The Road to Paris

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Peking admits that 400,000 armed "bandits" (i.e., Nationalist or other anti-Communist guerrillas) are still fighting the Red rule. Formosa's Nationalists claim that the armed resisters number well above a million. But this popular force is not yet effectively organized. The U.S. shows no present intention of encouraging or using the anti-Communists of Formosa or the mainland to undermine Mao in his own backyard. This in spite of estimates that, with a little help from outside, the anti-Communist Chinese could pin down half the Chinese Red army.

"Go On Advancing!" Like many a dictator before him, Mao tries to divert the minds of his people from his unkept promises by emphasizing "foreign encirclement." His press keeps up a din for the conquest of Formosa and Tibet.

Radio Peking last week blared the order of the Red day, exhorted Mao's men on: "The imperialist armies under command of MacArthur await their fate of being totally crushed . . ." The entire people of Korea, of China, of Asia and the whole world are watching your glorious struggle with unbounded respect.

"Advance boldly, advance and go on advancing ! Strike down . . . and continue to strike down! We say again: Strike!"

That was loud talk, but as Mao's troops were proving in Korea, it was not empty talk. It was a set of directions for the road to Paris—and beyond.

* Such American liberals as Owen Lattimore and Harvard's Professor John Fairbank have impugned the motives of the U.S. Open Door policy, by which Secretary of State John Hay in 1899 protected China from a growing web of foreign "concessions"; Hay insisted that China have a right to trade with all nations. In spite of this policy, U.S. investment in China was never large. It reached $122 million in 1937, about a quarter of the U.S. investment in Mexico, and much of the U.S. China investment was in hospitals and schools. Ironically, many U.S. traders in China falsely denounced by the Communists as the mainspring of "U.S. imperialism," joined with the liberals and the Communists in tearing down Chiang Kaishek. Few of the U.S. China traders ever had any drive toward imperialism or any sense of the real nonimperialist meaning of the Open Door policy, as explained by the late Henry Cabot Lodge. Said he, prophetically: "We only ask that we be admitted to this great market [China] upon the same terms as the rest of the world. But within a few years, we have seen Russia closing in upon the Chinese empire. If she succeeds, we will not only be excluded from these markets, but we shall stand face to face with a power controlling an extent of territory and a mass of population the like of which the world has never seen. In the presence of such a colossus of despotism and military socialism, the welfare of every free people is in danger." Lodge said this in 1899, long before the military socialism of the czars had degenerated into the military socialism of the Bolsheviks.

* Total U.S. military and civilian government employees now in Formosa: 44.

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