Petition in Bankruptcy

China, the most important U.S. ally in the world outside Western Europe, was gone. This chilling calamity was ponderously proclaimed last week in unusual fashion--by a 1,054-page State Department white paper, weighing three pounds and selling for $3. Gone beyond recall beneath the Red tide (the U.S. was told) was the whole great heartland of Asia: the millions who had suffered first and longest the Axis onslaught, who had survived to resume their old fight against the armies of Communism. Bidding this nation bitter farewell, the U.S. Government seemed perilously close to adding: good riddance.

For the U.S. people, as for its State Department, this was a moment of rare anguish; an autopsy on a friend is not nice work. With such diplomatic surgery, Secretary of State Dean Acheson (and the staff of 80 who had worked on the white paper) had operated on the prostrate body of Nationalist China. Their task was complicated by the fact that the body was still stubbornly squirming with life.

"Frank Record." What had caused the disease and the disaster? The State Department's answer, said Dean Acheson, was "a frank record of an extremely complicated and most unhappy period in the life of a great country." The record, reviewing U.S. relations with China back to 1844, prefaced by a 15-page lawyer's brief by Acheson, and displaying some studied flourishes of erudition, added up to a savage indictment of China's Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his regime. Acheson summarized it:

"The government and the Kuomintang . . . had sunk into corruption, into a scramble for place and power, and into reliance on the United States to win the war for them ... Its leaders had proved incapable of meeting the crisis confronting them, its troops had lost the will to fight, and its government had lost popular support . . . History has proved again & again that a regime without faith in itself and an army without morale cannot survive the test of battle . . . The Nationalist armies did not lose a single battle during the crucial year of 1948 through lack of arms or ammunition . . . [They] did not have to be defeated; they disintegrated."

In its fumbling, vacillating attempts to help Nationalist China, the U.S. had actually spent $2 billion. It was a sum, said Acheson, "of proportionately greater magnitude in relation to the budget of that Government than the United States has provided to any nation of Western Europe since the end of the war."

The Ripe Apple. Through the State Department record marched an imposing parade of U.S. ambassadors and special presidential envoys. All of them, whatever their politics, had worked tirelessly for years to induce Chiang to clean his dirty, disordered house which had scarcely known a day without war--against the Communists, the Japanese (for eight years) and again the Communists. Every one of the U.S. envoys wanted to soften Kuomintang one-party rule, guarantee civil liberties, suppress graft, reform landholding, balance budgets.

But, said the State Department, Chiang conceded little and always too late: the official record depicts him as a leader whose wisdom was corrupted by power, his reason corroded by fear. He balked at the zealous U.S. envoys who urged and arranged negotiations with Communist leaders. As he became ever more stubbornly sure that Chinese unity could be won only by whipping the Red armies in battle, U.S. advisers from General Marshall down ever more firmly warned he could not win. They still thought China should make a deal with the Communists. Dead set against any deal of the kind, Chiang cockily prophesied: "Given time, the ripe apple will fall into our laps."

Instead it was Chiang who fell on Jan. 21, 1949. Promptly Chiang's successor, Acting President Li Tsung-jen, blatantly betrayed the bankruptcy of Nationalist China by trying to pull one of the most freakish double-steal plays in modern diplomacy. He proposed to the Soviet Union a pact promising elimination of U.S. influence in China--and simultaneously asked the U.S. for a statement of support to assist him in negotiation with Moscow. The State Department's one word for this was "incredible."

"Oriental Munich." This was the end of the tragic China road--but had not much of it been paved with shiny, good American intentions? Acheson argued vigorously that the U.S. could not have done more: "It is obvious that the American people would not have sanctioned ... a colossal commitment of our armies in 1945 or later . . . The ominous result . . . was beyond the control of the Government of the United States . . . Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it."

The State Department's brazen assertion of its own utter guiltlessness made less than no sense, notably in view of the fact that it sank $2 billion into a situation it had long regarded as hopeless. From Congress, Connecticut's John Davis Lodge snapped: "Apparently the Administration would rather lose a continent than lose a little face." House Minority Leader Joe Martin called the white paper an "Oriental Munich." Senator Arthur Vandenberg, more temperate, nailed as "tragic mistakes" the State Department's "impractical insistence" on coalition with the Communists, and the Yalta agreement, negotiated, behind China's back, which opened the gates of Manchuria to Soviet armies. The Yalta deal was dismissed by the State Department with shallow cynicism as something the Russians could have done whether or not the U.S. had given its covert legal and moral sanction.

The Patriotic Communists. Strange and disturbing scenes from the past--some vicious, some tragically funny--rose from the pages of the Government's record. There was irascible old General Stilwell, in 1944, sneering in his reports to Washington over Chiang's reluctance to swallow "the bitter pill of recognizing the Communists"--as if recognition of the Communists would be plain good medicine for a government needing a cathartic. The same year saw the dispatch of Henry Wallace, of all citizens, to Chiang to urge accord with the Communists. There was sardonic humor in the State Department record of his conversations: "Mr. Wallace again stressed the point that there should be no situation in China which might lead to conflict with the U.S.S.R. ... Mr. Wallace referred to the patriotic attitude of the Communists in the United States and said that he could not understand the attitude of the Chinese Communists."

Then there was garrulous Ambassador Pat Hurley reporting to Washington:"The Communists are not in fact Communists; they are striving for democratic principles." (That was a judgment made in wartime. But Hurley soon changed his mind, fought hard and successfully against State Department officials who wanted to arm the Communist "agrarian democrats.")

From the U.S. embassy in Chungking came a series of reports and recommendations which sounded fantastically gullible when set against today's knowledge of Communist General Mao's fealty to Moscow. Arms must be given to the Red forces, it was urged, "to hold the Communists to our side instead of throwing them into the arms of the Soviet Union." Another Foreign Service officer hailed the Communist revolution as "moderate and democratic," giving the people "democratic self-government, political consciousness and a sense of their rights." As far back as 1944 one embassy report flatly declared the Communists were "the force destined to control China." Urged another embassy report: "A coalition Chinese government in which the Communists find a satisfactory place is the solution . . . most desirable to us."

This eerie blend of fatalism and foolishness formed the background for the Marshall mission. Painstakingly, the white paper gives the now painful details: the suspension of arms shipments to Chiang to allow the U.S. a brief, bootless masquerade as a neutral arbiter between Chiang and the Communists; and General Marshall's increasing infatuation with the dream of building a middle-of-the-road "liberal" party from scattered political factions in a nation at fatal war with itself. From those factions that inspired such hope, only one leader later rose to power: General Li Tsung-jen, who last year proposed to the U.S.S.R. that American influence be eliminated.

The Suppressed Report. Had Nationalist China been a hopeless cause? If so, U.S. policy apparently made a mad marriage with despair and defeat many years ago, and wasted billions on the dowry. But the State Department's own record raised doubt that this was always so. After V-J day, it concedes, China's economic situation was "surprisingly good and contained many elements of hope." As late as 1947, the Nationalists were "at the very peak of their military successes."

At this point, Lieut. General Albert Wedemeyer had surveyed the scene in late IQJ? and reported to President Truman: the dangers to the U.S. in China were "as portentous as those leading to World War II." His recommendation: a sweeping fiveyear aid program, dependent on drastic domestic reforms in China. His prophetic warning: "A 'wait-and-see' policy would lead to ... disturbance verging on chaos, at the end of which the Chinese Communists would emerge as the dominant group." The U.S. did more than ignore Wedemeyer's recommendations. It suppressed release of his report until last week. In releasing it, Dean Acheson gave the Administration's astonishing reason for suppression: Wedemeyer had recommended that Manchuria be placed under U.N. trusteeship, and that would have disturbed the Nationalist government. At the time, Manchuria was almost completely in the hands of the conquering Communists.

For U.S. policymakers, the end came as ignominiously as fof China's Generalissimo. Wearily, Ambassador Stuart cabled Washington: "I have more than ever a sense of frustration ... I feel impotent to accomplish anything." Desperately he cabled for specific instructions to meet the shattering of Chinese resistance. In a tantrum born of its own indecision, Washington brushed off its ambassador's "hypothetical" inquiries: "It is not in the national interest to vouchsafe cut and dried answers to these over-simplified questions."

Last week, the "hypothetical" was real. All questions were answered in the simple eloquence of total defeat.

Platitudes & Principles. The U.S. asked: What now? Dean Acheson had an answer that was no answer at all. The U.S., he said, was "to encourage in every feasible way the development of China as an independent and stable nation"; it was to stand firmly "opposed to the subjection of China to any foreign power." Moreover, warned the Secretary, if Communist China tried aggression against its Asiatic neighbors, then we "would be confronted by a situation violative of the principles of the United Nations Charter." Pressed to translate this wind into any language meaning action, Acheson was evasive.

Judging the disaster, the U.S. had to face truths as bitter as they were plain. No one could deny the U.S. diplomats in China had faced fiercely stubborn problems, equally stubborn men. The Chiang regime (like the Greek government, which the U.S. also supported) suffered at one time or another from many of the worst vices known to governments: corruption and disunity, incompetence and indecision. Yet in a world racked by the evil and destruction of first fascist, then Communist aggression, the American job was to work with the world it found and know what world it wanted. In China, it tried and it failed. At no point in the long chronicle of its failure had it displayed a modest fraction of the stamina and decisiveness which had checked Communism in Europe. For its Asia policy, it had filed a petition in bankruptcy, seemed desperately to be seeking solvency in platitudes and recriminations.

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