The Mistake of a Century

Before his congressional questioners Douglas Mac Arthur said: "The greatest political mistake we have made in a hundred years in the Pacific was in allowing the Communists to grow to power in China ... I believe we will pay for it, for a century." MacArthur did not explore in detail the how & why of the great error. That task is undertaken in an angry, hardhitting book published last week--The China Story, by Freda Utley (Henry Regnery Co.; $3.50)-A British-born, U.S.-naturalized ex-Communist whose Russian husband vanished in the Soviet purges of the 30's, Author Utley is a seasoned, firsthand observer of China events: her 1947 book, Last Chance in China, was a prophetic, little-heeded account of how Communism was taking over Asia's key country. She sometimes weakens her case by the partisan bitterness of the ex-Communist; but most of The China Story is a tellingly documented account of the errors and confusion which lost the U.S. its last chance to save free China.

Too Little, Too Late. In its white paper of 1949, the U.S. State Department sidestepped responsibility for the fall of China; nothing the U.S. did or might have done, said the State Department, could have altered the outcome. Author Utley sweeps aside this contention.

U.S. diplomacy, she says, helped the Communists mightily with two blows: 1) the Yalta secret deal (1945) whereby President Roosevelt agreed to Russian rights in Manchuria (naval base at Port Arthur, use of Dairen harbor, operating controls over railways); and 2) the Marshall Mission (1946) in which General Marshall tried to force the National Government into a coalition with the Communists (see THE MACARTHUR HEARING).

How great was U.S. aid to Nationalist China? The State Department and its apologists say that $2 billion to $4 billion was given to Chiang Kai-shek--and squandered by him in ineffectual war on the Communists. Utley winnows the figures, concludes that not more than $360,000,000 (and probably less) in military aid actually got to the Nationalists. A good deal of U.S. aid arrived nine months to a year after the Communists conquered the greater part of China. It never came near to matching the vast aid, in captured Japanese arms, turned over to the Communists by the Russians.

The Agrarian Reformers. The most controversial issue in the China story is still the nature of China's Nationalist Government. Author Utley does not try to whitewash the Chiang Kai-shek regime. But she reviews Chiang's crushing postwar problems: the revival of a national economy beaten down by eight years of war against Japan. "The picture, drawn by popular journalists and authors, of a reactionary Kuomintang preserving a 'feudal' social organization," she concludes, "was in fact entirely misleading."

What are the facts about the land problem which, the anti-Nationalists claim, the Chinese Communists have solved? Says Author Utley: "The Communist solution for rural overpopulation was simply expropriation and liquidation, terror and murder and expulsion of the landowners and richer peasants, and the redivision of the land among the survivors. No liberal government with any regard for justice or democratic practices could have emulated the Communists."

Naming Names. In making the mistake of a century in China, what individuals were chiefly responsible? A large part of The China Story is devoted to an examination of the attitudes of the men who shaped or influenced U.S. policy.

DEAN ACHESON--who "oscillates between two contrary theses: one that 'good' and 'evil' are irreconcilable; the other that there is no real incompatibility between them . . . Mr. Acheson evidently believes that the Communist menace will disappear, given 'a chicken in every pot'--or a full rice bowl ... He takes no account of the fact that there are precious few Communists in Ireland, which is one of the poorest countries in Europe; whereas prosperous Czechoslovakia had enough of them to enable Stalin to win power ... Our Secretary of State is a leading example of a particular species of American that has flourished since the early 1930's. They think of themselves as 'liberal idealists,' but they are in fact protagonists of the Marxian materialistic philosophy."

PHILIP JESSUP--now U.S. Ambassador at Large (and chief editor of the State Department's white paper on China), who was chairman of the Institute of Pacific Relations when it "started its virulent smear campaign against Nationalist China."

OWEN LATTIMORE--"epitomized in his writing the views which inspired the Administration Far Eastern policy . . . Cleverest, most scholarly and persuasive of all . . . who have championed the Chinese Communists and represented the Soviet Union as democratic, peace-loving and 'progressive.' " Among the instances cited by Utley: in September 1938, Lattimore wrote in Pacific Affairs that the Moscow purge trials had shown Soviet citizens talking back to officials and "that sounds to me like democracy." In explanation, Lattimore told the Tydings Committee last year that it had looked as if the Soviet dictatorship was "becoming less rigid."

JOHN DAVIES, JOHN SERVICE and RAYMOND LUDDEN--all members of the U.S. diplomatic service during the early '40's, they strongly influenced Lieut. General Joseph ("Vinegar Joe") Stilwell, who called Chiang Kai-shek a "peanut" and wanted to arm Mao Tse-tung's forces; they were champions of the Chinese Communists, whom they extolled in official reports as dynamic, progressive democrats; bitter enemies of the Nationalist government, which they denounced as feudalistic, benighted and decadent.

JOHN CARTER VINCENT--in 1945 chief of the State Department's Office of Far Eastern Affairs, "a perfect position to exercise enormous influence over our policy in China." Vincent accompanied Vice President Henry Wallace, with Lattimore as a guide, on a trip to Soviet Siberia and

China in the summer of 1944. (He helped draft the directive to General Marshall defining his mission to China.)

Illusions Die Hard. The diplomats, says Utley, were buttressed by "a minority of writers, professors and lecturers representing the pro-Chinese Communist views of the State Department." Upon many of these publicists, "Yenan, the Chinese Communist capital, exerted a fatal fascination." The proCommunist, or anti-Nationalist, coterie in the 1940's "enjoyed what amounted to a closed shop in the book-reviewing field . . . Week after week, and year after year, most books on China were reviewed by [the same people] with the same point of view." They included Owen Lattimore; Theodore (Thunder Out of China) White and his collaborator Annalee Jacoby; the late Richard Lauterbach (Danger from the East); John K. Fairbank, history professor at Harvard, and Nathaniel Peffer, professor of international relations at Columbia (both longtime apologists for

Communist China); and Edgar (Red Star over China) Snow, who wrote in 1944: "The fact is, there has never been any Communism in China even in Communist areas." Others who plugged that line:

ANNA LOUISE STRONG, who, although expelled from the Soviet Union (TIME, Feb. 28, 1949), continues to extol the Chinese Communist "People's Democracy."

T. A. BISSON, of the Foreign Policy Association, a leading advocate of the theory that Communist China should "more accurately be called Democratic China."

MAXWELL STEWART, who as an editor of the Nation wrote in 1944 that the Chinese Communists attracted all "progressive and peace loving Chinese."

Utley's conclusion: "Illusions die hard, especially when reputations depend upon their preservation . . . Those who direct United States foreign policy still nurture illusions . . . They have finally turned against Soviet Russia because of Moscow's obvious and implacable hostility to the United States. But ... a lingering belief that Communism is a progressive force when not perverted by Stalin still. . . . prevents the adoption of a realistic Far Eastern policy ... As Confucius said: 'A man who knows he has committed a mistake and does not correct it is committing another mistake.' "

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.