The Voice of China

SOVIET RUSSIA IN CHINA (392 pp.]--Chiang Kai-shek -- Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($5).

One of history's grimmest ironies is that the Communists' lying assurances of their devotion to peace, democracy and progress have always found eager believers, while the Reds' truthful pinpointing of their own goals has been blandly ignored. Until it was too late, only a handful of people ever took seriously Lenin's statement that "the shortest route from Moscow to Paris is via Peiping and Calcutta." Yet who can today deny that he meant just what he said?

No man has fought harder, more steadfastly or more tragically to stem the forces advancing along the Lenin-mapped route than Chiang Kaishek, and no leader in the free world knows those forces better, or has known them longer. Out of his bitter knowledge comes this book, subtitled A Summing-Up at Seventy.* It is extraordinary, among other things, for what it is not. It is neither bitter nor angry; it wastes no time on past glories or on recriminations. It is a coldly impersonal study of what went wrong in China and what ought to be done now. The book is not offhand reading: it is badly organized and repetitious. But its dry, fact-studded text -- every line based on the dogged assumption that Chiang is still in the fight, despite his isolation in Formosa -- expresses his unbending will better than could rhetoric or fulmination.

What Went Wrong? Chiang's diagnosis of why China fell to Communism -- and why the rest of the world is threatened --can be summed up in one phrase: peaceful coexistence. Carefully, Chiang spells out the tortuous story from the day the Communists first lodged themselves like parasites within Sun Yat-sen's National Revolution to the time of the Japanese invasion which the Communists exploited to consolidate for further civil war, down to the moment when, after decades of war and chaos, "finally, the people lost their will to fight Communism."

Chiang apportions blame among Russian maneuvers, Japanese aggression, Chinese dupes and traitors, U.S. naivete--including Yalta's giveaway of Manchuria and the disastrous U.S. attempt (the Marshall mission) to mediate between the Nationalists and the Reds. But he does not dodge his own responsibility, charges himself with the basic fault of again and again having dealt with Russia and the Communists as men of good will. Each time the Chinese Reds were nearly defeated, "coexistence"' again saved them: "We were overconfident . . . We erred in being too lenient . . ."

If much of the world fell for the slogans about the Chinese Reds as mere agrarian reformers, about Nationalist corruption, etc.. it was, says Chiang, partly his government's fault: "We lacked initiative in propaganda and substance in ideology." The Red victory, by Chiang's reckoning, was only 20% military; for the rest he details the case histories of treachery, infiltration, propaganda, the exploitation of an uprooted social order. One of the Reds' earliest tactics, recalls Chiang, was to incite the poor of a village to loot before Communist agents burned down the house of the landlords; then they would let the fire spread to the houses of the poor, too, so that the homeless could be forced into the Red ranks. This is essentially what the Communists' vaunted promises of reform did to all China.

What to Do? Valuable as is Chiang's story of China's disaster, his analysis of overall Communist methods and theory is perhaps the most important part of his book. It is, in fact, a primer whose lessons by now should be--but are not--elementary in the foreign offices of anti-Communist and neutralist countries. Chiang demolishes the widespread, fatalistic notion that the growth of Asian Communism is the "natural result of backwardness.'' It is, above all, the result of deliberate policy and must be countered by deliberate policy. What is needed in the West to fight Communism's "dialectic unity of offense and defense" is total struggle. Chiang's occasionally inept translators render it as "total war," but from the context it is obvious that this is not what he means. On the contrary: the West's position is rendered too cumbersome, too defensive by its preoccupation with hydrogen war. Russia wants the West to think "that if there is going to be no nuclear war, there is not going to be any kind of war at all."

This notion, as Chiang sees it, means paralysis. The West, moreover, ought to stop coddling neutralist nations. Instead, its overall policy should be a coordinated campaign of "indirect warfare" for "liberation" of the peoples enslaved by the new-Red imperialism. This drive should be pushed on all fronts--political, economic, social, psychological, military. Chiang strongly implies that his Formosa army and other anti-Communist Asian forces should be allowed to attack Red China in Russia's rear--without open U.S. involvement. He also suggests that this could be done without provoking a general war. (Such notions, Chiang concedes with what might almost be taken for irony, are likely to cause "certain misgivings abroad.") Above all, fie wants the West to regain the initiative, to realize and proclaim that, in China as in all the world, the Communists stand for reaction; the true revolution is democracy.

What of Chiang Kaishek, the man, at 70? The only personal note permitted to appear is in a short preface--moving and intensely Chinese. Writes Chiang:

"Time speeds by like an arrow and with it are borne away first the months, then the years ... In reviewing our past, my wife and I share an acute consciousness of failure in not living up to the lofty ideals instilled in us by our mothers ... It was their constant and cherished expectation that we 'return thanks to the state by delivering our people from evil and suffering' . . . The double challenge of the mainland remaining unrecovered and our people therein crying out in vain for deliverance aggravates our sense of regret . . . My wife and I dedicate ourselves once more to the supreme task to which we are called and thus strive to be not unworthy of our upbringing."

* A two-part condensation is being published in LIFE this week and next.

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