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Not in years had the Generalissimo and his one-party regime turned a more promising face toward liberalism and democracy. But from Yenan's one-party regime came only snorts of doubt and disapproval. The Seventh Chinese Communist Congress had just met. Communist Boss Mao Tse-tung, Communist Chief of Staff General Chu Teh and other party leaders bravely flexed their political muscles and claimed that they commanded a regular army of 910,000 men (last fall it was 570,000), 2,200,000 partisans, 1,200,000 party members and territories inhabited by 95,000,000 Chinese. They called Chiang's proposed constitutional convention a "mockery of democracy," charged that it would be Kuomintang-packed, accused Chungking's "ruling clique" of preparing to launch a civil war.
The U.S., through the hearty and sensible good offices of Ambassador Patrick J. Hurley, had tried fervently to bring China's hostile factions together. But all of Pat Hurley's shrewd good nature and his Choctaw war whoops had failed to turn the trick. The Ambassador, after a report to Washington and a call at Moscow, was back in Chungking. He had conferred with Marshal Stalin, presumably on Russian intentions in East Asia. One report said that he had smoothed the way for a visit to the Kremlin by China's Acting Premier T. V. Soong and for a possible improvement in the increasingly chilly relations between Moscow and Chungking. Another report said Hurley was double-checking on Stalin's attitude toward the Chinese Communists (Foreign Commissar Molotov is once supposed to have dismissed the Yenan group as "margarine Communists").
Yenan's stiffening attitude toward Chungking had its counterpart in Moscow. Where two years ago there was relative aloofness between Russia and Chungking, there is now undisguised hostility. Moscow's War and the Working Class has tossed epithets like "Mihailovich" and "Quisling" at Kuomintang leaders. Izvestia has belittled T. V. Soong's administrative reforms. Bolshevik has praised Yenan's army and called Chiang's troops "passive spectators at best" in the fight against Japan. A Russian bestseller, Alexander Stepanov's novel Port Arthur, claimed Manchuria's key port as "Russian soil."
In the high political wind blowing across Asia's steppes, these might be no more than straws—but they were disturbing straws and they blew consistently in one direction. Nor could the men who are trying to hold together the pieces of China's political puzzle fail to be aware of the political pattern which Russia had imposed on Eastern Europe in the course of its liberation. To them the threat of a bloc of Soviet-dominated buffer states, torn from China, and extending from Manchuria to Sinkiang (see map) was very real. Should their fears be realized, a climacteric change would have taken place in the pattern of contemporary history.
The Issue. These fears and those of many friends of China and of democracy were set forth last week by two students of Russian and Chinese affairs—Max Eastman, onetime Communist editor, and J. B. Powell, former editor of Shanghai's liberal China Press, who lost part of both feet as a result of mistreatment in a Japanese prison camp. In Reader's Digest they wrote: