F57 6W I~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~P I~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I llllrlBl I I ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ - LI I I I ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ I i~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I i'l F i — ii;;;; ~~~~ I I;; I s - a - - -"- --- ~ I i i i I i I I i i iI II I i I I I j j Blunder Out of China A Commentary on the White - Jacoby Book by GERALDINE FITCH Published by AMERICAN CHINA POLICY ASSOCIATION 1 West 37th Street, New York, N. Y. Additional copies Single copies 25 copies 100 copies available: $0.25 $5.00 $15.00 Printed in the United States ' -/ - FORE ORD FOREWORD The author, Geraldine Fitch (Mrs. George A.), has made China her home since 1919. She has traveled over much of rural China by sedan chair, junk, Peking cart and train. In recent years she has made a special study of the Communist-Nationalist problem. In 1939 she was the only woman to testify to both Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees on neutrality revision and the Far East. Mrs. Fitch was a feature writer for Shanghai's largest English-language daily: the North China Daily News, and a book-reviewer for the late J. B. Powell's China Weekly Review. She is a contributing editor of China Monthly, and writes for many magazines and papers in this country. She is a past president of the American Association of University Women (Shanghai Branch), vice-president of the American China Policy Association, member of the National Institute of Social Sciences and of the Overseas Press Club of New York. Blunder Out of China To sift the grains of truth from the chaff of hearsay, to note all the exaggerations, inaccuracies, contradictions, and false statements in Thunder Out of China would require another book of equal length. The roar of thunder from Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby might be ignored had not the Book of the Month Club made it echo and reecho across this country, and if its naive and reactionary solution for China's problems were not being advocated by some in high places as a new US policy toward China. The authors of Thunder sometimes rise to heights whichcould they maintain the eminence-would give them real claim to literary distinction. Two cases in point are the initial description of Chungking, and the later portrayal of the heroism of both Americans and Chinese who flew the hazardous Hump when it was the only crevice in a tight blockade of China. But through nearly 300 of the 325 pages of their thundering runs a red streak of bias. Most of the time an easy fluency hides an appalling ignorance of China, nowhere more apparent to those who know and love the Chinese people than in the descriptions of these very people. They play on every string of the reader's sympathy in an unrealistic and discordant boogie-woogie about "the beating, whipping, torture and humiliation" of the peasants of China. Evidently they know nothing of the dignity and self-respect of the country people. They imagine the most peace-loving people in the world to be "seething with revolution"; ready to "set the countryside to flame." That their paeans of praise are reserved for the admittedly ruthless, tyrannical Chinese Communists shows a bias, conscious or unconscious. I do not assume that the authors are Communists. I think more [5 1 probably they are not. Such political naivete could hardly be a pose. But they have imbibed an amazing quantity of the Communist brew, and from here on will be hailed as the best of good-fellows in that camp. No true friend of China denies the need for administrative reform there today, but the real friend sees causes as well as crisis. No country could have suffered fifteen years of invasion without grave resultant disorders. What China needs today is aid, not condemnation. Seemingly impartial in leveling criticisms at both sides (as did General Marshall in his report on China), the authors (unlike Marshall) proceed to interpretations which are both communistic and contradictory. Chinese Communism, like Russian Communism, advancesnot by the support of the people and popularity with them-but by the use of terrorism and intimidation, oft-times by ruthless purging of opposition. White has made a one-sided selection of evidence, even of his own dispatches, contradicting his appraisals in Life magazine of Chiang Kai-shek and of the military situation in China. He lacks political background and historical and geographical perspective, using the same arguments against Chiang which were used against de Gaulle, making the same excuses for Mao Tze-tung which were made for Tito. He ignores the opinions of those who have had more intimate contact with Chiang, such as the late W. H. Donald and Wendell Willkie, of Henry Luce, Howard Coonley, Congressman Judd, Ambassador Hurley, General Wedemeyer, and scores of others. White's own appraisal in Life (May 1, 1944) was more consonant with that of Bishop James E. Walsh, long in China, who has said: When the history of our age is assessed, the present leader of China will stand revealed as one of its greatest men... A man of the people, he knows their needs and has nothing so much at heart as the promotion of their true welfare. He is neither a dictator nor a figurehead; he is simply a determined man with a conscience, a sense of responsibility, and a deep love of country. That the book is hurtful to China, all organizations like United Service to China, the Institution for the Chinese Blind, and the churches are discovering as they try to raise relief and reconstruction funds for China. For the sake of brevity, reference to the authors will be confined to Theodore White, although Mrs. Jacoby must be held responsible also for prostituting her literary talents to the hurt of a great people. In order to make the charges against this book specific, this analysis is divided under the following headings: half-truths and exaggerations; [6 inaccuracies; contradictions, false statements; the Communist slant; and meaningless or amusing verbiage. PART I FROM HALF-TRUTH TO EXAGGERATION White presents his readers with a great flow of words uninhibited by facts. From the moment he refers to the Japanese surrender on the U.S.S. Missouri as "an obsolete rite performed with primitive ceremony for a peace that had not come and a war that had not ended," I feel a lack of the sincerity which made John Hersey's Hiroshima so convincing. Readers without Chinese background are hoodwinked by the ease with which half-truths are embellished. Quite rightly White states that Dr. Sun Yat-sen's San Min Chu I (Three People's Principles) is "by all odds the major political theory in the land" and that China's task is like "attempting to devise one solution. for the problems of feudalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, the industrial revolution and the social unrest of today." Not original, but so far so good. But what White will not disclose is that China's staggering enterprise of going modern has been vastly complicated, not only by fifteen years.of Japanese invasion, but also by twenty years of subversive activities on the part of the Chinese Communists, directed by Moscow. With every autonomous and semi-independent "armed state within the state" now incorporated into the body politic except the Communist one, White comes forward advocating a return to regional feudalism. White also refers to the Sun Yat-sen revolution and calls the Whampoa Academy "a school for a host of flaming advocates of revolution," but when he wants to smear the military men who have remained loyal to Chiang Kai-shek through the years he says (p. 42) "the young students of the military academy were decimated in the early revolutionary battle; those who remained were loyal to the Kuomintang before all else, and faithful to Chiang." By innuendo White gives the impression that those killed in the early years of revolution would not have remained equally loyal. A study of White's use of the word "loyalty" would be revealing. Seemingly he cannot comprehend constancy over a period of years. Consistency is an enigma to him-perhaps because he has turned quite a somersault himself. "Within the areas that Chiang controlled," the author says, "his police butchered Communist leaders; families of known Communist [7 leaders were wiped out." This is oft-repeated, never documented. But if there were such reprisals, what caused them? White should read (as I have done) some of the diaries of Central China missionaries describing the massacres by the Communists in those years. In 1927 the young Red leader at Pheng Phi near Swatow had a large sign written in blood over his cave-headquarters, announcing that the Russian advisers had instructed the Chinese Reds to kill eight groups of villagers, including religious people of any sect and those who favored a capitalist America. And kill them they did, by the score! White admits that "by agreement with Chiang Kai-shek they (the Reds, during the United Front) were to leave positional warfare to him and wage guerrilla warfare behind the enemy lines," but he does not tell the reader that this was in agreed areas. And of course it was to reconquer the country -for the government, not for themselves. White becomes lyrical about the Communist record through the war: "One of the most amazing adventures in arms of all times!" This a half-truth with a vengeance, but not in White's meaning. While deployed to free their country from the Japanese, the Chinese Communists increased their army from an agreed 85,000 to a million and a half. While supposed to be helping their government, they conquered for themselves territories with a population of 90 million. In this opportunism, their attacks were often upon government troops, rather. than upon Japanese. In his "Vigil of a Nation" Lin Yu-tang gives dates, places, and names of generals where this occurred in scores of cases. As the war progressed, White says a stalemate caused renewed tension between the government and the Communists. This is merely a fraction of the truth. What caused the breakdown of the United Front in China? Does White not know of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, which caused a volte face on the part of the Reds in China? He must know that the Chinese Communists, who for two years had been calling the Generalissimo the "George Washington" of China, began then to call him "dictator," "fascist," "gangster," and.many similar epithets. And if he knows, it is dishonest to withhold this information from the reader. Sometimes the flow of words runs to gross exaggeration, rather than to building on half-truth, as when White blandly states that "with the exception of Douglas MacArthur the commanders of the war against Japan in December 1941 were men blinded by an enormous and overweening arrogance" (p. 83). Of course those who talk in such extravagant terms, given time, will be smearing MacArthur as well. But Nimitz, Halsey, Stratemeyer, Chennault evidently made MacArthur [8] look like a modest violet. The Book of the Month Club chooses this sort of thing for a million Americans to read as choice literature. China claimed that she had a government (p. 97)-no election had ever voted it into power... they bridged the discrepancy between fact and statement with the Kuomintang's theory of state, a theory that did not work, but was none the less interesting. China was assumed to have not a government of the people but one held in trusteeship for them by the Kuomintang. Sun Yat-sen outlined the party's responsibilities in three stages... Russia also claims to have a government. Will Mr. White tell us when it was voted in by free election? Later he excuses the totalitarian Chinese Reds by saying: "Mao does not talk of voting." But is White side-swiping the Kuomintang for its peculiar theory of state, or Sun Yat-sen for so outlining the party's trusteeship? Unlike the one-party government of Russia and Yenan (intended as permanent), the oneparty rule of China was temporary. And even as White thunders, China moves on into Dr. Sun's third stage of constitutional democracy. So with the half-truth that an edict during the war made writers "avoid realism and pessimism," made them write "gay, cheery things." Today they may write what they please. Bolstering war morale makes more sense than Russia's purge since the war of poets and dramatists who would not write the ideology of Communism into their poems and their plays. So with his niggardly tribute to Chinese officers who hungered with their men, marched with them on foot: "they were a handful." His minimizing of China's resistance: "That this army held the line against the Japanese for six years is the most remarkable thing of all strange things about it." Strange? Stupendous, glorious. But it was not Communist, so White cannot explain it, and will not praise it. In Kweichow in 1944: "The troops received two days' rations when they dug in, and their mortars had 20 shells to a gun. For nine days without further food or ammunition, they fought in the cold and freezing weather. The hills were barren of food." But give this Nationalist Army at their Valley Forge unqualified praise? Never. It is only the Communists who are exalted-the Reds who, instead of fighting for their country, are out expanding their agreed areas, making hay while their brothers freeze, using the war for a putsch to power. Says White: "The Kuomintang could explain its defects in convincing terms of poverty and weakness." Was the explanation not valid? It could also have charged America with neglecting China on the lend-lease front. But White saves his praise for the Communists [ 9 ] trying to usurp the government. He has forgotten his dispatches to Life (May 1, 1944), showing the impossibility of supplying the armies, lacking both food and transportation. The Communist troops, White admits, could not stop a Japanese spearhead, "did not know how to handle artillery... or air corps; knew little of modern signal corps work, mechanization or medical practise, could not maneuver a division in battle." But "the Red Army had one quality that made it great-its fighting spirit." The government armies, bombarded from land, sea, and air for three months at Shanghai, must have had some of that spirit, too. That National army which fought nine days on two days' rations in freezing weather must have had some of this fighting spirit. But White's sympathies are not on their side. He admits the Communists "fought government troops... sounding like the man who claimed he had been hit in the fist with the other fellow's eye," admits that the National government could not possibly recognize all their opportunistic expansion at the end of the war. Nevertheless, it is the Communists' war-record which "is one of the most amazing of all times!" "Stilwell's handling of lend-lease had annoyed him (Chiang)." The grain of truth here is that Stilwell handled it. Suppose we had sent an American to handle lend-lease for Churchill or Stalin! Chiang "privately indulged in one of his famous rages," but White's imagination can describe what is private. "Chiang Kai-shek informed them that he had agreed to have an American commander-in-chief in China, because China could trust America, but under no circumstances would he permit that commander-in-chief to be General Stilwell; if America insisted, he would go it alone, retreating farther into the mountains with his loyal divisions before the Japanese advance." Hurrah for the Generalissimo! But to White this is just "incandescent fury." So Wedemeyer came into China to serve under this man of "uncontrollable fury" in the last of eight discouraging years of war, and "Wedemeyer got cooperation where Stilwell met stony refusal." Stilwell had wanted to arm the Chinese Communists; Stilwell got the only well-trained, well-equipped Chinese troops* for the Burma campaign, against the better judgment of the G'issimo who knew he needed them to protect the advance air-bases in China. Wedemeyer has said publicly: *Trained at Ramgarrh, India. [ 10 1 The actual contribution that our Chinese allies made in the recent war has not, in my opinion, been properly evaluated or appreciated... The steadfast determination of the Generalissimo as well as the Chinese people to fight on against overwhelming odds saved countless American lives and accelerated final victory. Is it strange that General Wedemeyer with his appreciation of China's resistance got cooperation? T. V. Soong, White reports, had to assent to the Sino-Russian Treaty of August 1945, "an agreement already roughed out for him by two other powers." No wonder the China Critic of Shanghai said editorially last year: "If Roosevelt and Churchill were so anxious to please the Russians, why didn't they give them concessions in Alaska or India, instead of giving away what didn't belong to them?" White's admission is a half-truth, however, because White must know that though the Yalta price was high, it bought Russia's promise of "moral support and military aid to the National Government of China" (SinoRussian Treaty, August 14, 1945), and yet he says: "If we (USA) sought security in China by espousing the Kuomintang, the Soviet Union means to counter by espousing the Chinese Communists." He knows Russia promised to espouse the National Government. He knows Russia promised to make Dairen an open port. Yet at an IPR luncheon honoring White for villifying China, I heard White say: "Russia has never broken a promise to China!" China must change or die... China must build the same railroads, open the same mines, clear the same rivers, erect the same steel mills, whether the Kuomintang or the Communists or both control her destiny. The Communist record is one of cutting railroads, destroying machinery, murdering six government engineers sent to reopen the Kailan Mines, clearing no rivers, erecting no steel mills. China has changed. China will change. China with the oldest civilization on the face of the earth will live on when White and his thunder have ceased to rumble. PART II IGNORANCE AND INACCURACIES Since the authors did not go to China until after the war had started, they lack the perspective to compare New China (then less than 30 years old) with Old China. Though advertised as a Chinese scholar, White's knowledge of the language, judged by many mistakes in rendering of Chinese names, is extremely limited. With only a smattering of Chinese, he would [ 11 ] be unable to converse intelligently with the farmers in their colloquial "t'u hua." Ignorance of the rural Chinese for whom he professes such profound sympathy is apparent in every description of them. "They live in such terrible poverty that they have nothing to lose but their chains!... The beating, whipping, torture and humiliation of the villagers of Asia by officials and gendarmes is part of the substance of government authority." The farmer of China is an independent, industrious, cheerful individual. He is not "beaten, swindled and kicked about all his waking days." Reliable statistics (such as Dr. J. Lossing Buck's "Land Utilization in China," 3 vol.) show that a higher percentage of the farmers of China own their own land than of American farmers. Eighty per cent of the people live on the land-far too many for the amount of arable land-but heretofore they have been free souls, respected as the second most important group in the nation, never before (to my knowledge) labeled "brood mares" and "beasts of burden." The "land redistribution" slogan of the Chinese Communists is not the solution of the agrarian problem. The land reclamation and better land utilization record of the National Government can be obtained from our own Department of Agriculture which has aided both surveys and completed projects. White saw China only during the war. Undoubtedly he saw sad sights and many of them, as in any invaded country. But his descriptions are those of an imaginary proletarian revolution-of the serfs of Czarist Russia or the peons of Mexico-they do not fit the farmers of China. Statistics on land in the book, for which no authority is quoted, are incorrect. Indeed (p. 27) he says, "It is characteristic that this (the peasant's relation to the land) the most overwhelming of all her problems should completely lack adequate statistics." White must mean that he is completely uninformed on the three volumes of "Land Utilization" by Dr. J. Lossing Buck, or "Free China's New Deal" by Hubert Freyn, or similar authoritative texts by Chinese economists. White leaves off where the government of Chiang Kai-shek begins: with constructive achievements to improve the lot of the farmer. The People's Livelihood is one of Dr. Sun's Three Principles, and the National Government before the war, during the war, and since the war has made marked progress in river conservancy, irrigation projects, reforestation, land reclamation, credit cooperatives, etc. It could have accomplished much more but for the obstruction of the Communists. On the other hand, even if their sincerity were conceded, the Chinese [ 12 1 Communists have neither the personnel, the resources, nor the program to do anything commensurate. "The great question of China is whether any democratic form of government can ease these tensions by wise laws, peacefully, before the peasant takes the law into his own hands and sets the countryside to flame." So says revolutionary White. The Chinese farmer is no anarchist. Usually attempts of the Communists to incite widespread revolt peter out, though within the limits of a village the riff-raff may be impelled to aid them in lawless confiscation. Moreover, while White thunders, the National Government goes right on in peaceful change, convening the National Assembly, presenting the "wise laws" of a constitution drafted and revised, revised and re-drafted many times-a constitution prepared in the Legislative Yuan under the aegis of Dr. Sun Fo, whom White would concede to be a liberal, and approved last year by the Chinese Communists them- t: selves. By abstention from the National Assembly which adopted the Constitution, the Communists are the ones who refuse "to ease the - tension by wise laws." They also are the ones who "take the law into their own hands and set the countryside to flames." Not the farmers. Of the Japanese in surrender, White says: If anyone had asked why they lost, why they were being forced to sign an end to all their world, they would have advanced a dozen cogent reasons wrapped up in figures on tonnages... never entertained a thought that they might have lost because what they had conceived was so hideously wicked that it generated its own defeat. >" But, by White's description, what America had conceived was so Y wicked it should also have "generated its own defeat." For "America's war had cut blindly across the course of the greatest revolution in the g history of mankind, the revolution of Asia." Wicked America, inter- fering with world revolution! China, too, according to White, should have "generated its own defeat." He says: The story of the China war is the story of the tragedy of Chiang Kaishek, a man who misunderstood the war as badly as the Japanese or the Allied technicians of victory. Chiang could not understand the revolution whose creature he was... - So Japan, America and China were all deserving of defeat. They opposed the great world revolution! [ 13 ] When, in contrast, White sings that "the Chinese Communists had the people with them, and with the people they made their own new justice," the reader should note that "justice," like "democracy," is something the Communists manufacture to suit their ends. To all who understand Communist tactics this will be apparent. But the majority of Americans do not know China, do not know that the "new justice" includes intimidation, coercion and purging of opposition. Any government which does not want to go Communist is "reactionary," "fascist," "inefficient" and "corrupt!" In 1927 the first coalition of Chinese Communists and the Kuomintang came to an end. White says: "What happened in those three weeks is a mystery." He is either ignorant of what happened, or glosses over what he does not want to admit: i. e., that the Chinese Communists, with the connivance of the Russian advisers to Chiang's government, tried to usurp the government at Hankow. Chiang broke with them and established the National Government at Nanking. White says this "was not recognized as the only legitimate government of China." A country cannot have two legitimate governments. The Communists had entered the Kuomintang on orders from Moscow to bore from within; they had tried to obstruct the northern expedition by seizure of the Whampoa Academy and then the Canton Arsenal. Failing in both, they tried to discredit Chiang by the "Nanking incident" when Communist troops attacked "foreigners." They fomented strikes and labor troubles in Shanghai, and unsuccessful revolts among peasants and farmers. Chiang was kidnapped in Sian in 1936. White says: "No one has ever recorded in full what actually happened during Chiang's kidnapping." Madame Chiang wrote the inside story; so did W. H. Donald, and the G'issimo himself. Does White mean he never read their accounts or that it serves his purpose to ignore them? He is inaccurate on most statistics. He says the population of 200,000 in Chungking "more than doubled." It was 500,000 before the war. His seven million recruits who never reached the front is criminally wide of the mark. His figures on delegates to the National Assembly are wrong. He is inaccurate in claiming that Communist terrorism is "in the past." The Reds murdered the young medics trained by Father Lebbe during this war. This Belgian was another Father Damien, a great humanitarian, himself imprisoned by the Communists, dying soon after his release. The Reds drove 130 missionaries out of Shantung in 1946, destroyed the 80-year-old agricultural project of the Belgian Mission at Shiwantze in the same year, and continue to liquidate property-holders to this day. [ 14 1 Sometimes White is more naive than inaccurate, as when he says: "Part of the tradition of the State Department, and an honored one, is for members (like Hurley's staff in China) to report the truth to the American government." How odd! He should have added "as they see it," because Hurley saw it differently from his young, pro-Communist staff. Wedemeyer, too, did not view the Chinese Communists as did the young career men Hurley sent home. It is equally naive to say: "The Ambassador is charged with the duty of formulating and applying basic American policy." But it explains; the statement about Ambassador Gauss, amusing to anyone who knew the unimaginative Gauss: "(He) felt fresh forces pressing him on to a new concept of the role of American Ambassador!" PART III CONTRADICTIONS The number of conflicting statements within the covers of this book is legion, with space here for only a few. The references to warlords are so contradictory with so many nuances of meaning that one wonders if White knows what a warlord is. China's warlords were military governors of provinces, when the provinces also had civil governors. As they built up independent armies, some of them gained control of several provinces. On page 34 they "were purely destructive;" on page 39 some of them are "repentant warlords... who have seen the light;" and on page 49 they are patriotic warlords, choosing to fight with the National Government rather than yield to the Japanese; on page 53 "warlord armies from the south and southwest were marching to join the battle"-brave warlords; on page 58 they are "corrupt warlords" again. Then "commanders of the secondary areas were usually provincial warlords who stood outside the pale of Chiang Kai-shek's confidence," (p. 71) and again, "At one time half of the eight or nine war areas were commanded by men who within the previous fifteen years had fought or offered to fight open civil war against Chiang." In other words, four (or four and a half) warlords who had previously been disloyal were now serving the Generalissimo. True, most of the former warlords had incorporated their independent armies into the National forces-all but the Communists, who maintain an independent army to this day. Why doesn't White, as reporter, say so if impartial? Why stop short of the Communist warlords? And why, in final solution for China's ills, recommend re [ 15 1 turning to this feudal system of autonomous regions, where warlords — nothing less-would be independent or semi-independent regional heads? The Chinese Communists are excused for everything they do against their government: "They are forced to agitate or die," "keep public support at fever pitch or see it perish," their activity brought them "into incessant friction with government units." But when the government finally had to discipline the Fourth Route Army (Communist) for expanding beyond its agreed area time and again,* White calls that a "massacre." Of Communist attacks on government troops, White says: "It was total war; and there were no neutrals." Not even their own countrymen. Anything the Reds do can be rationalized. Nothing the government does can be right. One amusing contradiction is that this terrible Kuomintang, this undemocratic party, was riddled with cliques, was "as heterogenous a political catch-all as the democratic party in America." That lets the cat out of the bag. Everyone can see now how ominous, how fascist, how undemocratic it is! The CC Clique seems to be confined to a membership of the two Chen brothers-all who are ever named. It was "reactionary, it was anti-foreign, it stood closest to the Generalissimo, but it was also the only group within the Kuomintang organized from the grass-roots up." These are strangely contradictory terms! "All other groups derive their strength either from their armed forces, or from the personal patronage trough at the capital." No other group besides the Communists has armed forces, and the "patronage trough" sounds like political machines in America. By the time White adds that "in some provinces the tangpu (local Kuomintang) were dominated by the local warlord (sic!) and in other areas the party had definite particularistic provincial tendencies," it would seem that China is pretty individualistic, with no Politburo to tell each Chinese what he must do, how he must vote, or else. The Military Clique is not powerful enough or else not fascist enough to "have much power." Maybe China is democratic! Then there is the Political Science group "who understood modern business methods and wanted to make an efficient China, safe for industry... that would do the country good." This group stood for *At the time, Chiang said he had forgiven the 4th Route Army "until seventy times seven." [ 16 1 "orderly government by law," for "a streamlined state," but "the war by wiping out these (business) men, had stripped the Political Science group of its main source of power." Of those White makes out as "do-gooders" stripped of power, on the very next page he says: "when American criticism became too pressing Chiang would give a plum to one or two fairly respectable characters from the Political Science group." On one page "Tremendous popular support rolled up behind" Sun Fo; on another, "A few malcontents rallied around Sun Fo." "Less than 10% of the party membership was independent of Chiang's will," which might mean 90% were loyal-something White would not understand. He acknowledges that Chiang's picture is in every distant hamlet, but will not concede to him popular support. Government administration is under three heads: "All three gave fealty to the G'issimo" and "the G'issimo liked them all." Quite wonderful in a country White thinks barely hangs together. Moreover, Chiang, this man of "uncontrollable fury," "placated and soothed one after the other." But the mutual loyalty implied in their fealty, White cannot understand. The pen really dipped in venom is reserved for China's great leader, never once called by White the President of China. To Chiang Kai-shek, on the day victory over Japan was being broadcasted from Chungking, White pays no tribute. The Generalissimo, longer at war than any other leader of Allies or Axis, victorious now, but in plain uniform without military decoration, made the announcement to his people, without recrimination against the enemy, without bitterness or gloating. White was in the studio that day. A friend of mine was there, too, and says White was down on one knee, hastily scribbling the G'issimo's message as it was read in translation by Hollington Tong. As the broadcast ended and the group went out, most of the people of Chungking seemed to be pressing about the radio station, tumultuously cheering. No police were holding back the people, no bodyguard was there for the G'issimo as he walked down the steps and some little distance through the throng to his car. White, behind the G'issimo, was greatly impressed, and kept saying to my friend: "Isn't this wonderful? Did you ever see anything like it?" But to picture Chiang Kai-shek as a man of "uncontrollable fury" for a best-seller, White curbs his enthusiasm, forgets the thrill of that hour, and brands one of the great men of history with this canard: No one could tell that here was a man who had just seen the defeat of his national enemy and who, only that night, was about to set in motion the wheels of machinery that was to engulf the country afresh in civil war. [ 17 1 The Book of the Month Club makes such its considered choice! White's greatest contradiction, his personal lack of integrity, is evident if one contrasts his description of General Chiang Kai-shek in his book as a man with a "lust for power, calculating ruthlessness monumental stubbornness" with his own pen-picture in Life magazine of May 1, 1944 (Note, not in the first year of the war, but after seven of the eight years!): China has been kept in this war by the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek... This leadership has been unswervingly, unflinchingly and heroically antiJapanese. It is Chiang who, at the darkest moments of China's loneliness, has held his government and his people to their destined task. He is a man of great intelligence. In his understanding of China he is unsurpassed. White paid this high tribute to Chiang Kai-shek in Life after seven years of war. General Wedemeyer gives even higher praise for Chiang during the eighth and most difficult year of the war: There are few people who could speak more authoritatively than I do concerning the sincerity, high moral purpose and Christian humility of China's present leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. I had frequent, practically daily, contacts with him under the most trying conditions. I can attest to his unselfish devotion to the Chinese people and his earnest desire to provide a democratic way of life within China. Those who know the President of China know whether the tributes or the canard are the truth. But White cannot have been truthful both times. The Generalissimo did not completely change in the last year of the war. Either White falsified the picture in 1944 to please Life, or perjured his soul to write a sensational book in 1946. Many people, knowing little of China, have thought this book impartial because White says something good before he says something bad. But he manages to completely poison the good: Chiang had the "sanctity of a deacon, was a devout and practising Methodist, reads the Bible every day," but he is made out a hypocrite, still "harsh and ruthless," a man who "sent into battle soldiers doomed before they heard gunfire," a leader who on the day of victory was planning to plunge the nation into civil war. Chiang insists on "unconditional loyalty to himself," he exhorts his troops "be loyal... Love your country!" Loyalty troubles White a lot. He doesn't like it. He can't get around it. He finds it difficult to turn it into anything else. White concedes that General Stilwell clashed not only with Chiang Kai-shek, but with the British Mountbatten and with the Ameri [ 18 ] can Chennault. He says he was ill-served by his entire public relations staff, that "he disliked paper work, and the men who did his staff work served him atrociously." There were many frictions, but he was a great guy! Chiang, whose picture admittedly "hung in every village, his name still a magic symbol" in 1944, who got on admirably with the late Wendell Willkie, with Donald Nelson, with Patrick Hurley, with General Wedemeyer and General Marshall, must have been the difficult one. Stilwell took "a hell of a beating" in Burma; naturally wanted to train, equip and clothe a Chinese army to return and retake Burma. The training program at Ramgarrh, India, was not just of the rag-tag remnant which Stilwell led out of Burma on foot. More than 50,000 Chinese were crowded into planes and flown over the Hump to this secret training point. White says: "Chinese opposition to Stilwell's program (of a Burma campaign) is hard to analyze." Things seem hard for White to analyze if he doesn't like the deductions. When trained and equipped, Chiang wanted those Chinese troops back in China. He felt he needed them there. When, as a result of not having them, the American airfields were lost to the Japs, he probably still felt the same. But Stilwell got those best-trained, bestequipped troops for Burma. Chennault felt "the fighting in Burma was a waste of time." Chennault believed with sufficient air-power he could keep the Japanese in eastern China from attacking the air-bases; he said: "All supplies should be concentrated on the Fourteenth Air Force and what supplies were left over should be turned over to the Chinese to do with as they saw fit." But Stilwell, who handled lendlease for China, had his way. It resolves into a question of which was more important in defeating the Japanese: reopening a difficult and narrow road soon to revert to jungle, or protecting the big airfields so important if the Americans had to invade the coast. White's own description of the demolition of the airfields when the Japs came, fields built at such cost in blood and sweat, gives weight to the theory that Chiang was right. "Stilwell felt he was fighting the Burma campaign alone," says White. At least he had the only well-fed, well-equipped, well-trained Chinese troops. Chiang felt he needed them in China. Chennault thought so, too. When visiting famine-stricken Honan during the war, White ate what he calls "the finest and most sickening banquet I ever ate." Compared to hundreds of Chinese feasts in normal times it was a simple enough meal. In New York City in November, 1946, the Committee for a "Democratic" Far Eastern Policy (Communist Front) honored Teddy at $100 per plate! For relief in Honan, still needy? Oh dear [19 ] no. For United Service to China? Not at all. The Committee pushes a party-line policy for China, and it takes funds. When he described the Chinese Reds, White grows lyrical: "Rarely in the history of modern war or politics has there been any political adventure to match this in imagination or epic grandeur. The job was done by men who worked with history as if it were a tool and with peasants as if they were raw material." Just so he assured us earlier: "The strength of Chungking and its government came from the villages in which these peasants lived and from their ancient way of life." And yet again in fluent contradiction, White tells us: "The revolutionary surge of the Chinese people against their ancient unhappiness is too strong for any group to control and distort." At another time: "The peasants were putty in the hands of their Communist mentors." Consistency-thy name is not White! The lyricism continues in praise of Mao Tze-tung: "Mao was set on a pinnacle of adoration," and he compares him to Chiang Kai-shek with some backhanded tributes to Chiang. The Communists, White tells us, had had no national congress since 1928, "their Central Executive Council met rarely and the direction of the party lay in the hands of the Political Bureau dominated by Mao Tze-tung and Chou En-lai." "The party and the army unquestioningly executed" their decisions. As in Russia, no democratic procedures-no general elections, but criticized for this? Not by White. And yet how he scores the Kuomintang for not being more democratic. "The Political Bureau handed down high policy after the leaders had argued it out-and Yenan made no criticism... Unanimity on policy was total... a stark contrast to Chungking." White likes this "unanimity" better: "None of the critical atmosphere of Chungking, where the cynical, civilized bureaucrats of the Kuomintang gossiped and picked each other to pieces constantly." As in America? White does not like this "freedom to gossip," though how he could have written his book without it is difficult to see. Of many canards against Ambassador Hurley, White says of his attempt to make peace between the government and the Chinese Communists: "This would have required infinite patience, an almost saintly tolerance, vigorous administrative skill and a deep understanding of China." So Hurley failed. But, between them, General Marshall and Ambassador Stuart possessed all these attributes, and they, too, failed. Could it be that the Communists are at fault, Mr. White? [ 20 ] But the great Americans in China to White are those who would arm the Communists, or force Chiang to grant all they asked. First White admits that "actually no minor number of seats would satisfy the Chinese Communists" and then in direct contradiction, "A government that tried to solve these problems might have granted the Communists only token representation and still won their support." (In the interim government Chiang offered them 13 seats out of 40, when according to White's own figures they represent only 1/5 of the population). Then two "Kuomintang liberals" made a proposal which "might have been accepted a year earlier but the Communists had already launched a campaign for dominance of East China. They were unwilling to settle for anything that would leave them-and China-subject to the Generalissimo's veto power." So they must dominate? They are not content with coalition, or 1/5 representation. While the Yenan radio became more vituperative, while White acknowledges they hurled "fishwife adjectives" at Chiang, the strongest criticism he can make is: "It became almost possible to sympathize with the Kuomintang whose manners in public were perfect." But to get American supplies, the Kuomintang took the way of "brilliant doubletalk" and "on this road the Communists would have been lost." So despite their fluency with "fishwife adjectives," the Communists took the rough, direct' way of the battlefield-"to wage military offensive that would secure American recognition." Once more White calls Shanghai "the citadel of the middle class," the class he had said was wiped out at the beginning of the war. Government officials sent in to take over had soon alienated themselves even "from the sturdy active businessmen who ten years before had been their greatest strength"-and who according to White had been wiped out. Such contradictions of his own statements become wearisome. The least a co-author might have done would be io note these conflicting assertions and suggest revision. PART IV TRUE OR FALSE? Some of the most thunderous statements can scarcely be classified as inaccurate. When they bear no resemblance to the truth, they must be labeled false. Americans have a sort of proverb: "Thoughts unexpressed may sometimes fall back dead, But God Himself can't help them when they're said." [ 21 1 And the Chinese have one: "One man spreads a false report and a hundred repeat it as the truth." In effect it matters not whether that man is ignorant or consciously malicious. And in this modem day of of book clubs and best sellers, instead of a hundred to repeat the false report, there may be a million. A wholly false statement is this: "In Shanghai collecting the lifeless bodies of child laborers at factory gates in the morning is a routine affair." I have lived in Shanghai through the early years of China's developing industry when children worked long hours for a pittance, and through the years when the Municipal Council in the International Settlement and the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in the Chinese areas achieved labor laws and established excellent factory inspection.* I submit that White's villifying statement was never true. Children who died during the war starved because of the Japanese invasion, not as "child laborers at factory gates." When White talks about a fixed station in life "from which there is no escape," he is giving a false picture, for China is remarkably free from distinctions of class or caste. He may not know that the merchant eats in a room back of the shop with his clerks, that the master carpenter dips into the same dishes with his apprentices; that the landowner often works in the fields with his tenants and eats with them around a common table. Many a Chinese Abraham Lincoln has passed the Han-lin examinations making him eligible for high official position. Complete ignorance of China's social democracy is inexcusable in one who presumes to write books about the country and the people. "Officials thundered against the hoarding-but no action was ever taken." Representing Life magazine, White might be expected to read Time reporting the execution of certain unrepentant hoarders. The white man has "thrust his faith down the gullet of the heathen at bayonet's point." What utter nonsense! Unless White is an anti-Christian Communist, he must be either untruthful or woefully ignorant of the centuries of educational, medical and evangelistic work of Christian missions, establishing some of the finest universities, many of the best hospitals, helping the Chinese establish schools for the blind, missions to lepers, orphanages, technical institutes, agricultural missions, etc., etc. Presumably to explain why the Chinese Communists were fighting government troops more than Japanese after the United Front broke down, White says: "The campaigns the Japanese fought between 1938 and 1944 were foraging expeditions rather than battles." These years *Under Chief Inspector Eleanor Hinder and assistant, Rewi Alley. [ 22 1 cover battles for Changsha where the foreign correspondents went over the battlefield and acknowledged the heavy lossof life (on both sides); the battle of Ichang (won by the Japanese with poison gas); many Japanese attempts to cross the Yellow River into Shensi; Chinese victories in Burma and at the Salween. Small wonder General Wedemeyer says: "The actual contribution that our Chinese allies made in the recent war has not been properly evaluated or appreciated... against overwhelming odds (they) saved countless American lives and accelerated our final victory." It is untrue to say "all other parties (except the Kuomintang) were outlawed." White knows the parties comprising the Democratic League -including the Young China Party and the Social Democrats-are not outlawed. He knows there was a Communist (Tung-Pi-wu) on the Chinese delegation to the San Francisco Conference; that there were Communist delegates in the People's Political Council of January, 1946. He knows that only their own refusal to participate kept the Communists from being in the recent National Assembly which adopted the Constitution. They make themselves "outlaws" by having an independent army, like the former warlords, but it is completely false to say that other political parties (unless armed) would be outlawed. It is a canard to say that Sun Fo "almost alone in China could say what he believed." Almost anyone in China can say what he pleases, but he cannot be too subversive in his activities. A government friend of mine, Dr. R. Y. Lo, said to me in Shanghai last year: "Within our yuan (department) we are as free to criticize as anyone in any country, though we try to emerge from our controversies with a unified report on policies." White, who lauded Chiang Kai-shek in 1944, now charges that during the twenty years since he broke with Communists, both Chiang and China have changed. "His one passion now became and remained an over-riding lust for power. All his politics revolved about the concept of force." It's a false picture. It would show somewhere in the two volumes of his wartime utterances, so remarkably free from bitterness, hatred or vituperation against either the Japanese or the Communists. There one finds a Christian leader, exhorting his people to pray for the enemy, to keep hatred out of their hearts. Veracity is not with White when he passes off slander against the Generalissimo's personal character by saying he was "infuriated by gossip he would have shrugged off twenty years earlier." Chiang has always resented gossip affecting his wife, such as the idle slander of Lady Chesterton of England in a book about her travels in China. On protest through the British ambassador the book was banned in England [ 23 1 until the false assertions had been deleted. Chiang had even greater reason for refuting the slander, referred to by White, spread by irresponsible columnists and radio commentators all over the United States. "By the time the Japanese struck," says White, "Chiang controlled all China south of the Yellow River." The only exception to a unified China in 1931 was the fortified area in the heart of China where the Chinese Communists, having failed to usurp the government, having been ousted from the Kuomintang, had set up a Soviet Republic with their own government, their own currency, their own army. Other villifying statements, unfair and untrue, are that "seven million men had died of sickness and hunger or because they had deserted to their homes or en masse to the enemy," that "going into the army was usually a death sentence" and that General Ho Yin-ching was responsible "more than any other man except Chiang Kai-shek for the rotting away of the Chinese armies in the field, the starving of Chinese soldiers." It is a long-suffering Chiang Kai-shek that does not sue Theodore White for libel like that. White himself gave a very different picture in Life in May, 1944: The soldiers of China are hungry. The transportation (lack of it) is such that even if the government could organize an efficient quartermaster corps in the rear there would be no way of getting meats, fresh food and beans to the front in quantity to feed the soldiers... The great burden of the war has been borne by the armies of the Central Government itself. These armies were responsible for the great victories about Taierchwang and Changsha, for the heroic defenses of Shanghai and Hankow and in recent years the Gorges and Rice Bowl area. After six, seven years of war and blockade there was lack of supplies of all kinds, dreadful lack of communications, calamitous lack of trucks, locomotives, and rolling-stock of all kinds. Let Theodore White sit down some time and try to imagine how different the picture might have been if China, like Russia, had had eleven billion dollars worth of lend-lease supplies, both war and medical! White says: "Expropriation had been a cardinal tenet of Communist doctrine in the 1930's, now it was outlawed except in cases of landlords who aided or collaborated with the invader." But missionary John Abernathy of Shantung province says: "The Chinese Communists have terrorized more people and destroyed more property in one year than the Japanese did in eight... If a farmer has more than two acres of land they call him a capitalist, arrest him, publicly humiliate him, take from him all that he has and turn him out to beg." My conversa [ 24 i tions with Chinese men from the same province last winter confirm Abernathy's statement. In the non-Communist city of Tientsin alone, some 400,000 farming people have been driven off their land to become refugees and beggars by the expropriation of their land-and these humble people were certainly not all collaborators. Whatever "economic equalization" the Communists aim at, they pretty well succeed in making beggars of all. "China had become a secondary concern of American strategy by the spring of 1945." When I repeated this to General Wedemeyer, he did not hesitate to label it "absolutely incorrect." White says Wedemeyer was to train a first-class Chinese fighting machine, but "what the machine was to be used for, who was to drive it, where it was to go, was not Wedemeyer's business." The General put the same label on that one! Teddy goes on: "Hurley was the Number One American in China. Wedemeyer, as Number Two, was harassed and angered by Hurley's petulance and nagging." General Wedemeyer calls Hurley a great American, with whom he did not always agree. But Wedemeyer's directives were from the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Hurley did not give him orders, nor did the Ambassador interfere in any way with the accomplishment of his objectives. "The Generalissimo gave the kiss of death to all reform hopes." Step by step, if not quite as fast as White's book was selling, China under the Generalissimo's lead was moving forward toward full constitutional democracy. "Of 1440 delegates (to the National Assembly) 950 were selected before the Japanese war." One should not write in such ignorance as to be open to the charge of falsifying. Originally there were 1,200 delegates. As a concession for unity's sake, 850 new ones, both party delegates and non-partisan, including far more Communists than their numbers warranted, were provided for. Still the Communists refused to participate, but the Young China Party and the Social Democrats sent delegates. It makes White's statement that "the government would not promise to widen the membership of the Constitutional Assembly" one more untruth. It is wholly misleading to say that the choice in China, either for the Chinese or for America, became: "Chiang Kai-shek or Communism... no one ever mentioned a middle way." All negotiations, whether under Hurley or Marshall, have been predicated on the "middle way" of a coalition government with Communists, Democratic League members and non-partisans. But what White advocates, as far as I can make it out, is equivalent to warlord feudalism, semi-independent provinces again; a weakened national army "that cannot dom [ 25 ] inate the entire map of China at one time;" "each province responsible for its own internal security," which was the warlord system. He says the centralization sought in the past is impossible. The great middle group in China "wants peace and will labor for it... If they were well-organized they could guarantee peace... But they lack an army..." More feudal, party armies advocated for China? Heaven forbid! China is farther along the road to democracy than that. "The lines between the middle and the working class are drawn with relentless rigidity." This ill fits a land where from early generations the poor boy who passed the provincial examinations could become a high official, where today the son of a village merchant can become the President of China, the daughter of a Methodist colporteur the First Lady of the Land. Americans can hardly teach China social democracy! So with White's false picture of "revolution stirring and shaking every province, every county, every village in the land-working in the columns of hungering refugees, in the bivouac of every soldier." Like many other Americans, the writer's husband has done relief work or worked with Chinese soldiers all through the war. Not only his experience with soldiers wounded once, twice, three times and still eager to get back to the front lines, but his movies taken in many parts of China during the war give the lie to the distorted picture of White's seething proletariat, soldier, and browbeaten peasant. If White wanted to write a book about the peasants of China, he should have become personally acquainted with them first. PART V THE COMMUNIST BIAS As soon as the author charges that "America's war had cut blindly across the course of the greatest revolution in the history of Asia"-the bias-conscious or unconscious-is apparent. When White sees his own country as the one that blindly keeps the people of half the world from freedom, he is wearing Communist spectacles, whatever his religion. Only so could he write of the war in the Pacific: "Japan's plunge into the South Seas was a turning point in the history of subject Asia, so portentous a phase in a revolution of hundreds of millions of men, that the war itself was reduced almost to a detail." The great revolution is in Theodore's mind, and the Pacific War is a mere detail in which he did not trouble to fight. World revolution is the thing! [ 26 i Throughout the book White approves any expansion of the Communists while the Chinese Government is fighting the Japanese: In 1943 they were in full tide of expansion again. They had nearly eliminated government influence in the province of Shantung by the end of that year, and the Eighth Route Army in Kiangsu was stronger than ever. The New Fourth Army which the Central Government had tried to wipe out (sic!) in 1941 was also flourishing. It occupied all the central part of Kiangsu and most of the south of that province. Its units stretched inland... most of Hupeh and parts of Honan. Approving the race of the Communists against their Government after Japanese capitulation, White says: "Manchuria alone remained in dispute... They did not yield the Yangstze Valley and Shanghai to Chiang out of fear alone; they yielded because they had decided to trade Shanghai for the much richer prize of Manchuria." Who wanted to trade? What right had they to either? "Speeding north in one of the most dramatic marches in all history"-brave, opportunistic Reds! "A radio and courier network linked all Communist centers... The whole description is like that of Tito making hay while the war raged. All sorts of excuses for the Communists. White admits that they were "not for national war against the Japanese but for power for themselves," that they were "complete masters of brutality when brutality becomes necessary." When is it necessary? He condemns Chiang Kai-shek for ruthlessness or brutality, even though not substantiated. His excuse for the Communist army not concentrating large numbers of troops "across the Yellow River or along the coast" is that "any such concentration would have been an open invitation to the Japanese to attack frontally in a battle they could surely win." Quite an admission; but the government troops had to attack frontally whether they could win or not. Another strange admission is that after Stilwell's recall, "For the rest of the war, America's concern in China was politics, not warfare. And politics meant simply an effort to understand and cooperate with the leaders of Yenan." That must have made things difficult for both General Wedemeyer and Chiang Kai-shek. Admitting that the Chinese Communist party "in the 20's" (It was not organized until 1921) had been controlled body and soul by Moscow, its 1927 troubles were partly due to "its own immaturity," partly the ignorant advice of Russia (hard on Russia's best advisers, Borodin and Bleucher!); "from Pearl Harbor on, the US became more and more important to the Chinese Communists, the Soviet Union ever [ 27 1 more remote." The explanation given is: "America had been in Communist mythology a land of predatory capitalism, now by contact with Stilwell they had a new picture of American policy." (The attitude would soon change if they didn't get the lend-lease they were angling for!) "By 1944 the Chinese Communist Party was rooted in its own soil. Sinified, nationalistic..." (Just like Tito's Communists in Yugoslavia!) The Communists loved the American Observer group, Col. David Barrett, Jack Service, etc. They had great hopes of direct American aid. But "we threw the opportunity away. We proved to them that no matter how friendly they might be to us, we would support the government of Chiang Kai-shek against them under any circumstances." Why against them? Weren't both fighting the Japanese? Or could it possibly be that the Communists were fighting Chiang? "Chiang stood for a moment within reach of statesmanship." If he had assented to Communist terms, the authors think it would have meant peace. Not for a moment. As with Hurley, they would have doubled their demands. "Dissent meant bloodshed, and Chiang dissented." Naive authors! Chiang should have thrown over the unified China planned by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, built up by overthrow of the warlords, and returned to the feudal system of "recognizing regional control." "Control of individual provinces by different parties could not lessen the unity of China any more than control of individual states by Democrats or Republicans." Do Republicans or Democrats maintain armies? Do we have no centralized control? This business of "control of individual provinces" is the old feudal warlord system eliminated by the Chiang government all over again. And the presence of the American marines, it is said, helped to prevent the Communist plan. The railroads were protected by US Marines. "Until the government forces moved beyond the protection of that American flag, the Chinese Communists could not attack them." Otherwise they would have, and finally they even ambushed the American Marines. So the authors are quite clearly for the Communists. "Up to now the Communist Party has shone by comparison with the Kuomintang." Only if as a new government they "move energetically forward to reform, can the Communist protestation of loyalty be tested." Loyalty to what? Their lack of loyalty to their government can be proved by their entire past history. When the Kuomintang was admittedly revolutionary and "moving energetically forward to reform," the Chinese Communists under instructions from Moscow joined it to bore from [ 28 1 within. Today similar instructions* direct them to "break up the good feeling between Chiang Kai-shek and the United States," to "do everything possible by civil war to overthrow the government while continuing to negotiate with General George C. Marshall." White says the Communist leaders "would hesitate as little to demand the ultimate sacrifice of thousands or even millions of peasants as they would to offer their own lives as sacrifice." Well, in the twenty years of their history in China they haven't offered their own lives, but they have sacrificed at least tens of thousands of the people. "They have cheated and broken promises; they are bitterly intolerant of criticism," but none the less Teddy is for them, because he is for revolution-world revolution-which makes a Pacific War for our freedom "a mere detail!" He admits that "If we withdrew unilaterally then in ten years all China may be under Communist control-and in measurable yearsall Asia." But this is not "a terrifying prospect" to White. "We must come to an agreement with Russia by direct negotiation or by a conference that includes the two great parties of China." By now he has forgotten "the great middle group wherein lies the hope of China." "We must make clear to the Russians..." and "Suppose Russia will not cooperate?" Then "we must do what Russia does, offer bread and equality in their daily life, adopt a policy of change, we will not clash with Russia, nor can she menace us." It is nice to have White's assurance! What makes him think that Russia, having broken the August 1945 treaty with China from the moment the ink was dry, will keep a treaty with us about China? Having said that "the Open Door policy meant simply that China was 'open' to everyone but the Chinese," I wonder if White would now advocate an Iron Curtain policy which would mean that China is closed to everyone but the Russians? PART VI WORDS-WITHOUT MEANING Sometimes the fluent Teddy writes for effect with little meaning "There was a carefully tailored Chinese general who had spent the war in Chungking where he disposed tired divisions on paper about a continental map." Probably in most countries at war the Minister of War or chief of staff spends the war years in the capital, his uniform carefully tailored, and his armies tired. *See Document No. 16 of the Far Eastern Bureau of the supposedly-dissolved Third International. [ 29 1 "The trouble with almost all the writing that war correspondents did in China was that it was built on press conferences and communiques." The trouble with much of it, including much of White's, was that it was based on hearsay with a Communist bias. The propaganda machine still has enough freedom to grind it out daily. White conjures up his own image of people, puts his own thoughts into them-good or bad-as he does or does not like them, breathes a halitosis into them instead of the breath of life, and says, "Behold the man!" Chiang (whom he later said wanted to keep his hand "on every trivial detail") "divided his administration into three main spheres under Ho Yin-chin, Chen-Li-fu and H. H. Kung." Now watch White creating for all to see. They were "all three smooth and charming," "all of them comrades-in-arms for some twenty years." The reader gets the superficial impression that he is fair, impartial. But White wants to leave the impression that they are "evil spirits-all," so he makes General IHo "responsible.. for the rotting away of the Chinese armies in the field, the starving of Chinese soldiers" (though in Life White had said that for the lack of transportation it was impossible to get food to the front.) White blames Chen Li-fu (graduate of the University of Pittsburgh) for his loyalty to Chiang, sneers at him for respecting China's great past, for thinking the west inferior in culture. Chen "spoke with the tongue of men and angels, was a master of Chinese classical prose, an exquisite calligrapher," but he is a villain in league with the "toughest characters" because he tried to keep the lid on Communism during the war. And what he does to Dr. Kung is to seem fair by admitting "90% of the criticism against him is not true," and then to breathe upon him with this: "gutlessly presiding over a cabinet that reeked of corruption and indecision, surrounded by a kitchen council of cringing sycophants, symbolizing all the ridiculous decay they saw in their nation." Words, words, but poisonous ones for one of the most kindly and generous of men! Sometimes White's wordiness is a substitute for superficialitysometimes it is merely amusing. What can it possibly mean that "in other areas the party had definite particularistic tendencies?" When the pedestrian Gauss felt "fresh forces pressing him on to a new concept of the role of American ambassador?" "Gauss was discarded as he labored to bring this peace to birth." Rather, in the midst of such birth-pangs, he resigned. "The gossips who always knew everything if it were discreditable enough were sure Chiang had made a secret deal with the Japanese." [ 30 1 White spreads the false report for a hundred (or a million) to read and repeat. Too much of what he writes seems to be "discreditable gossip." His apology for Chinese Communist "democracy" is contained in these words: Mao does not speak of voting... will settle differences among themselves by discussion and arbitration rather than by appealing separately to the people at the polls. Similar to the USA if the democratic party represented the whole people; differences between southern and northern democrats would be presented to the people as a whole for confirmation. It is a dishonest analogy, and makes his questions which follow quite insincere-questions about "civil liberties and minority rights" if the Communists come into power. "Will they yield to a peaceful vote, if outvoted?" He has already admitted: "Mao does not speak of voting." Mao (and White) have found a better way of deciding things than appealing to the people at the polls. White says the gangs of Shanghai's underworld have no counterpart in western cities. Such a gang "sank its roots into all the filth and misery of the great lawless city, disposed of its gunmen as they saw fit, protected its clients by violence, was an organized force perhaps more powerful than the police." Ah, give us Chicago or Harlem, a nice law-abiding Al Capone or Baby Face Dillinger-none of these Izzy-the-Eel Chinese "perhaps more powerful than the police." No wonder (with so much current criticism of China) that the wife of one of China's delegates to UN looked up from the morning paper and said to her husband, with the surprise of one who had thought America must be perfect, "Why, there seems to be a murder here almost every day!" White's book with its transparent Communist bias, thundering about all the bad in China, telling little of the good, becomes boresome. At times this is broken by unintentionally amusing bits. For instance: "The Chinese Communist party was born of intellectual ferment." White needs to learn the facts of life. The party was born of Russians (sent by the Third International) in a free-love experiment with Chinese radicals, the offspring a half-caste to be named without benefit of baptism the Chinese Communist Party, and "Commie" or "CP" for short! There is so much about China that White doesn't know, so much he knows which isn't true, that one might be amused by his roaring [ 31 ] and rumbling except for one tragic fact. His Thunder beclouds the real issue. China is inching toward democracy, but at every inch an armed minority obstructs reconstruction, creates chaos, and prevents unity and political-economic democracy. Failing to sense this, White does not see China's struggle as part of the world's ideological warfare. As China was first in the battle against the aggression of fascism, so China is today in the vanguard against the aggression of communism. And China knows, as White does not, that both are totalitarian, both the enemy of freedom. [ 32 1 1 m m m m m 0 M I I 0 1 m I I 0 1 0 0 m i m 0 I I,I 0 m i m I I I UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 3 9015 00115 2647 THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN DATE DUE ',5.. I.,:'lt F-: c1 A'N^ MAY 0 2 1997 I F~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~~~~~~___________~__~~~___ _I ~~_ ~_~