Showdown in China

LAST CHANCE IN CHINA (408 pp.)--Freda Utley--Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

In 1927, the Labor Party asked Freda Utley to stand for Parliament in Manchester, but she declined. She joined the Communist Party and left for Moscow, there married a Soviet government employee she had met in England. It was in Moscow that she bought her first corset. Into it she stuffed the secret dispatches entrusted to her by the Comintern to deliver to the Chinese Communists.

Her husband had been assigned to Japan; they spent a year there, and another six in Moscow. One night in Moscow in 1936, her husband woke her and said: "We have visitors." Two OGPU officers ransacked the apartment while a soldier barred the door; the next morning they marched her husband off to be "examined." She never saw him again.

This experience left Miss Utley an embittered and angry woman. During the war she urged the U.S. to sign a negotiated peace with Hitler, so that Germany and Russia could kill each other off. In China, she now wants the U.S. to commit itself to intervention if necessary, "to challenge Russia in the interests of peace and freedom while she is still too weak to dare risk war with us." Like Governor Dewey, she finds it hard to understand a State Department that says so-far-and-no-further to Communism in Europe, while by neutrality in China it is helping Communism to destroy our Pacific ally. Chiang Kai-shek's government is admittedly ugly and confused in action, she says, but if the U.S. waits for a democratic China before giving aid, the Communists will have won all. Once China is free from civil war and helped economically by the U.S., Chiang will come through on his promise to clean house.

This is a position that many U.S. readers are reaching by themselves, on the basis of news reports from China. Miss Utley's contribution to it would have been more valuable if it ran to less I-told-you-so, and was stripped of strident strictures against those who fail to agree with her at every point.

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