SOVIET RUSSIA IN CHINA (392 pp.]—Chiang Kai-shek — Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($5).
One of history's grimmest ironies is that the Communists' lying assurances of their devotion to peace, democracy and progress have always found eager believers, while the Reds' truthful pinpointing of their own goals has been blandly ignored. Until it was too late, only a handful of people ever took seriously Lenin's statement that "the shortest route from Moscow to Paris is via Peiping and Calcutta." Yet who can today deny that he meant just what he said?
No man has fought harder, more steadfastly or more tragically to stem the forces advancing along the Lenin-mapped route than Chiang Kaishek, and no leader in the free world knows those forces better, or has known them longer. Out of his bitter knowledge comes this book, subtitled A Summing-Up at Seventy.* It is extraordinary, among other things, for what it is not. It is neither bitter nor angry; it wastes no time on past glories or on recriminations. It is a coldly impersonal study of what went wrong in China and what ought to be done now. The book is not offhand reading: it is badly organized and repetitious. But its dry, fact-studded text — every line based on the dogged assumption that Chiang is still in the fight, despite his isolation in Formosa — expresses his unbending will better than could rhetoric or fulmination.
What Went Wrong? Chiang's diagnosis of why China fell to Communism — and why the rest of the world is threatened —can be summed up in one phrase: peaceful coexistence. Carefully, Chiang spells out the tortuous story from the day the Communists first lodged themselves like parasites within Sun Yat-sen's National Revolution to the time of the Japanese invasion which the Communists exploited to consolidate for further civil war, down to the moment when, after decades of war and chaos, "finally, the people lost their will to fight Communism."
Chiang apportions blame among Russian maneuvers, Japanese aggression, Chinese dupes and traitors, U.S. naiveté—including Yalta's giveaway of Manchuria and the disastrous U.S. attempt (the Marshall mission) to mediate between the Nationalists and the Reds. But he does not dodge his own responsibility, charges himself with the basic fault of again and again having dealt with Russia and the Communists as men of good will. Each time the Chinese Reds were nearly defeated, "coexistence"' again saved them: "We were overconfident . . . We erred in being too lenient . . ."