingor what supplies were available. Aggrieved, humiliated and distrustful, the Chinese were so touchy and difficult that joint staff meetings
had become purely formal and quite useless.
Wedemeyer managed to change the whole atmosphere by inviting
the Chinese to discuss and criticize American tactics and strategy,
while frankly discussing Chinese shortcomings
himself. In time heestablished a real alliance; a working partnership which enabled him
to persuade the Chinese to do the right thing, because he convinced
them that he was fair-minded and did not disregard China’s interests.
Accordingto the same testimony, it was General Wedemeyer’s
great contribution
to the war in the Far East to insist on the concentration of available air power on a few important objectives and teachthe Chinese to aim at cutting off the enemy from his supply bases,
instead of futilely endeavoring to resist attacks everywhere with theirinadequate fighting power. He also taught the Chinese not to be lured

General Wedemeyer

in China

267

into a premature advance after a small victory-a
mistake which had
often cost them dearly-but
instead always to wait to attack until
their supplies had caught up with them.
General Wedemeyer himself attributes his success in large part to
the repercussions of the Stilwell incident in China. Chiang Kai-shek
and the National Government were well aware, he told me, that if the
new American commander were to pronounce as adverse a judgment
upon them as Stilwell had done, they would be deprived of Americanaid.
“Wedemeyer changed the spirit of everything,” General Odlum, theCanadian ambassador, had said to me in Chungking.
“Whereas Stilwell and Gauss were inclined to build up both sides in China, thereby
weakening her and preventing her from ever becoming strong andunited, lvedemeyer has given America a logical role and a consistentpolicy in line with American interests and the maintenance of world
peace.”
Victor Odlum had also said to me, “When you get to Shanghai try
to find out how Wedemeyer did it; how he managed to win back thetrust of the Chinese and accomplish so much more than Stilwell in
the reorganizationof the Chinese Army into a real fighting force.”
My first interview with Wedemeyer and the press conferences I
attended gave me some idea of the answer. Wedemeyer struck me atonce as a democrat as distinct from a demagogue, a man who respected others whatever their race or rank. His tact, intelligence andpatience never failed him and he kept his mind always on principles
and nonpersonal issues. Sometimes he reminded his questioners that“it is personal liberty we fought for,” but he neither swore nor
preached, and I never saw him lose his temper although he often had
plenty of provocation.
The pro-Communists
among the correspondents continually tried
to put him on the spot at the regular weekly press conferences. Thisshould have been easy since he had the impossible assignment of supposedly being in China only to “repatriate Japanese prisoners,” while
actually, as everyone knew, the United States Army and Navy were
giving some help to the National Government in recovering its sovereignty over its liberated territories.
Wedemeyer, being not only theAmerican Commander
in Chief but also Chief of Staff to ChiangKai-shek, was in an awkward and ambiguous position. A lesser man

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Last Chance i~z China

would have been driven to administer a sharp rebuke to those who,
week after week, needled him concerning the help being given to the
Nationalist
forces and asked questions which they knew he was precluded from answering. But LVedemcyer never treated their questions
as if they were meant to embarrass him, ant1 disarmed them by his amiability and honesty. He frequently reminded us that as a soldier hecarried out orders but did not inaugurate policies, and he never gave
rude or smart or lying answers. In general he escaped from being
drawn into political controversies in which he might have become as
identified with anti-Communism
as Stilwell had been with pro-cornmunist policies.
Being able to meet the correspondents
in any game of wits, Al
LVedemeyer won their respect, while his natural and unpretentious
manner, courtesy and reserved friendliness made him generally popular.
Very tall and slim with prematurely gray hair, blue eyes, and a
Byzantine
cast of features, this soft-spoken,
self-controlledman
seemed as free of personal vanity as he was well-informed
and intelligent. Far from “hating paper work” like his predecessor in China,
Wedemeyer had been the brains of the Operations Division of, theWar Department and been responsible for the planning of the Normandy invasion.
In conversation with him, one was aware that hehad read and thought a great deal. He is a student of history, fully
conscious of the connection between economics and politics, and wellaware that the sacrifices of war are meaningless unless the aims forwhich they are fought are consistently pursued. He was also too wise
to think that he has all the answers to the problems of China and theworld.
One American officer said to me, “Do you notice that everyone
associated with Wedemeyer tries to protect or shield him ? From hischauffeur to his Chief of Staff they all fear that advantage will betaken of his kindness and his trustful nature.”
Another,a colonel, said, “Trouble with the old man is that hethinks there is good in everybody.”
His friends had no real reason to be afraid. The general was nota fool, and although it might be his philosophy that belief in a man or
nation calls out the best that is in them, he was not easily deceived.
Once anyone had betrayed his confidence he never trusted him again,
and he could be mercilessly outspoken to friends as well as opponents.

General Wedemeyer

in China

269

The important thing in China was that his attitude and behavior
were exactly what was required to win the trust of Chiang Kai-shek
and the better elements in the Kuomintang.
The Chinese took strong
criticism from him and accepted his advice because of his unmistakable integrity and lack of personal vanity. Whereas the admonitions
and insults of Stilwell had but rend,ered them more obstinate and set
in their ways, FVedemeyer’s frank and friendly approach disarmed
them.
Wedemeyer was never superior or contemptuous but instead approached the Chinese saying, in effect : “We are Americans and you
are Chinese. We are different but we are friends and equals. I want
to help you for the sake of both our countries. I cannot help you unless
we are frank with one another and speak plainly. I see and appreciate
your difficulties and doubt if I could have done better in your place.
But if we co-operate the situation can be greatly improved.”
In spite of all the elaborate politeness and ceremonious circumlocution of the Chinese, they appreciate truthfulness
and plain dealing.
Thus Wedemeyer was able to get changes made and reforms instituted in the Chinese Army, where Stilwell had failed to make any impression.
Even the Communist sympathizers among the correspondents liked
the general and never labeled him a “reactionary.”
In conversations
with me and others he said he understood, and had sympathy for, theaspirations which the Chinese Communists voiced. But he was too
intelligent and analytical not to understand the real purpose behind thedemocratic slogans which deluded the followers and sympathizers of
the Communist Party. He knew that Communism is a world conspiracy against democracy and above all against America.
He hadread enough and seen enough to know Russia’s purpose and, while
recognizing the good side of what the Chinese Communists had donein the Northwest, he saw them as the obstacle to Chinese unity andknew they were Russia’s puppets.
As he said to me early in December 1945 :We did not fight the war in order to permit the Russians to ravage
and plunder the land of an ally as they are doing in Manchuria ; nor
to allow the Communists to create chaos and confusion in China inorder to preclude the possibility of unification and democratization
under the National Government.

270

Last Chncein China

It was clear that Wedemeyer for his part was in favor of giving the
Chinese Government the necessary moral and material support to prevent her “crashing down” according to Japanese prophecies. But, asI have already related, obstacles were already being placed in his way
by the State Department.
Leaving United States Army Headquarters
in the Development
Building one afternoon I was held up by a long column of trucks fullof Chinese Sixth Army men on their way to the docks to take ship for
Manchuria.
I had never before seen Chinese soldiers like these and I
stared at them in amazement. Each man was warmly clad in woolenkhaki uniform and greatcoat. They all had steel helmets. They had
gloves. They even had leather boots. Bronzed, lean and hardy, obviously well fed and alert, in both their equipment and their appearance
they offered a striking contrast to most Chinese soldiers.
Here was visible proof of what American help had done for someunits, at least, of China’s National armies. To the Communists andtheir sympathizers the sight of this division was, of course, an outrage. Wherever one’s political sympathies lay one realized how little
chance the Communist forces up north would have against such soldiers as these. China had never before had such well-equipped soldiers to fight for her. Had the United States in 1946 and 1947 notrefused to let the National Government have the ammunition
anddivisionsreplacement
supplies required, I these American-trained
would almost certainly have saved Manchuria
from the Communists. But we wasted our investment by refusing to supply working
capital.
Wedemeyer would not talk about himself but I obtained the answer
to Victor Odlum’s question in interviews with members of his staff.
General Paul Caraway, who enjoys the unique distinction of being
the son of two United States Senators, since both his mother andfather were elected to Congress from Arkansas, gave me a graphic
descriptionof the situation in China when Wedemeyer arrived in
October I 944 :Everything
was going to hell, he said. The Chinese armies weremelting away, the Japanese were advancing.
Chiang Kai-shek was
extremely depressed. Everything seemed hopeless.
General Wedemeyer told us he had decided on three things: First,
on a plan to hold our supply bases at all costs. Second, on a way toGeneral Wedemeyer

in China

271

improve the fighting effectiveness of the Chinese Army.
Third, hesaid, we must at all times act like Americans.
By this he meant that
we must be honest and straightforwardwith the Chinese. He said
that the old China hands or experts who had hitherto handled things
had stayed too long in China to be objective in their judgments. There
was no middle ground as between the group who considered the Chinese hopeless and those who thought China could do no wrong.
Wedemeyer said no Chinese was to be spoken, and we should not
try to imitate the Chinese by bowing, clasping our hands together andgenerally pretending to be like them. We must always speak throughan interpreter, thus making sure that we were understood.
We mustkeep our own customs and entity and always act like Americans.
Above all we must never promise what we could not perform or produce. \Ve must always keep our word and never deceive the Chineseor withhold the truth from them.
Under Wedemeyer we always did what we had undertaken to do.
When it was impossible to supply something the Chinese asked for,we frankly refused, but at the same time we explained why it was impossible. Unlike our predecessors in Stilwell’s day, we did not keep
secret from the Chinese what supplies were available. So they knew
just as well as we did what could or could not be done.
Then also Wedemeyer showed a real interest in the Chinese armies.
He did not regard them as a pawn to be used by us, irrespective ofChina’s interests in any campaigns we decided upon.
Studies were made on how to improve the soldiers’ rations in theactual supply conditions which existed, and on how to decrease thesize of the Chinese Army while increasing its fighting power. We
worked out a merit system. We worked on the basis of the existing
pattern of handling Chinese troops, instead of imposing our own
pattern.
the Chinese Combat CommandandWedemeyer
reorganized
the Chinese Training Center. Under the latter we set up an Artillery
School, an Infantry
School, an Ordnance School, a Heavy Mortar
School, and a Command and General Staff School. The Chinese
Combat Command, on the other hand, undertook the figuring out. It
advised and assisted the Chinese commanders on how to distribute
their supplies and how to fight.
The results were gratifying.
Forty miles northeast of Kweilin the
Chinese gave the Japs bloody hell.
We helped with supplies. The Chinese soldier is brave enough.
Our S.O.S. started deliveries and put liaison men in the Chinese
S.O.S. We got a terrific trucking system going in South China.
None of our success in improving
the efficiency of the Chinesearmies would have been possible had it not been for Wedemeyer’apersonality.
His sincerity, modesty and patience won the admiration

Last Chance in China
272
and affection of Chiang Kai-shek. The two men respected and appreciated each other, for the Generalissimo has some of the same qualities which distinguish Al Wedemeyer.
Never have I seen a time when, harassed as he may have been,
Chiang Kai-shek was not honest and did not take remarks in thespirit in which they were offered. When he refused to do something
we suggested he always explained the reasons why.
On one occasion when things were most difficult, the Japanesecontinually advancing, and disaster imminent, we submitted a plan to
the Generalissimo on how to beat the Japanese offensive. He came toour headquarters to listen to it, never letting his attention wander.
The plan was approved.
We never tried to double-cross or outsmart the Chinese. Nor did
we look down on them or their efforts. Always we told the Chinese
just what supplies we had.
We established a parallel system with Chinese and American opposite commands sitting together from the lowest level to the highest.
Then if, for instance, the Divisional Command American and Chinese
representatives could not agree, the situation would be reported to
the next higher level. Usually the matter was settled lower down.
But Chiang Kai-shek gave the order that in the event of disagreement
at the highest level the American view should prevail. He so completely trusted Wedemeyer that he was ready to take his word as final.
Colonel Logan worked out a ration for the Chinese soldier including meat and peanut oil. This Logan ration was adopted for all the
American-sponsoredunits in the Chinese Army.
We raised heck about the recruiting system in China. We took the
big shots to SECand impress them with the terrible condition of therecruits. Thus we managed to get improvements made.
I asked Caraway about Wedemeyer’s earlier history.
He replied
simply : “When he graduated from West Point Al Wedemeyer was
designated as the cadet who in his conduct best exemplified the motto :Duty, Honor, Country.”
Captain MacAfee, another officer who served under Wedemeyer,
said to me : “He is distinguished in particular by his power of analysis
and ability to carry things through; by his determination.
He neverthrows up his hands in despair or tries to place blame on others. Desperate as the situation was when he arrived in China, he remedied itby those qualities.”
General Caraway and Captain MacAfee are young men. General
Stratemeyer,
who commanded the U. S. air forces in China, wasGeneral Wedemeyer

in China

273

Wedemeyer’s senior in age and permanent rank, and was regarded
by the press as something of a martinet and a man of little warmth
Nevertheless he too was Wedemeyer’s staunch adand humanity.
mirer. He said :Too many Americans judge the Chinese by Shanghai. They don’tknow the Chinese and they don’t understand what appalling difficulties they had to face during the war. As Chiang’s Chief of Staff,
Wedemeyer too had to cope with these problems. No one was better
fitted to do so, because, under Tom Handy in the War Department,
he had been the brain power back of the Operational Division.
Wedemeyer was the staff strategist of the whole war. Marshallgives him the credit. You ought to talk to Marshall about him, for
Marshall believes in giving credit to his subordinates.
It was Wedemeyer who gave Marshall the Normandy invasion plans for the Joint
Chiefs of Staff.
Wedemeyer is air-minded.
He believes in air power and sacrificed
supplies and ammunition
for the ground forces to give them to us in
China. When he came to China he said that the only reason for military offensives was to get back our air bases, protect them and advancethem. He never dillydallied.
He always made clean-cut rapid decisions : yes or no.
He gave me the authority and the means to set up flying schools in
China : primary, basic, advanced, operational, and training schools for
Chinese fliers. He pushed the composite Chinese-American
Air Wing
backed logisticallyby Americans.
The great difficulty was maintenance and supply. The Chinese can be trained to be excellent fliers.
This American-Chinesecomposite wing had half Chinese and half
American personnel. Gradually we built up an integrated ChineseAmerican force. If, for instance, there were nine planes, five would
be commanded by Americans, four by Chinese. To bolster up the
Chinese we dispersed our base forces.
Wedemeyer accomplished much with little because of his personality. He is convincing, thorough, hard-working
and straightforward
in all he does. He put his cards on the table and everyone, Chineseand Americans, got behind him and pushed. He accomplished wonders with the army, the air force and the Chinese Government by hispatience, tact and honesty.
I think he just sold himself and his ability to everyone. When hecame there was chaos. He is both a smart strategist and a reader ofhuman nature. That is a rare combination and makes him a great
general. In southeast Asia where he was Mountbatten’s
Chief ofStaff before coming to China, the situation with the British was also
very difficult. By speaking his mind but always remaining courteous

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Last Chance in China

and never becoming self-important
Wedemeyer did a lot of good. I
think his success is due to his always keeping himself in the background and always showing consideration for others, whether Alliedcommanders or American junior officers and enlisted men. He does
not push himself forward and is never personal.
Before he came to China he had had to sell the British the right way
of doing things. Then he had to sell it to the Chinese. His lack ofvanity and his sincerity enabled him to do it. He succeeded in convincing the Chinese that the best plan would be to agree upon a reasonable number of divisions to be fed and clothed and equipped. He
collaborated with the Chinese in improving the pay, food and medicalcare of these selected Chinese divisions.
In particular we wanted to
improve the treatment of the wounded. If Japan had not surrendered
before the projected offensive in South China had come off, we shouldhave evacuated the Chinese wounded by air in a planned campaign.
Personal contact of the kind which Wedemeyer inaugurated was ofgreater importance than Lend-Lease. Ninety percent of our boys now
have a warm spot in their hearts for China. Earlier they had only
contempt or dislike.
General Stratemeyer seemed to me too optimistic.
I fear that few
American GI’s had much, if any, affection for the Chinese. UnitedStates Army Headquarters contained a high proportion of personnel
with an understandingof Chinese problems. Besides the generals I
have quoted, and such men as Colonel Don Scott and Colonel Lintonof the Education Department, I might also mention Colonel Pendleton Hogan of Gg whose sensitive personality as a novelist in civilian
life enabled him to appreciate and interpret an alien culture. As
already related, I met junior officers who had served with Chinese
troops and appreciated their qualities. But most GI’s never got toknow any Chinese but prostitutes, and had dealings only with coolies
and barkeepers. I met one young corporal who had made friends
with a college graduate. When he got to know her family, he conceived
such a liking for the Chinese that he contemplated returning to China
after the war. But the Chinese attitude toward social intercourse between the sexes, combined with the average American’s color prejudices, prevented most GI’s from being invited to Chinese homes.
There was, of course, also the Leftist politically conscious type ofsoldier who managed to have touch with Madame Sun Yat-sen. She
entertains like a queen and likes bright young men. One of them I

General Wedemeyer

in China

275

knew. He thought her so wonderful that he had naturally become a
Communist sympathizer.
The United States Army Command received little or no help fromeither the Stars a-nd Stripes or the United States Information
Service(U.S.I.S.)
in its efforts to establish good relations between theAmerican armed forces and the Chinese. U.S.I.S.
(formerly
theO.W.I. ) seemed to have an unduly large quota of Communist sympathizers. The Chinese press selections which it translated and circulated, although purporting
to represent a cross section of Chinese
opinions, were culled largely from Communist and Democratic League
sources. Even their stateside news seemed to give preference to antiNational Government expressions of opinion.
But here it must be
admitted that U.S.I.S. was hardly to blame. A large number, if not
an actual majority,of American newspapers at this time represented
the civil war in China as one between a “reactionary”
government
and the “progressive liberal” forces led by the Communists.
General VVedemeyer had practically no control over the Sfa.r.s andStripes which seemed intent on exacerbating Sino-American
relationsand encouraging the agitation to be sent home. Rarely did this organof the United States Army publish anything which might have taught
the GI’s the why and wherefore of their presence in China, or enabled
them to judge the Chinese more fairly. Of course, any real discussionof the world situation, or of the danger Russia constituted to America
as well as to China would have been taboo since we were still practicBut it was hardly necessary to angle the news
ing Coue diplomacy.
in favor of the Communists, and something could have been done to
inform Americans in China as to the causes for the poverty and material backwardness of China, and make them aware that an alien
civilization
is not necessarily contemptible.
Naturally
the bored American soldiers and sailors in Shanghai,
longing to go home and seeing no valid reason for their presence in
China, failed to present the Chinese with any striking evidence of thesuperiorityof American culture. Some treated the Chinese as badly
as or worse than Negroes are often treated in the States. There werealso incidents of drunken brawling and of actual physical violencedone to Chinese civilians.
And, as everywhere else, some Americans
engaged in black-market
operations, selling goods obtained at the
PX stores at a huge profit.

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Last Chance in China

Either because many Marine officers had been in China before tne
war, spoke the language and understood and respected the Chinese,or because the Marine Corps is the best disciplined of the UnitedStates armed services, there was a striking contrast between the behavior of the Army and Navy in Shanghai and that of the Marines inNorth China. Discipline certainly counted for a great deal, as also thebetter “indoctrination”
of the Marines.
There was no Stars a.nd
Stripes to play up their grievance and incite them to hatred of theChinese Government.
I was surprised to find how many enlisted men
and sergeants as well as officers understood very well why they werein China. Their minds had certainly not been corrupted by Communist propaganda, and several of them told me that their officers had
explained to them that their presence in North China was necessary
to keep the Russians out.
Perhaps, however, the ancient culture of China, so evident inPeking, also had its effect. I do not, of course, mean to imply that themarines spent their time studying Chinese civilization,although agood many of them went on the sight-seeing tours arranged by the
Red Cross. But I was struck by their politeness toward the Chinese
in stores and restaurants, and on the streets, and by the number ofyoung men who told me they liked the Chinese people. No one in
Peking could consider the Chinese uncivilized
or regard them with
the ignorant contempt shown by many GI’s and sailors in Shanghai.
The marines coming into China after Japan’s surrender, never
having been subject to the vitiatin g atmosphere of wartime Chungking or liberated Shanghai, and commanded by commissioned andnoncomissioned
officers with great pride in the traditionsof theMarine Corps, did not publicly clamor to go home. They knew they
had an important job to do. Sometimes they talked of the possibilityof war, and I found them surprisingly well-informed.
They knew, if
the Army enlisted men did not, that Russia threatened America as
well as China. And they had no affection for the Communists who
sniped at them and occasionally made prisoners of men who went
duck shooting in the countryside or were ambushed on patrol duty.
In Tsingtao, when I went to obtain a billet for the night en route to
Peking, there was a notice on the major’s desk saying, “We Too
Want to Go Home.”“Does it mean,” I asked, “that, like the Army and Navy, you wantto get out ?”General Wedemeyer

in China

277“No,” he replied, “it means that we, in the personnel division, want
to go home as much as the men who come to us.”
“But you haven’t had any demonstrations here?”“No, of course not. We are marines.”
I talked to many Marine enlisted men in the Peking Hotel where I
was billeted and which, now called “Hostel Number 2,” was full ofthem. Far from being the tough “leathernecks” of tradition, most ofthem were young and courteous and some of them surprised me bytheir views and their way of spending their liberty hours. There were,
for instance, the three young sergeants who met me near Executive
Headquarters one evening and asked me to have a drink with them,because, as they said, I “looked so American” as I walked down thestreet. I found they had spent the afternoon playing with the Chinesechildren at a Catholic orphanage, and they took me off to visit a Japanese family they were sorry for. All three were veterans of the
Pacific War and when I expressed some surprise at their attitude oneof them said : “There was a time and place for hatred; we don’t feelthat way now. These people are very decent and the war wasn’t theirfault.”The Marine Corps commanders seemed to be in an advantageous
position in that they were evidently freer of control by either the War
or State Department or less afraid of press censure than the Army.
Whereas Army officers knew they might get into hot water at home
if they spoke freely or acted accordin g to their convictions concerning
the Communist or Russian menace, the Marine officers I met could
apparently afford to be realists. This was particularly true of General
Worton, General Rockey’s Chief of Staff, who went out of his way
to help me make the most of my few days’ stay in Peking and Tientsin
because he saw the danger which the Communists
constituted
asclearly as I did.
Until General Marshall withdrew them from China in February
1947 the U.S. Marine Corps by its presence kept the Communists andthe Soviet Government in check. The big Communist offensive inManchuria, which endangered the whole Nationalist position in North
China, was not launched until after the marines were on their way
home.
General Wedemeyer had shown himself to be a statesman as well
as a diplomat and a soldier in his late 1945 proposal for dealing with
the Manchurian situation.
He said to me in Shanghai :278

Last Chance in China

China has not got the strength unaided to re-establish her authority
over both her Northern Provinces and Manchuria against the strong
Communist opposition.
It is most improbable that American public
opinion would allow sufficient aid to be given to the Chinese Govemment to recover and to hold both the provinces between the Yangtze
and the Great Wall, and the Northeast.
Moreover, a unilateral approach by the United States might involve us in a war with Russia. I
have therefore personally advocated that we should invoke the machinery of the United Nations Charter.
The United Nations organization has been set up to solve international problems which might develop into a world-wide
conflict.
Action should therefore be taken through U.N. to stop the establishment of these Russian puppet governments in the Far East and in the
Middle East. I have suggested to Washington that the United States
propose a temporary trusteeship of the Big Four over Manchuria,
under terms which envisage the return of Manchuria to China when,in the view of the Four Powers, she is in a position to establish her
own control. Both the legal and ethnological right of China to possession of Manchuria would be specifically recognized. The same action
should be taken with regard to Korea whose future independence waspledged by the United States, but which is at present split into a
Northern Russian zone and a Southern American zone.
The correctness of General Wedemeyer’s appraisal of the situation
has been amply proved by the course of events. Yet it is doubtful
whether Chiang Kai-shek could have taken his advice. Not only wasit politically
impossible for him to go before the Chinese people andsay that after their eight-year war against Japan Manchuria could
as to the continuity of American
not yet be regained. Uncertainty
policy made it an even more dangerous gamble to trust the UnitedStates to prevent a permanent partition of China, sanctified by a Big
Three agreement. It seemed a lesser risk to endeavor to regain both
Manchuria and North China by force of arms.
Having been for so long a victim of power politics China is sadly
aware that she cannot count for certain on a square deal in any international conference or organization,
Having been betrayed at Yalta,
how could she be certain she would not again find her rights sacrificed to Russia’s ambitions if she trusted to the United Nations topreserve her integrity and prevent Russia or her puppets from stealing
Manchuria ?
Other Army and Marine officers I talked to were equally aware

I

G e n e r a l W e d e m e y e r in C h i n a279that C h i n a w a s a sort of p r e w a r S p a i n in reverse, with the United
S tates backing the legitimate g o v e r n m e n t a n d the Russians backing
the rebel Communists, as the Axis h a d b a c k e d France.
S talin h a d little n e e d at this tim e to fight his o w n battles. Americans w h o called themselves liberals w e r e busy fighting t h e m for him.
A s already noted, W e d e m e y e r at his press conferences w a s b e i n g
h a u l e d over the coals by correspondents w h o o p p o s e d aid to the
National G o v e r n m e n t a n d w a n t e d us to transfer o u r support to theCommunists. This w a s at a tim e w h e n the Communists w e r e alreadyfighting a verbal c a m p a i g n against “A m e r i c a n imperialism.”
The
Soviet radio station in S h a n g h a i a n d the two Russian l a n g u a g e n e w s p a p e r s there w e r e carrying o n a continuous subtle c a m p a i g n to discredit a n d d e r i d e America. T h e Associated Press correspondent in
the C o m m u n i s t capital of Y e n a n w a s already reporting o n the extensive anti-American p r o p a g a n d a b e i n g carried o n by the Communists.
A C o m m u n i s t s p o k e s m a n in Chungking, w h e n w e l c o m i n g the resignation of the “Imperialist”
Hurley, regretted that G e n e r a l W e d e m e y e r h a d not b e e n “r e m o v e d from his c o m m a n d . ”
I u s e d to reflect in S h a n g h a i that if A m e r i c a n e c o n o m i c advisers
a n d g o v e r n m e n t representatives only could establish the s a m e relations with the C h i n e s e as the A m e r i c a n A r m y advisers h a d d o n e ,there w o u l d b e a real h o p e of C h i n e s e progress, of the emancipationof h e r p e o p l e from poverty, a n d the elimination of graft a n d incompetence in the administration, without C h i n a ’s subjection to foreign
domination.
T h e Chinese, after a h u n d r e d years of b e i n g bullied a n d lookedd o w n u p o n by Westerners, a n d after thousands of years of considering
theirs to b e the o n e a n d only civilization, a r e unduly sensitive. T h e ya r e so afraid that they a r e b e i n g looked d o w n u p o n , a n d so fearful ofcriticism, that it is h a r d to teach t h e m anything. A t least, so o n e isalways b e i n g told. B u t I w o n d e r sometimes whether the fault d o e s
not lie largely in us. Certainly, foreigners w h o h a v e w o n their friendship a n d trust d o not find it so difficult to advise or teach them. Thisw a s demonstrated in the case of G e n e r a l W e d e m e y e r a n d m a n y ofthe officers u n d e r him, notably by G e n e r a l Robert McClure, w h o w a s
in c h a r g e of the U.S. A r m y p e r s o n n e l training the C h i n e s e Army. B u tsuch a task requires patience a n d tact a n d g o o d will.
Personally it h a s b e e n m y experience that the C h i n e s e d o not resent

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Last Chance in China

criticism if they are convinced that one is a friend and sincerely trying
to help them. In 1938 I had given utterance to the most scathing
denunciation of the treatment of the wounded in China in interviews
published in the Chinese press. My book Cltina at War, published in
1939, was certainly no paean of praise. I had tried to understand thesituation in China but I had pulled no punches concerning what I had
seen, both at the front and in Hankow, and what I had heard. I criticized the government very strongly and I was not at all forbearing
concerning Madame Chiang and her advisers in the New Life Movement. Nevertheless I continued to be regarded as a friend. My criticisms were even welcomed by many although some of my strictures
were no doubt based on too superficial knowledge.
It was recognizedthat I wanted to help China, not harm her. Even when I tactlessly
blundered in social intercourse by a brutal or insensitive Western
frankness I was forgiven.
The Communists have a distinct advantage in that their devotion
to Moscow and their iconoclastic attitude toward China’s old values
and pattern of civilization
free them from any such aversion to learning from the Russians, as hampers the Nationalists
in their relations
with the Americans and the British.
Back in the United States it seemed to me a tragedy that General
Wedemeyer’s
appointment as Ambassador to China was canceled at
the last moment for fear of annoying the Communists.
Here was oneof the few Americans who was fully trusted by the Generalissimo andcould have influenced him in a truly liberal direction. He might havebeen able to lay the foundations for the same firm and friendly SinoAmerican
relations in the political and economic field as he had already laid in military matters. For it seems to me that China has only
two choices : one to become a part of the Soviet Empire; the other toaccept friendly Western guidance until the material, and political foundations have been laid for democracy. She cannot work her way to
democracy if she stands alone ; her enemies are too close.
Our demands for a strong and democratic China are incompatible
at the present stage. China might become strong if she developed
into a replica of the militarist-feudal-monopolistic-capitalist
Japan wehave destroyed. She might become strong if she followed the Moscow road and industrialized under a totalitarian
dictatorship on autarchic lines. But if she is to become both democratic and strong we

General Wedemeyer

in China

281

must help her, and we cannot do so unless we take account of theroot causes of her difficulties and recognize that her problems are very
different from our own. Co-operation between two peoples, one materially and politically backward and the other the richest and mostadvanced technologicallyof all nations, presents grave difficulties
which can be overcome only by tact, intelligence, forbearance, understanding and sympathy.
The pattern for effective Sino-Americancollaboration
was set by the United States Army during the lastmonths of the war. Unfortunately,
since then, we have done little
but affront Chinese susceptibilities, while also diminishing
their confidence in our political sagacity by our clumsy pressure on behalf of
the Communists.
Because of all the bad advice we have given themsince Yalta, they are by now perhaps impervious to good advice evenwhen offered in a friendly spirit.
China badly needs friends who both understand her difficulties andare not afraid to tell her the truth; friends whom she can learn from,and listen to, without fear that they will take advantage of her weaknesses and faults. Such a friend, it seems to me, was Al Wedemeyer,
and it was an ill omen for both China and America that he left China.
Whether or not it is possible to hope that the United States would-help and guide China without dominating her is a moot point. But
such tutelage would offer both countries a better hope for the future,
and also be more profitable for the United States than the present
halfhearted military and economic support coupled with curses andcompulsions to set up an impotent coalition government,

CHAPTERThe Ddemma

XIIof the Chifiese LiberaZs

HE double standard
used in judging Soviet Russia and othercountries by Western “progressives”
is nowhere more apparent than with regard to China. Stalin’s ruthless totalitarian
dictatorshipis excused as a necessity forced on the Communists by
the “hostility of the capitalist world.” This hostility, real a quarter ofa century ago, has been a myth for at least two decades. The UnitedStates poured Lend-Lease into Russia to save her. Britain likewise
supplied the Red Army with equipment. The leaders of the “capitalist world” allowed Soviet Russia to establish her dominion over morethan half of Europe by the ill-omened Yalta and Potsdam agreements
and the earlier betrayal of Mikhailovitch.
Since the end of the war
Russia and her satellites have been treated with greater generosity by
UNRRA
than most other countries.
On the other hand, no excuses for the lack of democracy in China
are made by the same writers who give Russia every benefit of every
doubt. Yet China was preyed on, oppressed, exploited and weakened
by the Western Powers and Russia for a century ; left to fight Japan
unaided year after year; never received more than a trickle of LendLease, and is today, unlike Russia, actually menaced by foreign conquest. Moreover although Chiang Kai-shek’s so-called dictatorshipis not even comparable to the iron tyranny of the Russian Communist
Party, some of the same writers who condone concentration camps,
terror, press censorship, hunger and servitude in the Soviet Union,label Chiang-Kai-shek’s
government the worst in the world.
The difficulties faced by the Republic of China since its inception,
only three decades ago, have in fact been unequaled in the history of
any modern state. It inherited both the evil legacy of nearly threehundred years of ultraconservative
Manchu rule and the problems
created by the aggressive European imperialismof the nineteenth
282

TThe Dilemmaof the Chinese Liberals

283

century. The vast size of China, her enormous population, her backward economy and ancient cultural traditions, would alone have rendered the task of the reformers a colossal one. Their problems wereimmeasurably enhanced by the fact that almost all the Powers meddled in China’s affairs.
From the outset forces within and without sought to stifle ordestroy the New China to which the Kuomintang
acted as midwife.
The Republic was almost strangled at birth by its progenitors when
Yuan Shih-kai, its first President, sought to make himself emperor
with the backing of foreign Powers. It was kept in swaddling clothes
by the unequal treaties which curtailed China’s sovereignty and freedom and prevented a normal development.
All the Great Powers
sought to crush Chinese nationalism when it infringed on their “special rights” or commercial interests. No one of them would protect
China from aggression by any of the others. It was this situation
which led Sun Yat-sen to describe China as a subcolony, meaningthat she suffered all the ills of foreign exploitation by a number ofPowers, without the advantage of being a colony protected by one ofthem.
When finally, in 1927, the Western-orientatedKuomintang
majority led by Chiang Kai-shek broke with the Communists and Russia and established its rule in place of that of the war-lord-dominatedPeking Government, the reformed China they hoped to create wasstunted in childhood by too heavy labors. True that the Kuomintang
Government won customs autonomy by 1928 and was soon well on
the way through negotiation to abrogation of all the unequal treaties
with the West. But, as the West retreated and signified its willingness
to relinquish imperialist privileges, to treat China as an equal and tohelp her to modernize herself, Japan was advancing.
Japan’s young, confident and aggressive imperialism, built up originally by Britain and the United States as a counterweight to Russia,
menaced Kuomintang
China from the moment of its birth.
As if this were not a sufficient handicap for the Chinese seeking toreconstruct their country, the old Russian threat to her independencecame alive again in a new form : the Communists constitute an unsurmountable obstacle to China’s national unity, reconstruction and democratic development.
Never since its inauguration
has the present National Government

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Last Chance in China

of China been free of the necessity to divert its main energies to war.
The civil war on two fronts-against
the Communists on the Left andfor the suppression of the surviving war lords and other reactionary
elements on the Right-occupied
the government’s main energies andburdened its finances for the whole of the first decade of its existence.
When Japan, in 1931, struck her first great blow against China by
the rape of Manchuria, Chiang Kai-shek’s armies were busy fighting
the Communists.
It was not until 1935 that the Communist Army was
driven into the Northwest
and China could at last settle down topeaceful reconstruction.
Meanwhile the Japanese had got into a position in which they expected to be able to detach North China under
Failing to do so, they struck at China
an “autonomous” government.
again with redoubled force, determined to “beat China to her knees,”
as Prince Konoye expressed it in 1938.
The National Government of China was always between the Scyllaof Japanese domination and the Charybdis of Communism, which ineffect means Russian hegemony.
Chiang Kai-shek’s endeavor to free China from her colonial status
without her falling from the iVestern imperialist or Japanese frying
pan into the Communist fire, has been rendered all the more difficult
by the unawareness of most Westerners of what was at stake. During
the Sino-Japanese War and since V-J Day, too many Americans
failed to realize that the Generalissimo dared not trust the Communists since they were under Moscow’s orders and might at any moment be ordered to betray China.
In the historical circumstances outlined above it is hardly surprising that the Kuomintang
has so far failed to reconstruct China on
democratic lines, and has been unable to eliminate the dead wood andOne of the Chinese Central
corrupt elements in the government.
News reporters said to me in Chungking : “Chiang Kai-shek’s hands
have always been tied. He has been fighting continuously to save thelife of the nation, and has never had time to. clean up the administration.”
The American demand for a strong ad democratic China is totally
unrealistic.
China should not be expected to run before she can walk.
We may have forgotten, but the Chinese remember that the prematureform of government reattempt in 191 I to set up a parliamentary

The Dilemmaof the Chinese Liberals

sulted in anarchy and war-lord rule, with the so-called Republican
Government at Peiping the puppet of whichever war lord in the vicinity happened to be strongest.
China is at about the same stage of development as England and-1
France were in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when the greatest need was for a king who could insure some security and liberty forthe people by curbing the feudal barons. This does not imply that
China ought to have an emperor today; but it does mean that her
greatest need is law and order, which can be enforced only by a strong
government.
If security for private enterprise were assured, the basis for a subsequent democratic development could be created. But China is not
only expected to telescope into a few years the developments which
other countries have required centuries to achieve, she is also required
to be all things to all men-to
establish a government and an economic organizationof society which will be pleasing both to thedemocratic IVest and to the Communist totalitarians.
Pulled all ways
at once she cannot move forward.
Secondly, few of China’s critics see that, since even in the mostadvanced Western democracies war necessitates some curtailmentofcivil liberties, in an economically and politically backward country
such as China it requires an authoritarianadministration.
Indeed,China’s military failures in the war against Japan, in so far as they
were not due to her lack of arms and her exhaustion after so many
years of unaided struggle, were the result of the weakness of her governmentnot in its dictatorial nature but in its failure to dictate.
To call the Kuomintang
Government “fascist” is the very reverseof the truth. Its powers are not limitless but far too limited. In war it
lacks entirely the simian efficiency of the Nazi, Japanese and Soviet
States. It interferes with the individual too little, not too much. Its
sins of omission are far greater than its sins of commission.
Itsgravest fault is the ineffectiveness of its administration,and its failure
to force through necessary reforms.
It is too soft, not too hard.
Whether or not any other government could have done better in thecircumstances, the whole problem of China is distorted by those who
paint a picture of a small group of wicked reactionaries maintainingatotalitarian dictatorship.

\
\’

i
’
I
’
,,,,,

286

Last Chance in China

In their efforts to discredit the administrationof Chiang Kai-shek,
American liberals as well as the Communists endeavor to have it bothways.
As Counselor Chen Chih-mai said to the New York Shanghai Tiffin
Club in May 1947: “In one breath the Chinese Government is described as both incompetent and fascist. Fascism, as we all admit,
is a bad thing . . . but incompetence is certainly not one of its sins.
The word fascist and the word omni-competence are almost synonymous, and if we are one [incompetent]
we certainly cannot be at thesame time the other [fascist].”In the economic as in the political sphere the Chinese Government
cannot do right in the eyes of its critics. If it were to allow free trade,free exchange and free enterprise, it might please foreign businessinterests but it would affront foreign and Chinese “progressives.”
When it endeavors to control the national economy in order to promote industrial development and curb the abuses of an uncontrolled
capitalist society, it is labeled “fascist,” not only by its Right Wing
critics but also by those who approve of a regimented economy only
if it bears the Communist label.
Nor is it easy to see how the National Government can at one andthe same time reconstruct China for the Chinese and make her strong
enough to maintain her independence, while also pleasing her Western
allies.
The Chinese Government is in somewhat the same situation as
Aesop’s character, the man who was traveling with his son and his
donkey. No matter what he did, he was abused by the public. If herode and his boy walked, people said it was shameful; if his son rodeand he walked this too was disapproved ; when both rode, he was held
to be abusing the donkey. Finally he and his son, in despair at theoutcries of the public, carried the donkey.
Since it cannot do right in the eyes of its Western critics the Chinese Government wastes the energies and lives of its people trying toplease everybody and thus fails to cope with any of the grave problems it faces. Nor is its situation rendered easier by the conflicting
views of the Chinese themselves as regards what ought to be done.
Both the weakness and the strength of the Kuomintang
lie in thediversity of the elements which compose it and in the mixture of Confucian and Western concepts which constitute its ideology.

The Dilemmaof the Chinese Liberals

287

Sun Yat-sen had hoped to unite China, make her independent andset her on the road to reconstruction
and modernization
by including
all “good men” in his party. Since China needed all her strength forthe gigantic tasks ahead of her he had emphasized nationalism andsought the support of all classes. The only internal enemies were conceived to be the war lords or other elements who opposed the National(Kuomintang)
Revolution.
Both on this account and because Sun
Yat-sen clung to the Confucian belief that virtue, derived from understanding or knowledge, is the primary requisite of good government,
the practical application of his Three Principles was left indefinite
enough for all to subscribe to them.
Consequently the house of the Kuomintang has many mansions. It
includes the most diverse elements, both socially and with respect totheir conceptions of the desired image of a New China, and also in
regard to the methods to be adopted to bring it into existence. Even
the Communists now give at least lip service to the San Min Chu ISun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People.
The heterogeneous compositionof the Kuomintang
Government
constituted its strength when the primary problem was to maintain
Chinese unity in face of the Japanese invader. However, when China’s
internal economic and political problems demand solution by positive
action, this same heterogeneous composition becomes the governmarch north from Canton
ment’s weakness. During its triumphantthe Kuomintang
was transformed from ato Shanghai in 192G1927
small party and army of patriots and revolutionaries
into an enormouscoalition.
Men who could not agree on anything else could agree on
the Kuomintang’s
primary aims : the national liberation of China ; her
freedom from the shackles on her national sovereignty imposed byunequal treaties with the Great Powers ; an end to war-lord rule under
the Peking Government and to the weakness and disunity which had
allowed foreigners to dominate and exploit China.
It has always been a Chinese characteristic to compromise rather
than to fight. So the war lords and other “feudal” or reactionary elements were not all exterminated,
but were allowed to join the Kuomintang if they were ready to submit. The Communists were as muchin favor of this policy as the Kuomintang
in the days of their collaboration. In 1926 Stalin argued in Moscow, against the Trotskyists,that Chiang Kai-shek was a valuable ally because he knew how to288

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demoralize the war lords and “induce them to pass over to the side of
the revolution, bag and baggage, without striking a blow.”
In 1927, before it had had time to digest the reactionary elements
it had absorbed, the Kuomintang lost its extreme Left Wing, the Chinese Communists.
The coalition broke when, on arrival in Shanghai,
there seemed no longer any possibility of collaboration between those
who wanted to compromise both with the foreigners and the “feudal”
elements at home, and those who wanted to transform the National
Revolution into a social revolution.
It may be argued that it was Chiang Kai-shek’s initial and greatest
mistake to break completely with the Communists in 1927; that hewould have been able to win greater concessions from the West andward off Japanese aggression had he retained in reserve the powerfulweapon of a Communist movement with which to threaten the Powers. It is undoubtedly true that the fear of Communism in China waswhat brought Britain and America to terms in 1927 and 1928. Hada real Communist danger existed in subsequent years Japan might
not have dared to fight the National Government which was the only
bulwark against it. By massacring and fighting the Communists,
Chiang Kai-shek was destroying what could have been his most potent
weapon in his dealings with foreign Powers.
Had the Chinese Communists been a native revolutionary
movement, instead of an arm of the Soviet State, this thesis would be tenable. But Chiang Kai-shek had every reason to believe that Stalin’s
promise to the Cornintern to destroy him and the Kuomintang
was
not a bluff. The exterminationof the Communists, which seemed theonly way to halt the momentum of the extremist revolutionary movement, was the price China had to pay for collaboration with the West.
What Chiang Kai-shek could not possibly have foreseen was thatless than twenty years after his Shanghai massacre of the Communists, America and Britain, whose good will the slaughter was expected to secure, should turn around and castigate him for his refusal
to make sufficient concessions to the Communists to induce them toenter a “coalition government.”
Such is the irony of history.
Had China been left alone, the civil war might have worked itself
out and led eventually to the establishment of a vigorous and progressive government.
The Communists would not have won out, but
in so far as they represent a native revolutionary
peasant movement,
their influence would have prevailed and allowed China to shed the old

The Dilemmaof the Chinese Liberals

289

skin of medieval or primitive agrarian social and economic relationships. However, since foreign Powers were forever taking advantage
of China’s difficulties to further their own selfish aims, the conflict between Right and Left in China became irreconcilable.
Each side hardened and the sap of liberalism dried up or dripped uselessly to theground.
In expelling the Communists and seeking to exterminate them, theKuomintang
was inevitably led to rely to an increasing extent on theconservative forces. Yet it did not at once lose its character of a reform movement. In the years preceding the war with Japan the Kuomintang not only gave China a higher degree of unity and a stronger
and a more effiective administrative
system than she had known since
the seventeenth century, but it started her along the road toward modernization of her economy and development into a Western-type
democracy.
In the decade before the Sino-Japanese War, the internal weakness
engendered by the civil war with the Communists was in part compensated by the National Government’s
increasing control over the
war lords who had originallyrefused to accept its authority.
The
pressure of both the Communists and the Japanese helped to bringformerly independent provincial governments under the control of the
National Government.
For, once the local governments were compelled to call for Nanking’s
aid, they inevitably found themselves
forced to accept its financial and administrative
supervision.
Bit bybit the Kuomintang
Government was succeeding in establishing respect for its laws over most of China and creating the nucleus of aneffective administrative
apparatus.
During this period T. V. Soong, the outstanding representative of
the Western-educatedand orientated Chinese, performed near miracles in the organization of China’s finances. A managed currency was
successfully instituted, although the Chinese hitherto had regarded acoin as worth only the metal of which it was composed. Confidence
was great enough for loans to be floated within the country, rendering
China more independent of Western and Japanese financiers than she
had been for a century. Britain and America, ready by now to aid
the National Government in the reconstruction of China, helped institute the currency and other reforms which were laying the foundation of a modern state.
At the same time it must be recognized that Chiang Kai-shek, when

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in 1927 he decided to check the revolutionary
movement and enlist
the support of the compradors and their Western partners or bosses,
gave the Treaty Port merchants and bankers a paramount voice in thesettling of China’s destiny. Chiang’s marriage to Mei-ling Soong bothconsolidated and symbolized the alliance. Some writers have regarded
it as a betrayal of the original aim of the Kuomintang
Revolution, butsince Sun Yat-sen had himself not only married another daughter of
the Soongs, but also obtained financial aid from Western-orientated
Chinese capitalists, this thesis is hard to maintain. That Chiang paida high price is, however, unquestionable.
It was Japan who, in spite of her own ruin, succeeded in crushing
the rising forces of liberal reformist Chinese nationalism represented
by the Kuomintang.
The National Government did not degenerate
until the war with Japan had ruined China’s middle classes, cut her
off from foreign trade, thrown the government on the support of the
backward Western provinces and vastly increased the power of theChinese Communists.
Chiang Kai-shek had originally been able to balance himself, with
consummate political skill, on the support of many diverse elements
and political groups in China while yet leaning slightly in the direction of the liberals. Following the fall of Hankow and Canton, andwith increasing difficulty after the Stalin-Hitler,
and Russo-Japanesepacts, he had held China united in spite of her military reverses. But,
as the long years of war dragged on, and particularly after the early
had enabled
defeats of the Anglo-American
forces in 1941-1942
Japan to make the blockade of Free China practically watertight, theNational Government in Chungking was forced to rely more and moreon the quasi-feudal or reactionary forces.
It is as if Chiang Kai-shek had originally
sat on a three-leggedstool supported by Right, Left and Center. The Center (the Westernized middle class with its economic base in the cities of the lost
coastal area) was desperately weakened by the war and Japan’s occupation of China’s coastal provinces.
The Left (the Communists)broke away and was used as a club by his enemies. Even the third leg
was pared down by Wan, u Ching-wei’s defection to the Japanese in1939.
Unless he and his government were to collapse entirely, ChiangKai-shek was forced to retain the support of the conservatives andThe Dilemmaof the Chinese Liberals

291

reactionaries.
He could not, until the war was over, even assert his
authority
over such pre-Kuomintang
war-lord elements as “Tiger
Lung,” the Governor of Yunnan. Much less was it possible for him toalienate the whole provincial rural gentry by drastic land reform.
The influence of the Westernizers naturally declined once the National Government was driven to the backward interior provinces andhad to depend in large part for survival on the support of what theCommunists call the feudal elements. The Whampoa officers, trainedin the Military Academy set up by the Kuomintang in the early twenties, constituted a professional caste personally loyal to Chiang Kaishek. The loyalty of other generals and officers was more questionable, in particular that of the provincial armies. It had to be held
through eight years of defeat and Japan’s tempting peace offers, andthese officers came in the main from the landowningclasses. This
alone made it practically impossible to institute agrarian reforms during the war. The government’s
dependence on the land tax as its
main source of revenue during the blockade also forced it to rely on
the village gentry to collect it. As Owen Lattimore admits, “It is simply impossible to collect the land tax without the goodwill of the landlords.”
Americans like General Stilwell, who damned Chiang Kai-shek for
not making a clean sweep of all the reactionaries and grafters in theadministration,
ignored political realities. Even President Roosevelt
had been careful not to alienate the bosses who controlled the Democratic machine in several large American cities. It would have been
far more difficult, indeed impossible, for Chiang Kai-shek to dispensewith the support of similar types of Chinese politicians.
Chiang wasforced to retain in power men like his Chief of Staff Ho Ying-chin
who, timid and inefficient as he might be, had the necessary connections and influence to hold China’s heterogeneous armies together.
The Generalissimo, I was told, would have liked to appoint General
But,
Chen Cheng in Ho’s place long before he actually did so in 1946.
although Chen Cheng was both able and incorrupt and held in highesteem by American officers, he is not a Whampoa graduate and thiswas too great a handicap in wartime for a chief of staff in China,
where the ties between the graduates of China’s West Point kept
various armies more or less united under Chiang Kai-shek’s corn-mand.

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The Generalissimo was confronted with the same problem whenever he attempted to cleanse the civilian administration.
Even if hehad desired to replace H. H. Kung or T. V. Soong, he could not findanyone else with the necessary knowledge of finance combined with
political connections. Wh en in 1947, he made Chang Chun Premier,
the latter was handicapped from the start by the tremendous financial
power and influence enjoyed by the Soongs and Kungs, by then both
excluded from the administration.
China’s backwardness was both her strength and her weakness.
Her primitive economy and quasi-feudal social organization made it
impossible for her to win the war alone, but it also enabled her to survive in spite of her defeats, loss of territory and revenue, and isolation
through blockade. The semimodernized Eastern provinces with theirrailways, roads and factories fell to the invader. The old primitive
China in the West remained unconquerable.
The bright promises and hopes of the young Kuomintang
Party
died in China’s unending struggle to survive as a nation. It was inevitable that the government should develop into a military dictatorship, since war was its constant preoccupation.
At the same time, thetraditions and philosophy of the Chinese people, their individualism,
their age-old refusal to honor force above reason, their sense ofhumor, cynicism and laissez-faire philosophy-ina word, their rejection of both the militarist concepts which underlie Western civilization and the ruthless totalitarianconcepts of Communism-prevented the National Government from becoming a streamline dictatorship on Nazi or Communist lines.
China got the worst of both worlds. Her government is not democratic; yet it has few or none of the advantages enjoyed by a fascist
or a Communist dictatorship.
Hence its failure to win the approval
either of the West or of Russia. Hence its military failures. Hencethe inability to mobilize the whole people for war, to force everyone
to sacrifice for the nation, and to pursue an internal policy ruthlessenough to squash all opposition. Hence also in large part its inability
to cope with the postwar economic crisis.
China emerged from the war morally as well as economically exhausted. Internal moral decay and the withering of the Kuomintang’s
roots in the economic and political life of the nation rendered theThe Dilemnmof the Chinese Liberals

293

National Government
incapable of rehabilitating
the country fastenough to halt the insidious Communist infeciion. The Kuomintang,which had originally been the party of the National Revolution,
hadlost its functional cells in the economy and become in the main a party
It had been narrowed down intoof officials and their hangers-on.
too close an approximationof a group of “ins” and their friends andrelatives, divorced from the people as a whole. The government suffers from hardening of the arteries and badly needs new blood. Youngmen of promise either cannot get into office or are kept in subordinate positions.
The poverty of the country and the civil war gave little opportunity
to the educated classes and the small merchants and industrialists
toobtain an adequate income. Since the political problem seemed incapable of solution by political means a huge army still had to besupported.
Only the printing presses could supply the required revenue. Inflation destroyed the initiative of private enterprise and thecontinuous rise in prices hit the middle classes hardest. Government
service seemed the only road to security.
Hence the greater andgreater pressure from the “outs” to get in, and the strong resistanceof the “ins” to get out.
All this, of course, plays into the hands of the Communists.
Someof the disgruntled“outs” join them, or support them, without any
liking for what they stand for, because they have no hope of winning
position in, or influence with, the present government.
The Democratic League is an outstanding example of a group of politicians trying to rise to high office through an alliance with the Communists.
There are also individual examples, as for instance the former Tientsin
comprador of an American friend of mine. In 1946, he joined theCommunists in the hope that if they came to power he would have
got in “on the ground floor” with a new government.
Loyalty to old friends and associates, which is a virtue in private
life, has become a vicious hardening and narrowing
influence in
Chiang Kai-shek’s government.
Yet it may have been for a time theonly cement which could hold China in the war, and may have caused
her government to refuse Japan’s tempting peace offers when there
seemed no hope of victory.
Some government members who had
opposed the war at the start were held in line by their loyalty to theGeneralissimo, even when they thought a peace should be negotiated.

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There is a reverse side to most defects and virtues. The ramifications of the family system, and the adherence, even of radicals, to the
old Chinese ethic which puts so much emphasis on loyalty to family
and friends, are a great handicap in setting up a modern, efficient andincorrupt
administration.
On the other hand they soften political
hatreds, offer a strong barrier to Communism and provide a sort ofgroup insurance in times of anarchy or civil war. As regards the latter point I remember how many of the refugees arriving in Hankow in1938 were fed and sheltered by their own clan organizations.
The
family system also operates sometimes as a political insurance in timesof disorder and civil war.
In general, both the gulf between the “ins” and the “outs” and thechasm which divides the two sides in the civil war are bridged inplaces by the curious criss-cross of family relationships and old friendships. Many families have a foot in both camps, Some have connections with almost every faction, old and new. Relatives of theCommunists can be encountered among the fashionable women of
Shanghai, and the sons and daughters of some high Kuomintang
officials have joined the Communists.
One of the wealthiest Chinese
bankers, Kang Hsin-chih, had a daughter in Yenan; her sister was
married to the Chinese Consul General in New York, P. H. Chang.
Dr. Paul Linebarger told me of a talk he had in 1940 with a certain
Kiang Kang-bu who had been a friend of his father many years before. Mr. Kiang was an old man who a long time ago had formed a
Socialist Party of his own which was refused affiliation with the Second International
because it had only a half-dozen members. In rg4o
he had become an official of the Nanking puppet government headedby Wang Cbing-wei. Linebarger was grieved but Kiang told him not
to worry about him.
“My son,” he said, “is an official of the Chungking Government.
My daughter is at Yenan with the Communists, and when she speakson the radio she tells the world what a horrible person I am. But bothof them are good children who will not forget the duties of filial piety.
Best of all there is my wife--she is in San Francisco with a bankaccount. Don’t be too sorry for me.”Mr. Kiang Kang-hu was justified in the faith he had put in his children, at least in so far as his daughter was concerned. In 1947 shecame to Nanking to try to save her father, in prison as a collaborator.

The Dilemmaof the Chinese Liberals

293

The Chinese press recounted how she went daily to visit him and wasmoving heaven and earth to save his life. Her husband, a Jewish doctor, famous in Ycnan under the Chinese name he had taken, once gave
me a lift in his automobile from the airfield in Peiping to Executive
Headquarters,
but he would not tell me from what country he came.
In an earlier chapter I referred to the young scion of the Chu
family who worked with Chou En-lai at the Communist Party Headquarters in the capital and who, through his nine married aunts, wasconnected with the Soongs, with the “young Marshall,”Chang
Hsueh-liang,of Manchuria, and with some half-dozen other influential and wealthy Chinese families. My conversations with this young
man’s grandfather in Peking were among the most interesting I had
in China. Mr. Chu Chi-chien had lived long and seen much and could
find little evidence of progress in recent years either in China or the
rest of the world.
One evening he spoke of Chinese lost hopes of what the revolution
would accomplish, and of the decay of public and private morals today.
He said :Nowadays everything is upside down. In the old days government
aimed at taxing as little as possible, and expenditure was based on
income. Now the reverse is done: it is decided first how much tospend and then the necessary income is raised. Formerly the ideal
was frugal living and many people were supported. Now our ideals
have been twisted around. We have adopted the European idea thateveryone should be independent.
We no longer have the old sense offamily obligation.
But are things any better? The old family system
had its merits as well as its faults. In general we seem to have discarded our old morality without acquiring a new one to take its place.
Society is in dissolution, not only in China but also in the Westernworld. Society needs the cement of accepted ethical values and standards of behavior. When you destroy the old morality without creatinga new one everything goes from bad to worse.
The ills of China are not the fault of the Kuomintang.
If you try
to reform too fast you make matters worse. The amalgamation of old
China and the West is difficult enough, but our financial crisis makes
matters infinitely worse.
It is sad for me to reflect at the end of my life that our National
Revolution and our long war against Japan have not made conditions
better; indeed they are worse than ever, not only on account of thedangers that threaten us from without, but because of the decline ofour morals.

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Mr. Chu was one of the old guard of the Kuomintang,although nolonger active. His nephew, Yu Ta-wei, who interpreted for US, was
not a member of the Kuomintang
but was nevertheless Vice-Ministerof War. Having studied at Krupp’s inGermany
before the war, he
had done an excellent job setting up the arsenals in blockaded Free
China which supplied the armies with about all the ammunition andarms they had. Shortly after I met him, Yu Ta-wci, who is regarded
as one of the ablest administrators
in China, became hlinister of Communications.
He is admitted by foreigners and Chinese alike to be
doing an amazingly good job of restoring the railways. His work ofreconstruction cannot, of course, keep pace with the Communist workof destruction, but in Central and South China be has accomplishedmiracles of quick restoration of destroyed communications.
The corruption,
graft and nepotism, which constitute China’s
gravest weakness, are in large part the legacy of the past. They arerooted in conceptions of loyalty to family and friends which weresocially valuable in a loosely knit agrarian society in which government played a minor role, but are a deadly poison in a modern, highly
integrated state. They also stem, however, from the too-great trials
and difficulties to which the Republic of China has been subjected andthe terrible poverty which denies an adequate livelihood to the great
majorityof the people, under any system of distribution.
Most individuals whom life has treated too hard and too unjustly
become demoralized in one way or another. The same may be true ofnations. If no amount of striving and self-sacrifice and devotion toprinciple ever produces rewards, and the fates are forever confronting
us with new difficulties, there comes a time when further effort seems
futile and the easy path is chosen-it
cannot lead to glory but will at
least ensure a livelihood.
If it be true that the original essence and quality of the Kuomintang
Party has been lost in China’s unending wars, and the clear stream
muddied by the accretion of too many alien elements, the same processof degeneration has affected the Communists also. On the one handtheir subservience to Moscow has afflicted them with the same process
of moral degeneration as other Communist
Parties.
They havechanged their principles as the wind blew and now have only one unchanging aim: to win power. On the other hand, like the Kuomintang, they have of recent years accepted the services of anyone ready

The Dilemmaof the Chinese Liberals

297

to give lip service to the party. Bandits, former Japanese puppet
troops and collaborators, old war lords and compradors have joinedwith the Communists since V-J Day.
Many old branches on the Kuomintang
tree are rotten. But there
are some fresh green branches underneath.
One can meet many
younger officials who are personally incorrupt, efficient and qualified.
In Communist China the position is exactly the reverse. The leaders
are efficient, clever, energetic and personally incorrupt.
Rut their followers are quite incapable of fulfilling the duties of administrators
ortechnicians.
From all accounts the Communist administrationof the territories
they have “liberated” since V-J Day does not compare with that of
the old model Border Region centering around Yenan. The Communists are finding it impossible to check graft and stop abuses ofpower now that the orginal Party membership is spread thin overwide areas. In some places they have been so short of personnel thatthey have installed in office former bandits who extort more from thepeople than the landlords and tax collectors and, in general, behave
like the old war lords whose origins were similar. The inhabitants ofHarbin, for instance, were reported in 1947 to be living under a reignof terror with no security of life or property.
It is not only the “rich” who flee when the Communists come. For
instance, a Nezw York T&es correspondent on June IO, 1946, reported the presence of 40,000 refugees in Chinkiang who had fled
there from the Communist-held
northern half of Kiangsu.
For themost part, they were peasants owning, at most, three or four acres ofland, and they had become refugees in Kuomintang
China to escapeCommunist exactions or conscription into the Communist armies. In
May 1946, 120,000
refugees from Communist areas were reported to
be in Shihchiachuan in southwest Hopei.
The capture of Kalgan by the Nationalist forces, in October 1946,
illustrated most clearly how far the Communists have moved fromtheir original position as the champions of the Chinese working
classes. They had so little faith in the Chinese proletariat and so complete a disregard for their interests that, before surrendering
thetown, they deprived three thousand workers of their livelihood by
dynamiting fifty-two factories (including those producing such necessities as flour, soap, matches and soybean sauce) and also destroying

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the workers’ dormitories.
Th ey also dynamited the rail yards, thepower station and all other public utilities.*
It was hardly surprisingthat the people of Kalgan appear to have welcomed the Nationalist
forces as liberators.
Nor are the peasants faring any better than the working class in
Communist-controlledareas. Fighting more vigorously and continuously against the National Government than they ever did against
the Japanese, the Communists, in order to supply larger armies, resort
to methods of squeezing the farmers no different from those of the old
war lords. At the height of the Communist offensive in Manchuria
and North China, peasants in Hopei (near Peking) were complaining that the Communists had come three times within a month to collect “taxes.“**Just as formerly the Chinese “common man” was punished by theJapanese for not resisting the Communists and by the Communists
for not resisting the Japanese, so now he is squeezed between the opposing Communist and Nationalist forces.
Neither the Kuomintang
nor the Communist flood has ever possessed sufficient force to sweep away the old landmarks in China.
When united, as from 1922 to 1927, they proved irresistible.
But
their unity could not possibly endure since each wished to follow different courses in reconstructing
China, and in foreign policy. So thegovernment has been forced continually to waste its revenue in trying
to suppress the Communists; and the Communists have concentrated
their efforts on destroying everything the Kuomintang
built up.
Although unavoidable, the divorce between the two movements has
been a tragedy for China. Each desired to destroy the other but had
not the strength to do so. Each welcomed the support of alien elements in order to acquire the necessary strength. Each was corrupted
in different ways. The reforming patriotic essence of the Kuomintang
was watered down and almost lost. The Communists became a groupout for power at any price, ready to lie and cheat to ‘get it, and evento deny their own theories, betray their own precepts and pretend tobe followers of Sun Yat-sen, not of Marx.
At times they can hardly*See Time magazine of November 18, 1946, for an eyewitness account of what its
correspondent Frederifk Gruin called the Communists “political mistake rivaling theirmilitary failure.”** See Time magazine June 30, 1947, as well as Chinese Central News reports.

The Dilemmaof the Chinese Liberals299

be distinguishedfrom robbers and war lords. The leaders of theParty remained personally incorrupt in a narrow material sense but
morally and politicallythey have lost their integrityby becoming
Moscow’s puppets.
The Chinese liberals who have been attracted to Communism
by
their disgust at the shortcomingsof the National Government
areusually quickly repelled when they come into close contact with theCommunists.
Dr. Fu Ssu-nien, the distinguished historian and philosopher who was one of the nonparty delegates to the Political Consultative Council, said to me in Chungking that the Kuomintang
andthe Communists actually support each other. “Those who are inclined
to withdraw their support from the Kuomintang
stick to it because
the alternative, the Communists, is worse; those who are revolted by
Communist practices as distinct from their professions nevertheless
do not all repudiate Communism because the only alternative is thepresent Kuomintang
Government.”
Most Chinese are convinced that the National Government, weakand corrupt as it is, has at least the virtue of being for China, whereas
the Communists are for Russia first. Few educated Chinese, after
their country’s experience during the past century, will pin theirfaith to a Party which takes its orders from a foreign Power. The unhappy liberals continue to support the government, hoping against
hope that it can be reformed and purified.
The Chinese being an old and experienced people recognize thelimitations of human nature. They are ready to tolerate a considerable
margin of corruption-too
great a margin in fact-in
the establishedgovernment.
Years ago, when I remarked to Madame Chiang that
one had to admit that the Chinese Communists were personally incorrupt in the material sense, she retorted at once : “Yes, of course ; they
aren’t yet in power.” The answer was typical of the Chinese view ofgovernment.
The established government has more leaway for corruption and maladministration
than in the West. And the Kuomintang has inherited the position of the emperors in the sense that it is“the government,” accepted as such by the great majority of the people. The Chinese, however great their disappointment at its performance, are disposed to give it decades in which to reform itself andshow what it can accomplish.
The Communists, on the other hand,
have only a small margin in which to operate. They would lose every-

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thing, including their lives, unless their leaders were incorrupt andable. They have no hope at all unless they set a better example thanthe established government since the cost of revolution would not beworth while unless the Chinese were certain that a change would bevery much for the better.
The Communists, owing to the poor quality of their recent adherents, their terroristic measures and the anarchy they create, as well as
their foreign ties, offer no guarantee that their rule would be an improvement over that of the present government.
The defeat of Japan and the support of America should have enabled the liberals to regain their strength.
But America has given
them little backing, and the civil war has prevented the economic
recovery which could resuscitate China’s middle classes and enable
the liberals to regain the position they held in 1937.
China’s primary need is not the installation in power of men who
talk glibly about democracy, or of ineffectual dreamers who refuse to
see the realities of China’s situation. What the Chinese people desperately require is a clean, efficient and progressive government able toinspire respect for its laws, protect both capital and labor, encourage
enterprise and carry through the immense tasks of reconstruction.
Had the United States exerted a fraction of the energy and effort
it has used to force Chiang Kai-shek to share power with the Communists, in pressuring him to get rid of the dead and rotten wood in his
government and give scope and opportunity
to the men inside andoutside the government who could and would reform the administration, the Chinese people would not now be faced with no alternative
to reaction and misgovernment
other than the Communist dictatorship and subjection to Moscow.
Such interference in the internal affairs of China would no doubt
be labeled “imperialist
intervention,”
but it would in fact constitutea real good-neighbor
policy since it would liberate China from the
double stranglehold of reactionaries and Communists which is ruining her.
In the statement he made on January 7, 1947, General Marshallrecognized that the salvation of the situation in China “would be theassumption of leadership by the liberals in the government and in theminority parties” whom he characterized as rra splendid body of men.”
He did not, however, specify who are the liberals who, “under theThe Dilemmaof the Chinese Liberals

301

leadership of Generalissimo Chian, v Kai-shek,” would, he believed, be
able “to unite China through good government.”
Moreover, by identifying liberalism with willingness to appease the Communists, he confused America’s friends in China and emboldened the enemies of
democracy.
How can any intelligent Chinese understand why America, intent
on rooting out the Communist termites from public office at home,
insists upon China admitting them into her government?
Why, it isasked, do we insist that what is bad for America is good for China?
No Chinese has forgotten that, until a short while before Pearl
Harbor, America supplied Japan with war materials while encouraging China to continue fighting Japan. Now he hears the Communists saying that “the essence of the policy of American imperialism
is to colonize China.” Although he may have no sympathy for theCommunists he is uneasy. He asks himself: “Is this perhaps the reason why the United States seemingly backs both sides, thus perpetuating civil war? Is America deliberately seeking to weaken China?”
Thus our confused and vacillating
policy adds fuel to the firelighted by the Communists.
We have made it easy for the Communists to inspire anti-American
demonstrations and to convince many
Chinese that they are speaking the truth when they say that “the only
difference between Japanese and American imperialismis that thelatter is stronger and more hypocritical.”
The long war, Soviet Russia’s determination that China shall know
no peace until she submits herself to Moscow, and America’s misguided China policy, have all combined to weaken the Chinese liberals.
They continue to be ground between the upper and nether millstonesof Communism and reaction. Many have given up all hope and attend
only to their private affairs. Some escape to America. Others begin
to believe that nothing could be worse than the present state of affairs,
not even submission to Moscow, which would at least ensure peace.
Yet, at least while I was in China, even the most pessimistic liberals
still had a faint hope that Chiang Kai-shek would reform his administration.
It had not been forgotten that in the few years of peace which preceded the Sino-Japanese War the Kuomintang
had given China thebest government she had known for centuries and had won the confidence of the Western Powers in its ability to secure order and mod-302

Last Chance in China

ernize China. The National Government, corrupt and inefficient as
it has become, still has the prestige of having brought China throughan ordeal which no one in I 937 would have believed she could survive.
Chiang Kai-shek’s steadfastness in defeat, his cool and farsighted
judgment and his unswerving loyalty to the democracies at the lowest
ebb of their fortunes; the fact that he had maintained the fabric of thestate and a high degree of national unity through the dark and dreary
years when Japan occupied half of China; the abolition of extraterritoriality
so long the objective of the National Revolution;
andChina’s elevation, at least on paper, to Big Power rank-all
combined
to give the Generalissimo a stature which the worst abuses of his
administration
could not entirely obscure.
Anyone present when Chiang Kai-shek came to Shanghai in February 1946 could not fail to be impressed by the mood of the people.
I am not referring to the huge mass meeting at the Race Course atwhich the Generalissimo and General Wedemeyer both spoke to themultitudes from far off over the heads of soldiers and police. It wasan impressive sight with the innumerable banners of the demonstrators waving in the sunlight, and Chiang speaking, not of triumph, butof the responsibilities which the Chinese had assumed now that extraterritoriality
and foreign privilege had after so long been done awaywith. But what really impressed me was the look on the faces of thecrowd when next day the Generalissimo appeared on the balcony of
the Municipal Ruilding.
This was no organized demonstration,
but an unheralded appearance after his first press conference in the city so long held by Japan.
There were love and devotion in the eyes of the-young men close to mein the street. There was only a handful of police and they did not try
to prevent the crowd drawing close. Chiang and his wife stood fully
exposed on the second-floor roofless balcony. Correspondents climbed
up to take pictures close enough to touch him, and he would havebeen an easy target for anyone in the crowd below to which he spoke.
Such a scene would have been unthinkable in Moscow where Stalin
keeps the population at a r.lore than respectful distance and would not
dream of risking being shot at by his “loyal” subjects at close range.
Since then Chiang Kai-shek’s prestige has undoubtedly declined.
But still no intelligent Chinese liberal, however bitterly he may denounce the shortcomings of the government, wants to see it over-The Dilemmaof the Chinese Liberals

303

thrown.
The alternative he well knows would be anarchy or foreign
domination.
As Christopher Rand, a correspondent by no means favorably inclined toward the National Government, reported in the New York
Herald Tribune of April 12, 1917 : “The fact is that non-Communist
China without Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek is a picture horrible
for many thinking Chinese to contemplate. For better or worse, heis believed practically indispensable to its orderly existence. The political balance between its diverse regions, personalities and cliques isalmost entirely in his hands.”
The situation as some Chinese liberals see it was expressed to me by
one of the editors of the Ta Kung Pao, China’s leading independent
newspaper, as follows :China’s primary problem is unity.
Everyone agrees that democratic unity, political freedom and economic equality are the aim. The
people want these things and both the government and the Communor thenists say they believe in them. But neither the Kuomintang
Communists live up to their professions. There is a tendency toward
an organized movement opposed to both the government and theCommunists but it has not yet come into existence. The opponents ofthe government are by no means all Communists.
I myself am nonParty.
The sad thing is that the internationalsituation affords China agreat opportunity, but it is doubtful whether we are capable of taking
advantage of it.
Chiang has led China to victory and he brought China nearer tounity than at any time in her recent history. If I were in his position
I would proclaim an end to the one-party rule of the Kuomintang
asthe first step toward democratic unity. I would hold a general election
throughout the country for a truly representative National Assembly.
I would try to give this assembly full powers like a Parliament or a
Congress. On the other hand I would make no compromise with theelements who want to split up China.
I asked him how democracy could be established in a country withHe replied that even a man who cannot
so high a degree of illiteracy.
read or write can vote. But he was vague on the system of voting inso huge a country with a population consisting mainly of peasants who
would be unable to judge whom to vote for, and would be an easy prey

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Last Chance in China

to demagogues and easily bribed. Like so many Chinese liberals hetended to ignore the practical difficulties.
“If I were Mao,” he went on, “I would become the leader of theSecond Party in China. Mao ought to struggle for a democratic
China instead of for personal prestige. In his place, instead of demanding that the Communists keep their arms and troops, I would
insist on a democratic setup for everyone. I would abolish the autonomous Border Region and give up my private army. At the sametime I would ask what the Kuomintang
would do in return. Would
they also give up one-party rule and their army? There is no real
conflict of ideologies. Compromise is possible.”“But,” I said, “don’t you think that the Communists follow the
Party line laid down in Moscow ?”“My personal opinion is that they do.”“What then ? How can you believe in that case that Mao would
ever do as you suggest ?”“That is the sad part of it. There is a deadlock in China.”
The amount of criticism of the government one hears in China isitself both a healthy sign and a proof of the falseness of the charges
leveled against it by foreigners who loosely use the word “fascist” asa term of opprobrium for any government which is either not democratic in the Western sense, or not “friendly”
enough to Russian totalitarianism.
The men one talks to inside the Chinese Government
are as dissatisfied with its working and its achievements as the liberals outside. The reformist urge is there, continually pulsing below
the surface. There is not, even in the higher ranks of the bureaucracy,
any of the self-complacent hypocrisy concerning the condition of thepeople which one finds in Russia. In China, at least, when men starve
they are not expected to pretend that life is glorious and joyous andhappy.
Men in high positions in the administration
will discuss
frankly with you its manifold shortcomings.
On the other hand, Chinese officials naturally are put on the defensive by those foreigners who approach them with an obvious Communist bias, or unwillingness
to see or learn anything about the realcauses of China’s shortcomings.
With them they put on a “front” orfoolishly make face-saving statements which only give a weapon totheir enemies,
TO me the Chinese seemed refreshingly
unhypocriticaland honest

The Dilemmaof the Chinese Liberals

305

No serious attempt is made to throw
in discussing their difficulties.
dust in the eyes of visitors. There is no Intourist to guide you so thatyou should see and hear only what the government is proud of. The
secret police do not dog your steps. This is proved by the lack of fearwith which anyone in China will criticize or damn the government.
Americanmilitaryobservers who visited Kalgan, following
its
capture from the Communists in October 1946, reported that one of
the main objections the inhabitants had to the Communist regime was
the ubiquitous spy system which made them afraid to talk. In Nationalist China at least one important freedom exists: the freedom togrumble.
Nor has the Chinese Government ever tried to prevent the people
Such incidents as the shutting downfrom reading foreign literature.
of the British public library in Moscow, or the refusal of Marshal Tito
to allow his subjects to read American magazines and newspapers in
the reading room of the United States Embassy, are simply unthinkable in China. Foreign newspapers and books are freely admitted,
and foreign journals and books published in cheap pirated editions
give them a wider circulation than shortage of foreign funds would
otherwise permit. In general it is quite absurd even to compare conditions in China with those existing in totalitarian
countries withregard to freedom of access to news and knowledge, and freedom ofthought and expression.
The following remarks, made to me by a liberal writer and former
university professor who had taken service with the government on
the outbreak of the war with Japan, are typical of the “self-criticism”
freely voiced by members of the administration.
Our greatest weakness is the slowness and the cumbersome working of the administrative
machinery.
There is far too much “redtape,” as the English call it. Even minor decisions cannot be madeuntil they have been okayed by a multitude of departments.
Also thevarious ministries are inclined to interpret their powers too liberally.
As in the United States there are overlapping jurisdictions,but weare too poor to be able to “muddle through” as Americans can, and as
Britain used to be able to do. We urgently need a simplification of theadministrative
machinery and a clear definition of the spheres of thevarious departments.
Our greatest lack is trained and efficient personnel. Most of ourChungking bureaucrats are incapable of adjusting themselves to their

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Last Chance in China

The same is even more true of our local
increased responsibilities.
government where the shortage of educated people is acute.
The National Government officials are failing to live up to thedemands of China’s new status in the world. They are inclined to go
on doing things in the old traditional Chinese way, as if China werestill fighting a lone battle with nothing to sustain her but her belief in
her own culture. Moreover they fear to shoulder responsibilities andtry to dodge issues, postpone decisions and shift their burdens onto
others.
Wendell Willkie was right when he said that there was in China anequivalent of British “old school tie.” Most of China’s leading men
were at one time fiery revolutionaries,
but many of them have outlived
their usefulness. They are too Chinese, so to speak, to be leaders ofChina now that we have become an integral part of a global community and are expected to play our part alongside the leading WesternPowers.
It is unfair to classify these men as reactionaries, but it is a fact thatthey are out of date and have become obstacles in the way of China’s
development and progress. Just b ecause in the past they played so
important a role, and were so necessary to our survival as a nation,
they are inclined to think that any innovation constitutes a reflection
on what they have accomplished in the past. Men like H. H. Kung, forexample, are not reactionaries, and perhaps only they and their methods could have kept China fighting against such great odds for solong. The trouble now is that although they favor reform they often
miss the point on the most important issues; they are incapable ofadapting themselves to the requirements of a new situation.
I used to sit in on most of the meetings of the Central Executive
Committee of the Party which take place twice a year. You would be
surprised at the frankness with which the Party leaders criticize thosein executive positions, and also at the many propositions for reformwhich are made. The same is true of the People’s Political Council
instituted in 1938 to represent the provincial assemblies and professional associations. Although it is true that the members of the latter
were, generally speaking, appointed by the National Government, thisdid not prevent them from acting independently and freely voicing
their opinions. Appointed or not, they voiced the grievances of thelocalities they represented.
“Yes,” I replied, “it sounds rather like England six or seven centuries ago when the first Parliaments were called by the King. The
representatives of the people, although sitting at Westminster at theKing’s pleasure, did not always vote the way the monarch desired.”In this mixed-up era of ours the “liberal” label is too often tagged

The Dilemmaof the Chinese Liberals

307

to those who in no respect deserve it but call themselves “progressives” because they are friendly to Communists.
Conversely the designation, “a reactionary”
has become a synonym for those who, in
WinstonChurchill’swords, “react to the menace of an armed
Communist.”
Our own political terms are all confused and they are in any casepeculiarly inappropriate to the Chinese scene. In a country composedlargely of illiterate peasants, ruined by eight years of war against
Japan and continuing civil war, threatened by anarchy or partition,
desperately needing not a paper democratic constitution but a strong,clean and efficient government, what are the truly progressive forces?
It is rather like asking who were the liberals at the time of Magna
Carta ? Certainly they were not the wicked barons who forced a bad
king to grant them the liberty to oppress their own underlings.
A free election in China today might well result in a repetition ofwhat happened after the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1912 :unlimited war-lord rule in a divided country inviting foreign conquest.
A good example of confused Western thinking about China waspresented in the first issue of United Nations World which put Sun Fo
first on the list and included the following in its roster of liberals:
Wang Shih-chieh;
Shao Li-tse;
Yu Ta-wei; Yen, the educator;
Chang Lan, Chairman of the Democratic League, Lo Lung-chi,itsspokesman and Mrs. Herman Liu, its foremost woman member;
Wang Yun-wu, the publisher who is now Minister of Economics;
and brother
Wong Wen-hao ; Chang Chia-ngau, the industrialist,of Carson Chang ; Lu Tso-fu, shipping magnate ; Lin Yutang ; andKuo Mo-jo.
A comparable American list would include Henry Wallace; Cordell Hull;Joe Davies (author of Missio~z to Moscow) ; Robert
Young; Claude B. Hutchison;
Claude Pepper; Marshall Field; Mrs.
Roosevelt; Charles A. Beard ; Henry Ford ; Henry Kaiser; Walter
Lippman and John Steinbeck. It might even include Al Capone since
the veteran Chang Lan of the Democratic League included on the
Chinese list is a former war-lord who made a fortune selling opium.
Thus the essence of the dilemma of the Chinese liberals lies not
only in the impossibilityof establishing a democratic government on
Western lines at this stage of her development, and in the midst ofcivil war with the totalitariansof the Left. It lies also in the failure

308

Last Chance in Chinaof the modern world to define liberalism in intelligible and noncontradictory terms. Does liberalism retain its original meaning of freeenterprise,elected representative
government
and equality under
law ? Or does liberalism mean “progress” toward state capitalism, or
state socialism, or whatever one chooses to call a state-controlled
economy and government regulation of all the activities of the people ?
Chiang Kai-shek is generally regarded as ignorant of economics
and unaware of the social and economic forces which move mankind.
Yet, in Claim’s Destiny, he shows himself better informed of the tendencies of our era and the contradictions
they pose than many liberals.
He writes :People who favored democracy looked down at China’s position,
long suppressed under the unequal treaties, without considering t!lat
the economics of the world after the first world war, advanced fromfree competition toward monopoly and centralization.
They praised
themselves as being modern while applying economic theories of thefirst industrial revolution to fit a China facing the trends of the second revolution in Europe and America.*
Chiang Kai-shek puts his finger on the spot when, in referring to
failure to develop economic rehabilitation according to
the 1927-1937
schedule, he says that the cause was not only imperialist interference(Japanese aggression) and civil war (“counterrevolutionary
influences”) but also theoretical disagreements.
“The economists at thattime,” he writes, “were equally divided between the theories of democracy and Communism.”
Which way, indeed, should China develop? It is expected of her
by her conservative American patrons that she apply nineteenthcentury economic theories ; while at the same time her voluble American critics of the Left demand that she institute “economic democracy” on Communist lines. To make confusion worse confounded,both schools of American “friends of China” demand that she institute a Western-type constitutional government, with sufficient power
guaranteed to the Communists to bore from within to destroy it.
Chiang Kai-shek is eminently right in seeing that many liberals
put the cart before the horse ; that in “devoting their efforts to thearticles of constitutional law and to creating a political system,” with* A private rendering of this passage from the original,

The Dilenlmaof the Chinese Liberals309

out realizing that “a revolution of reconstruction”
must come first,
they opened the door “for the secret schemes of the war lords, giving
the imperialists the opportunity to extend their exploitation.”
This isas true today, when “the imperialists”
signifies mainly Russia, as it
was following the overthrow of the Manchus in 1911 when “the imperialists” meant Britain, France, Japan, Russia and even America
who all backed different war lords in order to try to establish paramount influence over the weak “Republican,” “constitutional”
PekingGovernment.
I think any unprejudiced historian has to accept the correctness of
Chiang Kai-shek’s dictum :We all know that political tutelage is the path to be followed in
attainment of a democratic government by the people, that without
this the foundations of a government of the people cannot be erected,
and that otherwise the constitution to be framed in the future can only
become a valueless piece of white paper with black words.*
The basic dilemma is how to ensure that those in charge of thetutoring are qualified and honest enough to do it. Undoubtedly
theKuomintang
has lost most of its original savor as a reforming, revitalizing agency. Yet, perhaps it could be restored if America would
use her friendly efforts to encourage, assist and aid the best elements
inside the Kuomintang,instead of squeezing out the remaining salt inthe body politic of China by pressuring the government to admit to ashare of power democracy’s worst enemies : the Communists.
* A private rendering of this passagefrom the original.

CHAPTERXIII

Poverty and the LandM

popular writers on China ascribe the terrible poverty of
the Chinese peasant to exploitation
by “feudal” landowners
government ; and they lead
supported by a “reactionary”
their readers to suppose that China has only to redistribute the landThis view is entirely misleading.
for her people to enjoy prosperity.
Backward as China is, the miserable condition of her farming population is not due to the same causes as those which made life brutish
and short for the peasants of medieval Europe.
The feudal organization of society came to an end in China thousands of years ago. There is no hereditary caste of landowners; thepeasants are not serfs tied to the soil; land is freely bought and sold.
The law of primogeniture,
which preserved large estates in Europe
by entailing them on the eldest son, was abolished in China in the second century B.C. The hereditary fiefs of the nobility were subsequently divided up among all sons and thus disappeared. Dr. HuShih, the world-renowned
scholar who was for a time Ambassador to
the United States, has written :OSTThis tradition of the equal division of hereditary property among
all the sons of a family was the practice among all classes of the population and tended to equalize wealth and landownership.
Because ofthis practice no great estate could remain in existence for as long as
three generations.
This economic equalization has tended to create a social structurein which there are practically no class divisions, nor even enduring
divisions between the rich and the poor.
In Lancashire, England, they used to say, “Clogs to clogs in three
generations,” meaning that the grandsons of workers who became
In China
capitalists frequently reverted to the ranks of the proletariat.
310

Poverty

md the Land

3’1

estates and farms are continually being subdivided so that today’s rich
may be tomorrow’spoor. Few landowners in any case own large
estates.
Of course, some families enlarge their land holdings and makemoney as merchants, petty industrialists,
usurers or government officials, remaining “rich” from generation to generation. It is not to bedenied that the “rich” exploit the poor; but feudal, so beloved by theCommunists, is not the correct word to apply to landlord-tenant
relationships.
Communists in particular ought to know better since Marx madea distinction between feudalism and the “Asiatic system” of paymentof rents in kind, This system is neither feudal nor capitalist. In someplaces it has already given place to a capitalist landlord-tenant
relationship through the payment of cash instead of crop or share rents.
The problem in China is one of protecting the tenant from rack
rents, high interest rates, the inequitable allocation of the tax burdencaused by the landlords’ political influence and of helping him to acquire ownership of the land he cultivates. But the Chinese peasants
are not serfs as the Russians were before 1864.
The basic trouble in China, from which flow all the curses thatafflict the farmers, is simply too many people and not enough land.
Until fewer people try to make a living off the land, no action by
the government can be effective in cm-in g agrarian poverty, or counteracting the play of economic forces which places the tenant at themercy of the landlord and the small peasant proprietor at the mercyof the usurers and merchants. Nor are most landlords likely to ceasesqueezing their tenants so long as they themselves are only a little
better off than those they exploit.
Exact statistics are not available. The government has never had
the necessary respite from war to get as far as making a census or aland survey. In this respect China is still behind England under William the Conqueror who, in 1086 in his famous Domesday Book, surveyed every estate and farm and catalogued the livestock and impI+
ments they possessed. Surveys have, however, been made in various
parts of China which supply an approximate idea of the number ofpeople in relation to the cultivatable land.
According to the most recent estimates, China’s populationnow
totals 457,000,000,
331,000,oooof whom live off the land. The

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Last Chance in China

amount of farm land amounts to only about half an acre per head andto less than one acre per farm inhabitant.
These figures comparewith approximately
eight acres per person in the United States andthirty acres for each American engaged in agriculture.
According to Dr. John Lossing Buck,* the number of farm persons
per square mile of cultivated territory in China proper averages 1,500.
Dr. Chiu**
apparently including all the outlying territories
undernominal Chinese jurisdiction,such as Manchuria, states that the density of population according to the estimated area of land is 104.4 persquare mile, as compared with 41.3 in the United States, 453 in Japan,
365 in Germany, 197 in France, and only 19.8 in Russia.
The discrepancy between the figures per square mile of cultivatedland and total area is explained by the fact that half of China has amean annual rainfall of less than twenty inches, and by the mountainous nature of other areas. According to Dr. Wang \Ven-hao, China’s
foremost geologist, less than 20 percent of China’s land is suitable for
agriculture.
Her Northeastern provinces (Manchuria)
are her only
large thinly populated area. Prior to Japan’s conquest it is estimatedthat a million Chinese emigrated there annually.
Since V-J Day
Russia and the Chinese Communists have prevented the resumptionof such internal emigration.
Britain,with an acreage of 0.67 cultivated land per head of thetotal population, has to import half her food. Even the fertile land of
France with only one person to each 1.29 acres has failed to feed herself since the end of the war. In Russia, with an estimated 2.01 acresof cultivated land per capita, and huge empty areas which could bemade arable, collectivizationand mechanization
had not by 1939
substantially
increased the total grain production above the level of
Czarist times.? Millions of Russians, like the Chinese, are on the borderland of starvation.
All in all, however, the primitive but skilled“gardeners” of China make a better showing with regard to the use
made of the available land than semi-industrialized
Russia.
*Buck, Land Utilization in China (Chicago, 1937), p. 364.
** Dr. A. Kaiming Chiu, Chinu, University of California Press, 1946.
TFreda Utley, The Dream We Lost? page 156. The Soviet Government’s figures ofgrain production give the “biological yield” which is the quantity of grain estimated in
the standing crops with a deduction of IO percent for harvest loss. On this basis, thetotal grain harvest in 1913 was 94.1 million tons as against 82.7 in 1936, 1~0.3 in 1937,
95.0 in 1938 and a similar figure in 1939.

Poverty

alzd the Land

Dr. Y. C. Koo, one of China’s
Chungking :leading economists,313
said to me in

Increased production,industrialization
and birth control afford
the only solution for China’s agrarian problem. Even the conservatives in the government admit the necessity for land reform. But liberals and conservatives alike know that this alone cannot solve ourproblem. At present there is not enough food and there are too many
people. Western science and techniques and organization,soil conservancy, irrigation,
reforestationand improved seeds and chemicalfertilizers can very greatly increase the yield of the land. Combinedwith the industrialization
which will decrease the pressure on theland, and village industries to give the peasants employment in their
free time, this is the best solution. There is in fact no other solution
for China’s poverty. The redistributionof the land which the Communists want would not help much nor provide a lasting remedy.
Most of China’s landowners are small holders. We have few great
estates. The pressure on the land and the acute poverty of the peasantswould be only temporarily
relieved by expropriating
the landowners
or killing them off.
How true this statement was is borne out by the findings of theAmerican-Chinese
Agricultural
Mission. After a five months’ investigation on the spot, it reported in November 1946 that overpopulation in relation to the available tillable land is China’s fundamental
problem. Claude B. Hutchison, Dean of the College of Agricultureof
California University,
who headed the American section of the mission, states that overpopulation
is more important than the ills emphasized by political writers -landlordism,
high rents and interest
rates, heavy taxes and the “feudal” backwardness of Chinese agriculture.
The Mission, while making constructive
suggestions forcoping with the political and social problem, declared that the benefitsof agrarian reform, and even of industrialization,
could not afford asolution for Chinese poverty unless population pressure decreases.
It is obvious that, with only half an acre of cultivated land perhead of her population and the country split three ways by strategic
stalemate, China could not under any system have avoided starvation
for large numbers of her people. The large army and the refugeeswollen population of the large cities -bothin Nationalist territorycould be provided for only by forcing the peasants to give up food

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Last Chance in China

they needed for themselves. The correspondents
who blamed theChinese Government for all the misery they saw around them shouldhave studied the facts instead of letting their emotions run away withthem.
Not only is most of the good land in China already settled, butthere is far too much cultivation of marginal areas. The deforestation of mountainsides to carve out farms has resulted in soil erosion
and in the silting up of many streams and canals, thus destroying or
impairing large areas of good land.
The greatest pressure of population is on the most fertile rice-bearing lands of the South. The number of farm persons per square milein Central, East and South China is estimated to be 1,700 as against
goo in the Northwest.
But the average production per capita of the
farm populationin the former territories
is 1,500 kilograms asagainst 800 in the Northwest where wheat is the main crop.
Outside of Manchuria and the Northwest, according to Dr. J. Lossing Buck, an additional ten percent of farm land could be made available for profitable cultivation
by such measures as the removal ofgraves, elimination of land in boundaries after consolidation of fragmented holdings, and putting under the plow arable lands not now
cultivated.
The last measure requires a capital expenditure outside
the range of individual farmers or landlords, but it can be noted thatgrave clearance has proceeded on a fairly large scale and amounts toa spontaneous reform which takes place without government compulsion.
It is generally agreed that the following measures are needed:
Improved water control to prevent floods and droughts.
Reforestation
to prevent soil erosion and the clogging of streams
and irrigation canals with silt washed down the mountainsides.
Repair and extension of the irrigation systems of the plains.
Improved seed and the use of chemical fertilizers.
Remedies for insect pests and plant diseases and, in general, theapplication of modern scientific knowledge to the improvementofsoils, crops, livestock and farm implements.
These could increase thequantity and quality of China’s agricultural
production and preventthe famines which frequently occur.
Co-operative marketing, credits and improved transportationareother measures essential if China is to feed her people and give thepeasants a reasonably high standard of life.

Povertyand the Land315

But the basic problem remains : rural overpopulation which cannot
be remedied by redistributionof the land. Nor would the collectivization and mechanizationof farms on the Soviet model be an advantage. On the contrary, it would vastly intensify the problem bythrowing
millions out of work and diminishing
China’s total foodproduction.
For although her per capita production is very low theamount of food produced per acre is correspondingly
high. In his
Lasd Utilizationin Chinn, published in 1937, Dr. Buck showed thatthe average yield of wheat per acre was actually higher in China thanin the United States-sixteen
bushels as against fourteen.
But theChinese crop is harvested with sickles and, of course, requires
many times more people to produce it. The total rice crop is twice aslarge as the wheat crop. Farms average only four acres in size andthe density of population, according to Dr. J. Lossing Buck, is ashigh as 1,700 farm persons per square mile of cultivated territory
inCentral-East-South
China. Production per farm worker is estimatedat only one-fourteenth of that of an American farmer.
A general discussion of “feudal landowners” and the interpretationof basic geographic and demographic factors as “oppression” clearly
does not fairly portray the Chinese agrarian problem.
Of course, the Communists have a simple remedy for overpopulation and the agrarian problem. It consists simply of liquidatingthelandowners--cutting
off their heads or driving them out. Lin Tsuhan (Lin Pai-chu),
the Communist
Commissar of Finance, told
Edgar Snow years ago that forty to fifty percent of the revenue ofSoviet China was raised by land confiscation. This policy was abandoned in 1935 but, as we have seen, appears to have been resumed
recently under the guise of “settle account” trials of landowners.
However, Chou En-lai once admitted to Carl Crow that the confiscation of estates had worked hardships on a great many innocent people
and created “wrong ideas” about the ownership of property.
Clearly the solution of the agrarian problem by violence was not
popular among a majorityof the peasants. It is extremely doubtful
if a free vote in China would lead to the passage of a law for theconfiscation of all land without compensation.
Many of the poor are
related to the rich, others are loyal to those they work for and every
peasant hopes to become a property owner. Only a Stalinist dictatorship, hardened to the starvation or killing of millions and indiffer-

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Last Chzce

itz China

ent to the wishes of the people, ~vould attack China’s agrarian problem
by wholesale expropriationof the landowners and kulaks-theRussian term for a prosperous peasant owner.
Even so, it would not be a lasting solution. The lack of enoughland for all the cultivators would soon lead to a situation similar tothe one which exists today.
The National Government is itself largely to blame for the readiness with which foreigners accept the oversimplified
Communist version of the causes of Chinese rural poverty. Its information and propaganda agencies do not encourage journalists
or authors to obtainsuch statistical and factual information
as is available. The officials
who come in contact with visiting foreigners are for the most part
American-educatedChinese long since cut off from their ancestralroots in the villages and often themselves ignorant of the facts revealed by the economic and social surveys which have been made.
It was not until I returned to the United States that, thanks to Dr.
J. Lossing Buck, I discovered that the University of Nanking’s College of Agriculture,
while in exile at Chengtu, had continued to makesurveys and to publish its monthly journal Ecolzomic Facts. Dr. Buckhas sutnmarized much of the available informationfrom this andother sources in a’paper prepared for the 1947 Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations. The picture he presents of agrarian conditions in China bears little resemblance to the popular American conception of China as a country in which rural poverty is the result of“feudal” oppression.
Dr. Buck does not deny the oppressive nature of the landlord system in many places, or the fact that rents are too high. But he shows
the great variety of tenures, some good and some bad, and he points
out that more farmers in China own the land they cultivate than in the
United States-about
50 percent in China as against 42 percent in
the United States.
Many tenants are also owners of a small plot of land of their own,
and some tenants are more prosperous than owners. Taking China asa whole, he estimates that only a quarter of the farm population owns
no land at all. In the most fertile rice-growing
districts of the South,
however, the proportion of tenants rises as high as 75 percent, asagainst only 25 percent in the wheat regions of the North.
According to a survey conducted by the National Agricultural
Re-

Povertyand the Land

3’7

search Bureau, in a majority of the Southern provinces 40 percent of
the farmers are tenants and 20 to 30 percent owners.
Since no land survey covering the whole country has been made inmodern times the above figures are all only estimates and must be
accepted with reservations.
Moreover, the really important point is
the amount of land held by those who cultivate it as compared withthat owned by landlords.
According to an estimate made by the Sun Yat-sen Institute of
Nanking before the war, IO percent of the farming population owns
a little over half the cultivated land in China.
Accordingto an investigation
conducted in 1926-1927
by thepart-Communist\Vuhan Government 43 percent of the cultivated land
was owned by only 5 percent of the population.
;Ynother 20 percentof the land was owned by poor and middle-class farmers with less thanof the farming population owned
IO0 1no11,* so that three-quarters
only a third of the land. These figures, however, relate to the central
Yangtze Valley area where it is known that there are more large landowners than elsewhere.
These estimates are in any case all prewar and it is known thatthe inflation has enabled the peasants in many districts to becomeowners of the farms they formerly cultivated as tenants.
When visiting a textile factory in Shanghai in January 1946 I wastold that the difficulty in obtaining skilled labor was largely due tothe fact that workers who had returned to their villages during theJapanese occupation would not now go back to the factories,because of
the better economic position of their families. Many former tenants
had become owners, thanks to the inflation.
In Free China during the war years, according to Dr. Buck, thesituation of the farming population was generally better than before
the war because the normal large surplus of man power on the farms
minimized the effects of war on the supply of farm labor for crop production. In other words, the forced recruitment of soldiers from thevillages improved the economic situation for those who escaped thedraft by diminishing
the supply and increasing the demand for agricultural labor and farm products.
In general, Dr. Buck concludes, costs of production in agriculture,* One mou is 0.x.52 acre.

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Last Chance in China

taxes, labor and interest rates and cash rents lagged behind the prices
received by farmers for the products they sold. True that up to 1943
the prices received by farmers for their produce increased less thanthe prices they paid for clothing and other manufactured goods, sothat they bought less clothing and spent less on recreation. But since
the farmer’s cost of production expenditures
occurred prior to his
sales the continual rise in prices put him in an advantageous position.
His expenses were incurred at a lower price level than his receipts.
On the other hand, the institution of taxes in kind instead of cash
naturally worked to the farmer’s disadvantage.
As regards rents, Dr. Buck, basing his estimates on surveys madein Szechwan by the Nanking College of Agriculture
and Forestry,finds the average to have been as high as 12.5 percent of the land
value, as against a total of all taxes of 3.44 yuan for each IOO yuan ofland value. Landlords, after deducting taxes paid from rent received,
obtained I I percent annual interest on the value of their land.
Rents are certainly too high. Conversely, interest rates are usuallymuch higher, averaging 30 percent in the case of loans provided bylandlords and between 21 and 28 percent when provided by relatives
and merchants. The Farmer’s Bank charges only 12 percent, but thecredits it supplies are only a small fraction of the credits required by
farmers. The natural working of economic laws in a country of terrific pressure on the land, dearth of capital, and undeveloped industries, makes it practically impossible to lower rents by law. Rather
than die of starvation without employment the landless Chinese will
accept the most onerous terms of tenancy, and even if he knows thatthe law is on his side, who will enforce the law?
There are many different kinds of land tenure: rents in kindamounting to a percentage of the crop, rents in kind of a fixed quantity per mou of land, and cash rents. Rents in kind are often higher
than 50 percent of the produce. As might be expected, rack renting
is prevalent in the most fertile districts where the pressure on the landis greatest.
The National Government, as long ago as 1936, passed a land law
forbidding
the payment of more than a third of the produce as rent.
In 1946 a new law limited landlords to an 8 percent return on theirinvestment.
But little, if any, notice is taken of these laws. The tenant’s lack of education is another factor enabling the landlord, mer-

Povertyand the Land

3’9

chant and usurer to cheat him. The lack of marketing facilities andpoor communications
further penalizes him and forces him to sell tothe same person to whom he owes rent or interest.
Yet we cannot conclude that the renting of land is inherently wrong.
At least, if we do we must also conclude that all private ownership ofproperty, however acquired, should be abolished and we ought all toestablish a Socialist order of society. It is certainly not logical tomaintain that China should annul all property rights while America
continues to believe in the capitalist order of society. What is wrong
in China is the failure of the state to protect the rights of the tenant
and restrain the landlord from taking advantage of his position to
deprive the cultivators of the rewards of their labors. The landlordtenant relationship should be an equal and just partnership with thelandlord supplying capital and technical advice. In China there are
instances of this, but too often the tenant’s lack of education as wellas his poverty renders the relationship more nearly that of master andservant. However, good landlords both assist the tenants and act asa buffer between them and the state by saving them from overtaxation.
The absence of a land survey works grave injustices and also diminishes the government’s revenues. The Land Administration
so farhas surveyed only 600 hsien. Samples of these surveys indicate thatperhaps a third of the cultivated area of China is not recorded. The
owners of perhaps a quarter of the cultivated area pay no taxes, thusincreasing the burdens of the others.
There is no doubt that land taxes are too high, averaging $1.79(U. S. money) per acre in prewar days as compared with only $.gr
to $1.15 in the eastern and northern United States, and imposing inmany parts of China an intolerable burden. Nor is there any doubtthat the big landowners are usually able to avoid paying as much as
the poor because they are often themselves the tax collectors.
Nor
does the farmer receive from the government any benefits commensurate with the taxes he pays. In other words, the Chinese State restson the back of the poverty-stricken
and often starving farmers whoreap little or no benefits from its expenditures.
Since those expenditures are almost all for war, the farmer does not even indirectly profit
as he would if industries were to be developed and communications
improved.

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Last Chance in China

It is, nevertheless, unfair to conclude that the government’s paper
schemes for land reform are just window dressing.
Kuomintang
China has model districts where rents have been reduced, and beginnings made in local self-government.
Yenan is not the only region
where land reforms have been instituted,
but few journalists havebeen interested in viewing the National Government’s show places.
‘As Dr. Buck remarks : “The Communist Government in the Northhas received a much better press than the National Government although its actual accomplishment in the field of technical agricultureis slight in comparison.”
Nor is it true that the National Government represents in the main
the “reactionary
landowning class.” The old civil service examinations which gave a monopoly of office to the “scholar gentry” wereabolished in 1912 following the establishment of the Republic. Today
government officials are recruited from all classes and are largely ofbourgeois origin.
The landowners today are not an organized class. The trouble isthat the ignorance of the peasantry and the weakness of the Central
Government give the village gentry too much power in local affairs.
As one district magistrate said in a meeting of the People’s PoliticalCouncil : “We need three things in order to reform local government :education, more education, and again more education. Only education can free us of servitude to the village gentry and from backwardness and corruption.”
It must be written to the credit of the National Government that it
has made a real effort to set up schools in the villages. Appropriations for education are the third largest in the Budget, although military expenditures, of course, are very much greater.
The Minister of Education, Chu Chia-hua, told me in Chungkingthat there are already two schools in existence for each pa0 (a pao
meaning 500 families).
The National Government provides free tuition and food in its universities-an
example of the tendency to try
to run before YOU can walk, since China is far too poor to afford this.
The result is that the students don’t get enough to live on, and consequently demonstrate against the government.
Also, one is always being told in China that the bright village lads
who succeed in getting an education go off to the towns to get jobs.
Hence the lack of educated people in the rural districts which forces

Povertyand the Land321

the local magistrates to fall back upon the “gentry.”
Hence also thedearth of teachers.
The influence of the landowningclass seems to be strongest precisely where the authorityof the National Government is weakest,
particularlyin the provinces which have never been more than nominally under the Central Government’s
control, and where cx-war
lords oppress the people.
As in so many other spheres the sins of the Central Government
are those of omission rather than commission; they arise from lackof power, not from the exercise of tyrannical power.
The high rate of taxation levied on the landowning class is in itself
a proof that it is not favored by the government.
The city merchantand industrialist
bear no such heavy burdens.
Sun Yat-sen said that “to the tiller belongs the soil” should be theaim of the Kuomintang.
But he did not advocate expropriationof themillions of landowners who own the soil of China. He thought that
equalization of landownershipwould come through an application ofHenry George’s theory of unearned increment. The landowner was
to assess the value of his land, and the state should have the right topurchase it at the price set by the owner. The landowner would be
prevented from placing too high a value on his land by having to paya correspondingly
high tax. Any increase in the value of the landshould go to the community.
It is impossible to say whether or not this scheme if carried out
could have brought to an end the present exploitation of the Chinese
peasantry through high rents and usury. For up to now, war being
the main preoccupationof the government, and obtaining the supplies to feed its armies its main concern, land reform has had to wait.
Yet if one looks, one can find men in the National Government who
appreciate the fact that land reform is China’s primary need. Unlike
the demagogues, they realize the immense difficulties.
In a small bare room in a tumbledown house on a side street in
Chungking I found the Land Administration
office. I talked to a man
there who was an enthusiast, but a tired one. The room was very
cold, and he was elderly, thin and emaciated. Both Mr. Cheng Chenyu and his surroundings
seemed symbolic of the lack of attention being
given by more prominent members of the government to the economic
and social reforms which alone can save China.

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Last Chance in China

Mr. Cheng told me that the government had a complete policy forthe relief of the peasant but it had been impossible to carry it out inwartime.
Nevertheless, in Free China something had been done evenduring the war. The policy of the Kuomintang,
he insisted, has inview the protection of independent farmers and the creation of moreof them. He said :The registration of tenancy in all provinces is being carried out,
and tenancies will be annulled when found to be illegal.
We want to create independent farmers.
Those who cultivate
should own the land.
We have experimented in almost every province. According to ourland regulations rents should not exceed 375 per 1,000 of the produceof the land. A law to this effect was passed in 1936. Wherever our
authority
extends we try to enforce this law. In 1936 we tried to
enforce it in Kwantung, Shansi, Kwangsi, Shensi and Kiangsu. The
trouble is that the law cannot be generally enforced because in manyhsien there is no effective administrative
authority.
In the provinces where the Central Government authority has beenlong established, the law can be enforced. In others it is not possible
to do so. For instance in Szechwan taxes are passed on to the tenant
and we cannot stop it.
Our aim is to develop strong local government authorities with theability to enforce the law. Since rgzg the Central Government has
been trying to create a new hsien system which would create powerful
local administrations.
These administrations
are usually elected. In
some provinces, notably in Kiangsu and Kansu and Kwangsi, thework has been carried out more energetically than in others.
Basically our problem is the question of our ability to enforce thelaws and regulations of the Central Government.
But there are also
members of the Central Government who oppose our reforms. Thereis always much opposition to the new laws we try to introduce. They
are opposed at meetings of the Executive Yuan and the Supreme Defense Council. The opposition’s argument is always that enforcementof the rules would create local disturbances and we cannot afford thisin wartime. Also, China is so big and local conditions vary so greatly
that it is impossible to lay down regulations from the center which
will be applicable everywhere.
The majority of government officials is in favor of reform. The
Generalissimo himself is. Unfortunately
often someone gets between
him and those who want to tell him the true situation.
A conversation I had in Chungking with Dr. Y. C. Koo, who shortly afterward became China’s representative on the International Monetary Fund, illustrated most clearly the financial difficulties which arePovertyand the Land323

the stumbling block in the way of agrarian reform. I had met thisyouthful-looking,quiet-spoken,
American-educatedChinese economist two years before at the Bretton Woods Monetary Conference andbeen impressed by his exceptional combinationof theoreticalandpractical knowledge.
Dr. Koo was at this time still head of the Farmers Bank whichuses its funds to give six-month production credits to farmers in the
period before harvesting, and also grants five to ten-year loans forland improvement,
irrigationand other capital expenditures.
“The Farmers Bank,” he said, “can do no more than scratch thesurface of China’s agrarian problem. Its resources are infinitesimalcompared with the needs of the Chinese farmers. During the war thewhole of the government’s
revenue could not finance the war, hence
the inflation.
Every state institution in China clamored for funds andall of them had useful proposals. But there was simply no way offinancing the most desirable projects.”
The Farmers Bank’s depositors are mainly government
institutions which are required to put some of their funds in it. The Bank
is not able to issue bonds because the public would not buy them. So
it has to struggle to get deposits in competition with the commercial
banks.
In March rg46 the Farmers Bank had a total of 6,4oo,ooo,ooo
yuan in loans outstanding, of which sixty-four percent were for irrigation. But the inflation was already rapidly diminishingthe valueof its funds.
Dr. Koo was of the opinion that the peasants had suffered relatively
less from the inflation than other sections of the population. This wasindicated by the statistical tables he showed me comparing the pricerises of the goods they bought and the produce they sold. Loans, atleast those repayable in cash like the Farmers Bank loans, had ofcourse been lightened by the inflation.
But local usurers’ loans were
almost always in kind and the interest rates were terrific; often one
hundred percent. The peasants had suffered most through the loss ofmen to the army. Also, their taxes in kind had been greatly increased.
Dr. T. F. Tsiang, at that time head of CNRRA,
said to me inChungking :The war taught us the importance of solving that great problem of
the common man in China-partial
unemployment.
In the long win-324

Last Chance in China

ter months the peasant has little to do and his land is insufficient tomaintain him. Contrary to reports abroad, the war improved thecondition of the peasantry because labor was in such great demand.
The wives and daughters of the peasants made money in local industries, in public work and as servants. As regards the public works,
such as road building, even if little or nothing was paid to the laborers,
they were at least fed. Unemployment
ahnost disappeared during the
war and the peasants acquired an extra source of income.
It is the intellectuals, the officials and professional people who havesuffered most. The inflation hit them hardest, whereas many farmers
benefited from it.
If once we can start demobilizing
the army our economy can recover. The actual size of the army today is about three and a half
million men. A standing army of a million is all that should be necessary in the future. This great man power when released should be
used partially on public works. Althoughthese are relief projects
decent wages must be paid ; the worker for his part must actuallywork. The state should set an example in providing model conditionsof pay, shelter and medical care. We can obtain equipment fromUNRRA.
One-third of our UNRRA
allocations is to go for relief,
two-thirds for rehabilitation.
We have asked for trucks, large power
plants, flour mills, cement. It would be a mistake to utilize UNRRA
supplies mainly for relief, for then we could never lift China out of her
poverty.
Our great difficulty is lack of shipping. For instance, Formosa has
coal, sugar and rice, but needs to import textiles.
I have asked
UNRRA
to send us ships. We also need ships to move the bean cropfrom Manchuria.
We have proposed that the Chinese Government
should give half the bean crop for relief in Europe in return for help
in transportingit.
The most difficult job facing us is in the war-ravaged areas. In
Kwangsi, for instance, many cities are almost entirely destroyed. In
Hunan, Changsha is eighty percent destroyed.
In Hupeh in the
Laohoko area the see-saw warfare wiped out whole towns and villages. Shelter is a tremendous problem in these places. I have proposed that we cope with this problem by such measures as giving
credits for the purchase of material for those who can make bricks andtile and also to lumbermen; put up public shelters for the very poor andallocate loans for property rebuilding for those who still have any
property.
We also have a tremendous personnel problem and our first need
is for medical doctors. We have typhus in Nanking, malaria in Kiangsu and Formosa and cholera still in Kwangsi.
Secondly we needriver conservancy personnel.
As regards foreign capital investment in China and the general line

3

/
I
I

Povertyand the Land325

of our economic development there is considerable difference of opinion. There is an argument as between the relative merits of stateand private enterprise.
However, we are all agreed that we don’t
want any Morgans in China. All the railroads should be state-owned.
Steel production will have to be mainly a government enterprise because of the capital required. Private enterprise is not to be excluded.
Oil will be completely government-owned,
also hydroelectric
power.
The general idea is that the basic or controlling sectors of the economy will be government-owned
or controlled.
Now the rural population is threatened by depression. What is tobe done? We should, I think, take a lesson from the New Deal. In
China a New Deal would be economical instead of wasteful.
In theUnited States work had to be invented and many of the projects of
the WPA were useless; but in China there is a tremendous need for
public works -roads,
railways, canals, dike repairs.
During the war the peasants took down their old spinning wheels
and looms which had not been used for years. Small-scale industry
was revitalized.
For instance, seventy alcohol factories for fuel were
established in Szechwan alone and forty of them are still operating.
There would be absolutely no difficulty in finding desirable andnecessary public works on which the peasants could use their free time.
I myself advocate the building of more roads and railways, the improvement of rivers and embankments.
These would be costly but
not inflationary
public works because the yield from them in increased national income would be very great. The biggest job wehave on hand now is the repairing of the dikes on the Yellow River
Three million United States doland building up the embankment.
lars have been given for this through UNRRA
and we ourselves havecontributed fifty million Chinese dollars.
The maintenance of large armies has in fact constituted a Chinese
substitute for WPA.
It is obvious how greatly the country would
benefit if the millions who are now soldiers were employed on the
public works so urgently needed in China.
At the time I interviewed him, Dr. Tsiang was still optimistic.
“If
only fools on both sides, here and in America, don’t spoil everything,”
he said, “we shall be able to surmount our difficulties.”
Two months later when I saw him again in Shanghai, Dr. T, F.
Tsiang was already a much worried and less-happy man. Late in1946 he resigned his job and rumor had it that he had been unable toget along with T. V. Soong. This, combined with La Guardia’s rash
decision to embargo supplies to China, made his position untenable.
It was clear from his talk with me that his ideas were basically right,

326

Last Chance in China

whatever his performance may have been. His aim was reconstruction, industrial development and aid to small-scale enterprise. This in
itself must have put him at loggerheads with the bankers, big merchants and financiers of Shanghai whose fortunes are independent ofgeneral prosperity and who think in terms of trade rather than production.
Dr. Tsiang is an outstanding example of a liberal and an economist forced out of an important post by the opposition of Chinese
financiers, his inability to stop corruption
among his subordinates,
and the Communist wrecking of all plans for reconstruction.
Many other liberals who think they could put China to rights if
given office would no doubt experience the same disillusionment
andwould fail similarly. They lack the necessary backing of a strong andprosperous middle class. They are at the mercy of those who havepolitical power derived either from foreign support, or a provincial
army or from connections in high places in the government.
Ameliorationof the desperate poverty of the Chinese peasants depends upon industrial
development to provide alternative employment; the application of modern scientific techniques to the land toincrease its yield and above all to ensure a larger production per man;the finding of ways to tap and organize investment credit for rural
use ; and a government strong enough to enforce its laws for theprotection of the farmer.
Similarly as regards the coolies and factory workers, as long as thepeasants are on the border line of starvation,and periodic famines
send a flood of destitute men and women to the cities, wages mustremain low.
Rural reconstruction and reform, together with a rise in the present miserable standard of living of the working class, are impossible
without peace.

CHAPTERXIV

Can Chziza Remain

Y

Chinese?

ago Bertrand Russell told me he thought Moscow andPeking the two most beautiful cities in the world.
I lived in
the former for nearly six years but I saw Peking for the firsttime in February 1946. I had little time to explore it, either then or
two weeks later on my way back from Yenan. My time was occupied
mainly with interviews, but I managed to visit the Forbidden City andsee the Temple of Heaven. I received at least a faint impression of
the glories of Imperial China.
Peking is as different from Shanghai as Moscow is from New Yorkor from Washington.
Its main streets are as wide and straight as
the boulevards of Paris, whereas Shanghai streets are narrower than
London’s and more crowded.
Surrounded by its ancient walls andbuilt on a great plain not far from the desert, the ancient capital of
China bears even less resemblance to ramshackle Chungking,sprawling over the cliffs above two rivers amid the lush vegetation of theSouthwest.
Nor does Peking show any of the scars of war so evident
The Japanese even freshened up the paint of the blue,in Chungking.
gold and green dragon design on the ceiling of some of the buildingsin the Forbidden City.
Since V-J Day there has been a strong movement in China to reestablish the seat of government at Peking, which is so much better
suited than any other Chinese city to be the capital of the nation.
There are sound economic reasons for transferring
the center of
power to the North in proximity
to China’s iron and coal, since only
by developing the resources of the Northern and Northeastern
provinces can China solve her economic problem and become strong. But
the proximityof Russia is thought to make Peking too dangerous asite for the capital. One recalls how the short distance between Leningrad and Soviet Russia’s frontier caused Lenin to transfer the capitalof the U. S. S. R. to Moscow.
327
EARS

328

Lccst Chance in China

Peking reminded me faintly of Moscow.
There is the same contrast between the vivid colors of ancient palaces, temples andchurches, and the dirty and decrepit wooden houses in the poorer
parts of the city. Peking is, however, not disfigured by the ugly
jerry-built
tenement houses put up in Moscow since the revolution,
the only sign of comparative modernity
being the fine nineteenthcentury European houses in the Legation quarter. The beautiful private homes and gardens hidden behind high walls along narrow alleys
are Chinese in style, and well cared for by the “gentry” who live inthem. In Moscow, except for Stalin and the other leaders who live
behind the Kremlin’s high red walls, the ruling class lives in newbuildings with modern comforts, while most of the fine old houses
have become slums. The old is gradually being torn down or obscured by the new and year by year less of the old beauty remains. In
Peking the old stands out in greater splendor against the sordidnessof the present.
Both cities are built around walled palaces, but the successors of
the Czars live in the Kremlin, while the Forbidden City of Peking
is a museum and a park. A few of its buildings are now used as resi’ dences or offices for the military, but it is open to the public. The
grim towers of the Kremlin and the bulging cupolas of Moscow’s
churches are in a different world from Peking’s graceful palaces andtemples. Old Moscow’s architecture is a product of the marriage between Byzantium and Tartary ; Peking is pre-eminently
Chinese inspite of its lama temples and Mongol relics. But there is the same
Oriental love of color and in winter the same beauty of sparklingsnow under blue skies.
In Peking where Kublai Khan once held his gorgeous court, one
feels the influence and closeness of the lands beyond the Great Wallwhich march with Russia’s frontiers, and out of which came the conquerors of both countries in the thirteenth century. One remembersthat both Moscow and Peking were once a part of the huge Mongol
Empire conquered by Ghengis Khan and his successors. Both cities
have, or had, their Tartar walls. In Moscow the area inside the wallis called “Kitaiski gorod,” meaning Chinese city. In Peking the Tartar city surrounded by a massive gray stone wall with gates is themain part of the town. While I lived in Moscow the whitewashed
Tartar wall was pulled down to clear the way for traffic.
Yet it is in Russia rather than in China that Tartar influence left

Can China Remain Chinese?

329

a permanent imprint.
Chinese civilization was too old and widespreadand its attractions too great for the barbarians from beyond the Wall,the mountains and the desert to extinguish it, Instead they wereabsorbed into the great stream of Chinese culture. Neither the Mongols nor the Manchus changed the character of Chinese civilization.
The Slavs were still too barbarous to resist the Mongol influencewhen the Golden Horde settled itself in South Russia. Moscow itself
became an important city under Russian princes who owed their existence to the services they performed as tax collectors and vassals of
the Tartar conquerors.
Two hundred years after they had come as conquerors the Tartars
were defeated and became an oppressed minority in Russia, but theirinfluence survived.
Russia’s civilization,although largely Byzantine
Greek in origin, is strongly colored in modes of thought and behavior
by the Tartar strain.
Perhaps it was the people of Peking who reminded me of Moscow.
Their dark, nondescript, worn, padded clothing makes the same drab
impression, and the drovers with their fur or leather caps would
pass unnoticed in the streets of Moscow, driving the same sort ofprimitive carts. There are even droshkies, as in Russia, with similar
miserable thin horses.
On the other hand, the coolies, rickshamen and shopkeepers of
Peking are anything but Russian in manners and behavior.
Unlikethe unfriendly,
bitter, ragged rickshamen of Shanghai who abuse
you most when you pay them well, those of Peking are clean, decently
dressed and courteous. They bow and thank you for payment andthey talk as they pull. Some must earn their living largely out of thecommission they receive from the shops they take you to. Incidentally,
when I was there, there were more beautiful things still to be bought
in Peking than in Shanghai and at more reasonable cost. You could
still find lovely old embroideries, exquisite jewelry and ornaments.
I happened to get hold of a man who had been Count Ciano’s rickshaman in days gone by. He spoke a little English and was happiest
if he could take me sight-seeing.
He was very proud of his city andknew about as much as an official guide. One notes the contrast between Peking, a Chinese city where the foreigner lives as a guest, andShanghai, a foreign metropolis reflecting in exaggerated form all thebustle and hustling competitive spirit of the West.
The day I left Chungking
I met a United States ‘Army sergeant

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Last Chance in China

who spoke Chinese. He said to me : “There are a number of Chinese
words which I learned in college, but never heard spoken until I went
to Peking. The word for civilization,for instance. In Peking it isfrequently used, but I never heard it in Chungking.”
I wished I had met him sooner, for he knew China well and wasentirely free from either political or racial prejudices-exceptional
qualifications.
Why this intelligent young man was only a sergeantI never discovered. His was the arduous and difficult task of searching through the Chinese countryside
to discover the fate of lost
American fliers in the war. His superior was a Hawaiian-Chinese
United States Army captain, and their relations were as friendly as
their skin and hair were different.
The captain, a debonair, elegant
and cheerful youth, taught me a few Chinese words and phrases on
the flight to Shanghai, but he knew less about Chinese history andculture than the sergeant, and he was far more anxious to go home.
In our ride to the Chungking airport the sergeant told me of his“1 have heard much about the starvation among theadventures.
peasants of Szechwan but I really haven’t seen signs of it. In all thevillages I have been in, the people seemed very healthy. They have togive up a lot of grain to the government, but they have plenty of vegetables, which are untaxed. I think, perhaps this is the source of their
physical strength. Just look.” H e pointed to the fertile green hillsides on both sides of the road. “They grow a fresh crop every few
weeks, and maybe their abundant supply of vegetables compensates
for the lack of meat and insufficient rice.”
The contrast between China North and South is sharply broughthome to one by air travel, which almost abolishes time but not geography. I had left Chungking in springlike weather with the trees
green and the lush vegetation giving promise of plenty, but in Shanghai it was still very cold, and to the north the earth was brown andhard and sprinkled with snow.
There can be no better way to approach Peking than by air. Suddenly after hours of flying over the dull brown flatlands of North
China, where the little villages are lost in the vast expanse, the great
Imperial City appears beneath you, huge and square, surrounded bymassive walls. Here and there, as we came near, a tall building caught
the rays of the setting sun, and before reaching the airfield to the westof the city I had a glimpse of the Summer Palace and the lake aroundwhich its gardens are set out. For the first time I was seeing theCan China Remain Chinese?

331

China of old pictures or designs on porcelain--delicate
bridges andpagodas and birds skimming over the water.
I remembered that European Powers had sacked the Summer Palace in ~goo when they crushed the Boxer Rebellion. But the menace ofbarbarian invasion from the north was now closer than the decaying
or retreating forces of Western imperialism.
Peking, for centuries
the fount of Chinese culture and seat of ancient learning, fears anolder danger than that of the British and French gunboats which arrived in South China a century ago. It was easy to conjure up avision of the savage Mongol and Manchu hordes which had swept inacross the plains from the north and northeast to conquer China.
Just inside the Forbidden City the guide points out to you thehill where the last of the Ming Emperors hanged himself when the
Manchu banners broke through the gates of Peking, three hundredyears ago. Later, when I went to Manchuria from Tientsin in a tiny
“flying jeep,” we swooped low over the Great Wall, which had beenuseless to halt the barbarian invasions in the past, and could not
now impede the incursions of the semi-Mongol Muscovites and theirChinese disciples. In the old days China could absorb her conquerors.
Today the technical superiority of the West and its imitators and theinsidious weapons of propaganda have deprived China of her longlost advantage of being the most civilized and prosperous nation in
the world.
Peking is one of the most-beloved cities on earth. Hu Shih, when
he lived in America, had told me how he longed to return there. LaoShe, author of Rickshaw Boy, had said to me in Chungking that hedared not go back to Peking. “One just cannot work there, one is
too happy. ” Arch Steele, who had lived in Peking before the war,
was determined to end his days there, and he and his wife offered
me a courtyard in their dream house when I was ready to retire fromthe futility of modern life.
I found George Peck, with whom I had had strenuous politicalarguments in Chungking,in a little Chinese house outside the Forbidden City. He had retired from the 0. W. I. to write books at
leisure in Peking, where he lived cheaply in Chinese style in beautiful
surroundings.
General Worton,
Chief of Staff to General Rockey
commanding the United States Marines in North China, consideredcoming to Peking like coming home.
The few days I spent in Peking before and after my visit to Yenan

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enabled me to feel its charm and appreciate its effect on all mannerand conditions of men. I also understood better why the Chinese, battered and weak and poor, cling to their cultural values.
Peking is no Rome to the Chinese ; it is not even one of the oldest
cities of China. But because China’s last three dynasties ruled fromthere, because for centuries it was the seat of government and thecenter of learning, because more of Old China survives there in monument and atmosphere than anywhere else, and because Peking is so
close to Russia’s power, I was most conscious here of the “ideological” conflict between the Soviet Union on the one hand, and China
and the West on the other.
Li Tsung-jen, the general from faraway Kwangsi in South China,
was now commander of the Generalissimo’s headquarters in Peking.
My interview, which took place in a beautiful old palace inside theForbidden City, was extended for hours and included a simple lunch
served in a hall of the long-dead Manchu Emperors.
Li Tsung-jen
had been in command of the forces which won the battle of Taierchwang in the north in rg38-about
the only victory China had in thefirst year of the war. He and Pai Chung-hsi (the Mohammedan general who is now Minister of National Defense) had flung their troops
into the defense of the Wuhan cities in 1938 and seen their own
province fall defenseless to the invaders that same year. Their present
responsible positions were proof of the falsity of the accusation thatno one can enjoy power in China without a personal or provincial
army to back him up.
I remembered Li Tsung-jen not only as a patriot but also as aphilosopher and an intelligent student of history and economics. Withhim one could tire the sun with talking about all the problems of
mankind. He had been a favorite of mine in the old days and had beencalled “Freda’s General” by the Hankow Last Ditchers.
So whenFirst he told me in detail the
we met again he talked to me frankly.
sad story of Russia’s depredation and duplicity in Manchuria.
Whatshocked him most was not the crimes of the Russian soldiers but the“barbaric and uncivilized way of thinking” of the Soviet Government.
He recognized China’s inability to match Russia’s military might, yet
when I asked him whether China’s situation was not hopeless, bereplied :“No, not hopeless. In the end right is always triumphant.
I amCan China Remain Chinese?

* 333

sure of it. How could China have endured for SO many thousands ofyears had we not believed in a moral law, and were not virtue, which
is truth, in the long run stronger than injustice and lies ?”Was this faith the source of China’s strength in adversity?
Militarily weak as she is, torn by civil war and with a corrupt and inefficient administration,
China’s inner strength, derived from belief in amoral law, has in fact enabled her to resist longer against greater odds
than any nation in the modern world. In spite of my conviction thatthe virtues which preserved China in the past can no longer save her
today, I was almost ready to believe, for a moment, that she mightsurvive in the future as in the past and outlive her conquerors.
Could
she escape the fate of those who place their trust in the technicallyefficient Frankensteinmonster they have created ? Could Sun Yatsen’s hope ever be realized of a China learning enough from the Westto make her strong and prosperous, but rejecting both the Western
and Russian ideologies?
For nearly a hundred years after the invasion of the Western world,
China tried to save her culture by refusing to take the same path as
Japan. She had bent before the aggressors instead of imitating them.
For three decades the Kuomintang
had sought to emancipate andmodernize China, with the help first of Russia, then of America, while
not relinquishingher own distinctive social values and philosophy.
The end is not yet, but the fate of China is likely to be determinedwithin the next few years.
In the past China was invaded only by barbarians without an ideology who wanted to rule her and enjoy the benefits of Chinese civilization, not to change it. They were easily absorbed.
Today the“barbarians”
from beyond Sinkiang, Mongolia and Manchuria havea theory, a concept of social and economic order and a “religion”
which could extinguish China’s independent culture. Already in Communist China the cultural effects can be seen. The pictures and woodcuts, ornaments and children’s playthings produced in Yenan are
more Russian in style than Chinese.
The influence of Russia over the Chinese Communists is alreadygreater than that of the West over the rest of China. The Soviet
Union is closer to China as a whole in spite of its totalitarian
form ofgovernment, because Stalin rules over a people also still largely medieval in thought and in standard of life.

Last Chance irt China
334 <The differences between a Chinese and a Russian intellectual are
far greater than those between Western man and a Chinese scholar.
The Confucian
and the Greco-Roman-Christianconcepts of the“good, the true and the beautiful” are much closer akin than the
Chinese and Communist ideologies. But the problems of the Chinese
and the Russian peoples are similar. Their poverty, their ignorance,
their crying need for freedom from starvation or penury-thesemakethem brothers. They live almost identically miserable lives and both
can easily be led to hate the prosperous, easy-living, mechanicallyadvanced Westerners.
The fate of China will be decided according to which proves
stronger: her closer affinity to the West in ideas and culture, or thepressures to solve her economic and political problems along RussianCommunist lines.
The student of ancient and medieval European history has somecomprehension of the Chinese problem, because not only the economic
frame but also the long forgotten values of medieval Christendom arenearer to China’s today than those of our modern Western civilization.* But since Chinese civilizationand history are unique in many
respects, only a scholar who has devoted his life to the study ofChinese language, literature and history could bring clarity into ourjudgments
of present-day
China.
Unfortunately
the Sinologists
usually fail to relate their knowledge of the past to the problems of
today or to write popular books. As Bertram D. Wolfe pointed out
in reviewing the latest edition of Kenneth Scott Latourette’s monumental work, The Chinese: Their History
and Culture, books on
China have a way of Aowing in two divergent channels that have nopoint of contact with each other. On the one hand there are the dependable and illumating works of scholars, such as Latourette, which
are little read except by specialists; on the other there are the books
by “reporters and special pleaders, brash and arrogant and misleading
but popular in form and intended for wide distribution.”
Whereasthe scholarly work is likely to recognize the Chinese Revolution as
an attempt to transform China in terms of her own heritage, the books* For instance, E. H.. Tawney, the medieval historian wrote one of the best books
available on China’s agrarian problem, Lund and Labor ‘in Chkz, and the sociologicaltheorist Karl Mannheim wrote on the Confucian society.

Can China Remain Chinese?

335

by popular authors and journalists usually ignore China’s past and
her right to a development of her own, treating the Chinese Revolution either as a belated attempt to “catch up with” Western civilization, or as an abortive Communist revolution.
For the most part the scholars have left a free field to the experts
who presume to pass judgment and affix their little labels according
to what is good or bad, true or false, progressive or reactionaryin
their own narrow view and in our particularWestern“era ofprogress.”
Dr. Paul M. A. Linebarger, son of the Judge Linebarger who was
Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s friend and biographer, is one of the few exceptions.
Brought up in China and with a scholar’s knowledge of its history,
traditions and classical learning, he is also a modern political scientist,
who served in China during the war as an intelligence officer andexpert on psychological warfare. His book on The Politicd Doctrinesof Suez Yat-sen is an illuminating
study of the essence of the Principles which are the Bible of the Kuomintang,and of their relation to
Confucianism
and the basic philosophy of the Chinese people. His
Government irt Republican CA&a gives an account both sympathetic
and objective, realistic and understandingof China’s recent history
and her cultural and ethical values.
According to Dr. Linebarger, Sun Yat-sen’s precepts and teachings
were an attempt, not to displace Confucianism, but to revive, develop
and adapt it to modern conditions. Sun believed that “Chinese nationalism and the regeneration of the Chinese people had to be based on
the old morality of China, which was superior to any other moralitythat the world had known, and which was among the treasures of theChinese people. . . . He praised the ancient Chinese superiority
inthe field of social science, while stressing the necessity of Westernknowledge in the field of the physical and applied sciences alone.”The basic concept of Confucianism
had been that the underlying
problem of society is “ideology” : the character of the moral ideas
prevalent among the individuals
composing it. According
to thisview, where there is no common body of ideas a society can hardly
be said to exist. If, on the other hand, the great majorityof people
accept and believe in the same moral laws there is harmony (whichin Chinese incorporates the ideograph used to denote peace). “The336

Last Chance in China

state existed only for the purpose of fillingsocial harmony.”out the shortcomingsofthere was no
In a society- such as Confucius dreamed of-where
disagreement in outlook, policy would not be a governmental question; if there were no disharmony of thought and behaviour, there
would be no necessity of enforcing conformance to the generally accepted criteria of conduct. From this standpoint, government itself issocially pathological, a remedy for a poorly ordered society. Men arecontrolled indirectly by the examples of virtue; they do good because
they have learned to do good and do it unquestioningly
and simply.
Whatever control is exercised over man is exercised by their ideology,
and if other men desire to control they must seek it through shaping
the ideas of others. As its full expression, such a doctrine would notlead to mere anarchy, but it would eliminate the political altogether
from the culture of man, replacing it with an educational process.
Ideological control would need to be supplemented by political only
if it failed to cover the total range of social behaviour, and left loopholes for conflict and dispute.“*I have quoted thus at length from Dr. Linebarger’s book because it
seems to me impossible to try to understand China without attempting
to get at the basic ideas which still shape the thoughts and aspirationof her people.
It is, of course, obvious that the Chinese do not live up to the Confucian precepts any more than the Western world lives according toChristian teaching. Nevertheless one has to understand men’s ideals inorder to understand their behavior and their politics. The trouble inmodern China is that the “loopholes for conflict and dispute” are now
so large that the garment of social behavior has become a tattered rag.
Sun Yat-sen, however, thought that a new one could be woven out of
the same old raw material to fit a modernized China.
He thought of himself as a rebuilder and not a destroyer of theancient Chinese culture or morality.
Confucius had said, “Investigate
into things, attain the utmost knowledge, make the thoughts sincere,rectify the heart, cultivate the person; regulate the family, govern the
country rightly, pacify the world.” The central point of his teachings,
the doctrine of jen, “in the simplest terms means fellow feeling for
one’s kind . . . to love fellow men, in other words to have a feelingthe relationship becomesof sympathy toward mankind. Intellectually* The Political Doctrines of Sun Yet-sen, page 30.

Can China

Remain Chinese?

337

common purpose, emotionally it takes the form of fellow feeling.“*
In those days, the Chinese considered their own society and civilization as practically identical ; outside it were only barbarians. Sun Yatsen endeavored to readjust the Confucian concepts to fit a national
state among other nations. But the original concept of Chinese civilization as coterminous with world civilization renders it easier for the
Chinese than for other nations to embrace the concept of world peace
and unity on the basis of a universally accepted ethic.
The basic antagonism between Marxism and Sun Yat-sen’s adaptation of the ancient Chinese ethics is obvious. The Marxists believethat men will be good if the economic system abolishes classes andclass warfare. The Chinese believe that if men are taught to be virtuous the economic, social and political system is unimportant.
Sun Yat-sen categorically rejected the materialist interpretationofhistory and the concept of class warfare, saying that Marx had been
not a physiologistof society but a pathologist who knew only its
diseases. Sun was also more concerned with China’s general poverty
than with the injustices of the distributive
system, as was natural
since, as he said, China had no large, privileged wealthy class. Above
all, Sun Yat-sen reflected the Chinese mentality which disregards
theoretical absolutes and seeks for the golden mean. The empiricism
and reasonableness of the Chinese approach to life and social problems
are mirrored in Sun’s teachings.
Sun Yat-sen was characteristically
Chinese in the emphasis he put
on men, rather than on rules and principles, and in his belief in an
intellectual and moral elite. He thought that “if China were ruledby the right sort of men, programs would be correct according to the
expediency of the moment.” He had too much faith in the capacity of“ideologicalcontrol” to prevent the corruptionof men by power.
Hence he did not foresee the degeneration of his party. Nor for thatmatter did Lenin, with his contrary concepts of how to create thegood society, foresee the transmutationof the Bolshevists into totaltyrants.
Neither the Communists
nor the Kuomintang
have proved thetruth of their theories. The “common man” still “eats bitterness” inboth societies. But it is important to recognize the basic antagonism*Historyof Chinese Potiticat
barger, op. cit.

Thought,

by Liang Ch’i-ch’ao.

Quoted by Dr. Line-338

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in ideology and hence the absurdity of thinking that the two sides in
China can ever agree. The Kuomintang
is much stronger than theCommunists because, even though it may honor Sun Yat-sen’s precepts more in the breach than in the observance, its “bible” is Chinese,
whereas that of the Communists is alien.
The tragedy of the Kuomintang
lies not only in its incapacity toresist the “diseases of defeat” which have corrupted it, but also in its
failure to develop a vital, vigorous body of revolutionary
doctrine tostand up against the Communist counterrevolution.
The writings of
Sun Yat-sen, like those of Confucius before him, have become a
Sacred Book instead of being kept alive by the adaptation, development and modification of his doctrine to changing conditions.
Sun Yat-sen can hardly be blamed for this. He specifically statedthat the greatest difficulty is to know, not to act; and that since it wasoften imperative to act without sufficient understanding,his plansshould be revised on the basis of knowledge obtained the hard waywhat he called learning through the “hardship of errors.” He had thewisdom to recognize that means determine ends, saying : “No matter
what you do, success lies in good method.”
In this respect also heheld views diametrically opposite to the Communists who believe thatthe end justifies the means.
Chiang Kai-shek, whatever his failures or successes as a ruler, evidently sincerely believes in the teachings of Sun Yat-sen; his failures
can be ascribed as much to the “National Father’s” mistakes as to his
own. If the Communists denounce Chiang Kai-shek’s book China’s
Destiny as “fascist,” they have no right at the same time to say they
believe in the Three Principles of the People and are loyal to Sun Yatsen’s teachings. If, as they maintain, Chiang is a “fascist” because
in his book he seeks to inspire his people with pride in their past, andbecause he writes about the ill effects of imperialist aggression, thennot only was Sun Yat-sen a “reactionary”
or “fascist” but all patriotism must be regarded as wicked and all modern nations must be
similarly smeared.
Chiang’s enemies may say that anyone who glorifies the past or
seeks to restore ancient virtues or ethics is a reactionary.
But in viewof the mess we “progressive”
moderns have made of the world it
seems to me doubtful whether everything old is necessarily bad. Although I doubt whether China can become strong enough to survive

Caw China Remain Chinese?

339

in our world of power politics, while preserving or reviving her ancient concepts of man’s place in society and of what constitutes “virtue,” I do not think we have the right to assume that we have all theanswers to the problems of our era. As the eminent Sinologist Latourette remarks, “China’s political structure has endured longer thanany other ever devised by man, and, measured by the area and thenumber of people governed, was one of the most successful in history. . . the Chinese culture whose disruption the present generation has
witnessed, and the civilizationof the West which brought about thearebothnotableachievements of the human genius,
revolution . . .
and it would be difficult to decide which is the more admirable.“*The paradox of the situation, it seems to me, is that whereas our
problems today are mainly moral ones, we consider economics predominant; the Chinese, on the other hand, whose problems are primarily economic, insist that the revival of public and private morals is
the primary need.
No one can read Chinu’s Destiny with an open mind and a little
knowledge of Sun Yat-sen’s teachings without recognizingthat theGeneralissimo is but expounding, and to some extent bringing up todate, the teachings of the man who is now called “The Father of the
Nation.”Chiang insists, like Dr. Sun, that the traditional
Chinese conceptsof the relation of man to society are more valid than the West’s pragmatic, or class-war, philosophy. Like Dr. Sun, he believes that China
can learn physical science and techniques from us and yet cling to her
traditional ethics. According to both of them China’s weakness today
is largely due to the degeneration of her social customs and morals,
which in turn is represented as the result mainly of imperialist aggression and the corruption which resulted from it. Chiang inveighsagainst the tendency of individuals “to take private interests as a basis
for determining good or evil” and ascribes to this the coming to power“in country and villages” of “depraved and frivolous persons,” and ofcrafty men “acting illegally, sacrificing public safety and other people’s
happiness for their own selfish desires.”
Chiang lists the old ethical standards of the Chinese people as folfilial piety, benevolence, love, trust, honesty, peacelows : “Loyalty,l

The Chinese: Their History and Culture. The Macmillan Company.

340

Last Chance in China

and righteousness”;
and adds that “the four cardinal points for which
China stands as a nation are propriety, righteousness, modesty andhumility.”
Since these words and their meanings could be variously interpreted, it is worth while quoting further from China’s Destiny.*
By the experience of 5000 years of rule and the vicissitudes of disorganizationand decline, our people have acquired the virtue of understanding
modesty, knowing humiliation,
enduring disgrace andshouldering hardships. Because of understanding
modesty, we arecapable of accepting our lot. Because of knowing humiliation, we arecapable of perseverance. Because we are capable of accepting our lot,
we do not oppress or insult other races. Because we are capable ofperseverance, we do not accept oppression or insults from other races.
Because we are capable of enduring disgrace, the strength of our raceis accumulated inwardly, and is not exposed outwardly.
Because weare capable of shouldering hardship, the determination of our people isenduring and is not spasmodic.
It seems to me that the qualities of the Chinese people are here
correctly stated; or at least that the claims made for them by theGeneralissimo are somewhat less extravagant than the patriotic utterances of the spokesmen for other nations. It is also to be noted thatthe virtues of the Chinese people enumerated by Chiang Kai-shek arequite different from those on which either the West or Russia prides
itself. There is, for instance, no mention of bravery in battle; instead,the emphasis is on endurance, perseverance, and restraint toward
others.
Having specified the qualities which the “men of old” are held tohave possessed, Chiang goes on to state that during the last century
China’s “national prestige and the morality of the people have deteriorated to a point which had never been reached before in 5000 years.
. . . The nation and the people revealed weaknesses in political, economic, social and psychological spheres due to outside interference andinternal dangers. These conditions came into being to an extent unprecedented in history, and they almost destroyed our power of recovery and rehabilitation.”
It is obvious that one of China’s gravest problems today is the
split between those who, like Sun Yat-sen or Chiang Kai-shek, believe that China can save herself by revitalizing her ancient ethics and* A private rendering of this passage from the original.

Can China Remain Chinese?

341

concepts of man’s duty to society, and those with the diametrically
opposite view that China should effect as radical a transformationofher ideas and morality as of her economy. The conflict is not even
only two-sided.
The radicals-those
who want to discard the pastcompletely-arethemselves divided among those who want to follow
Russia and those whose eyes are fixed on the West.
Chiang writes that China wrongly went from one extreme to theother : from blindly opposing the foreigners to submission ; from arrogance to self-pity and mockery of the remnants of her own culture.
He writes: “Everythingforeign came to be considered right, andeverything Chinese wrong.” The Chinese, he insists, should have had
enough self-confidence to know what is good and what is bad inboth and to have kept their minds on Chinese needs and China’s survival. Instead, as he rightly observes, “the fight for democracy or
Communism represented nothing but the opposing ideas of Englandand America and of Soviet Russia.” Thus the copying of the Westcaused Chinese culture to “fall into disunity and ruin.”
The ancient virtues which he insists are still valid are not, says
Chiang, destructive of society or conducive to aggressive policies ortyrannical government.
The true Chinese character, he concludes, has“self-respect but not conceit; humility but not subservience.”
Although we in the West may be too inclined to believe that politics can be only the clash and accommodation of opposing interests,
and international
relations a question of power, it is also to be doubted
whether the Confucian and Christian ideal of harmony through adherence to virtuous and wise precepts is realizable. But I see no reason
to call those Chinese who believe that the good society can be attained only through wisdom and virtue more “reactionary”
than those
who believe it can be established by force, hate, fear and liquidations.
It must nevertheless be acknowledged that Sun Yat-sen’s insistenceon virtue as primary and economics and social reform as secondary
handicapped his successors in the performance of the difficult task hisParty was left with atory has assigned to them. The Kuomintang
very vague idea of what to do once China achieved national independence. His Third Principle, that of “the people’s livelihood,”or“economic well-being,” was stated in broad and at times seemingly
contradictoryterms.
Sun’s vagueness with regard to the practical applicationof his342

Last Chance in China

theory of “distributive
justice” had the advantage of enabling theKuomintang
to appeal to all elements of the population in the struggle
for national liberation, but left his successors without a definite policy
sanctified by his name. The independence of China has been achieved
for a moment in so far as the unequal treaties are concerned, andChina is, at least in name, a Great Power.
The question now is“Where do we go from here ?” and the “Sacred Books” do not contain the answer. So many different meanings can be read into themthat both the Kuomintang
and the Communists of today claim to be
the executor of Sun’s will, and within the ranks of the Kuomintang
itself there are directly opposite views as to the course which Chinesereconstruction
and reform should take.
Sun Yat-sen did, however, lay down certain basic principles for
economic development and reform. His economic theories were empirical and related specifically to China’s situation. The scarcity ofcapital and magnitude of the required industrializationnecessitatedthe launching of huge state enterprises together with governmental
restrictions on the use to be made of capital in private hands. He advocated a mixed economy with “all matters that can be and are better
carried out by private enterprise” left in private hands and “encouraged and protected by liberal laws,” and all “matters that cannot betaken up by private concerns and those that possess monopolistic
character” taken up by the government as national undertakings.
In respect to the industrial revolution which China must carry out
if she is not to be submerged as a nation, Sun Yat-sen went into
considerable detail and drew up specific plans. It was with regard to
the precise method of ensuring “distributive
justice” that he wasvague, since according to his belief virtue is the primary requisite.
A study of his writings leaves no doubt that Sun Yat-sen had hoped
to unite China, shape her into a nation state and bring her back into
the vanguard of civilizationby the acquisition of Western scientificknowledge and mechanical techniques, while repudiating
both theWestern and Russian ideologies. He worked for revival of the ancient morality which had once made China great and prosperous andenabled her to outlive every other civilization.
What he did not foresee was that China, instead of being re-cemented by faith in her own
cultural values, would split vertically.
Instead of young China combining a Chinese Confucian Renaissance with an industrial revolution,

Can China Rem&

Chinese?

343

there is a continual struggle between the adherents of various imported ideologies.
Not only do the Marxist Communists
fight theKuomintang,
but within the Kuomintang
there is conflict between
those who regard the essence of Sun Yat-sen’s teachings to be
their attachment to the Confucian past and who are nowadays called
reactionaries, and those who have adopted Western pragmatic concepts of one kind or another and are called liberals.
There is also a horizontal division in China, at least in so far as
the liberals and progressives are concerned. While the mass of thepeople are still living in the Middle Ages, a large proportionof theeducated classes belong to the modern world, pulled this way andthat by the diverse currents of liberal and Marxist and Stalinist political thought. It is as if China belonged simultaneously to two worlds
revolving on different axes and knowing little about each other. In
the small world of the intellectuals political discussion and ways ofthought and living are similar to those of the West. In the other thereis the vast silent reality of Old China, familistic
in organization,
Confucian and Taoist in its concepts of life, unheeding of the currents
of modern thought, entirely absorbed in the bitter struggle to keep
alive or to win a modicum of security by fair means or foul.
Political discussion is similar to that which goes on in America.
This in itself makes it largely unreal, a kind of shadowboxing
unrelated to the real problems of gov’ernment in China. For China’s problems cannot be solved by American or European methods.
The liberals inside the government, faced with the stern realities of
the Chinese economic and political situation, are poles apart fromthose without responsibility
who still live in a dream world of nineteenth-century democratic ideals. The latter could make a great contribution to Chinese progress if given jobs and allowed to learn by
experience.
Too many Chinese liberals become useless or go sour
through frustration.
Others join the Communists in despair or disgust, or in the false hope that the Communists are sincere in theirdemocratic professions.
Others still, like some of the leaders of the
Democratic League, see alliance with the Communists as a means toforce their way into the government.
Basically, however, the trouble
is that there isn’t room for everyone at the top, and it is only in thehigher ranks of government service that the income is adequate.
There is a certain analogy between the position and the reactions of344

Last Chance in China

many of China’s educated middle class and those of the Indian intelligentsia under the British. They turn against the government because
the government makes no use of their talents or their knowledge.
Itis, unfortunately,
all too true that in China old men, and useless andcorrupt men, are kept in high office while many an able young man
cannot get a job because he has no relative or patron in the administration.
Before the war with Japan there were positions and opportunity in industry and trade and the professions, but since the economy is now stagnant on account of the civil war there are few jobs
for the Chinese youth of the middle classes outside government service. And the salaries of those who have government jobs are so small
on account of the inflation that they do not earn enough to live on if
they are honest.
Many of the criticisms of the government made by the opposition
are entirely valid. Others are completely unrealistic since they take noaccount either of the exigencies of the war and its legacy of destruction, disorganizationand demoralization,
or of the dead hand of thepast which lies so heavy on the Chinese people and blocks even thesincerest efforts at reform. The Communists solve the problem ofconservatism and ignorance by forcibly changing the people’s way oflife, ignoring prejudices and ancient concepts of right and wrong.
China could be dragged out of medievalism by force and terror as
Russia has been. But the price would be an end to all hope of her
development into a democracy, the annihilationof her distinctive culture, and a bitterer servitude for her people than any they have yetexperienced.
On the other hand the world will not wait for China’s
gradual emergence as a modern state through a process of education,
persuasion and peaceful reform. China will not be able to preserve her
independence unless she hurries the process of modernization.
Hence
the dilemma of the liberals--a dilemma which is well understood bythose inside the government but too often ignored by its critics outside. How can China become strong and united, and thus able to survive as a nation, without abandoning the democratic path ? How cana process of development normally requiring
centuries be accomplished in a decade or two without resorting to compulsion, dictatorship and terror ? How avoid foreign conquest or Communist tyranny
without resorting to tyrannical methods of “persuasion”?
Dr. Y. C. Koo, whom I have already quoted with regard to China’s
agrarian problem, said to me in Chungking :Cam China Remain Chinese?

345

What we are up against is China’s cultural heritage: the attitude
of our people toward life. This has brought us many misfortunes aswell as enabled us to endure them. A Chinese desires many children
more than anything else in life. An old man is happy, even when heis desperately poor, if he has many grandchildren
around him. Yetbirth control is as essential as any economic reform for China.
Our philosophy, our teaching, our traditional attitude, is to endure
rather than to strive actively to change our conditions.
We are, ofcourse, changing and have been changing for a long time. But only
passively. We accept and endure but we do not actively try to control, for our own benefit, the new forces which affect our lives andchange our environment.
Dynamic changes are actually now proceeding but not fast enough.
I asked him how he thought the presence of the Americans in themost backward parts of China, the sight of American mechanical devices and so forth, affected the Chinese people. “How do you think
the coolies dragging their heavy loads feel about the Americans rushing by in their trucks? Do they envy them and hate them? Do theyeven visualize the possibility of ever living the easy lives of Americans ?”His reply was that the Americans in China were having a great
effect, providing
a powerful stimulus toward change and progress,
but I wondered if he, or anyone else, could guess at what would be
the final result. Would the Chinese hate the opulent Westerners as in
the past, or try to follow us ?
I am not a Sinologist, nor have I spent long enough time in China
to become impregnated with the Chinese view of life, traditions andatmosphere. But if only because I used to study history I have a dimconception of what a miracle of readjustment most Americans andEuropeans expect of the Chinese people. “Changing the whole courseof our civilization
in a few years is more than the people can bear”
was the way it was expressed to me by Chiang Mo-lin, Secretary of
the Executive Yuan and former president of Peking University.
I
had met him at a dinner party the evening before given by P. H.
Chang, now consul general in New York. I had not known who he
was but had been so impressed by his knowledge, intelligence andcalm philosophical outlook that I asked to meet him again.
A thin elderly man looking worn and ill, he holds one of the highest
positions in the government, though you would never have guessed itfrom his manner or from the simple way he lived. It was early morn-

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Last Chance in China

ing and he received me at his home, which was unguarded and indistinguishable from the other little houses on the street. He said :It is as if Americans were required overnight to change their styleof cooking and their sanitation, and live the Chinese way. Thechanges we have to make in the course of our civilization, the adaptations and the breaks with the past, are more than our people canbear in a short period of time. We are expected to become a democracy overnight and adopt Western individualist
concepts of life andgovernment.
The bases and the cement of Chinese civilization,
thevirtues we have cultivated, are not suited to the life we must now
force ourselves to lead. Loyalty which keeps people together; filial
piety which keeps the family united; frugality which means that one
consumes as little as possible in order to support more people; diligence which enables one to produce a little more in order to be able
to keep more people alive-these
are the four virtues we have understood, and which have been passed on by word of mouth from time
immemorial.
They are ingrained in the habits of our people.
In America everyone understands machinery, and machinery is thebasis of civilized life. In China the four virtues are understood byeveryone, for they were the basis of our civilization and the source ofthe strength and endurance of our people. Today what was once ourgreatest asset has become a liability.
The practice of these virtues
does not make us efficient in production.
It is natural for us to try toemploy as many people as possible in a business, to spread the workand the income. whereas you on the contrary seek continually to decrease the amount of labor, lowering the cost of production.
What
you regard as inefficiency and nepotism or corruption is to our people
a natural way of doing one’s duty to one’s family by maintainingas
many relatives as possible. It is considered a virtue, not a crime.
Men like Chiang Mo-lin live in two worlds and understand thevalues of both. Talking to them one appreciates the immense difficulties of the Chinese Government.
Many foreign critics of China
think only that China is backward and that a “good” government
could find remedies for the poverty and “inefficiency.‘*
They ignore
or minimize the tremendous obstacles to change and reform according
to our pattern among a people which has endured for thousands ofyears with quite different values from ours. Not that the Chiang
Mo-lins believe that China can or should remain set in her old ways.
That would mean death to her as a nation ; enslavement by the efficient West or the ruthless Russians. But they know that the Govern-

Can China Remain Chinese?

347

ment of China is powerless to change her people’s way of life andhabits of thought “overnight.”
The liberals outside the government are certain they could put
China to rights if they had the power, * those in the administration
know the immensity of the tasks confronting
the country and the
obstacles to progress which even a dictatorship could not quickly overcome. Chiang Mo-lin is a scholar and a man of integrity in an important position, something like a vice-prime minister.
But he knewthat in spite of his considerable powers neither he nor anyone else
could remake China against the will of her voteless millions.
The
Communists and those of like mind would remold China by force as
But neither Chiang
old Russia was remolded by the Bolsheviks.
Kai-shek nor those around him are dictatorial-minded
in this sense.
China’s real defect in our modern world, in which “patriotism”
andsubordinationof the individual conscience to the state have been carried so far everywhere, and to the nth degree in Nazi or Communist
States, is her soft, old-world, in some respects “medieval,” morality.
The Chinese can be cruel and corruption
is rife among them, butthey have a profound sense of the dignity of the individual
and hisright to personal freedom. Freedom may often mean only the rightto starve, but it is at least better to starve in freedom than to work in aconcentration
camp. In China’s technologically
backward economy,
nature, or fate, sometimes government, appear as the cause of humanmisery rather than a class or a system.
No foreigner in China can fail to be struck by the social democracy
People of widely different social levels,
evident in human relations.
rich or poor, official, merchant, scholar, peasant or worker, talk toeach other without constraint as one human being to another. Thereis little subservience. Even the coolies and the poorest of peasants
do not feel or act like slaves. They may beg but they do not cringe,
and poverty does not cause them to lose their self-respect. Morally atleast, they are free men.
One afternoon in Chungking, after spending an afternoon with aChinese friend of Durdin’s at his home, I commented on the fact that
it would be hard to imagine people in America spending hours in anicy cold room, sitting on hard chairs, drinking only tea and discussing
the problems of mankind.
“Yes,” Durdin said simply, “there is a
profound ethical basis to Chinese civilization.”

348

Last Chance in China

I used to be a Marxist, but i no longer believe that all human ills,
injustices and wrongs can be remedied by material advancement. The
Chinese are the most cheerful people in the world, and are happy incircumstances which we should consider intolerably wretched, becauseof their attitude toward life and their appreciation of the basic humanneeds which a “high standard of living” does not necessarily, or evennormally, satisfy in a mechanical universe.
All this is not to argue that the Chinese people should be left inpoverty, misgoverned, close to starvation, frequently dying of hunger.
It is only an answer to the type of thinking which concludes that
China should copy us in every way or be given no choice but to imitate either the JVest or the U.S.S.R.
The Chinese have values worth
preserving.
It is silly to label everything old as reactionary and therefore bad, to want to extinguish completely the values, principles andbeliefs which have enabled the Chinese to outlive all other civilizations, and to be happy with a modicum of material comforts, gadgets
and conveniences.
The peasant certainly needs better tools, chemical fertilizers, land
reform, more to eat, better clothes and a higher standard of life. But
it seems to me not only arrogant but absurd to say that the Chinese
villagers are “emotionally starved” because they do not have movies,
newspapers or radios.
In this mixed-up era of ours with its changing landmarks there isan extraordinary
confusion of values, meanings and labels. It is customary among so-called progressives to put the labels “reactionary,fascist, corrupt” on all anti-Communist
elements, and “liberal, progressive, democratic” on those who are sympathetic toward the Soviet
Union and its disciples abroad. As Winston Churchill said in Parliament, a reactionary has come to mean anyone who reacts against anarmed Communist.
Just as bad money drives out good, so the bastard terminology
ofthe “Left” has debased our whole verbal coinage. The word liberal
no longer means an opponent of tyranny and lover of freedom but isinstead often used to denote a Russophile or a person friendly to Communists. There is a similar ambiguity as regards the word progressive. Too many people fail to sense that, since the political world also
is round, there are times when the conservatives are the liberals andto progress means to move toward tyranny.

Can China Remain Chinese?

349

In China, whose values and whose economic and political problems
are so different from ours, the glib use of Western labels is peculiarly
inappropriate.
It renders impossible anything but a superficial analyIt is, for instance, erroneous and missis of the political situation.
leading to label as wicked and corrupt reactionaries all the Chinese
who believe with Sun Yat-sen that China should preserve her ancientmorality while adapting herself to the modern world. Nor is it truethat such “reactionaries”
are always also corrupt, and the “liberals”
usually honest. A Chinese may be both corrupt and liberal, or conservative and poor without a stain on his character. Another may be
an efficient administrator
and dishonest, or inefficient and honest.
One Chinese official may believe in a Western democratic and capitalist development for China and be entirely self-seeking;another
may cling to China’s traditional ethics and yet be a patriot.
Confusion has been worse confounded by the identificationof aChinese progressive with a Russophile. One finds even such writers
as Lin Yutang, who no longer have any sympathy with the Communists and ought to know better, describing Sun Fo (son of Sun Yatsen) as a “great liberal social thinker and a great admirer of Russia.”
As if it were possible both to be a liberal and an admirer of totalitariantyranny ! Moreover in the economic and political policies he advocatesfor China Sun Fo is anything but a liberal. He has argued for a
Russian-orientatedpolicy, and he wanted China to embark on an
autarchic economic development with strict state control of the national economy. Had his plans been accepted, both Chinese free enterprise and foreign capital would have been placed under such handicaps that China would perforce have followed a Russian line of development. Certainly no commercial treaty could ever have been signed
by China and the United States had Sun Fo’s views prevailed.
On the other hand, there is the case of Chen Li-fu and his brother,usually signaled out in books on China as the arch-reactionaries
who
have grouped the worst elements of the Kuomintang
in the “C.C.
clique.” Actually this clique, best known through Leftist gossip, has
about as much reality as the “Cliveden Set” in England before thewar which was largely a figment of Communist imagination.
Chen
Li-fu is accused of being a reactionary mainly because he has waged
The economic policies he advoan unrelenting war on Communism.
cates are liberal in the original meaning of the word. He opposed Sun

Last Chnnce ila China
3.50
Fo and was largely instrumental in getting the government to abandon the state capitalist plans for reconstruction which might have condemned China to industrialize without benefit of foreign aid, a policy
which would mean enslaving the people, as in Soviet Russia, in orderto squeeze out of them the necessary capital for the development ofstate enterprise.
Chen Li-fu incidentallyis one of the most incorrupt officials in
China. He has neither lands nor houses nor cash in the bank, and his
worst enemies admit that he is honest. His real crime in the eyes of
opposition to CommuWestern “liberals” is his uncompromisingnism. He is one of the best exponents of Sun Yat-sen’s Principles
and claims to have drawn 23,ooo young men away from Communism.
I don’t know how he can make any exact calculation of this sort, but
undoubtedly his lectures and writings
have been a potent force in
China. In his view the two weak points of the Communists are theirlack of knowledge of Chinese culture and history, and their doctrineof ends justifying
means. To him their doctrines are completely destructive of morality, and he is convinced that once this is demonstrated the Chinese will not accept them.
In 1938, when I first met Chen Li-fu, he was Minister of Education and already the b&e noire of the Leftists. I had expected to meeta monster since I had heard so often that he was a “hidebound reactionary” and the scourge of all liberals. I found a slim, delicate-featured man with the face of an ascetic and the eyes of a dreamer,
dressed in a long Chinese robe of spotless white linen which enhanced
the spiritualityof his finely molded features. Friends and enemies
alike had to recognize an outstanding personality in this intelligent
Even in those days I apprerepresentative of the Confucian tradition.
ciated that it was a little too glib to label him simply as a reactionary.
He just does not fit into any of our Western categories.
.
In conversation with him in Chungking
in 1946 I found Chen
Li-fu far more concerned with agrarian poverty and rural stagnation
than many of the Western-orientated
Chinese who are designated asliberals in America.
His views of what was wrong and of what
ought to be done echoed those of the nineteenth-century
AmericanPopulists who blamed the gap between farm income and farm debts
on the monopolists of finance and transport, or those of later midwestern American opponents of “Eastern financiers” and their p&t-

Can China Remain Chinese?
ical representatives.
ern. ” He said :351

Only in the case of China the bankers are “West-

China’s banking structure is mainly to blame for our rural backwardness. It grew out of the ideas and practices of banking developed
by foreigners in the foreign concessions who were naturally interested
in trade, not in China’s agriculturalor industrial development.
Eventoday Chinese banks concentrate on commerce and pay almost exclusive attention to the cities.
Enlarging on this theme he said that the foreigners were not to be
blamed for this state of affairs, but it was the main cause of China’s
present critical economic situation.
Large amounts of capital werelying idle in the cities, or used in speculation instead of in productive
enterprise, and the inflation could never be checked so long as production did not increase all over the country.
He continued :Some means to reform the banking system must be found. Capitalmust be made to flow to the villages to be lent out at low interest rates
through co-operative societies of all kinds. The banks must be madeto serve agriculture first, industry second and commerce last, insteadof the other way round.
It seemed to me that Chen Li-fu’s ideas were very close to Sun Yatsen’s and that if he is a reactionary, so also was Sun Yat-sen. The
falsity of such a label lies in using a Western yardstick to judge theChinese.
Chen Li-fu is a conservative in the sense that he believes in, andwants to preserve, the qualities and philosophical and ethical valuesof China’s old civilization.
This does not mean that he wants China
to remain backward, “feudal,” poor and misgoverned.
On the contrary, he is an engineer who shares Sun Yat-sen’s vision of a China
rejuvenated and strengthened by Western physical science and techniques ; and it was he who while Minister of Education insisted on
more students studying technical subjects and fewer literature andphilosophy.
He is a conservative in the sense that he does not believethat the West has anything new and better to offer in the social sciences. He rejects completely Marxist materialism and the latter-day
Western morality which has come to be expressed almost entirely in352

Last Chance in China

economic terms. As he said to me in Chungking : “China should open
her doors to welcome Western civilization,
but she should not forget
the good points of her own.”
1Vhen asked by a Time correspondent what he considered the nearest counterpart in the West of his interpretationof San Min Chu I,
Chen Li-fu replied: “The evolutionary
program of the British Labor
Party. ” Such a man can hardly with justice be called a reactionary.
Chen Li-fu in his talks with mc in 1946 was far more outspoken
about Russia than most government officials and had no faith in thepathetic efforts being made to avert Russian aggression by soft words.
Perhaps this is the main reason why he is always awarded the role ofchief villain in the Kuomintan g government by Communist-sympathizing journalists.
Few of the latter ever sought him out to talk to
him and ascertain his real views, although he was easily accessible in
his unpretentious office near the Press Hostel. I consider him one of
the most intelligent and best-informed
men in China and not unprogressive except in the sense that “progress” has come to signify apartiality
for Communist dictatorship.
This also was the opinion of
my old friend the Canadian ambassador, General Odium, who always
said “Nonsense” when anyone referred to Chen Li-fu as a reactionary
or a “fascist.”CHAPTERXV

Chz‘iza:Foczls ofCony%ct
HAT’S the use ? Russia is too big, too crafty, too cruel for
us to fight. She will conquer in the end. Why not giveup now and be friendly ?”These are not the words of some popular columnist today pleadingthat we should “get along with Russia” at all costs. It is a quotationfrom a dispatch written by Edwin Conger, the United States Minister
to China in 1903, when Russia was already threatening to acquire
dominion over China.
In the same period Secretary of State John Hay wrote: “I take it
for granted that Russia knows as we do that we will not fight over
Manchuria.”
Half a century later, on February I I, 1945, the President of theUnited States promised Russia at Yalta that the “claims of the Soviet
Union” to a pre-eminent position in Manchuria should “be unquestionably fulfilled after Japan has been defeated.”
Theodore Roosevelt had said that although the Open-Door
Policywas an excellent thing, it must “completely disappear as soon as a
powerful nation determines to disregard it and is willing to run therisk of war.”Franklin D. Roosevelt did not consider the integrity of China andthe Open Door even worth not fighting for. At a time when Russia
was in no position to challenge America the President of the UnitedStates voluntarily
offered Stalin control over Manchuria’s main ports
and all her railways, and promised to force the Chinese Government
to agree.
Had President Roosevelt studied the record of the past, or if he
had not willfully
insisted on placing his trust in Stalin’s good intentions, he must have recognized the enduring truth of what the London
Times wrote in 1895 :
353

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Last Chance in China

It is obvious that with Russian fleets in the harbor of Port Arthur
and a railway connecting that place with the Siberian trunk line, Manchuria would practically
become a Russian province, the Chinese
capital itself would be in Russia’s grip, and every power in any degreeinterested in Chinese affairs would have to effect a fundamental revision of the arrangements by which its position and commercial interests are at present secured.
For half a century Russia’s ambition to acquire hegemony over the
Far East was frustrated by Japan. Today, thanks to the annihilationof Japan’s power by the United States and the concessions made at
Yalta, Russia is back where she was before Japan defeated her in‘905.
China, terribly weakened by the long unequal struggle with Japanand torn asunder by the civil war which Russia encourages, cannot
defend herself. If the United States does not give full and effective
support to the Chinese Government, there is no barrier to Russia’s
advance. If Russia through the instrumentalityof the Chinese Communists should acquire de facto control of Manchuria and most of
North China, the Kremlin will have succeeded in winning what theCzars failed to acquire fifty years ago-aposition in which Russia
can “defend” China against the West, but no one can defend China
against her.
Japan was both raised up and cast down by the West. It is always
possible that she will be revived again as a counterweight to Russia,
but it is unlikely that she will soon play an independent role. The
period from the first Sino-Japanese War in 1894 to the end of the second one in 1945 thus appears as only a break in the continuity of thethree-cornered conflict among Russia, China and the West.
In the seventeenth century, when Russia had first tried to force her
way down the Amur River to the Pacific, the Manchu dynasty whichthen ruled China was young and vigorous enough to repulse her.
Forced to admit defeat the Czars accepted a frontier to the north of
the Watershed for a century and a half. By 1854 the weakness of
the Chinese Government at Peking and the Crimean War combined
to incite Russia to make inroads on Chinese territory.
The Czar demanded that China allow her right of way down the Amur to protect
her Pacific coast line from Anglo-Frenchattack. China, at thattime involved in the Taiping Rebellion, was unable to resist when

China: Focus of Conflict

355

Russia took control of the river and of all the territory
to the northof it. As an English historian has neatly expressed it, the “only” gain
Russia had to show for a three-year war against Turkey, Englandand France was the seizure of a couple of hundred thousand square
miles of CItincse territory.*
China, of course, had had no connection
with the conflict out of which the Crimean War began. As so often
in subsequent years she was made to pay the price in other people’squarrels.
The territories of which Russia had taken possession were sparsely
inhabited and not of vital importance to the Celestial Empire. China
was far more fearful of the vigorous aggression of Britain and France
in the South than of Russia, and Japan was not yet a Great Power.
‘Anticipating
the policy of the Soviets, the Czar in 1858 came forward
as China’s protector.
As her reward for acting as mediator between
the Manchu Emperors and the Western Powers, which had alreadytwice defeated China, Russia obtained formal possession from the
Chinese Emperor not only of the territories north of the Amur but
also of the seacoast as far as Korea and inland to the Ussuri River. A
few years later Russia claimed and took Sakhalin from Japan in
return for Russia’s renunciationof all claims to the Kurile Islands.
By this time the process of extortionand counterextortionat
China’s expense was well under way. From the First Opium War in
1838 until 1922, first England and France, then Russia, then Germany and Japan almost tore China to pieces. Territory
was seizedfrom her. Colonial areas called concessions were established on Chinese soil at Shanghai and in other so-called Treaty Ports. China had
to agree to foreigners in China being exempted from Chinese law andfrom Chinese taxation(extraterritoriality).
Foreign gunboats had
the freedom of her rivers and her coasts. Foreign soldiers guarded
their nationals even in the capital city of Peking. Foreigners
controlled her customs in order to collect the interest due on money borrowed from abroad to pay the “indemnities”
imposed on her for being
militarily too weak to resist aggression. Her government was forbidden to protect her industries or increase its revenues by being held toa maximum tariff of five percent on imports. The ports occupied by
the Powers as “leased territory,”
together with the land close to the* G. F. Hudson in The Far East in World Politics.

Last Chance in China
356
railroads which were constructed in the second half of the century,
became foreign territory from which China could be attacked if she
resisted any demands made on her, and from which the Powers could
make war upon one another on Chinese soil.
Thus China was tied hand and foot by the Powers to prevent her
from either thrusting them out or building herself up into a strong
state. Each concession wrested from her by one Power was at once
demanded by the others. The United States, although refraining
from armed aggression, insisted under the “most favored nation”
clause of her treaties with China that all privileges obtained by others
should also be enjoyed by Americans.
By the end of the nineteenth century Russia was threatening toacquire a dominant position in China, not as an “aggressor” but as afriend anxious to “protect” China against Britain and Japan, but naturally requiring “strategic facilities” for this purpose. So when England’s ward, Japan, defeated China in 1895, Russia, backed by Germany and France, prevcntcd the victorious
Japanese from taking
Southern Manchuria and Port Arthur.
She virtuously
proclaimed
that no nation was to be allowed to increase its territorial possessions
at China’s expense.
In those days it would have been difficult to know to which Powerto award the palm of hypocrisy.
In I 894 a formal Russo-Chinese Treaty of alliance gave Russia theright to use all Chinese ports in time of war. She was also promiseda naval base in Southern Manchuria, and by 1898 was demanding the“lease” of Port Arthur-allof course for China’s “protection.”Tothe uneasy British it seemed that Russia would soon be in a position
from which she could “quietly watch the dissolution of the Chinese
Empire.”Meanwhile Germany had taken possession of the Port of Tsingtao
in Shantung; and France had obtained a “leasehold” on the Kwantung Coast between Indo-China and Hong Kong and a railway concession to connect Tonkin and Yunnan.
France was also claiming
most of South China as her “sphere.”
England, at that time at the height of her industrial and maritime
supremacy, and in possession of Hong Kong, was naturally opposed
to annexation of Chinese territory by other Powers and to exclusive

China: Focus of Conflict

357“spheres” for Russia, France, Germany or anyone else.* Free trade isalways the cause of the strong, and it was England, not America, who
first enunciated the principle of the Open Door. England then, like
America today, stood to gain most if China were not partitioned.
But
the British knew they could not themselves halt Russia now that thecompletion of the Trans-Siberian
Railway had enabled Russia toescape from the domination of British sea power. Russia then as now
was the only Great Power able to exert military pressure directly on
China. Like the United States in the present era, England herself
could not, or would not, fight to preserve the Open Door so long as
there seemed any other way to safeguard her interests.
If partition was to be the order of the day the British Government
was going to make sure that England got the lion’s share. At all
costs she was goin g to prevent any other Power turning the whole of
China into a colony. So in April 1898 after Russia had obtained Port
Arthur,Britainjoined in the new scramble for territories
and“spheres of influence.”
She demanded and obtained from China the“lease” of Weihaiwei
in Shantung and claimed as her “sphere” thewhole Yangtze Valley.
At the close of the nineteenth century, the battle for concessions in
China had thus taken the form of conflicts for “spheres of influence”
within which a foreign Power sought exclusive right to capital investment, mainly in the form of railways. The demands of Russia, Franceand England, in particular, became so all-embracing that the conflicts
among the Powers could no longer be resolved at China’s expense.
There would soon be so little of the Celestial Empire left to divide upthat a major war in Europe was an immediate danger.
When Russia’s ally, France, came into direct conflict with Englandover railway construction rights in Central China, the situation was
saved for the moment by America’s active entry into Far Easternpolitics with the doctrine of the Open Door. The United States became the protagonistof the policy which served both her own and* Andre Nolde, in his Lo Chine de Ckiung Kai Chek, Paris, 1946, opens his bookwith the thesis that the Open Door was a hypocritical British and American invention
for preserving a status quo favorable to the U. S. and the British Empire. He says of
the Open-Door principle: “Principe inspire en apparence d’un liberalisme economiquede bon aloi, en realit avantageux surtout pour les positions commerciales et bancaires
deja acquises par la Grande-Bretagne et les Etats-Unis.”358

Last Chance in China

England’s interests best, but which England was not in a good moral
position to espouse.
Fifty years earlier, and nearly a hundred years before General
George Marshall arrived in Chungking on his ill-fated mission, hisnamesake, Humphrey Marshall, had written from China to the State
Department :It is my opinion that the highest interests of the United States
are involved in sustaining China . . . rather than see China become
the theatre of wide spread anarchy, and ultimately the prey of European ambition.
Opposition to either the partition of China or her domination by
any one Power had thus been recognized as the best policy for America long before she joined hands with England to try to stop Russia.
This aim did not preclude deals at China’s expense if and when it
seemed that American interests could be preserved by sacrificing
China’s
Nor did it prevent the United States from claiming forAmerican citizens all the privileges or special rights given to others
under the unequal treaties which China was forced to sign. The
United States kept its hands clean. Americans did not themselves
send generals with armies to force concessions from China. But asearly as 1844 America’s first commercial treaty with China ensured
her not only “most favored nation” treatment in respect to customs
dues, but also included the provision:“If additional advantages or
privileges of whatever description be conceded by China to any othernation, the United States [will] be entitled thereupon to complete
equal and impartial participation in the same.”
A later treaty, that of 1858, obtained for American citizens in evenwider terms the right to share in any and all privileges, economic or
political, which China might be forced to concede to any other nation,
The “Open-Door”
Policy as enunciated by John Hay in r8gg was
the logical outcome of America’s desire to defend her commercial interests in China without fighting either the Chinese or the aggressors
in China. It seemed a cheap way to defend both principle and selfinterest.
The interests of America were not sufficiently involved in Far
Eastern trade to warrant either an imperialist policy or real aid to
China. On the other hand, if only other nations could be persuaded

China: Focus of Conflict359

to act according to the principles enunciated by the United States,
America’s trade and investment in China would be safeguarded.
Ifthey would not, then the United States would be compelled to findanother way of preserving her interests and the balance of power.
In any case American principles were not to be allowed to stand in
the way of American nationals enjoying what other less virtuous
nations obtained by force.
The United States, accordingly, under Theodore Roosevelt, went
along with Britain in helping Japan and encouraging her to fightRussia. An American loan helped finance Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, and the United States acted as mediator in the peace
signed at Portsmouth in 1905. This peace denied Japan the full fruitsof her victory, but Russia, in spite of her defeats, was less exhausted
than Japan and might have continued the war to her advantage had
not the United States persuaded the Czar to make peace.
Prior to the Russo-Japanese War, the victim over whose body it
was fought had attempted to take a hand in the determinationof herfate. In 1900 the Chinese, goaded beyond endurance, tried to shake
off their chains by massacring the hated white men on her soil. The
British, French, Germans, Russians, Japanese and Americans
laidaside their rivalries for a moment to crush the Boxer Rebellion inblood and fire. Having sacked Peking and taught China her lesson,
they could safely renew the conflict among themselves.
saved the United States from theJapan’s defeat of Russia in 1905
necessity of swallowing its principles in order to secure its interests.
Japan at first was too weakened by her dearly bought victory to acquire exclusive domination
over Manchuria
and hegemony over
China. But when, during the First World War, Japan thought she
had the opportunity
to reduce China to vassalage while the European
Powers were busy trying to exterminate
one another, the UnitedStates abandoned lofty principle for compromise.
In 1917
when
Japan presented China with the Twenty-one Demands which would
have converted the whole Republic into a vassal state, SecretaryLansing, while continuing to oppose “in principle” special rights andprivileges for any power in China, signed a document recognizing
Japan’s “special interests in China, particularlyin the part to which
her possessions are contiguous.”
In 1919at the Versailles Peace Conference President Wilson, inLast Chance irz China
pursuance of his “great design,” a League of Nations, went even farther. He agreed, over China’s protests, to let Japan keep control of theChinese province of Shantung* in order to get her signature to theCovenant of the League of Nations, just as, a generation later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was to betray both China and Poland at
Yalta for a similarly worthless Russian promise of support for a
United Nations organization.
In 1922, at the Washington Conference, the United States could
afford to adhere to principle again, since she no longer had any “great
designs,” since Russia and Germany were out of the picture for thetime being, and since Japan could be kept in order without risk ofwar. Japan was forced to give up Shantung, to clear out of Russian
Siberia and to sign the Nine-Power
Treaty, guaranteeing the territorial integrity of China and her national independence.
This treaty was intended to ensure a hands-off policy by all theGreat Powers. But it did not free China from the shackles on her
sovereignty imposed during the previous century. The “Open-Door”
Policy remained what it had been since its inception, a device to prevent any one Power gaining an advantage over the others by seizureof territory
or acquisition of exclusive rights. In John Hay’s words
it was intended to “protect all rights guaranteed to friendly Powers”
by preserving “China’s territorial and administrative
entity.”The unequal treaties remained in force, and Japan retained her“special rights and privileges” in Manchuria.
No concessions weremade in 1922 to China’s aspirations to real independence. She was
expected to “set her house in order” but it was still cluttered up withforeigners who got in her way and rendered her task impossible.
The Washington
Conference was accordingly a bitter disappointment to the Chinese. They had hoped that the Western Powers would
not only cease extorting new concessions but would allow China todevelop into an independent modern state. Instead, as Wang Chingwei said at the time, China was freed “from the Japanese policy of
independent violent encroachment” only to leave her a victim “to the
co-operative slow encroachment of all the Great Powers.”
Sun Yat-sen had originally been confident enough of Western aid
in China’s reconstruction
to submit plans for the development of*This had already been agreed to by Britain
during the war.

and France in secret treaties signed

China: Focus of Conflict

361

China’s economic resources to the mutual benefit of the West andChina. He had written that it was his hope that “the present spheresof influence can be abolished, internationaland commercial war done
away with, internecine capitalist competition got rid of, and, last but
not least, the class struggle between labor and capital avoided.”
He did not turn to Communist Russia for help in the emancipationof China until compelled to recognize that only force could enable theChinese people to win their freedom.
The 1923 to 1927 period of Kuomintang-Communist-Russiancollaboration came during the brief period when the Soviet Government
still hoped to win world power through the support of the working
class and the oppressed “colonial peoples,” rather than by building up
the greatest military machine in the world. Lenin had denounced all
the special rights and privileges of Czarist Russia in China, which
Stalin was to claim a quarter of a century later. Russia appeared to
Sun Yat-sen as the only country willing and able to help China in her
struggle for liberation.
After Sun’s death the Kuomintang-Communist
alliance successIt seemed then that Soviet
fully swept all before it from 1925 to 1927.
Russia might acquire what the Czars had fought in vain to achieve, avirtual hegemony over China, or China’s absorption into Russia’s
empire as an ally and protectorate.
This very real threat to the Open
Door and all it stood for in the way of imperialist privilege and commercial interests led the United States to join hands with Britain insupporting the moderate forces of Chinese nationalism led by ChiangKai-shek.
Had not the Cornintern, locked in the struggle between Stalin andTrotsky, played its hand so badly, China might have remained Russia’s friend instead of becoming America’s.
The mixture of Right and Left policies adopted by the Cornintern
ruined Russia’s chances. Had the line of sincere collaboration
withwhat Marxists call the “bourgeois revolution”
been followed, Sun
Yat-sen’s aim of a non-Communist
China allied to Russia, and freed
from Western Imperialist exploitation, might have been achieved. But
Stalin, in his efforts both to destroy the Trotskyist
oppositioninRussia and to steal its fire, lost the chance of creating either a friendly
non-Communist
China or a Communist-dominated
China. He for-

362

Last Chance in Chinabade the Chinese Communists to organize the peasants, workers andsoldiers into Soviets ready to seize power over the New China to beestablished after the “Imperialists”
and the war lords had been defeated, this being the Trotskyist strategy. He insisted instead that the
Chinese Communists subordinate themselves to Chiang Kai-shek’sorders and do nothing to prepare for the eventuality of a break. But,
at the same time, he declared that Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang would later on be annihilated by the Communists in a social revolution, thus making it certain that a break must come.
Naturally Chiang Kai-shek and the Right Wing of the Kuomintang
decided to be liquidators instead of waiting to be liquidated. Thus theComintern under Stalin’s guidance both destroyed the possibility, if
it ever existed, of turning China’s national revolution into a Communist revolution, and threw away the chance of lasting co-operation
between the Kuomintang and the Communists.
.
The civil war which began in 1927, and has been openly renewedsince V-J Day, was the price China paid for the repulse of Russia. It
acted as a continual brake on the new government established at Nanking in 1927. It split the forces which might have rejuvenated China
and enabled her to grow strong enough to resist her external enemies.
It helped Japan as today it helps Russia.
China under the Kuomintang
became sufficiently united and nationally conscious to resist Japan and deny her victory. But both the
split with the Communists and the very short period vouchsafed to
the government to reconstruct China and create a modern army,
before Japan attacked in full force in 1937, destroyed the early hopesof the Kuomintang
Revolution. China today, as at the end of the nineteenth century, is too weak to stand up to Russian pressure. She isagain what she was before the rise to power of the Kuomintang-thevictim of power politics and the focus of world conflict.
In affliction there is comfort in the misery of others. The Japanese
1 can today console themselves with the thought that the Chinese, who
got Japan into her present situation by refusing to be conquered
quietly, have not even won the right to be left alone to reconstructtheir country. Russia has taken over from Japan the “divine mission”
of keeping China disunited and preventing
her reconstruction
anddevelopment into a strong modern state. And China’s Western friends
now echo the criticisms of the Kuomintang
Government formerly
given by Japan as an excuse for her aggression.

China: Focus of Conflict363

In the year following his country’s defeat a Japanese with an ironic
sense of humor could comment on the fact that Japan under General
MacArthurwas somewhat better off than China. Japan was at least
being protected from the Communist menace from within and without, while China was being urged by the United States to take RUSsia’s agents into her government, and the Chinese Communists werecompletingthe material destruction which Japan had begun. By
1947 more economic assistance was being given by the United States
to occupied Japan than to China. China, like Poland, was finding that
it was better to have fought America than to have been her ally.
Nevertheless, in spite of all the weaknesses of China; in spite of thestrains and stresses which must have broken a people with less patience and fortitude ; in spite of the fact that victory meant merely theexchange of one aggressor for another; in spite of the failures of theKuomintang
Government and its inability to fulfill the tasks it had
set itself in the twenties -in spite of all this, China under Chiang Kaishek has attained too high a degree of national consciousness and selfrespect for the wishes of her people to be ignored. She has not reverted entirely to her nineteenth-century
position of being only apawn in international
power politics.
The struggle today is not one for greater or lesser spoils in China.
It is no longer a conflict among the Powers for territory,
concessionsor special rights and privileges, but one to decide who shall determine
the direction of China’s development and her orientation in world politics. The century-old struggle over the body of China has been transformed into one for control of her mind and heart. Today there is an
ideological war in which Chinese fight Chinese, instead of foreigners
fighting Chinese or one another.
Until the defeat of Japan there was a three-cornered
contest as
among Communism,
represented by Russia, Western or AngloAmerican political and economic ideas, and Japan’s force-backed propaganda for a greater East Asia ruled by herself. By reverting to the
obsolete pattern of nineteenth-century
direct colonial conquest Japan
threw away her opportunity
to unite and lead the Orient against both
the declining imperialism of the West and the rising Soviet imperialism. Today there remains only the conflict between the West andRussia.
The Japanese never had any real chance of success. Not only theirbrutal and stupid methods but also the reactionary nature of the ele-

364

Last Chance in Chimernents and principles they appealed to, nullified their military strength.
They could win battles and occupy territories but they could not win
sufficient adherents to secure their conquests.
For a few years the threat of Japanese conquest united China andheld in abeyance the basic conflict between the Moscow-orientated
Communists and the Western-orientatedNational Government.
Assoon as Japan’s defeat at America’s hands became a certainty the conflict was resumed. Today it holds the center of the stage. Two opposite principles of unification, two opposing philosophies, ways of lifeand paths out of medieval backwardness, the Communistic and thedemocratic, tear China apart. She cannot progress until the conflictis resolved. She stands at the crossroads and cannot take the path tomodernization
or reform either to the Right or the Left, either into
Russia’s orbit or America’s, until one side or other is victorious anddominant.
During my stay in China and for a year afterward China was held
suspended and impotent. She could do nothing to solve her problems
because America compelled her to try to resolve by negotiation andcompromise an irreconcilable
conflict.
We continued to insist thatthe ills she suffered from were of internal origin, ip spite of all theevidence that the poison which was wasting her away was administered by an outside agency. True that China was herself diseased.
But left alone she could have recovered.
The Communist abscesswould disappear if she were allowed to regain health and strength
through reconstruction and peaceful reform. But Russia’s aim was toweaken her further by aggravating the disease.
Viewed historically, and without reference to the diverse motives of
those who determined it, American policy showed little difference inthe attitude adopted toward Russia in 1945-46 and toward Japan in
the thirties.
The difference consisted only in the greater degree of
benevolence displayed toward Russian aggression.
In the years preceding the Tripartite
Pact of rg4o among Germany,
Italy and Japan, America had expressed disapproval of Japan’s bullying of China and had refused to recognize the puppet or semiautonomous states she set up in Manchuria and North China. Nothing, however, was done to stop Japan while it could have been done without
risk of war.

China: Focus of Conflict,365

The United States, unlike England, sought to save face by giving
lip service to principles, but actually she too was prepared to compromise with the aggressors at China’s expense. Her official protests andAmbassador
Grew’s representations
in Tokyo were all concernedwith only the preservationof America’s
interests in China, andAmerica continued to supply Japan with the sinews of war until six
months before Pearl Harbor.
By regarding the fate of China as of comparatively
minor importance to that of Europe, and by disregarding the real menace fromJapan in its preoccupation with the more distant and uncertain menaceof Germany, the United States brought on the Pacific War it had
sought for forty years to avoid by seeking a basis for compromisewith the Japanese aggressors. Instead of saving China and curbing
Japan when it could have been done without war, America and Britain let Japan build up the strength to attack them. Even after Pearl
Harbor the same line of high talk and low practice was followed. At
Cairo a promise was given to China that all territories
stolen fromher should be returned to her; at Yalta the promise was secretly
annulled.
In 1946 and 1947, America similarly sought to avoid a showdown
in the Far East by her support of Chinese Communist claims. Thinking she might safeguard her interests by conciliating
the Chinese
Communists
she weakened China and strengthened Russia for the
future war which only uncompromising
support of the Chinese Government could avert.
“First lofty principles, then disillusionment,
then compromise”*this was as true of America’s Far Eastern policy in 1946 when General Marshall attempted to brin g about a compromise with Russia’s
agents, the Chinese Communist
Party, as it had been in the years
when Ambassador Grew in Tokyo and Secretary Hull in Washington
hoped to preserve American interests in China by appeasing Japan
while professing disapproval of all her acts of aggression.
Implementing
principle requires sacrifice, and sacrifices are acceptable to a people only when real or imagined vital national interests
are involved. The downfall from principle to compromise to abandonment of principle in America’s foreign policy has been due to her lack
* The Big Three, by David DalIin, Yale University Press.

Last Chance in China
366
of interest in world affairs. The basic truth which explains the contradictions in American policy is, simply, that so long as the majorityof Americans were uninterested in the fate of China, no American
Government could afford to stand on principle.
Thus, again andagain, confronted with the grim realities of power politics, the UnitedStates has sought a compromise.
This was easily understandable, even justifiable, in the past when
the United States was vowed to isolation, and before she had become
involved, following Pearl Harbor, in the hardest and bloodiest war
in her history. It is not so easy to understand why at the height ofher military power in 1945 the United States voluntarily
renounced
what had been the aim of her Far Eastern policy for fifty years-a
united and independent China.
For the sake of the doubtful and unnecessary entry of Russia into
the war against Japan, and for Stalin’s blessing on his “great design”
of a United Nations organization, President Roosevelt at Yalta madethe whole war against Japan meaningless. Japan would never haveattacked at Pearl Harbor if we had been prepared to let her hold Manchuria and North China, which in effect meant domination over thewhole of China. Yet at the very time when the blood of so many
Americans shed in the Pacific had ensured the certain defeat of Japan,
the United States sought to brin g Russia into the war at a price enabling her, instead of Japan, to dominate the Far East. Not only hashistory few examples to show of such a mean betrayal of an ally as
the Yalta deal giving Russia Port Arthur and control over the railways of Manchuria, but it is hard to call to mind an equally unintelligent and purposeless sacrifice of the fruits of victory by a strong
Power. As Wellington Koo said to the Cleveland Council on World
Affairs in January 1947, the concessions made to Russia at Yalta
without
consultation
with China were “a curious and practicallyunique instance of one ally asking a price of another at the expense ofa third for co-operation in what was morally and politically a common
cause.”The treatment of China by President Roosevelt was paralleled onlyby the treatment of Poland. In Europe as in Asia the the ally which
first resisted Axis aggression was sacrificed at Yalta to the ambitionsof Hitler’s successor as the scourge of democracy.
The Chinese ambassador to the United States was also correct

China: Focus of Conflict

367

when he stated in the same speech that the Yalta deals had placed responsibilityon the United States “for stability and security” in the
Far East. Having opened the door to Russian aggression, we obligated ourselves to protect China.
It is obvious now that it should have been the objective of American policy to keep Russia out of the Far Eastern War, instead ofbribing her to come in. Russia would not then today, as in 18g51904, hold the initiative in the Far East. Thanks to the weakening
and deteriorationof the Kuomintang
Government and to the existence of a strong Chinese Communist Party and army as well as tothe elimination of Japan, the Russians have a far better chance thanunder the Czars to acquire domination over China.
As paper compensation for the sacrifice of China to Stalin’s ambitions, the United States maintained her Big Four rank-a
meaningless gesture unless America can nullify the Yalta deal by giving China
sufficient support to resist Russia. Pretensions to greatness are dangerous without the means to support them, and by agreeing to Russia’s demands in Manchuria the United States deprived China of control over the one region developed into an industrial base, of her one
hope to become strong, independent and “a bulwark of world peace.”
America’s Far Eastern policy until Yalta was based on a comSelf-interest
required equal
bination of self-interest and principle.
opportunity
for American trade; morality required opposition to thedismembermentof China or its becoming the colony of any one
Power.
Today the commercial motive should be vastly reinforced by the
security motive, but this is not yet obvious to the whole American
people. Having been led by propaganda during the Second Ilrorld
War to believe that there were only two “wicked” and aggressive nations, Germany and Japan, it was natural that Americans should havebelieved that having killed the dragons they could safely go home.
Older nations, like England, have learned something from history.
They know that different roles are played by different actors from
epoch to epoch, and that yesterday’s ally may be tomorrow’s
enemy.
Americans, after their long period of isolationism, forgot the lessons
their forefathers learned too well. A people whose ancestors forswore
participationin “the interminable quarrels of Europe” fought in two
world wars believing that a crusade against the wicked could rid the368

Last Chance in Chinaworld of sin. The fact that Japan was our ally in World War I, andour enemy in World War II, did not teach the necessary lesson which
centuries of experience have demonstrated
to other nations.
The
United States agreed to let Russia have the Kuriles with as little
thought for the future as it had when Japan took over the Marshalland Caroline Islands after World War I. Not only did the UnitedStates refrain during the war from using its tremendous power, andthe dependence of its allies on its resources and production, to ensure
its own future security, but also in the Far East America agreed tosacrifice the ally who had been fighting Japan for eight years, but who
was weak, to the ally who was neutral and was strong.
In the Far East, as in Europe, Russian policy has been anything but
enigmatic.
It is indeed far easier to understand than America’s vacillating, ambiguous and contradictory
actions and reactions.
Stalin confronts the countries within his reach with a simple choice :Join us or be destroyed. The pattern for Greece is precisely the same
as for China, or for that matter for America.
Naturally
Stalin’s
chances of immediate success are greatest in the countries which are
worst governed, have suffered most from the war, and are close to
Russia’s borders. Greece and China have been softened up for conquest by misery and despair, injustice and misgovernment.
But evenin the case of America, strong, prosperous and free, Stalin can hope
eventually to succeed, provided his depredations elsewhere can force
us to ruin ourselves in the effort to bolster up weak nations, rather
than meet the Soviet challenge at the source.
The course of events in the Far East since the Sino-Soviet War
began in 1937 demonstrates with particular clarity Stalin’s masterly
opportunism.
Of course, no nation in its foreign policy, not even the
United States, ever acts entirely on principle.
Few, however, haveever matched the Soviet Government’s
in cynical “realism,” readiness to change sides and disregard for its pledged word.
From 1937 until Japan’s defeat, the Soviet Government gave or
withheld support to China, bargained with Japan and made deals
with her at China’s expense, called on the Chinese Communists tofight Japan or to fight the Chinese Government, kept or broke its
treaties with Japan, according to what suited the short-range aim ofRussian security and the long-range
objective of dominion over

China:

Focus of Conflict

369

China. Stalin was thus able, without fighting Japan, to win far morethan the United States which sacrificed so many lives in the bloody
battles on the islands and atolls of the Pacific.
America’s diplomacy was as weak as her armed forces were strong.
Stalin, playing from weakness, showed himself a master of power
politics.
Although World War II started in China, and the United States
was brought into it by Japan, America’s eyes continued to be fixed on
Europe. Most Americans have only a hazy idea of what went on in
the Far East during the war, and even less interest in what has happened since Japan’s defeat.
The fate of Europe, whence came thefathers or ancestors of most Americans, has naturally seemed of paramount importance in spite of the lesson of Pearl Harbor.
At postwar international
or Big Three conferences the Far East was usuallyomitted from the agenda. Moreover the official policy of whitewashing Russia withheld from the American public knowledge of Russia’s
actions in Asia long after the real face of the Soviet Union had been
revealed in Europe.
In 1943 and 1944 the Press Censor forbade any realistic appraisalof the chances for and against Russia’s entry into war against Japan.
The negotiations, pacts and deals between Moscow and Tokyo wereignored or misrepresented so that no offense might be given to Stalin
by adverse comment. Wh en, for instance, on March 30, 1944, Russia
and Japan signed a five-year nonaggression pact, the Army and Navy
Jourml was virtually alone in recognizing its implications
and thebenefits it conferred on Japan.
Obviously the agreement was materially as well as politically helpful to Japan’s war effort. Not only did Russia recognize Manchukuo
and repeat her promise not to attack Japan, but the former one-yearleases of fisheries in Russian waters was replaced by a firm five-year
agreement. The fish supplies thus assured to Japan were calculated as
equivalent to at least the output of a hundred thousand farms. This
gain far outweighed the annulment of Japan’s oil and coal concessions in Russian Sakhalin, since Japan at the time possessed plenty ofcoal in Manchuria
and oil in the Dutch East Indies. Nevertheless,almost every editorial writer and commentator in the United States
succeeded by some abstruse process of reasoning in representing thepact as evidence of the identity of Russian and American purposes.

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Last Chavlce in China

Immediately
after this agreement Chinese Intelligence
Reports
showed that Japan had withdrawn
several of her famous Kwantung
Army divisions from Manchuria
to Central China. So the Soviet
Union enabled the Japanese to put more power into the drive theylaunched that spring along the Hankow-Canton
Railway than they
had displayed for several years. At the same time they launched aspring offensive on India. But the Chinese were alone in asking
whether Japan would have dared to weaken its Mancburian defenses
without an understanding with Russia which went even farther thantheir “nonaggression”
or neutrality pacts. The American press had
nothing to say concerning this evidence of something in the nature of
Russo- Japanese collusion.
In 1946 in Peiping, where I interviewed two of the top-ranking
Japanese generals in Chinese hands, I received some interesting answers to the questions I put concerning Russo- Japanese relations.
At my request, General Sun Lien-chung, commander of the Eleventh War Area, had arranged for me to meet General Nemoto andMajor General Watanabe, both of whom were Kwantung Army officers who had served throughout
the Sino-Japanese War in North
China and Manchuria.
We met in a dark-walled, gloomy room inside the compound where
thousands of Japanese soldiers awaited repatriation after their surrender. Japanese sentries guarded the entrance to the “prison” andthere was no sign of any Chinese guards. Except for my interpreter,a woman major in the Foreign Affairs Department of the Eleventh
Chinese War Zone, I was entirely surrounded by Japanese, militaryor civilian.
As we faced one another across the red baize-covered
table and sipped tea in a room furnished with stiff Western-Japanesestyle chairs, I might have thought I was back in the Japan I had
known twenty years before, asking questions about the cotton industry in the reception room of some large factory.
General Watanabe was slim, with a high forehead, beautiful hands
and pale aristocratic features. He never smiled, and looked and behaved altogether like a legendary Samurai.
Nemoto was thickset,
broad-shouldered
and ruddy of countenance, the hearty and jovial
type of Japanese who is represented in the movies as grinning andsaying “so sorry” as he decapitates his victims. Both were immaculately groomed in well-tailoreduniforms.
They no longer wore theChina:

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371

swords which used to be an inseparable part of Japanese militaryattire but they held themselves as erect and as proudly as in the daysof their glory and absolute power. The really arrogant type of Japanese was, however, represented by one of their civilian aides, a handsome young man in a well-tailored
Western suit, whose contempt forJapan’s conquerors, or for everyone but himself, had set his mouth inwhat seemed a perpetual sneer.
By a strange coincidence the Japanese interpreter, Mr. Fujita, asmiling, anxious-to-please
and rather plump civilian, had once been afellow student of mine at the London School of Economics. My interpreter, Major Shuping Kuai, had studied at Oxford University
and
we had all three belonged to the University Labor Federation in thosedistant postwar, or prewar, days. In spite of the many changes in international alignments and the death everywhere of the liberal hopes
we had all once cherished, we met as old friends rather than as representatives of the victorious and vanquished nations. The interview
became something in the nature of an historical post-mortem and sooneven the tight-lipped Japanese generals began to unbend.
They did not relax their vigilance in respect to any remarks they
may have been inclined to make concerning Soviet Russia. As Major
Shuping Kuai remarked afterward,
the Japanese were obviously
anxious to say nothing which the Russians might consider inimical.
As far as possible they tried to obscure the connection between Japan’s
war and Germany’s.
But they could not be expected to understandthat the Soviet Government would not like them to reveal how good
Russo-Japanese relations had been in spite of the Russo-German War.
In answer to my questions they stated that, follo\ving the SinoRussian Treaty of 1944, Japan had considered Russia friendly enoughfor ten Kwantung Army divisions to be released from defending theManchurian
frontier to go south to attack the Chinese Nationalist
forces.
General Nemoto also referred to the relief with which they had
heard of the earlier Russo-Japanese Pact, that of April 1941. He had
been in command of a division in Manchuria facing Russia’s troops
only 400 meters away. There were frequent border incidents andeveryone was uneasy. After the pact was signed it was felt that nothing would happen between Japan and Russia, and he himself had beentransferred to North China.

Last Chance in China
372
I asked him how the pact affected the Chinese Communists.
He
replied that according to Japanese Intelligence reports some were very
put out and disappointed, while others maintained that it was only aprovisional, temporary agreement. He thought that there had been
two schools in the Chinese Communist Party, one resenting and one
justifying
Soviet Russia’s friendly relations with Japan. He did notthink that the pact had had any influence on the Communists in theirattitude toward the Japanese. But he really did not know because theJapanese commanders were not much concerned.
“We never,” he said, “attached much importance to the Chinese
Communists as a military force. They were a nuisance, of course.
They interfered with our communications
now and again. But our
main objective was always the National forces. Never at any time
were orders issued to consider the Chinese Communist forces as amajor military objective. There were small skirmishes with them butthese were of little importance. It was not until after we surrenderedin August 1945 that the Communists came to exert military and political influence in North China.”
General Watanabe broke in to give me some figures of Japanesecasualties in fighting the Communists after V-J Day. With considerable indignation he said that in Shansi alone the Japanese had lost 5 I 5killed, 5 rg wounded and I 33 missing. The total for North China was
about five times that figure. Th e J a p anese had been obligated by theterms of the surrender to guard communicationlines and give themselves up only to the National Government forces. They were often
attacked by the Communist forces. In southern Shantung 4,000 Japanese had been surrounded by IOO,OOO Communist troops but had
nevertheless fought their way through to Tsinan to surrender to the
National Government authorities.
Bringing the conversation back to Russo-Japanese relations during
the war, I asked : “Can you explain to me why Japan did not attack
Russia ? Did you refrain from going to Germany’s help because youwere confident that the pacts with Russia would be honored; that
Russia would not attack Japan in any circumstances?”
General Nemoto gave an evasive reply saying that he did not know,that he had been in China all the time, not in Tokyo, but he thought
Japanese Intelligence had been very poor. They had never known
what the Allies intended. Then he said : “I thought after we got into

China:

Focus of Conflict373

war with the United States that Japan must lose or compromise.
1
hoped for a compromise peace but thought that if we could not get
this we should surely fight to the death. The way in which the war
ended was a great shock to me. I could never have imagined such an
end as our surrender before our armies were destroyed.”“But,” I said, “what I have never been able to understand is why,
if you were so certain that you could not win in a war against America, you failed to go to Germany’s aid. Surely your only hope lay inGermany’s not being defeated. Why then did you not go to war
against Russia before American aid to Russia could turn the tide, savethe Soviet Union and make Germany’s defeat a certainty?”
Again he evaded an answer. Instead of replying to my question hestarted to explain why Japan had attacked America in 1941. “Theoil situation was acute. Japan had either to surrender to economic
pressure or play her last card in order to get oil from the South Seas.
There was no alternative but to bend our knees or declare war on
America and Britain.
It was a desperate move.”
Watanabe said : “Before Pearl Harbor we thought Japan must
lose the war, but that the nation could be built anew on the ashes.”
And raising his head with dignity he added: “I still think so. Everything is finished. We have ceased to be a military nation. There will
be a new Japanese nation in a new shape. I am optimistic concerning
future Sino- Japanese relations.
Japan used to dictate her will bymeans of her military power. That power is gone. Japan is now inferior even to China in military power. We have got to begin anew
on the basis of real friendship with China. Now that we cannot dictate there is an opportunity for real friendship and co-operation.”“Yes,” I said, “the Chinese are not revengeful. Japan can be happy
that the Chinese are reasonable. Maybe in the future, if you change
your attitude, the outcome of this war will prove to have been beneficial to both nations.”
My conversation with the Japanese generals in Peiping had beeninteresting, but I had not learned what I wanted to know. As a historian I am still puzzled by Japan’s failure to help Germany, sinceGermany’s defeat entailed her own doom. Were the Japanese too
fainthearted, or too stupid, or too farsighted ? Did they rely until past
the eleventh hour on Russia intervening to save them as a counterweight against a China bound to the United States ? Or did they are-

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Last Charzce in China

fully and cleverly calculate thai if they avoided war with Russia theywould suffer only the mild punishment of an American occupation
and would be protected from massacre and rape, and from the Communist menace at home as well as abroad ?
Whether or not those who led Japan to defeat now regret that theylet Germany down, or are happy that they refrained from fighting
Russia and sharing Germany’s fate, the prisoners of Nuremberg musthave realized long before they were hanged that their greatest mistake
was the honoring of their commitments to Japan.
Had not Germany at once declared war on the United States following Pearl Harbor, there would have remained an isolationist andan anti-British
opposition to American
participationin the war
against Germany. Certainly it would have proved far harder for theUnited States administrationand the British to direct America’s
main war effort against Hitler.
Public opinion would almost certainly have forced a “defeat Japan first” instead of “defeat Hitler
first” strategy. This would have prevented Russia’s emergence as theprincipal victor of World War II, since it would have entailed directing the flood of Lend-Lease to China instead of to Russia.
Russian and British interests converged to swing the
In 1942
scales against Germany instead of Japan. Churchill came to America
in January 1942 to avert the danger of the “arsenal of democracy”
diverting its huge output to the Pacific away from the war in Europe.
Stalin and his henchmen, in their more subtle fashion, concentrated
on minimizing
Japan’s guilt and the danger she represented.
Ambassador
Litvinoff,shortly after his arrival in the UnitedStates, told the press that Hitler had “inspired” Japan’s attack on us,
leaving entirely out of account her war on China and all the other acts
which entitled Japan to be regarded as an aggressor in her own right.
The Soviet Union’s former ambassador to the United States, Alexander Troyanovsky,
went farther. In a booklet he published in MosCOW
called Why t?w United States Fights against Hitlerite Germany,
he said that the Japanese had been “tricked” into war with the UnitedStates and England.
At the same time Russia assured Japan that she need have no fearof the Soviet Union. On January agrd, 1942, Japan’s Foreign Minister, Shigenori
Togo, told the Diet that when Japan attacked
America she received assurance from Russia that the Soviet Government would observe the 1941 Neutrality
Pact to the letter.

China:

Focus of Conflict

37.5

The combined influence of the Communists, the Russophiles andthe Anglophiles
was amply sufficient to counteract the emotions of
the American people. The people, as distinct from the administrationand the press, wanted to fight the Japanese, who had attacked them,more than they wanted to fight the Germans against whom the UnitedStates had, in fact, been waging an undeclared war for more than ayear before Pearl Harbor.
Even the NCW York Tinzcs called Japan the “slave and jackal of
Hitler” -anabsurd statement since if it had been true Japan would
certainly have helped Germany by attacking Russia.
There is little use in speculation over might-have-beens.
But it is
worth remembering that had a “Japan first” strategy been adopted,
the postwar situation would have been far more favorable to America
and to the cause of democracy.
Not only would China have been
given a chance to emerge from the war as a Power strong enough tomaintain peace in the Far East, thereby releasing America from thenecessity of maintaining
armed forces in the Western Pacific, but
Russia would have been so worn down as to be unable to succeed
Germany as the dictator of Europe and the menace to world peace.
Both the totalitarian
powers of Europe, instead of only one of them,might have been destroyed.
It will, of course, be said that Russia would have made a separate
peace with Germany had we not given her the lion’s share of LendLease, and had not President Roosevelt at Teheran and Yalta promised to give her all and more than Germany had fought to win. Evenso, would not this have been better than the postwar situation whichconfronts us? The Nazis would have been defeated, or would havesurrendered, even if we had not given way to Russia’s imperialist
demands. Perhaps more Americans would have died in World War
II, but their sons would not have a third world war in prospect.
Penny-wise and pound-foolish
is an old English proverb which
fitly describes President Roosevelt’s secret Yalta deals with the dictator of all the Russias. The American lives saved in one generation
will seem few if another world war comes because we allowed Soviet
Russia to step into the shoes of both Germany and Japan. Since Russia never made more than a token contribution to the defeat of Japan,
not even the pennies were saved.
It may be argued that Yalta did no more than set the stamp of
American approval on what Russia would in any case have done.

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Last Chance iu China

With or without the blessing of the United States, the Red Armywould have swept into Manchuria as soon as Japan was bombed todefeat. The sacrifice of China was in fact made much earlier when
we decided to defeat Hitler first and poured out Lend-lease to Russia
while telling China she must continue to endure unaided. In so doing,
all hope of a future balance of power in the Far East was destroyed short of American armed support of China. Nevertheless it
is difficult to understand why President Roosevelt strove to bringRussia into the Far Eastern War instead of trying to keep her out.
There were in fact two wars, not one. Japan and Germany wereallies but not partners. In the Second World War, as in the first,
Japan showed herself indifferent to both the ideologies and the interests of her allies. To the Japanese militarists the conflicts among thewhite peoples were just so many opportunities to build up their own
Asiatic empire. In her eleventh-hour negotiations in Washington in
Japan showed that she would be as ready to join
November 1941,
our side as she had been a quarter of a century earlier if we would
accept her claim to dominate China. During the First World War
she refused the one service she rendered her allies, the convoying ofBritish and French ships through the Mediterranean,
until assured
by secret treaty that she would be given the special rights and territories she claimed in China. In the Second World War she showed
more concern in maintaining
good relations with Russia than withpreventing Germany’s defeat.
The record of relations between the Germans and the Japanese
after they signed the Anti-Cornintern
Pact in 1936 shows clearly thatboth were pursuing their own national policies with little or no regard for the convenience or interests of the other. In German eyesthat first alliance constituted an assurance against Russia’s involvement in Germany’s conflict with Britain or France, or a preparation
for joint war on Russia. But for Japan it constituted something similar to the Anglo-Japanesealliance of 1904 : an assurance that Germany would hold the ring for her while she devoured China as England had done in 1904-1905
when Japan fought Russia to decide who
would dominate China.
Encouraged by the evident desire of the Roosevelt administration
to find a basis for reconciliation
with Japan, Tokyo endeavored toreconstruct her relations with the West regardless of her alliance with

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377

Germany.
Only when it became clear that America was no more
prepared to recognize than to hinder Japanese conquests in China,
did Japan sign the September 1940 Tripartite Alliance with Germany
and Italy.
Russia equally with Japan reaped the benefit of America’s halfand-half Far Eastern policy. Since Japan was too bogged down in
China to be counted by Germany as an effective ally against Russia,
Hitler in August 1939
made his about-turn in foreign policy. The
Stalin-Hitler
Pact announced to the world that Germany had decided
to turn against the West instead of against Russia. The dominantgroup of Japanese militarists were ready to follow suit since they had
never wanted to fight Russia and were even less inclined to challenge
the Soviets after Japan’s defeat in the border conflict at Nomonhan
in the early summer of 1939.
Indeed, as it subsequently turned out,
Hitler was to find it far harder in the future to pry Japan loose from
Russia’s embrace than it had been to get Moscow and Tokyo to kissand make friends following the Stalin-Hitler
Pact.
The new and more binding alliance with Germany which Japanconcluded in September 1940 was not directed against Russia. It
bound the signatories to go to war against any Power not then involved in the European or China War which should become involvedin the future, but Russia was specifically exempted from its provisions.
It was directed solely against America. As we now know from German secret documents, made public by the State Department in 1946,
the Tripartite
Alliance was intended to exclude Russia from the war
and mark out for her “the role of a sort of neutral silent partner inthe war against the Anglo-Americans.”
It was therefore only natural that Japan should shortly afterward
conclude her first Neutrality
Treaty with Russia.
(April 1941)
Japan’s Tripartite
Alliance with Germany and Italy and her treaty
with Russia marked her recognition that she could not obtain dominion over China with America’s consent and must therefore better her
chance of gaining her ends through alliances with the enemies ofBritain, France and America.
Japan miscalculated in the case of America though not with regard
to the attitude of the Soviet Government.
The Tripartite
Alliance of
September 1940,
which Germany and Japan had hoped would keep
America out of their respective wars, galvanized the United States

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Last Chance in Chilta

into beginning to stop the supply of oil and scrap iron which had
hitherto fed Japan’s war machine.
Nevertheless, since Japan could not, in any event, fulfill her “divine destiny” if America continued refusing to recognize her conquests, she all along stood to gain most by America’s involvement inEurope’s War and Russian neutrality in the Pacific War. Germany
did in fact divert the thunder from Japan for several years, and Japan
Japan’s miscalculation
was ingave Germany little help in return.
thinking that America would not have the power or will to go on
fighting her after Germany’s defeat. Hence the hopes for a compromise peace which had been entertained by the Japanese generals I
interviewed in Peiping. The atom bomb destroyed that chance if itever existed.
In the Russo-German War which began in June I 941, Japan tried
to play the role of mediator as unsuccessfully as Germany had formerly done between Japan and China. The Germans were as intransigent and foolish as the Japanese had been. Henceforth Japan andGermany each went her own way. By her failure to reciprocate forGermany’s declaration of war against the United States by going to
war against Russia, Japan doomed herself to eventual defeat. She
could not survive Germany’s collapse. But, by maintaining good relations with Russia, the rulers of Japan must have hoped to hedge on
the outcome of the war. In any case Japan won great immediateadvantages and, perhaps, some permanent ones. She freed most of
her army for operations against China, the United States and theBritish Empire ; she won nearly two years in which to consolidate her
empire against the coming American attack; and she enjoyed the by
no means inconsiderable advantage of the Chinese Communist split
with Chungking and the direction of Communist military operations
mainly against the Chinese National Government.
Lastly, but of greatest importance after her defeat, Japan avoided
incurring the bitter hostility of Communist sympathizers and Russophiles in America and Britain and thus came out of the war withlighter losses than Germany.
There may never have been a secret understanding between Russia
and Japan in addition to their pacts and treaties, but they certainly
had a strong mutual interest. Both equally desired that Lend-Lease
and America’s war effort be directed against Germany.

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379

Those who, year after year, had expected Russia to enter the war
against Japan were as unrealistic as they were ignorant of Stalin’s
real interests and policies. He had gone to war with Germany only
because Russia was attacked. Why should he fight Japan unless attacked ? Not only did the Soviet Union need to avoid a war on two
fronts, but, once Germany’s defeat was assured, the longer Japan
could resist, and the heavier losses she could inflict on the UnitedStates and Britain, the more Russia would benefit. Moreover, from
Stalin’s point of view, the longer China suffered the better. The balance of forces in the postwar world would be just so much more in
the Soviet Union’s favor the weaker China became, and the greater
the opportunity offered to the Chinese Communists to dismember her.
It was accordingly only “realistic” on Stalin’s part to sign yet another treaty with Japan on March 30, 1944. It had become important to Stalin to keep Japan in the fight and encourage her to launch
her last great offensive in China by assuring her that it would be safe
to withdraw
the Kwantung
Army from the Russian border.
Anyfurther victories which Japan could now win in China would serve
to prepare the way for the Communist postwar offensive.
Stalin, however, made one important miscalculation.
The rapid
advance of America’s naval forces in the Pacific, the efficacy of her
air force and, above all, the atom bomb brought the war against Japanto too sudden a conclusion. Russia barely had time to scramble into
it before peace was signed. She managed to grab Manchuria, but she
was excluded from any share in the occupation of Japan. The gameshe was able to play in Europe could not be played in the Far East.
Japan certainly had good reason from past experience to hope forthe compromise peace which the Japanese generals told me they had
desired. Had not America and Britain for years insisted only on thepreservation of their interests in the Far East? Had not the UnitedStates as late as the spring of 1941
agreed to recognize Manchukuo
and mediate a Sino-Japanese peace if the Japanese Army would withdraw from China ? And did not a large section of the American press
speak of Chiang Kai-shek’s government in much the same abusive
terms as Japan had used?
However wrongly Japan may have diagnosed American policy, herleaders may have been wiser than they knew when they decided that
discretion was the better part of valor in relations with the Soviet

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Last Chance in China

Union.
By not going to war against Russia they failed to act like
Samurai, but they avoided incurring the virulent enmity of the Communists and their sympathizers in America and England. There wasnever the same loud cry for vengeance against the Japanese people asagainst the German people. The Death March of Bataan and otheratrocities and ill treatment of Americans at Japan’s hands led to no
dire reprisals on the Japanese people after our victory as on the Germans.
There was no Morgenthau
Plan for Japan, nor did she lose any
Japanese territories, nor did she suffer a Russian occupation and thelooting which goes with it. All Japanese war prisoners except thosein Russian hands were sent home, whereas both Britain and France
still held German prisoners as “slave laborers” two years after V-E
Day.
Japan was allowed to retain a government, while Germany wasshorn of her territories,
divided up, allowed no government of her
own and in general dealt with much like an African colony in the badold days when “the natives” had no rights and there was no justice
but the will of the conquerors.
No doubt the wisdom, statesmanship and soldierlike qualities of MacArthur
were largely responsible for the civilized, even chivalrous
treatment of Japan. But he would have been powerless had the Russians occupied half of Japan and had their friends in America insistedon the crucifixion of’the Japanese people. There is no doubt at allthat Japan profited greatly in the hour of her defeat by not having incurred the lasting hatred of Communists and Russophile “liberals”
everywhere in the world. Articles such as the widely circulated onesof John Hersey describing the terrible sufferings of the Japanese people when we dropped the atom bomb were not matched by any similar sympathetic accounts of the sufferings of the German people underthe blockbuster raids which killed or maimed uncounted numbers ofGerman civilians.
Stalin’s miscalculation of the length of time it would take America
to defeat Japan after Germany’s collapse caught him far short of hisgoal on V-J Day. In Europe he was able to establish a dominantposition.
In the Far East America still holds the whip hand. The
United States has of course been wary of using it. Instead of giving
full support to the Chinese National Government which stood by us

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Focus of Conflict

381

through every disappointment,
insult and injury, we spent our efforts
in 1946 in trying to hoist the Communists into a position in which
Nevertheless,they could render China’s Government
impotent.
largely because the Communists and Russia tried to take all, insteadof being satisfied with a large half of the loaf, China is still on ourside of the Iron Curtain. She may not remain so. The Chinese Communists, backed by Russia, may still destroy Chiang Kai-shek andhis government.
It must, indeed, seem hard to understandin theKremlin why Chiang should cling to the TVestern democracies who
seem not to wish to save him and his government from the Communists, whereas Stalin could and would probably be only too happy
to help him if he would join with Russia against America.
The whole jigsaw puzzle of Far Eastern relationships fits into place
if one observes the shape of Russia’s policy. Stalin gave China aid
and ordered the Chinese Communists to stop the civil war and forma united front with the National Government from 1937 to 1939,
because he was then afraid of Japan.
Following the Hitler-Stalin
Pact, since there was not yet a RussoJapanese Pact, the united front was still maintained in China but was
severely strained.
Following
the first Russo-Japanese Pact, that ofApril 1941, what amounted to an undeclared civil war began in China.
Following Hitler’s attack on Russia in June 1941,
since the Japaneserefrained from attacking the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communists
still remained virtuallyat war with the National Governmentof
China. The Soviet Government itself, however, refrained from open
expression of hostility
toward China until 1944
when America’s
counteroffensivein the Pacific began to gather strength.
By 194
when America’s victory was certain and Stalin needed nolonger fear Japan, he started calling her an aggressor for the first timeand prepared to break his treaties with the Japanese. Likewise it was
now safe for the Soviet press to start openly denouncing America’s
ally, the government of Chiang Kai-shek. The stage was already set
for the postwar Russo-American
conflict in China.

CHAPTER

Conchsion:Anzerica’s

XVI

Stake ilz Chiita

overnight at Iwo Jima, at Eniwetok in the MarshallIslands, and on tiny Johnson Island, I arrived in Hawaii by
Marine plane four days after leaving Tsingtao in North China.
The vast Pacific Ocean no longer seemed an impenetrable barrier toattack on America after this rapid flight.
The tiny garrisons of Army or Navy personnel on the little islands
won at such terrific cost in the war with Japan were now no longer
more than hostages to fortune.
In Honolulu
I saw William
L.
White’s They Were Expendable which tells the tragic story of theAmerican sailors and soldiers in the Philippines who had to bear thebrunt of Japan’s sudden attack a few years ago. The picture was notjust a reminder of our unpreparedness in the past. If and when Russia and her allies in China chose to attack us, the marines I had left
in North China would be as expendable as Bill White’s heroes. But
when I got home, the American people were still pretending in thecase of Russia, as formerly in the case of Japan, that there was no
danger.
Whether or not Hitler was right when he said that the bigger thelie the easier it is to make people believe it, there is no doubt that theuntruths
people want to hear are those most frequently
believed.
Looking on the bright side of things is sometimes an advantage, but
it is dangerous when it degenerates into fatuous self-delusion.
No
Communist
Fifth Column could ever do so much to soften up theAmerican people and weaken their defenses as the politicians, newspapermen and radio commentators who glossed over the ugly realitiesof the internationalsituation and lulled America into a false sense of
security.
By playing up to the universal human weakness of thinking
that something cannot be true because we do not wish it to be true,
they had caused the United States to sheathe its sword before thebattle was half won.
382

S

TOPPING

Conclusion:

America’s

Stake in China

383

No people are perhaps so prone to wishful thinking as the Americans. The comparatively
happy circumstances of their lives, theirwealth and industrial achievements, their short and successful history as a nation, and the softening of their critical faculties by the
optimistic advertising to which they are continually subjected, combine to weaken their resistance to “Pollyannaism.”
Since every prospect would be pleasing if the Soviet Union were
democratic and “peace-loving” and its rulers sought only for “security,” the editors, the columnists and the commentators who propagated escapist myths and told us we could “get along with Russia”
received a ready hearing in the United States. Just as stories withhappy endings are best sellers, and sad tales ending in tragedy aretransformed in Hollywood
studios into fairy tales in which virtue isalways triumphant and rewarded, so in international affairs the optimists who turn a blind eye on unpleasant facts have been preferred,
while the Cassandras have prophesied in vain.
Eventually, of course, truth prevails. This is the virtue of democracy and a press free except for its need to please its readers. But thecost of wishful thinking is high in loss of opportunity, time and lives.
In the eighteenth century Samuel Johnson wrote, “I know notwhether more is to be feared from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed
to lie.” In our enlightened modern age, more scribblers live in penthouses than in garrets. For years the columns of almost all the bestpaying magazines were open to the propagandists, the optimists andthe wishful thinkers. What they wrote, however false, unrealistic orsilly, was what people wanted to hear. Circulation was what mattered, not truth, or the search for it. Any writer who warned against
the Soviet Union had a hard time getting heard, not only during thewar, but for more than a year after V-E Day. To question Russia’s
right to call herself a democracy was regarded in wartime as tantamount to being a Nazi sympathizer;
and still today many honest
writers are frightened when the Communist-sympathizingpress labels
them reactionaries, Red baiters or fascists.
It is possible to argue that all the whitewashing of Russia, like thepretense of unity among the Big Three, was necessary during the war
in order to delude the enemy. But lying is always a two-edged weapon. TO deceive the enemy it was also necessary to deceive the Amer-

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Lust Chance in China

ican people. A habit of thought was engendered in the United States
which enabled the Soviet Union to get away with murder, bothliterally and figuratively,in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Manchuria. When the smoke of battle had cleared away, it was found that
all that victory had brought was a change in color, from black to red,in the totalitarian power which dominates most of Europe.
Until 1947 pretenses were kept up. Good money was thrown after
bad in the first year of Truman’s Presidency in the effort to obscure
the basic Russo-American
conflict by further sacrifices of small nations and democratic principles.
When at long last the facts of international
life were presented tothe public, the fiction was still maintained in some quarters that, if
Roosevelt had lived, Communist Russia and the United States would
have remained friends. Many would not admit that such “friendship”
as ever existed was due solely to Russia’s wartime dependence on
American aid, and the willingness of the United States Government
to make enormous concessions to Stalin at the expense of small or
weak allies. The destruction of all liberty in Eastern Europe and alarge part of Central Europe by Russia and her satellites, far frombeing attributed to the errors of President Roosevelt, was regarded as
an unpredictable calamity, or due to Roosevelt’s death and Stalin’s
consequent “distrust” of America and Britain.
In spite of all the sophistry, propaganda and wishful thinking distilled upon the air and in the press, by 1946 very few people still
believed, in so far as Europe was concerned, that the Soviet Union was
and that its disciples, the Communist Parties, arenonaggressive,
apostles of peace and collaboration.
Unfortunately,as regards the Far East, the illusions about Communism persisted. In Asia we continued to appease Russia, in the personof the Chinese Communists, long after we had begun saying “thus far
and no farther” in Europe. Just as earlier in combating the IAxis,
China’s struggle against Japan was disregarded long after we hadawakened to the Nazi menace, so in respect to the threat of Red fascism, China is still left to bear the brunt while we preoccupy ourselveswith Europe.
Rarely does history afford a nation the choice to learn from its past
mistakes. But America is now confronted with a situation so similar
to that preceding World War II that one still hopes that the lesson

Conclusion:

America’s

Stake in China385

of the past will be impressed on the Western world in time to avoid athird world war.
We could have stopped Germany and Japan without war if we had
acted soon enough and been prepared to risk war while the enemiesof democracy were still too weak to resist us. We could stop Russia
now without risk of war, whereas soon the totalitarians will have subjected enough people and built up sufficient strength to believe they
can destroy us. Once Stalin is able to meet us on equal terms, who
doubts that he will attack us ?
The enemies of democracy at home and abroad naturally seek toweaken our hands by confusing our minds. We are told that no aid
should be given to the enemies of Communism unless they are pureand undefiled.
Naturally,
if our allies must all be democratic while
Russia grasps the hand of any state or faction which is ready to support her totalitariantyranny, America will be isolated.
Our choice in China as in Greece is not one between democrats anddictators.
It is a choice between those who could be persuaded andassisted to transform their countries into democracies and those whoare irrevocably committed to the support of Communist tyranny.
Late as it is, the United States could still embark on an intelligent,farsighted and realistic China policy. Such a policy would need totake account of the following facts :China first of all needs relief from the intolerable burden of maintaining a world strategic line between two power systems. The UnitedStates, if she wishes to prevent China’s being sucked under by Soviet
Russia, must help foot the bill and cease expecting the Chinese alone
to hold the line for the democratic world.
Secondly, in the realm of economics, we must recognize that UnitedStates’ aid to China, although large in comparison with all prewar
financing, is still minute in comparison with the size of her populationand the immense task of reconstruction
and reform. United States’
aid must be directed in such fashion as to effect real improvementinlimited areas or sections of China’s economy because, however much
we pour into China, we cannot relieve her poverty at once everywhere.
But the Chinese people are industrious
and able to live on little.
China’s productive forces could be revived by a much smaller
capita expenditure than is required in Europe. Two or three billion
U. S. dollars would probably suffice, only part of which needs to be

pe

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Last Chance irt China

in the form of intergovernmentalloans, the rest being obtainable fromexport balances secured by Chinese exports to Japan’s former Asiatic
markets.
As a military poorhouse, on the other hand, China’s dead weight is
so tremendous that even ten or fifteen billion dollars might not save thesituation for the democracies.
American aid to China cannot be mere relief. It must be accompanied by a positive Chinese effort to decontrol her economy, remove
impediments to normal trade, and eliminate racketeering, hoarding,
speculation, black-marketing,maladministrationand the fiscal irresponsibility which has resulted in runaway inflation.
China needs an Old Deal, not a new one. She is not yet fit for acontrolled economy which even in advanced countries affords vast
opportunities for graft. China must do her part, but only American
political and economic support can enable the Chinese Government toallow free enterprise to quicken China’s economic development.
In the political sphere it must be recognized that the Chinese being
the heirs of the oldest civilization in the world are peculiarly sensitive
to questions of prestige. This is true not only of officials but of the
middle class and more intelligent workers, who can feel the international atmosphere even if uninformed as to details. Some Chinese feelthey are being exploited by Americans.
Many more feel they havebeen abandoned.
The uninformed or prejudiced criticism of China, so freely voicedin the American press for years past, has acted like an irritant on
an open wound. The Chinese themselves are well aware of theirfaults and realize, perhaps better than their foreign detractors, whatis wrong with their government.
But public reprimands by American
representatives may do more harm than good, since they intensify thegovernment’s desire to “save face,” and render it less inclined to
institute the drastic reforms which would constitute an admission of
past errors.
The public pillorying of China encourages the Xenophobes and reactionaries, strengthens the Communists
and weakens the liberalforces. As one of the latter said to me: “I may know that I havean ugly ill-tempered wife, but I very much resent it when a stranger
tells me so in public.”
The Chinese need-help and constructive practical advice, not moral

Conck6sion : America’s

Stake in China

387

lectures. We cannot help them, or ourselves, unless we recognize thatthe root cause of their demoralizationis the seeming hopelessness of
their situation in face of the Communist destruction coming on topof the eight-year war against Japan, and the denial of American aid
until they come to terms with those who profit from China’s distress.
A clear statement of United States support for China would supply
the political morale and sense of security without which all reform in
China is impossible.
We should recognize that aid to China cannot be effective unless
we take account of Chinese susceptibilities
and Communist
propaganda. We should take measures to insure that any financial assistance given to China by the United States be used to further the wellbeing of the people and China’s reconstruction;
but we shall get nowhere if we seem to be treating China as a colony by demanding that
Americans administer the funds we supply or control the economy of
the country.
There are honest and competent Chinese. We could
insist, privately, on such men being put in positions of responsibility.
We should also insist on proper auditing of expenditures.
We could
use our influence to bring about reforms. But we should never forgetthat Chiang Kai-shek is between two fires : that both the reactionaries
who do not want to see China modernized under Western influenceand the Communists who strive to bring her into Russia’s orbit seize
on every opportunity to accuse the National Government of delivering
China to American “imperialists.”
Strategic backing, economic and other reforms must all take time
to show results. But a grand American gesture assuring the Chineseof their right to sovereignty and independence, with an American
reaffirmationof interest in China’s fate and assurance of even smallscale military and economic aid, might still check Soviet Russia, rally
the liberal forces whom we have hitherto discouraged and save theday in China.
The United States cannot afford to disregard China and say “aplague on both your houses” to Nationalists and Communists.
The
Russian colossus is double-headed and faces both East and West ; andthe last war taught us that America is more likely to be attacked from
Asia than from Europe.
The Chinese nation is the largest and oldest in the world, and if it
goes Communist, there is little doubt that all Asia will eventually fol-

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Last Chance in China

low her. China is estimated to have a population of at least 45o,ooo,000. India, freed from British rule and also deprived of British protection, has nearly as many people. Add Indo-China, Burma, Malaya
and the Dutch East Indies and you have more than a billion peopleabout half the population of the world.
The Soviet Government already controls at least a quarter of abillion people in Europe and Asia. If a billion Asiatics are harnessedto the war machine of expanding Communism, the forces of democracy will be as outnumbered as the British when they faced Nazidominated Europe alone.
If, on the other hand, China succeeds with our help in becoming a
democracy the scales will be weighted in favor of a free world. Yet,
since V-J Day, with self-defeating obstinacy we have insisted that
China admit the Communists to a share in her government, and havedone nothing to prevent Russian encroachment in the North.
Only American political, economic and military aid can enable
China to pull herself out of the slough of despond into which eight
years of war against Japan, followed by an equally destructive civil
war, have plunged her. Only American encouragement and advice
can give the battered, weak and demoralized Chinese Government theenergy and hope to reform itself, and the strength to prevent theCommunists dragging China step by step into Russia’s orbit.
All the time I was in China, and for a year afterward, America, likea blind giant, continued to destroy with one hand what she was striving to build up with the other. Understandingthat the emergence ofa strong and independent China is the one hope for lasting peace in
the Far East and for American security, we continued to vacillate as
to how to help such a China to come into being.
Since one group at home advocated transferring our support to theChinese Communists in the belief that they could be “detatched” from
Moscow, and another group advocated continuing support of thelegitimate government of China, the United States backed both andthus perpetuated civil war.
The foreign policy of a democratic country depends on public opinion. The isolationist sentiments of the American people and the desire of her soldiers to go home were skillfullj
exploited by the Communists and their sympathizers to weaken United States policy. Since
we either could not, or would not, give China the necessary military

Conclusion:

America’s

Stake in China

389

support to resist Russia, we fell back on a policy of conciliating
Russia’s agents in China, the Communist Party.
The forgotten truism that foreign policy is determined by domestic
politics was never more clearly demonstrated than by the attitude of
the United States toward China. President Truman had to try tosatisfy both the conservatives and the followers of Henry Wallace.
Hence the ambiguity of his foreign policy. The friends and influencewhich the Democratic administration
hoped to win at home by sitting
on the fence in China prevented its pursuing an effective and realistic
policy and strengthened the enemies of democracy abroad.
The internationalsituation is too grim for party politics or the satisfaction of being proved right to be allowed to stand in the way of
Kmerica’s vital interests. Nor can the United States safely continue
to play the role of Little Red Riding Hood in a big bad world.
Until now Stalin could calculate that, every time Russia bared herfangs and gobbled up some weak nation, Americans would turn theirheads away until Russia once again assumed the disguise of a peaceloving, democratic, friendly power. Even the hard words which theUnited States spokesmen began to utter in 1947
did not have tobe taken too seriously. The Truman speech of March 12, 1947,
stating that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples “resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” was followed by Marshall’s Harvard speech denyingthat United States policy was directed “against any country or doctrine.”
American policy during the first half of 1g.q was reminiscent ofStephen Leacock’s story about the wife who, after deciding to leave
her husband, insisted at the last moment on taking him along when
she eloped in her lover’s automobile.
Having decided to break with
Russia and aid the countries struggling to avoid coming under Communist domination, the United States hastened to assure Stalin that,after all, we had no intention of combating Communism,or any“ideology.”
It is still possible to hope that the hesitant, vacillating
and contradictory American policy, which has succeeded the war and postwar
period of appeasement, will develop into a logical, world-wide,bold
and statesmanlike use of American power and influence.
Perhaps the lesson learned in Europe through what the Chinese

390

Last Chance in China

call the hardship of error will be applied in the Far East before China
breaks or is partitioned.
When I left China it was already obvious that American policy hadreached an impasse. General Marshall’s return and his recall of our
troops from China early in 1947 left a free field for the spread ofSoviet-Communist
power. Some Americans now see no other course
than our concentration on a satellite Japan as the last line of defenseof the democratic world in the Western Pacific. This would mean
the adoption of a completely defeatist attitude-thefinal abandonmentof the hopes for which so many youn, v Americans gave their lives in
the Pacific, in Burma and in China. For just as Japan is a natural
fortress and springboard for war, so China is a potential citadel ofpeace. A peaceful democratic and strong China linked with America
by bonds of friendship is our only insurance against another war in
the Pacific.
It is not yet too late for us to adopt a policy which might bringsuch a China into being. We must cease making impossible demands
on China. We must be realistic and unafraid. We must cease listening to the siren voices which assure us that the Chinese Communists
are not real Communists.
We must adopt a clear and uncompromising line in our Far Eastern policy without fear of Soviet Russia’s reaction or the outraged protest of Communist sympathizers at home.
We must be prepared if necessary to intervene in China to give her
the strength to become a democracy regardless of the abuse of those
who designate America as imperialistic. We must be prepared to challenge Russia in the interests of peace and freedom while she is still1
too weak to dare risk war with us.
In Europe we have seen the Iron Curtain crash down between us
and millions of lost allies in Yugoslavia,
Poland, Finland, Latvia,
Lithuania,
Estonia, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria. We must notrepeat the same mistake in China- that of abandoning to the totalitarians the nations which with our help could become democracies.
In that speech to Congress on March 12, 1947, President Truman
asked for $~OO,OOQOO~ to assist Greece and Turkey. Yet while prepared to pour aid into Greece to enable a far from “perfect” government to combat the Communist menace we continued to insist that
China should take the Communists into her government. As was saidin Congress, “We can’t go on embracing Communists
in China
and fighting them in Greece.”.

Cotdusion:

America’s

Stake is China

39=

The Greek Government, in President Truman’s words, “has been
operating in an atmosphere of chaos and extremism.
It has made mistakes. The extension of aid by this country does not mean that theUnited States condones everything that the Greek Government hasdone or will do.”
The Chinese Government is certainly no worse than the Government of Greece. It also is operating in an atmosphere of chaos andextremism.
It fought longer with less aid than any country which
resisted the Axis. It can even claim to have made better use of its
scanty allocation of about a dollar a head than the Greek Government which received more than fifty dollars per person and was yet
incapable of preventing starvation.
Why do we consider, with indifference, the subjugation of China’s
enormous population by Moscow’s agents aided by ruin and starvation,or positively encourage it, while we are awake to the necessity of saving Greece? There is no other explanation of the inconsistency ofAmerican policy East and West than the success of Communist sympathizers in selling us the idea that the Chinese Communists are “notreal Communists.”
You cannot, however, fool all the people all the time. The truth
must eventually prevail in a free country. Our awakening to the realities of the world situation will not long be confined to Europe. If thepatient Chinese can continue to be patient a little longer, Chiang Kaishek’s faith in IAmerica surely will be justified.
My life has spanned two worlds. I have experienced the grim reality of Stalin’s Russia where the people are never free either fromhunger or the shadow of terror, and hope only that tomorrow will not
be even worse than today. I know that our Western democratic world,
despite all its shortcomings,
is infinitely
preferable to Communist
tyranny.
We need to change with the changing times, but progress
is not progress if it leads us back to tyranny.
I hope that self-delusion, or a sense of guilt, or the infiuence of socalled progressives who believe in the face of all the evidence that
Soviet Russia has established a “new and better” form of democracythan ours, will not prevent the United States from using its power
to establish an American world order in conjunction with its allies.
I do not believe that the world can be saved in our atomic age
through agreement among the nations. Even if there were no Soviet

392

Last Chance in China

Union thirsting for world power, it would not be possible by universal
agreement to reconcile the ambitions, hatreds, jealousies and the inequalities in resources of the nations. Co-operation and lasting peace
are possible only under the aegis of a strong Power.
What is needed today is a new kind of world hegemony. Not theold exploitationof “colonial peoples” by white men boasting of theirsuperior civilization.
Not the imperialism of the Soviet Union with
its hypocriticalslogans and terror, its apparatus of brute force, itslooting, concentration camps and chain gangs. But a Pax Americana
as the only akernative to a Communist totalitarian world or the destruction of civilized life through an atomic war.
I am aware that Americans abroad, whether they come as allies orconquerors, have not displayed their best qualities. They may be unfitted for the exercise of world power. But what is the alternative?
Badly as Americans may have behaved in Europe and Asia, they are
not feared and hated like the Russians who strip bare the lands theyoccupy. The brutal treatment of Germany and the starvation forwhich the Morgenthau Plan and the Yalta and Potsdam Agreements
are responsible, are already regretted by most Americans and by the
British.
By now it is obvious that the Communists hoped that if they
could induce us to behave as cruelly as the Nazis, the conquered would
be driven by despair to become Soviet Russia’s allies.
It remains true that we cannot stand on principle to repel the Communist onslaught unless we cease to be guided by the Communist doctrine of ends justifying means and to disregard justice in dealing withweak allies and defeated enemies.
How many nations today would ask nothing better than to become
American satellites ? The Russian press may shout that the UnitedStates wants to dominate the whole world. If only this were true!
Unfortunately
for the world, there seems little chance of America
using her few years of “atom monopoly” to order the world a little
nearer to the heart’s desire of all mankind. Americans want neither
the glory nor the responsibility of using their power for good ends or
bad ones. Whatever they call themselves, nine out of ten Americans
are isolationists at heart. The American dream still beckons. They
do not yet grasp that by entering two world wars they have so altered
the balance of forces on this globe that it is no longer theirs to decide
for or against full participation in world affairs.

Conclusion:

America’s

Stake in China

393

When President Roosevelt insisted on unconditionalsurrender, hecommitted the American people to all the burdens and responsibilityof empire. We could not destroy Germany and Japan as nations
without also assuming responsibility,
not only for the fate of thepeoples of the defeated nations whom we disarmed, but also for the
defense of all Europe and the Far East against the Russian colossus.
Some desire empire. Americans are having imperial power andresponsibility
thrust upon them. Willingly
or unwillingly,
they have
got to accept the responsibilities
of world power or submit to the
dictation of others. They must rule or be ruled.
The next year or two will decide whether we are to wait for Russia
to become strong enough to attack us from the west or from the east,or whether we shall use our power while there is yet time to preventa third world war which we might lose.
We could still make of the United Nations a real force for peace instead of a debating hall for the apportionmentof the spoils of victory.
If we would place our stupendous power behind a United Nations
composed only of such nations as are, or desire to become, democracies and are prepared to submit disputes to the arbitramentof an international tribunal, the walls of the totalitarian world would crumble.
This then is the lesson which is borne in on me by my flight aroundthe world and my third visit to China :If we appease the Russian aggressor as we once appeased the Japanese aggressor we shall go down to ruin. If we abandon China welose all Asia. The Chinese Communists are better than the Russians,
but they are on the other side-theside which inevitably finds itself
pulled into the orbit of Stalin’s totalitarian tyranny.
It is too late for
us to the redeem the Russian Revolution and set Communist Russia
back on the path of liberal socialism. But it is not yet too late for us
to deflect China’s democratic national revolution back onto the course
outlined by that noble democrat, Dr. Sun Yat-sen.
We have a last chance in China. We may go on having a lastchance for quite a long time, but it will be a chance on which the odds
rise day by day against us. Our own inertia and confusion at home,the strident offensive of Soviet power backed by mighty fifth columns
everywhere in the world, the increasing demoralizationof the abandoned and too sorely tried Chinese-allthese put time on the hostileside. Our last chance to reform the Chinese Government,
re-equip

394

Last Chance in China

the Nationalist
armies, support loyalist China against foreign-aided
rebels seeking to bring the Chinese under Soviet hegemony, is at its
best right now. History has many turnings and surprises. I will notpretend to say that this day or that marks the decisive turning point.
But there seems to me no doubt that China’s destiny and our own
will be decided in the near future.
If we abandon China now, either because we put Europe first or
because of our misunderstandingof the Far Eastern situation, thewar will have been fought in vain. We shall condemn ourselves andour children to life in an America geared for war. There will be noother choice. External events-not
domestic politics-will
dictate our
economic policies, our yearly military and naval budgets, our strategic
diplomacy. But if we save China, and anchor her firmly in the worldof free nations, we will secure an unbalance of power in our favor. We
can then outwait Communist
Russia.
We can compete with the
Kremlin by challenging the Soviets to a competition of known benefits, not an auction of raw military power.
The chance of peace is now, if only we will look at things as they
are, and not as we should like them to be. The choice before us is oneof taking a very small risk of war now to obviate the certainty of war
in the future; or waiting until the rulers of Russia shall have extinguished liberty over so great a part of the earth that they will havefar better hopes of defeating us than Hitler ever had.
Good things could come out of the peace which it is still within our
power to establish in Asia as in Europe : prosperity, strong but moderate armament, a chance for federalism, the hope of a settled world,
But we will not keep this chance long-notwith the same odds. We
can win now with courage, generosity, intelligence and understanding.
We may be able to win at much greater cost later on. But the day
may come when invasion, civil war, hypocrisy and terror will extinguish all our freedoms and we will join forsaken China in the endlessnight of Communist “liberation.”

INDEXINDEX
Abyssinia, 239
Academy of Sciences, 192
Acheson, Dean, 247,248
Action Francaise, 187
Air Transport Command, 1.5, 17,31,84
Alaska, 22
Alien Property Custodian, 55
Alla, 89, 90
Altai, 261
American- Chinese Agricultural
Mission, 313
American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, 16,98
AmericanNational
Foreign
Trade
Council, 106
Amur River, 354-355
Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 376
Anshan, 229,231, 238
Anti-American demonstrations, 301
Anti-Comintem
Alliance, 189, 376
Arabia, 17
Army and Navy Bulletin, 251,369
Army Medical Service, 41“Asiatic system” of rent payments, 311
Associated Press, 220, 222, 223, 279
Assyria, 18
Ataturk, Kemal, 172
ATC, see Air Transport Command
Atkinson, Brooks, 201
Atom bomb, 23
Australia, 91
Austria, 259
Aying Yung, 184
Azores, 17

Battle for Asia, Snow, 200
Battle of Taier-chwang, 332
Beard, Charles A., 307
Belden, Jack, 2 12
Bethlehem, Jerusalem, 17“Big Three,” 68, 383
Big Three, The, Dallin, 36.5
Bodine, Cornelius, 260
Bohlen, Maj. -,36
Bolshevik Party, 159, 183
Border Governments, 128, 158
Border region, 151, 158, 167, 297
Borodin, 182
Bowerman, Miss -,90-91
Boxer Rebellion, 181, 331, 359
Bretton Woods, 323
British-American Tobacco Co., 224
British Empire, 18, 22, 23, 27
Broadway Mansions, 100, 113
Brooks, Sgt. -,144
Browder, Earl, 197
Brown, Constantine, 62
Brussels Conference, 53
Bucharin, 183
Buck, Dr. J. Lossing, 47, 314, 315, 316318, 320
Bulgaria, 172, 200, 259,390
Burma, 17, 31, 32, 36, 113, 202, 209,
260,265266, 388,390
Burma Road, 209-2 10
Butterfield and Swire, 103
Bymes, James, 239-240
Byzantium, Turkey, 157,32E

Cairo, Egypt, 365
Calcutta, India, 17,31
California University, 313
Canton, 33, 177, 180, 183, 210, 287,
290

Balkans, 384
Baltimore Sun, 220, 223,228
Barbey, Vice-Admiral Daniel E., 67
Bataan, 380

397

398

Last Chance in China

Capone, Al, 307
Caraway, Gen. Paul, 270-272
Carlson, Col. Evans, 202, 212
Caroline Islands, 368
Carter, E. C., 193, 216
Casablanca, Morocco, 16, 17
Cathay Hotel (Shanghai), 85
C. C. clique, 349
Central Bank of China, 49,57
Central Executive Committee, 42, 197,
243,247,306
Chahar, Iran, 77, 150
Challenge of Red China, The, Stein,152
Chamberlain, Neville, 5’3, 196
Chamber of Commerce (Shanghai),
178
Chang, Dr. Carson, 57,307
Chang, P. H., 345
Chang Chia-ngau, 307
Chang Chun, 107, 124, 125-126, 243,
292
Changchun, 75, 221, 222-224, 234, 244
Chang Hsin-fu, 224, 238
Chang Hsueh-hang, 121-122, 189, 29.5
Chang Kuo-sari, 154
Chang Lan, 307
Changsha, 40,202
Chang Shen-fu, 162
Chang Tso-lin, 179
Chang Wenching, 121-122
Chao, Gen. -,233
Chao, Mrs. -,153
Charles I, 141
Chefoo, 245,263
Chen, Eugene, 187
Chen, Jack, 187
Chen, Mary, 40,121
262,291Chen Cheng, Gen. -,Chen Chih-mai, 60, 2.55, 286
Cheng Chen-yu, 321-322
Chengtehfu, 77
Chengtu, 3 16
Chen Li-fu, 124, 257, 349-352
Chen Ming-&u, Gen. -,4143

Chennault, Gen. Claire, 207, 209, 213;
and Stilwell, 2 11
Chen Tu-hsiu, 182-183
Chen Yi, 136
Chialing River, 33
Chiang Kai-shek, Generalissimo, 24,
40, 41, 42-43, et pa&m; and Chinese
Communists,
70-72, 77-78, 80-81,
117, 124, 134, 135, 136, 195, 249-251,
261-262, 361-362; and Kuomintang,
177-183, 243, 282-284, 287-309; andLend-Lease, 207; and Mao Tsetung, 215; and Marshall, 75, 246,
257; and Stilwell, 209-214; and Sun
Vat-sen, 338-341; and Wedemeyer,
269, 271-272, 278, 280; and theUnited States, 248, 255-256
Chiang Kai-shek, Mme., 39, 46, 130132, 144, 211, 280, 290, 299, 302
Chiang Lung-cm, 141
Chiang Mo-lin, 345-347
Chicago Daily News, 65, 114,220
Chicago Sun, 223
Chicago University, 312
Chien Chun-su, 158-159, 160, 162, 164165
Chihfeng, 76-77
China, A. Kaiming Chiu, 312
China-American Chamber of Commerceand Industry, 106
China-American Council of Commerceand Industry, 208
China at War, Utley, 131, 194, 280
China Campaign Committee, 98
China Industry Company, 49
China’s Destiny, Chiang Kai-shek, 308,
309n., 338,339
China Textile Industries, Inc., 55
China Weekly Review, 195
Chinchow, 220, 222, 232,233,234
Chinese Air Force, 233
Chinese Central News Agency, 128,l54,261,262,284,298n.
Chinese Combat Command, 271
Chinese Customs Service, 103

Chinese Embassy (Washington, D. C.) ,60

Chinese Intelligence reports, 370
Chinese Ministryof Foreign Affairs,
262

Chinese National Aviation Corporation,
84,100Chinese Secret Service, 266
Chinese: Their History and Culture,
The, Latourette, 324,339n.
Chinese Training Center, 2 7 1
Chinese Universal Trading Co., 106
Ching Kiang, 297
Chingwangtao, 67
Chiu, Dr. A. Kaiming, 312
Chiulungpo Airport, 32
Chou En-lai, Gen., 77, 78-79, 80, 8182,116-l23,125,206,et

passimChristian Century, 201
Christian Science Monitor, 129
Chu, Chi-chien, 121, 295-296, 320
Chu, Dr. H. T., 190
Chungking, 17, 28, 30, 31, 33, 37, 40,
et passim; correspondents in, 34-36,
63, 113-115, 129-133, 226, 239; industries, 49-51, 56 ; student demonstrations, 65-66, 167-168, 240
Churchill, Winston, 73, lOSn., 196, 307,
348,374

Chu Teh, 76, 160-161, 165-167, 205,
218
Ciano, Count -,329
Cleveland Council on World Affairs,
366“Cliveden Set,” 349
CNAC, see Chinese National AviationCorp.
CNRRA, 108
Collins, John W., 216
Comintem, 25, 26-27, 79, 169, 173, 178,
180, 182, 183-184, et passim
Comintem Executive Committee,
188,
189

Commercial Press, 125Commercial Treaty, 248

Communist, bureaucracy, 18; dictatorship, 18, 19; ideology, 18, 123, 255,
334; Army, 121, 145, 154, 160
Communist Academy, 179, 192. See
also Academy of Sciences
Communist International, 17 1, 173
Communist Internatiod,
193
Communist News Service, 167
Communist Party (British), 186
Communist Party (Chinese), 62, 78,
79, 117, 119, 122, 123, et passim

Communist Party (French), 187
Communist Party (German), 79, 169,
187
Communist Party (Russian), 159, 160,
161, 162, 183, 193, 282, 304
Communist Party (U. S.), 168
Communist Party Headquarters, 115,
116, 117,139“Complex Problem of China,” Linebarger, 147
Comrade L, 26
Confucianism, 134, 325, 335-338, 341,
343

Conger, Edwin, 353
Correspondents, see Chungking,churia, Mukden
Coue, Dr. Emile, 61, 275
Crimea, 174
Crimean War, 354-355
Cromwell, Oliver, 136
Crow, Carl, 315
Cushing, Richard, 222,225
Czechoslovakia, 105Man-

Daily Worker, 72, 167
Dairen, 63, 64, 65, 67, 89, et passim
Dallin, David, 365n.
Davies, Joe, 124, 179, 307
Davies, John, 212
Davis, Spencer, 220,223
Dead Sea, 17
Demobilization, 17, 20-21,259
Democratic League, 43, 50, 56-58, 77,
124-125, 126, 129, et passim

Last Chance in China
Dimitrov, 187-188, 192, 193
Domesday Book, 3 11
Doolittle, Gen. James, 114
Dragon Throne, 121
Drake, Sir Francis, 18
Dream We Lost, The, Utley, 312“Dr. Haber ” 26-27
Duma, 181’
Durdin, Tillman, 65, 113-114, 116-117,
129, 153, 154, 162, et passim
Dutch East Indies, 97,369, 388
Ebner, Charlotte, 114,220
Economic Facts, 316
Edward I, 135
Qmt,
17
Eighth Route Army, 144, 190, 194,231-232,244,245
Eldridge, Fred, 212
Eleventh Chinese War Zone, 370
Emancipation Daily, 155, 167
England, see Great Britain
Eniwetok, 382
Estonia, 390
Executive Yuan, 36, 50,54, 55, 63, 118,
243,258,322,345
Export-Import Bank, 95
Far Eastern Survey, 204
Far East in World Politics, The, Hudson, 355
Farmers Bank, 318, 323
Feng Yu-hsiang, 182, 243
Field, Marshall, 307
Filan, Frank, 220
Finland, 172,390
First Opium War, 355
Five-Year Plans, 183
Forbidden City, 327, 328, 331,332
Ford, Henry, 307
Formosa, 136,324
Fourteenth Air Force, 209
France, 102, 141, 174, 178, 184, 187,
192, 197, 208, 255, et passim
France, Gen. Francisco, 172, 187, 279

French Concession, 101
Fujita, 371
Fukien, 41
Fushan, 231
Fusbun collieries, 224
Fu Ssu-nien 53, 125, 137,299
Gauss, Clarence E., 95, 98, 214, 267
George, Henry, 32 1
Germany, 18, 19, 21, 22, 32, 66, 86,
91, 93, 94, 104, 172, et pa&m
Gestapo, 225
G-5, 99, 274
Ghengis Khan, 328
Gloria -,90“God Save the King,” 135
Goethe, 157
Golden Horde, 329
Gould, Randall, 26, 110-111, 226-227
Government
in Republican
China,
Linebarger, 335“Grandmother of the Guerrillas,” 153
Great Britain, 16, 18, 19, 20, 32, 68,
et passim; and the United States, 2223; and China, 178, 356-359; andJapan, 27-28. See also Hong Kong,
Shanghai, England
Great Wall of China, 233, 278, 328,
329, 331
Greece, 105, 260-261, 368, 390-391
Greek Government, 391
Grew, Joseph, 204, 365
Grosse, Lev, 86, 87
Haber, “Ypsilon,” 26
Hahn, Emily, 53, 205, 206
Haichow, 163
Handy, Tom, 273
Hankow, 31, 33, 34, 35, 41, 113, 125,
132, 134, 150, et fiassim
Hankow-Canton Railway, 370“Hankow Last Ditchers,” 34, 113
Hanyang, 181
Harbin, 88, 223, 224, 230, 238, 248,
297

IndexHarriman, Aver-ill, 241
Harvard Law School, 60
Hawaii, H. I., 17
Hay, John, 353,358,360
Henry VII, 135
Hersey, John, 380
Hilton, James, 139
Hiroshima, Japan, 23
History of Chinese Political Thought,
Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, 33 7
Hitler, Adolf, 32, 94, 105, 136, 169,
172, 186, 187, 196, et passim
Hodge, Gen. John R., 261
Hogan, Col. Pendleton, 2 74
Holland, 192
Hollywood, 144
Holy Land, 17
Honan, 37, 182, 185, 324
Hongkew, 93,94
Hong Kong, 65, 104,108,205,356
Honkeiko, 231
Honolulu, H. I., 382
Hopei, 297,298“Hostel Number 2 ” 277
Ho Ying-chin, 291’
Hu, T. A., 49-50
Huang, Gen. J. L., 39, 137
Hudson, G. F., 3SSn.
Hull, Cordell, 307, 365
Hulutao, 67,235
Hump, the, 31,207,210
Hungary, 172,200, 259,390
Hupeh, 29,36, 182,324
Hurley, Gen. Patrick, 29-30, 70-72, 75,
97, 135, 213, 214, 215, 235, 279
Hu Shih, Dr., 310, 331
Hutchison, Claude B., 313
India, 31, 38, 97, 113,388
Indo-China, 388
Inflation, 44-48, 54-56, 107-108, 144145,323,351
Inner Mongolia, 29Institute of Pacific Relations, 192493,
204, 205, 216, 316

International Monetary Fund, 322
International News Service, 114, 220,
223
International Peace Hospital, 148-149
International Settlement, 101“Intourist” Hotel, 220, 223. See atso
Yamato Hotel
I. P. R., see Institute of Pacific Relations
Iron Curtain, 244,257, 381,390
Isaacs, Harold, 176n., 179n.
Isolationism, 19
Italy, 22, 239, 377
Iwo-Jima, 382
Jacoby, Annalee, 181
Jacquerie, 178
Japan, 15, 21, 22-24, 25, 28, et pas&z;
and China, 27, 30, 33, 62-63, 94-97,
181, 196-197, 201, 257, 283-284, 309,
363-364; and the United States, 98x.,359-360, 366. See also Russia, SinoJapanese War, Russo-Japanese War
Japan’s Feet of Clay, Utley, 41, 53,
116, 148
Jehol, 29, 76-77
Joffe, A., 176
Johnson, Samuel, 383
Johnson Island, 382
Judd, Walter, 21, 200-201,209
Kaiser, Henry, 307
Kalgan, 249,262, 297-298,305
Kang Hsin-chi, 294
Kansu, 322
Karachi, 17
Karlov, Gen. -,223
Kellis, Col. -,232-233
Kiang Kang-hu, 294
Kiangsi, 25, 163, 185, 297, 322,324“Kitaiski gorod,” 328
Konoye, Prince -,284
Koo, Wellington, 366
Koo, Dr. Y. C., 313, 322-323, 333, 345

402

Last

ChanceKorea, 29, 174,225, 258, 260, 261, 278,
355
Kovtoun-Stankevitch,
Andre, 231, 239
Rowloon, 65
Kremlin, 172-173, 192, 218, 245, 328,
* 354,381,394
Kublai Khan, 328
Kullgren, John, 102
Kung, H. H., 43, 46, 51-53, 57, 59,292, 306
Kunming, 17, 20, 31, 36, 56, 111, 154,
207
Kuo MO-JO, 125,307
Kuomintang, 24-25, 41-42, 43, 48-49,
51, 57, 59, 66, 104, et pass+; andChinese Communists, 68-69, 77-79,
80-82, 118-120, 122-129, 189, 193195, 217-218, 242; with Communists,
177-178, 283-284, 288-289, 298-299;
and land, 32 l-322 ; and Russia, 17%184, 361-362
Kurile Islands, 22, 241, 355
Kwangsi, 322, 324, 332
Kwantung, 322, 3.56, 368
Kwantung Army, 206, 370, 371
Kweichow, 37,91
Kweilin, 207,265, 271
Kweiyang, 265

Labor Party (British), 186,352
La Chinu de Chiung Kai Chek, Nolde,
3.57
La Guardia, Fiorello, 325
Lancashire, England, 310
Land, 38, 188-189, 310-326; and population, 311-315; division, 162-163,
185
Land Administration, 319, 321
Land and Labor in China, Tawney,
334n.
Lmd Utilization in China, Buck, 315
Lansing, Robert, 359
Laohoko, 324
Lao-she, 153-154,331

in China

Latourette, Kenneth Scott, 334, 339
Lattimore, Owen, 193, 291
Latvia. 390
Leacock, Stephen, 389
League of Nations, l87,359-360
Legislative Yuan, 53, 55
Lend-Lease, 19, 32, 41, 104-105, 126,
195, 207, 213, 221, et pa&m
Lenin, Nikolay, 64, 76, 127, 159, 160,
164, 166, 173, 174, et passim
Leningrad, 32 7
Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, 337n.
Liaotung Peninsula, 230
Lieberman, -,220
Life, 1.50
Li Li-San, 183, 184, 186,218
Lim, Dr. Robert, 38-41,148
Linchow-Tushan line, 265
Lindsey, Michael, 80
Linebarger, Judge -,335
Linebarger, Dr. Paul, 147-148, 294,
335-336
Ling Ching, 145, 150-151, 152
Linton, Col. -,35, 274
Lin Tsu-han, 3 15
Lin Yutang, 198,203,307
Lippmann, Walter, 72-73, 307
Lithuania, 390
Li Tsung-jen, 209, 237-239, 332-333
Litvinoff, Ambassador Maksim, 374
Liu, Mrs. Herman, 307
Logan, Col. -,272
Lo Lung-&i, Dr., 56, 129,307
Lominadze, Besso, 183
London, 20
London Daily Express, 223
London News Chronicle, 33
London School of Economics, 27, 371
London Times, 353-354
Long March, 185
Loo Chi-teh, Dr., 39,40
Lost Horizon, Hilton, 139
Louis XIV, 42
Lung, Tiger, 57-58,291
Lu Tso-fu, 307

IndexMacAfee, Capt. -,272
Macao, 65
MacArthur, Gen. Douglas, 363,380
McClure, Gen. Robert, 279
McCormick, Anne O’Hara, 94
McGathn, -,220
McLaughlin, Rev. Wilfred, 163
I
MacNair, Prof. -,312
Magna Carta, 307
Malaya, 32, 388
Malinovsky, Rodion, 222, 223, 236
Manchester Guurdian, 27
Manchu dynasty, 135, 307,354
Manchukuo, 76, SO, 196, 248, 379, 396
Manchuria, 21, 23, 29, 32, 63, 64, 67,
et jbssim; and the United States,
221, 235, 237, 246, 278; Chinese
Communists in, 76-77, 234, 245-247,
260-264; correspondents in, 130, 220231, 238; Red Army in, 28, 34, 62,
67-68,85, 163-164, 201, 219-241,242,
244-259, 376
Mannheim, Karl, 334n.
Mao Tse-tung, 78-79, 80, 137, 145,
147, 157, 159, 161, et passim
Marshall, Gen. George C., 24, 47, 63,
et passim; 123, 126; and Chinese
Communists,
74-77, 169, 217-218,
244-249, 253-255; as Secretary ofState, 259-260; failure in China, 25125s
Marshall, Humphrey, 358
Marshall Islands, 368, 382
Martin, Pepper, 220
Marx, Karl, 298, 311, 337
Marxist Communists, 343, 348
Ma Yin-ch’u, Prof., 48-49
Menxies, 232-233
Merwin, Rev. Wallace C., 201
Miao Chia-min, 56
Middleton, Brig. Gen. -,95
Mikhailovitch, 205,282
Miner, Charles E., 111
Mission to Moscow, Davies, 307

403

Molotov, Viachislav Mikhailovich,
61,
68n., 172, 254, 259
Mongol Empire, 328
Mongolia, 333
Moorad, George, 241
Moosa, Spencer, 35, 129
Morgenthau Plan, 392
Moscow, 24, 25, 26, 30, 43, 68, 70, 74,
79-80, 81, 85, 123, et passim
MO Teh-hui, 125
Mountbatten, Lord Louis, 2 10, 273
Mowrer, Edgar Ansel, 2 17
Mukden, 75, 89, 165, 226-227, 232,
238, 242, 244, 245, 261; correspondents in, 220-221; destruction
byRussians, 221-224, 226-232
Municipal Building (Shanghai), 302
Mussolini, Benito, 136, 159, 196
Mutual Broadcasting Company, 220
MVD (secret police of Russia), 64.
See also NKVD
Nanking, 47, 85, 140, 182, 195, 215,
248, 249, 258, 289, 294, 324, 362
Nanking College of Agriculture
andForestry, 318
Nanking Government, 24, 182
Nanking Road, 2 5
Nanking University, 316
National Agricultural
Research Bureau, 317
National Assembly, 58, 122, 126, 143,
250, 254
National Government, 28, 29, 34, 42,
45, 47, 48, 49, 56, 64, 65, et passim
Nationalist Armies, 33, 40, 63, 67, 76,
80, 119, 143, 146, 167, et passim
National Revolutionary Party, 24
National Salvation Association,124,
12s
National Socialism, 174
Nelson, Donald, 49, 208n.
Nemoto, Gen. -,370-373
N. E. P., see New Economic Policy
Neumann, Heinz, 183

404

Last Chance in China

New Bridge, 40
New Deal, 325
New Democracy, The, Mao Tse-tung,197, 199
New Economic Policy, 159
New First Army, 260
New Fourth Army, 150
New Life Movement, 39,131,280
New Yorker, 205
New York Herald Tribune, 72, 77, 263,
303
New York Post, 2 17,220, 223
New York Shanghai TXm Club, 286
New York Times, 65, 94, 113, 162, 220,
223, 242, 248, et passim
Nile Valley, 16
Nine-Power Treaty, 53, 360
1941 Neutrality Pact, 374
Nineteenth Route Army, 41,96
Ninth Route Army, 245
NKVD, 89,230
Nolde, Andre, 357n.
Nomonhan, 377
North Africa, 17
North China Daily News, 110-I 11
Northwestern University, 154
Noulens, 25-26
Novosty Dnya, 86

Oberlin College, 52
Odlum, Gen. Victor, 28, 79, 267, 270,
352
Okamura, General, 197
Olmsted, Gen. George, 99-100
Open Door Policy, 22, 353, 357-359,
360,361
Operations Division of the U. S. War
Dept., 268
Opper, Fritz, 220, 221, 226, 228
Oriental Economist, The, 30
Osaka, 228
O.S.S. (U. S.), 40,232
Outer Mongolia, 64, 261
Overseas Press Club, 239

0. W. I., see U. S. 1. S.
Oxford University, 371

Pacific Aflairs, 204
Pacific Ocean Cabinet, see Institute ofWorld Economy and Politics
Packard, Reynolds, 220,226
Pai Chung-hsi, Gem, 262,332
Palace Hotel (Shanghai), 25
Palestine, 97
Pan-American Airways, 100
Paris Conferences, 251
Pattern for World Revolution, Haber,
26
Pauley, Edwin S., 225
P.C.C., see Political Consultative Council
Pearl Harbor, 16, 22, 9&z., 100, 204,
301, 365, 366, 369, 373, 374, 375
Peck, George, 331
Peiping, 76, 78, 113, 115, 121x, 139,
215, 220, 224, 237, et passim; U. S.
Marines in, 276-277
Peiping Government, 283,287
Peiping-Hankow-Canton
Railroad, 206,
262
Peiping University, 345
Peking, lZln., 169, 182, 295. See ol.ro
Peiping
Peking University, 12 5People on Our Side, Snow, 205
People’s Political Council, 55, 306, 320
Pepper, Claude, 307
Peron, Gen. -,81, 172, 216
Persia, 17, 18, 29
Peter, King, 205
Philadelfihiu Record, 72
Poland, 72-73, 105, 170, 171, 172, 200,
207, 218, 255, 360, 363, 366, 390
Political Consultative Council, SO, SSn.,
111, 113, 115, 120-121, et passim
Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen, The,
Linebarger, 335,336~.
Political Science clique, 124, 243

IndexPort Arthur, 63, 64, 65, 67, 224, 229,
263, 354, &6-&7;366Portsmouth, England, 359
Potsdam, Germany, 282, 392
Potter, Phil, 220,228
Pravda, 97
Present Strategy and Tactics of theChinese Communists, 190, 191
Presidium of the Politbureau, 197
Press Censor, 369
Press Hostel, 34, 35, 36, 40, 85, 113,
114,115,129, 150
Problems of Leninism, Stalin, 19%
Public Salvation Grain Levy, 145
Puy, Maj. -,40-41
Quebec, Canada, 2 13
Quebec Conference, 1OSn.
Race Course (Shanghai), 302
Rand, Christopher, 263,303
Rangoon, Burma, 2 10
Reader’s Digest, 111
Realpolitik, 73
Red Army, 18, 25, 63, 76, 77, 111, 119,140, 143, 152, 154, et passim
Red Cross, 16, 91, 276
Red Cross (British), 90,91
Red Cross Club, 36
Red Cross Medical Commission, 38-39
Red Star Over China, Snow, 185
Reinbold, Rev. -,202
Ribbentrop, von, Joachim, 172
Richelieu, Cardinal, 135
Rickshaw Boy, Lao-shg, 153, 331
Rigg, Maj. Robert B., 216
Riviere, Claude, Ill-112
Robertson, Walter, 78
Rockey, Gen. -,277,331
Rome, Italy, 18, 157
Rook, Gen. Lowell W., 109~
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 307
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 23, 66, 69, 73,
164-165, 166, 188, et pa&m
Roosevelt, Theodore, 23,353,359

405

Roots, Dr. Logan, 31, 232
Rumania, 170~172,2~00,259,390 .
Rural Reconstructive Society, 124
Russell, Bertrand, 327
Russia, 16-19, 27,32, 38,44, et pa&m;
and China, 21-24, 27-28, 32, 34, 6168,71-74,

79-83,85-89,309,312,333-

334,354-356,373-381;
and Japan, 23,
196,201,361-362,379;
and Kuomintang, 176-181; and the United States,
23-24, 239-241, 251, 353, 367-368,
383-386,389-394

Russian Foreign Office, 68
Russian ideologies, 333, 342
Russian Revolution, 191
Russo-Chinese Treaty, 356
Russo-German War, 371
Russo- Japanese Pact, 196-197,
206-207, 208, 290, 371, 381
Russo-Japanese War, 164,359,370
Russophile, 348, 349, 375,380

204,

Sakhalin, 29, 355, 369
Salisbury, Lawrence, 205
Salween, 202,209
San Min Chu Z, 42, 104, 127, 137, 199,
200, 287,352
Scott, Col. Don, 37, 274
Semi-Mongol Muscovites, 331
Seventh Congress (Comintem),
187,
193
Shanghai, 17, 24-25, 27, 29, 32, 36, 41,
47, SO, St, et pa.ssim; Americans andBritish in, 99-101, 110-111, 275-276;
Japanese in, 91-96; Russians in, 8788; government, 101-112
Shanghai Country Hospital, 85
Shanghai Evening Post, 26, 85, llO111,116,205,226,227
Shansi, 52,194,322,372
Shantung, 360,372
Shantung War, 261
Shao Li-tze, 63, 124,179, 243,307
Shensi, 322

Last Chance in China
Shensi-Kansu-Ningsia
141, 146-147,

BorderRegion,151, 153, 167, 185

Shigenori Togo, 3 74
Shihchiachuan, 297
Shuping Kuai, Maj., 371
Siam, 81,189
Siberia, 22, 24, 89, 227, 228, 236, 258
Sinkiang, 29,333
Sino-Japanese War, 32, 34, 45, 103,
194-195, 197, 202-204, 241, 261, 284,
289,354
Sine-Soviet Treaty, 32, 34, 62, 63-64,
65-68, 77, 163-165, et passim
Sine-Soviet War, 368
Sixth Army (China), 2 70
Smedley, Agnes, 39, 150,201,212
Snow, Edgar, 35, 142, 171, 185, 19S196, 200-201, 205, 315
Social Democratic Party, 57, 124
Socialism, 174
Sokolsky, George, 62
Soldiers, American, 16-17, 21, 33, 36,
41, 151, 152, 274-275; Chinese, 3741, 270-272. See also Demobilization, Red Army
Soong, T. V., 43, 46, 49, 50-57, 59, 66,
121, 136,236, 243, 292, 325
Soong-Molotov Treaty, 30
S. 0. S., 271
Soviet Foreign Office, 173
Soviet Government, 66, 68, 69, 70, 74,
8 1, 86, et passim
Spain, 279
Stalin, Joseph, 18-19, 23, 24, 25, 29,
30, 32, 61, 64-66, et passim; andChiang Kai-shek, 179-180, 288, 361362; and Hitler, 186-187, 207
Stalingrad, Russia, 204
Stalin-Hitler Pact, 195, 204, 208, 290,
377, 381
Starr, Cornelius V., 85,100
Stars and Stripes, 35,89,22S, 227, 229,
27S, 276
Steele, Arch, 77, 113-114, 129, 241,
331

Stein, Gunther, 152, 201
Steinbeck, John, 307
Stewart, Col. -,233
Stilwell, Gen. Joseph, 29, 75, 126, 151,
252, 265, et passim; and Chiang Kaishek, 209-214, 291; and Chinese soldiers, 212,265; and Lend-Lease, 207208; recall, 208-209, 213-214
Stimson, Henry L., 204
Stratemeyer, Gen. G. E., 272-273, 274
Strong, Anna Louise, 150
Stuart, Findlay, 103
Stuart, Leighton, 249
siichow, 163Suez, 102
Summer Palace (Peking), 330,33 1
Bun Fo, 49, 51, 59, 63, 66, 79, 124,
et pa&m
Sung Chu-hsieng, 224
Sun Lien-chung, Gen., 370
Sun Yat-sen, 66, 81, 127, 133, 135, 137,
166, 176, et passim; and Communists, 176; and Russia, 360-361;
teachings, 335-343
Sun Yat-sen, Mme., 26, 124, 131, 258,
274-275
Sun Yat-sen Institute, 317
Supreme Defense Council, 322
Szechwan, 32, 46, SO, 51, 56, 59, 113,
125,318,322,330, 325
Szepingkai, 262
Taierchwang, 202
Tai Li, 40, 266
Taiping Rebellion, 181,354
To Kung Pao, 303
Tang En-po, Gen., 37, 94-95
Tartars, 174,328-329
Tartary architecture, 328
Tawney, E. H., 334n.
Taylor, George, 2 11
Teheran, Persia, 375
Temple of Heaven, 327
They Were Expendable, White, 382
Third Party, 124

IndexThree Principles of the People, 122,
137, 166, 177, 193, 194, 287, 338,
350. See also San &fin Chu I
Thunder Out of China, White andJacoby, 181, 192, 216
Tientsin, 88, 112, 174, 222, 232, 234,
277
Tientsin-Shanhaikwan
Railroad, 245
Time, 115, 298n., 352
Tito, Marshal, 109, 168, 171, 205, 305
Tokyo, 114,228,365,369,376
Tolum, 77
Tonkin, 356
Torossian, Vincent, 88
Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution,
Isaacs, 176, 179
Tram-Siberian Railway, 357
Treaty Ports, 355
Trieste, Italy, 205
Tripartite Alliance, 364, 377-378
Tripoli, 16
Trotsky, Leon, 178, 183, 361
Troyanovsky, Alexander, 374
Truman, Pres. Harry, 30, 74, 75, 220,240,248,251,384,389,390-391
Tsiang, Dr. T. F., 323, 325-326
Tsingtao, 276,356, 382
Tu Li-ming, 130
Tungting Lake, 202
Turkey, 390
Twenty-one Demands, 359
Twin Stars over China, Carison, 202
Ukraine, 105, 109,261
United Nations, 278, 360,366, 393
United Nations World, 307
United Press, 220, 223, 261
United States, 15, 19, 20, 21, 27, 61,
66, 67, 68, 100, 126, et passim
U. S. Army, 20, 86, 151, 267, 276, 277,
281,382
U. S. Army Air Force, 91,207,215, 272
U. S. Army Hdqtrs., 99, 207, 270, 274
U. S. Army Liaison, see O.S.S.
U. S. Army Post (Yenan), 159

407

U. S. Far Eastern policy, 21-24, 28-30,
73-75, 251-257, 357-360, 365-368,
390-391. See aIso Open Door Policy
U. S. Information Service, 72, 275, 331
U.S.I.S., see U. S. Information Service
U. S. Marine Corps, 20, 202, 215, 245,
251, 276,277,331
U. S. Military Intelligence, 102
U. S. Navy, 20, 86, 215, 234, 239,245,
267, 276,382
U.S.S.R., see Russia“Unity of the Workers of the World,”
174
University Labor Federation, 371
UNRRA,
19, 31, 101, 105, 108-110,
232, 260, 282,324-325
Ussuri River, 355
Vaughn, Miles, 258
V-E Day, 380, 383
Versailles Peace Conference, 359
Vigil of a Nation, The, Lin Yutang, 203
Vincent, John Carter, 252, 256-257“VinegarJoe,” see Stilwell,
Gen.
JosephV-J Day, 21, 28, 30, 46, 47, 113, 197,
202, 209, 215, 257, et passim
Vladivostok, Russia, 225, 229, 230
Vocational Education Association, 124
Walker, Gordon, 129
Walker, John, 115
Wallace, Henry, 124, 172, 258, 307,389
Wang, Dr. -,40
Wang Ching-wei, 182,257, 290, 360
Wang Ming, 193-194
Wang Shih-chieh, 126, 129, 136, 243,
307
Wang Shih-wei, 153
Wang Yao-wu, Gen., 40,261
Wang Yen-pei, 157
Wang Yun-wu, 125,307“War Communism” in Russia, 38

Last Chance in China
Washington, D. C., 31, 151, 213, 246,
Wuhan Government, 46
263, 264, 360
Wu Men-yu, 152
Watanabe, Maj. Gen. -,370-373
Wu Te-chen, Gen., 69-70
Wedemeyer, Gem Albert C., 29, 67, 7.5
137,138,201, et passim; and Chinese
Xenophobes, 386
army, 269-274; and Communists,
235, 269, 279-281; replaces Stilwell,214, 265-267
Yale Review, 147
Weihaiwei, 357
Yale University Press, 365
Weimar Republic, 169
Yalta, 23, 64, 72-73, 164-165, 226,235,
Weller, George, 65, 114, 116, 129, 142,
239, 241, 242, 278, et passim
168, 232, 244-245
Yalu River, 229
Welles. Sumner, 176
Yamato Hotel, 220, 226West China Development Co., 51
Yangtze River, 33, 111,209,278
Western Powers, 24, 32, 64, 65, 93, 96,
YangtzeValley, 215,317, 357
103, 134, 166, 176, et passim
Yeaton, Col. Ivan, 149,151
West Point Military Academy, 272
Yeaton, Mrs. Ivan, 151
Whampoa, 291
Yellow River, 325
White, Theodore, 35, 181,201, 202
Yen, the educator, 307
White, William L., 382
Yenan, 78, 81, 139-141, 152-158, 160,
White Russia, 105, 109, 261
161, 162-164, et passim; army post,
White Russians, 87-88, 229
149-151, 205, 297; children in, 143Whittlesea Hail, 149
144; trade, 144-146
Why the United States Fights against
Yenan Emancipation News, 162
Hitlerite
Germany,
Troyanovsky,
Yenan Guest House, 144
374
Yenan News Agency, 168
William the Conqueror, 311
Yenan Observer Group, 140
Willkie, Wendell, 196, 306
Yenan University, 141, 142-143
Wilson, Capt. -,36
Yenching University, 52
Wilson, Sgt. Dick, 89, 229, 230-232
Yen Hsi-shan, 146
Wilson, Woodrow, 359-360
Yen River, 152
Wolfe, Bertram D., 334
Yingkow, 63,67,235
Wong Wen-hao, 235-237, 307, 312
Yin Kou, 231
World War I, 64, 368, 376
World War II, 16, 177, 198, 259, 367,
Young, Robert, 307
Youth Party, 77, 124
368, 369, 374,375,376,384
Worton, Gen. -,277,331
Yuan Shih-Kai, 121
Yugoslavia, 105, 109, 170, 172, 200,
WPA, 325
Wrath in Burma, Eldridge, 2 12
205,390
Wu, Miss -,90
Yung Hsiung-Kuan, 161,167
Wu, K. C., 130, 142,240
Yunnan, 20,31,56,58,291,356
Yu Ta-wei, 122, 296,307
wu, s. Y., Sl, 79
Wuchang, 181
Wuhan cities, 32, 33, 39, 180, 181-182,
Zionism, 172
202,332. See dso Hankow

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