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If much of the world fell for the slogans about the Chinese Reds as mere agrarian reformers, about Nationalist corruption, etc.. it was, says Chiang, partly his government's fault: "We lacked initiative in propaganda and substance in ideology." The Red victory, by Chiang's reckoning, was only 20% military; for the rest he details the case histories of treachery, infiltration, propaganda, the exploitation of an uprooted social order. One of the Reds' earliest tactics, recalls Chiang, was to incite the poor of a village to loot before Communist agents burned down the house of the landlords; then they would let the fire spread to the houses of the poor, too, so that the homeless could be forced into the Red ranks. This is essentially what the Communists' vaunted promises of reform did to all China.
What to Do? Valuable as is Chiang's story of China's disaster, his analysis of overall Communist methods and theory is perhaps the most important part of his book. It is, in fact, a primer whose lessons by now should be—but are not—elementary in the foreign offices of anti-Communist and neutralist countries. Chiang demolishes the widespread, fatalistic notion that the growth of Asian Communism is the "natural result of backwardness.'' It is, above all, the result of deliberate policy and must be countered by deliberate policy. What is needed in the West to fight Communism's "dialectic unity of offense and defense" is total struggle. Chiang's occasionally inept translators render it as "total war," but from the context it is obvious that this is not what he means. On the contrary: the West's position is rendered too cumbersome, too defensive by its preoccupation with hydrogen war. Russia wants the West to think "that if there is going to be no nuclear war, there is not going to be any kind of war at all."
This notion, as Chiang sees it, means paralysis. The West, moreover, ought to stop coddling neutralist nations. Instead, its overall policy should be a coordinated campaign of "indirect warfare" for "liberation" of the peoples enslaved by the new-Red imperialism. This drive should be pushed on all fronts—political, economic, social, psychological, military. Chiang strongly implies that his Formosa army and other anti-Communist Asian forces should be allowed to attack Red China in Russia's rear—without open U.S. involvement. He also suggests that this could be done without provoking a general war. (Such notions, Chiang concedes with what might almost be taken for irony, are likely to cause "certain misgivings abroad.") Above all, fie wants the West to regain the initiative, to realize and proclaim that, in China as in all the world, the Communists stand for reaction; the true revolution is democracy.
What of Chiang Kaishek, the man, at 70? The only personal note permitted to appear is in a short preface—moving and intensely Chinese. Writes Chiang: