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Lenin wrote: "The road to Paris lies through Peking." The man who took that road for Bolshevism was China's Red Boss Mao Tse-tung. Four years ago Mao squatted in a cave in northwest China's Yenan wilderness. Last week he lived in a Peking palace and he stood, by able and accurate proxy, at Lake Success defying and denouncing the United Nations. His armies were giving the most powerful nation on earth the worst beating in its military history. The proud and ancient chancelleries of Europe quavered at his name and shrank from his power. Washington was paralyzed by the blow he had delivered and by the prospect of world revolution and disintegration that lay ahead.
Wu's Knees. In two awful hours of rasping vituperation at Lake Success, Mao's proxy, an unknown general named Wu Hsiu-chuan, had torn away all (or almost all) of the free world's illusions about Mao and Chinese Communism. The Mao presented there by his scar-faced servant Wu was none of the men painted by the soft China hands of American "liberalism."
This Mao who spoke with Wu's harsh voice was not an "agrarian reformer" (as the U.S. State Department had called him), nor a "town-meeting democrat" (as Owen Lattimore had called him), nor a Tito faithless to Moscow (as London and Washington had hoped). The Mao who spoke through Wu was China's most successful warlord since Kublai Khan. He laid down the terms for all Asia's subjugation. Upon that, Mao's senior partner, Stalin, prepared to build for the enslavement of the West. Together, Stalin and Mao had traveled more than halfway on the road that leads from Moscow to Paris, via Peking.
Modern history has no more dramatic scene than Wu's speech at Lake Success. The world heard only by dim and dignified hearsay of Hitler raging at statesmen who came to Berchtesgaden; it saw only the absurd arrested motion of Hitler's triumphant jig in the Forest of Compiègne. Millions by television and radio saw & heard Wu spew forth Communism's unappeasable hatred, cloaked in Communism's lies and muscled by Communism's paranoid vocabulary of denunciation.
U.S. Delegate to the U.K. Warren Austin had asked Wu to explain why Communist China had invaded Korea, just as the U.N. police action there was on the eve of success. Said Austin: "Will there be peace or war in Asia? The world awaits anxiously the answer."
While Austin talked, Wu had sat tense as a coiled spring. In appearance, the Wu at whom the statesmen and television viewers stared for an answer bore no resemblance to his master in Peking. Where Mao is fat, moonfaced, stooped and aging (at 57), Wu is well-knit, slant-headed and fortyish. Wu's hands were clasped in the lap of a cheap black suit. As many Orientals do, he betrayed his tension by nervous knee-knocking. When he rose, Austin quickly had his answer: Wu offered war or surrender. Not his knees, but a large part of the free world's were knocking before he finished.
Wu's Speech. The U.S., he said, is the historical foe of China: "The American imperialists have always been the cunning aggressor . . . never . . . the friends of the Chinese people . . . The Open Door was in fact an aggressive policy aimed at sharing the spoils with other imperialists."*