On the Other Hand: A Reply to Chester Bowles
SHAW, BRUNO
A Reply to Chester Bowles The China Delusion By Bruno Shaw The New Leader's February 22 "Asia 1954" issue contains an article on India by a fine, tolerant, intelligent man who until recently was...
...He recommends a different solution...
...Bowles know that the Communists have not lost the support of the Chinese people...
...This was wonderful indeed: we would help the paranoiac...
...One of these recommendations calls for us to "develop policies which may create tensions in the Soviet - Chinese relationship and loosen the ties between these two Communist nations...
...How does Mr...
...Let us not forget that, of the 22,000 Chinese Red prisoners of war in Korea, 98 per cent freely chose Formosa rather than return to Red China...
...Would it alter in any way, Mr...
...Let me offer a parallel case...
...Bowles warns us that we are making a mistake by helping to arm 80 million Pakistanis at the cost of alienating 360 million Indians...
...Let us alone," he pleaded...
...Bowles, are now talking as Jan Masaryk did...
...India is on the record for appeasement of Red China, and against isolation of the aggressor, not to speak of entering into a defense pact against him...
...Bowles offers us a program which leaps in two opposite directions at the same time...
...In his opening statement, Mr...
...Bowles, the inevitable certainty of domination of all the Chinese populations in the many Pacific and Asian countries by a Communist China...
...Does this mean that, if the victor in a civil war is utterly ruthless and savage, an intimidated and brain-washed population is necessarily with him...
...Either course would, in my opinion, be utterly disastrous to what is left of the free world...
...Did that mean that we deserved to fail...
...Bowles concludes by stating categorically that, if Chiang Kai-shek "had carried out land reforms in China on the mainland as he is now doing on Formosa, he might not have lost the support of the Chinese people...
...An honest look at American history, for example, will reveal that we had our full share of grafters and crooks in government, that we had our carpetbaggers, that we imposed inhuman burdens upon the South after the Civil War (which, at one time, Congress was convinced we had lost...
...In the course of this article, Chester Bowles devotes a few paragraphs to China...
...He has never been to China, but, after several years of close contact with the leaders of India, he finds himself able to recommend a "unified policy toward Asia" based on a premise which is astonishingly naive and wholly false...
...Bowles's recommendation of a moment before, unless it is his plan to bribe the Chinese Communists to split from Moscow by telling them in advance that, once they do so, we will help to isolate them...
...Or was graft and greed in our army and among purveyors to the armed forces even as late as the Spanish-American War (in which our men died in large numbers from rotten food and disease) a sure sign that our government did not deserve to live, or that it would never outgrow these and many other grievous faults that afflicted us...
...If such a defense program could be set up, it would undoubtedly solve the free world's problems in the Far East...
...You will have succeeded then in sanctioning a counterpart in Asia of the Soviet Union in Europe...
...Bowles is trying to persuade us to build a defense system upon a foundation that is wholly non-existent...
...But instead of giving that idea an opportunity to jell, Mr...
...and we thought that, once the battle was won, we would see a "brave new world...
...Jan Masaryk was guest speaker at the Overseas Press Club of America on his last visit to the United States...
...We asked him why he and other democratic leaders did not make a stand against the Soviet encroachment that was obviously beginning to devour his country...
...These two states, each desirous of imposing its will upon the entire world, agreed to settle for half and to divide the world between them—with Japan permitted to glean what it might...
...So many well-intentioned program-makers fail to relate conditions on the Chinese mainland to others which have been analogous to them...
...The fact is that there is no possibility of the kind of multilateral defense he offers so invitingly...
...I contend that the only way we will ever know is when Chiang's forces have an opportunity to land once again on the mainland...
...That is a splendid beginning...
...We were the "intolerants" of our time, who predicted that nothing good could come of appeasing Moscow...
...An independent, multilateral defense program, supported by all the countries of South Asia and directed against aggression from any source," says Mr...
...You will have produced, by bribery or by some as yet unknown method of coercion, a rift between two monstrous states, each of which has the same objective—the subjugation of all other states on its respective continent...
...And, knowing what the objectives of aggressive Communism are everywhere, would not the ultimate result be the emergence of a Communist Asia...
...Bowles, "could mobilize Asian nationalism against the spread of Communism...
...We had for a decade in Europe the Nazi state, side by side with the Soviet Union...
...This, of course, is totally opposed to Mr...
...But Mr...
...In 1941, the schizophrenic attacked the paranoiac...
...who declared that this was the same old Bolshevik Russia, and that it behooved us to take preventive measures against it—as we had failed to do against Nazi Germany and Japan in their rise to world menace...
...This sounds plausible and quite simple...
...A few months later, Jan Masaryk was thrown out of the window of his home in Prague, and killed...
...Now, Mr...
...And even if graft and inefficiency were greater in the Chinese Nationalist regime, does this mean that we must try to smother it now, when it is proving that it has learned so much from experience...
...As part of his proposed isolation of Communist China, Mr...
...Those of us who had seen Communism in action in earlier years were wholly skeptical of this plausible but unrealistic notion...
...Bowles are now talking...
...But in what, Mr...
...Bowles would have us go back to running over the same old trail...
...Indian leaders, and Mr...
...For all their sakes, I hope their views do not prevail, for they are well-meaning and good people and they deserve a better fate than that of Jan Masaryk...
...All we have to do is make friends with the Chinese Communist rulers, bribe them out of their friendship with Moscow, or scatter broken glass over the political roadway between Peking and Moscow, and we're in...
...We know what we are doing...
...Bowles—conceding that in some mysterious way you could accomplish this, which I do not think you can...
...If we can cause a split between the Chinese Reds and the Russian Reds, all will be well, he says...
...Bowles, "is one of the main challenges to imaginative Western statesmanship," which, in his opinion, it would be "inexcusable" for us not to follow, especially "with the tragic example of China etched in our minds...
...Bowles presents this "challenge" (the splitting of the Peking-Moscow axis) as a policy it would be inexcusable for us not to follow, he declares that "with good leadership in free Asia now and with positive, timely American policies, independence and freedom from Communism can be secured in that crucial section of the world which will eventually isolate the Communist world, even if it still includes China...
...Would it not at one blow legitimize a vast fifth column in every Pacific and Asian country...
...Bowles says: "To see why Communism won in China and to apply that lesson to the rest of Asia before it is too late is our main task...
...Immediately after Mr...
...Let me conclude with a brief recollection of another highly intelligent man who in his time talked as present-day Indian leaders and Mr...
...A Reply to Chester Bowles The China Delusion By Bruno Shaw The New Leader's February 22 "Asia 1954" issue contains an article on India by a fine, tolerant, intelligent man who until recently was United States Ambassador to New Delhi...
...Then, when we became embroiled in the horrifying business of world war (from which it had been obvious from Nazi and Japanese provocation we would not be able to escape), we felt quite sure that World War II was precisely the kind of psychiatric treatment that would snap our Soviet friends out of their Leninist fantasies...
...This, says Mr...
Vol. 37 • March 1954 • No. 11
