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"Medieval Western man agreed or consented to the substance of known and constant law. Modern Western man has never fully known his future law, for it is always still to be made. Agreement or consent is given not to the substance, but to the authoritative source that has the right to make it. In order to establish democracy, one has to establish not only free choice of representatives; one has first to establish the legislative function that representatives are to exercise. The implanting of democracy in custom-ruled societies requires simultaneous performance of two great tasks which, in the West, were carried out in sequence ...
"Chinese society remains one where ideas in everybody's mind still have a greater role, and organized government a smaller one, than in the West. This is a favorable condition for Communism, with its elaborate and ambitious theoretical doctrine, ready for sale to anyone shopping for new doctrine to replace the old . . .
"We in the West have some faith in our own ability to go forward without a handbook, to find the unpredictable solution of a problem by working it out, because we have done so for several centuries. That is not a readily transmissible faith; it has not been packaged like Marxism."
Under the Foam. Even with this ideological weapon, Communism could not have won China without violence.
The role of the Chinese Red army has never been clear to Westerners, who have been taught to look upon it as a sort of sustained Wat Tyler's rebellion of enraged peasants. Says the Bolton report:
"The army is the necessary basis for the greatest element in Chinese Communist strength, the control of territory. No area in China has become Communist since 1928 otherwise than through military occupation."
The Communists in China welcomed war because it hastened the undermining of society that Western progress had begun. The Bolton report describes the process:
"The Chinese have not, for much longer than a decade, been able to take for granted, as Americans take for granted, that the basic political order of the present is stable, and that all private calculations can be based on such an assumption. Thus the Chinese commercial class cannot make long-term contracts with confidence that the Chinese state will endure as long as the contract . . . Corruption thrives on these conditions, but corruption is but one aspect of the consequences. The tendency to milk the soil instead of conserving it, to spend before money loses value instead of saving, to reap a quick profit instead of engaging in long-term constructive efforts, to maintain what the monetary economists call 'liquidity of assets,' but in easily salable goods rather than money—all these underlie the corruption. Corruption is only the froth and foam on the crest of this massive ground swell of civic demoralization."