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Puffing to Teach. For the moment in China, Chen Li-fu's constructive social program is overshadowed by his country's emergency. At a time when much depends on what the West thinks of China's Government, liberal forces have grown stronger in Nanking. Chang Chun, whose own version of the East-West amalgam is between Chen's and T. V. Soong's, is premier with the Gimo's blessing. The interim regime that is to prepare for full-scale constitutional government and free elections, by next Christmas, contains few CC clique men, is strong with representatives of the more liberal "Political Science Group." Chen has an interesting explanation of the difference between his CC clique and the "Political Scientists." The latter, he says, were organized by the Kuomintang to fight the reactionary warlords, and are still concentrating on fighting reaction; his group was formed to fight Communists, still does.
In his homey sitting room, bright with embroidered cushions, painted lacquer ware and bucolic scrolls, Chen seems more like a retired and fastidious professor than the politician he is. At dinner, in accordance with the ceremonial niceties of cheng, he likes to discourse on the threefold appeal of Chinese cuisine—color, for the eye; smell, for the nostrils; taste, for the tongue. He is getting plump, is 20 pounds heavier than when he battled Communists. He is a family man. Recently, while his hospitable, bespectacled wife and four sprouting children looked on, Chen displayed a bit of simple Western technology he had learned. Puffing a bit, he showed them how to roller-skate on shiny contraptions just arrived from the U.S.
Halfway to an Amalgam. He will go farther than roller skating toward Western ways, but he wants the West to try to see China's problems through Chinese eyes. When George Marshall, like many another American, last year suggested coalition with the Communists, men like Chen were shocked (although Chen has been too correct to say so). To Marshall and other Americans Communism still seems a distant threat. Chen and his friends have had the Reds breathing down their necks for 20 years. It has been war, bitter, open, accepted. Nationalist Communications Minister Yu Ta-wei accepts the fact of war so completely that he can say: "I don't like it, but I don't blame the Communists for tearing up the railroads." And Chen Li-fu held the following icy dialogue with Communist Leader Chou Enlai:
Chou: "In those years when you were working against the Communist Party and I was underground, I once escaped only five minutes before your men arrived. Let me compliment you on your skill."
Chen: "Let me compliment you on your skill in escaping."
Men who thus accept the fact that they hunt each other to the death are not to be expected to bury the hatchet except in each other's necks. Americans who talk coalition with the Communists sound to the Chinese a little like the late General Patton's unhappy comparison of the German Nazi v. anti-Nazi struggle with the rivalry between U.S. Democrats and Republicans.