Rebuttal

In exile in Illinois, Formosa's ex-Gov ernor Dr. K. C. Wu has grown increasingly violent in denouncing the Chiang Kai-shek regime he once served. "Formosa has been perverted into a police state," he cried shrilly in Look. Last week China's most respected scholar, Dr. Hu Shih, onetime (1938-42) Ambassador to the U.S.. entered an emphatic rebuttal. It was all the more forceful because Philosopher Hu

Shih, a stout anti-Communist and longtime supporter of Chiang Kaishek, has himself long been an open critic of the Kuomintang.

Writing in this week's New Leader, Hu Shih was particularly scornful of K. C. W7u's implication that the political and military situation was good while he was governor of Formosa (1949-53), but that it has deteriorated tragically since.

"The fact is," said Hu Shih, "that Formosa was far from the rule of law and democracy in those early years of 1949-51 ... and only in the last three years, and notably since June 1952, has there been a far greater measure of civil liberties and the rule of law than at any time in the past . . . Freedom of speech and the press is now shared by all who have the moral courage to speak out . . . Elections have been and still are quite free. In the recent May 2 elections, the Kuomintang candidate for mayor in the capital city of Taipei . . . was overwhelmingly defeated."

In discussing freedom of the press, Hu Shih knew whereof he spoke: he had lent his name to the critical fortnightly, Free China, which Wu conceded to be an exception to his accusation. Hu Shih's retort: Whoever heard of a police state that permitted "exceptional" freedom?

Then Philosopher Hu Shih turned to K. C. Wu's own conduct in exile. For a scholar who measures his words, his judgment was scathing: "The battle for freedom and democracy has never been fought and won by craven, selfish politicians who remain silent while they enjoy political power, and then, when out of power and safely out of the country, smear their own country and government, for whose every mistake or misdeed they themselves cannot escape a just measure of moral responsibility."

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