Of all Americans occupying elective office, the man who knows most about the Far East is almost certainly Congressman Walter H. Judd (Republican) of Minnesota. On March 15, in the House of Representatives, he made the most comprehensive speech yet made on the subject. As the U.S. war effort in the Pacific gains momentum, his speech gains, if anything, in timeliness. Therefore TIME publishes extensive excerpts from it:
We got into this war through Asia; and if America gets into another war, almost certainly it will also be through Asia.
[But] there are few subjects about which American thinking is more confused today than it is about China. During 1938, 1939, and 1940, when I was going up & down the country reporting what I had seen in China in the preceding years, including a period of five months under the Japanese Army, and trying to awaken my fellow citizens to the dangers of Japan's and our own policies at that time, most people were inclined to say "Oh, don't worry about the Japanese. You are unduly alarmed. After all, the Japanese can't even lick the Chinese, and of course the Chinese can't fight, so what could the Japanese do to us?"
Then one morning Japan gave us the worst defeat in our whole 168 years of independent history. We woke up with a start and said: "Why, those Japanese are good. And if they can do that to us, how in the world have the Chinese been able to hold out against them for four and a half years? The Chinese must be good, too." Our estimate of the Chinese began to soar.
Idealization, Disillusion. Then Madam Chiang came to this country and she captured American imagination as few foreigners ever had, and certainly as no Asiatic ever had. Our estimate of the Chinese soared still higher—too high. To hear many Americans talk, including commentators and columnists, practically every Chinese was wholly selfless in his devotion to his country, patriotically sacrificing everything for freedom and his nation's welfare, and so forth. We who had lived there were concerned, and Chinese leaders were even more disturbed, because we and they knew that it was not a true picture of the situation in China or in any country, and that such over-idealization would inevitably lead to a swing-back into over-disillusionment. We are in the midst of that swing-back now. Those who a year ago could hardly find words good enough with which to describe our Chinese allies now can hardly find words bad enough. To hear them talk now, all Chinese are lazy, are crooks, and grafters, are obstructionists, antiforeign, hopelessly inefficient, split up into political factions interested more in preserving themselves than in defeating Japan, expecting us to do all the fighting, and so forth, and so forth. Between those two extremes, where is the truth? Some of you have asked me that question. I thought if you were going to ask my views, I ought to have a fresh look at the situation. I had been home for six years and I wanted to get the feel of things as they are in China today. So I went out to China last fall for that purpose.
I had worked there ten years as a medical missionary, one year in Nanking, five years in south China, and four years in north China. I was able to talk in their own language with many Chinese whom I had known well in the past, doctors with whom I had worked, nurses we had trained in