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If the fall of China meant a Communist Far East (as European statesmen assumed that it ultimately would) then Marshall Plan dollars would not be able to help Europe much. All ERP could do for The Netherlands, for example, would be to tide it over until it regained a large part of its former trade with Indonesia. A Communist Indonesia would shut off that possibility. In Malaya the British were fighting a desperate and, at the moment, a winning battle with the Communists. Among their allies were the vast majority of the million Chinese-born in Malaya, who are at present antiCommunist. If China went Red, those Chinese would tend to shift; Communists might then close off Malaya, which now produces trade dollars at the rate of $200 million a year.
The grand strategy of the Kremlin was based on the belief that Europe could not recover if East Asia went Red. Europe apparently did not know that, and neither did those Washington leaders who spoke of Europe as a "better investment" than Asia. It was the same investment.
Deeper Than Blame. The tragedy of the West's underestimate of Communist strength in Asia was not to be found in the mistakes of Chiang Kai-shek or George Marshall. It was deeper and broader than personal or partisan blame could encompass. A whole generation of Western diplomats, soldiers, journalists, scholars, missionaries and businessmen had applauded Westernization and progress in Asia without fully understanding that these facts had destructive as well as constructive effects.
The best reappraisal of the Asiatic crisis was a recently issued 100-page pamphlet, bearing the imprint of Subcommittee No. 5 (chaired by Congresswoman Frances P. Bolton) of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Americans expect almost anything of their Congress except cogent prose. Yet this document was written with analytical precision and moral passion. It explained the Communist success in China as a pattern that could be repeated again & again in any industrially backward country outside the main stream of Western progress.
The Bolton report said:
"China did not begin to move in terms of techniques, the use of industrial power, and production and organization until the 19th Century, about 400 years later than the time the Renaissance enlivened Europe . . . China had to face 19th Century progress with 15th Century politics. Even in Europe the rate of progress generated forces as explosive as those of the great religious wars and the French Revolution . . .
"In medieval Europe, before the growth of the modern state and modern politics, law was based upon immemorial custom . . . Government as a legislature making new law for new conditions, law that nobody knew before it was made, law that would change continually in the future, was unknown. The shift from custom functioning as law to law made by a legislature means a tremendous change from the domination of ideas, doctrine, tradition, toward the authority of command, of organization, of what we call bureaucracy. It is a change in the nature of everything that holds society together and makes a human community into what we call a nation or a state . . .