Before his congressional questioners Douglas Mac Arthur said: "The greatest political mistake we have made in a hundred years in the Pacific was in allowing the Communists to grow to power in China ... I believe we will pay for it, for a century." MacArthur did not explore in detail the how & why of the great error. That task is undertaken in an angry, hardhitting book published last week—The China Story, by Freda Utley (Henry Regnery Co.; $3.50)-A British-born, U.S.-naturalized ex-Communist whose Russian husband vanished in the Soviet purges of the 30's, Author Utley is a seasoned, firsthand observer of China events: her 1947 book, Last Chance in China, was a prophetic, little-heeded account of how Communism was taking over Asia's key country. She sometimes weakens her case by the partisan bitterness of the ex-Communist; but most of The China Story is a tellingly documented account of the errors and confusion which lost the U.S. its last chance to save free China.
Too Little, Too Late. In its white paper of 1949, the U.S. State Department sidestepped responsibility for the fall of China; nothing the U.S. did or might have done, said the State Department, could have altered the outcome. Author Utley sweeps aside this contention.
U.S. diplomacy, she says, helped the Communists mightily with two blows: 1) the Yalta secret deal (1945) whereby President Roosevelt agreed to Russian rights in Manchuria (naval base at Port Arthur, use of Dairen harbor, operating controls over railways); and 2) the Marshall Mission (1946) in which General Marshall tried to force the National Government into a coalition with the Communists (see THE MACARTHUR HEARING).
How great was U.S. aid to Nationalist China? The State Department and its apologists say that $2 billion to $4 billion was given to Chiang Kai-shek—and squandered by him in ineffectual war on the Communists. Utley winnows the figures, concludes that not more than $360,000,000 (and probably less) in military aid actually got to the Nationalists. A good deal of U.S. aid arrived nine months to a year after the Communists conquered the greater part of China. It never came near to matching the vast aid, in captured Japanese arms, turned over to the Communists by the Russians.
The Agrarian Reformers. The most controversial issue in the China story is still the nature of China's Nationalist Government. Author Utley does not try to whitewash the Chiang Kai-shek regime. But she reviews Chiang's crushing postwar problems: the revival of a national economy beaten down by eight years of war against Japan. "The picture, drawn by popular journalists and authors, of a reactionary Kuomintang preserving a 'feudal' social organization," she concludes, "was in fact entirely misleading."
What are the facts about the land problem which, the anti-Nationalists claim, the Chinese Communists have solved? Says Author Utley: "The Communist solution for rural overpopulation was simply expropriation and liquidation, terror and murder and expulsion of the landowners and richer peasants, and the redivision of the land among the survivors. No liberal government with any regard for justice or democratic practices could have emulated the Communists."