CHIANG & CHINA

...Perhaps the most glaring omission in Miss Utley's whole book is her failure to discuss the state of mind of the Chinese people...

...Miss Utley's whole book, by the way, is marked by distorted and forced interpretations of the materials available in the White Paper...

...In the first* place, it appears that the main cause of the Nationalist defeat was our failure to provide ammunition in proper quantities...

...If Miss Utley does not really deny the truth of the observations made by those she condemns, she is nevertheless quite convinced that the whole situation might have been reversed by a few easy expedients...

...Miss Utley's book not only fails to shed real light on what happened in China, but might even be considered a contribution to the cause of Commission insofar as it encourages the belief that headway can be made against Communism elsewhere in Asia by relying on Mac-Arthurian conceptions of "oriental psychology" while completely ignoring the state of mind of either the masses or the articulate public...

...At one point she says, "In this matter of land reform, it was the National Government's sins of omission rather than of commission which were the cause of its decline and fall...

...It will probably suffice to point out that her own favorite China expert, Gen...

...The picture of the Kuomin-tang's demoralization, loss of public support, and incompetence which emerges from all their testimony cannot be cancelled by subsequent events or the current political atmosphere...

...Miss Utley does not deny this contention...

...A large part of Miss Utley's polemic consists of an attempt to imply that all these witnesses were part of one vast conspiracy either knowingly or as dupes...

...There were many more whose attention was completely absorbed by the Chinese scene, who knew little or nothing of the history of world Communism and accordingly failed to see the Chinese Communists in their Marxist-Leninist context...

...All this may be true, but none of it supports her vehement assertion that its collapse was caused by errors of American policy...

...Among these dupes were Generals Stilwell and Marshall...

...Even while charging the United States with "selling out the Chiang armies" she also reproaches us because we "failed to exert pressure on behalf of the liberal reformers as distinct from the phony ones" and failed to help Chiang "emancipate himself from his wife's family...

...Reviewed by Benjamin Schwartz IT would be easy for one who rejects some of Miss Utley's fundamental theses to be goaded by her shrill tones into a blanket defense of those she attacks, but this reviewer is determined not to yield to the temptation...

...Among the many journalists, statesmen, and generals who observed and interpreted the Chinese scene during and after the last war, there were a few Soviet cultists both open and surreptitious...

...Actually, in certain inconspicuous passages, even Miss Utley concedes the factual basis of the testimony referred to above...

...Wedemeyer, has now explicitly and emphatically denied in Senate hearings that lack of ammunition was the cause of the Kuomintang collapse...

...Existing as they did in an environment in which the Communists were pretending to represent the aspirations of the "voiceless millions" (as well as of the articulate intelligentsia), these sins of omission proved to be sins of disastrous proportions...

...The only actors in her melodrama are the Communists, American conspirators and dupes, Chiang Kai-shek, and the great crusaders led by Sen...

...At another point she states, "There are those who maintain that it was inevitable that China should succumb to the Communists because they pretended at least to represent the voiceless millions of peasants . . . how could the illiterate millions of China be expected to know that support of the Communists would lead to their future enslavement to a totalitarian state...

...McCarthy...

...What is remarkable in the testimony of all these witnesses, from that of party-liners to Miss Utley's favorite, Gen...

...I will not enter here into all her interpretations of White Paper statistics...

...Instead, she pleads that the Kuomintang was faced with tremendous historic odds, that the Chinese economic problems were not easily solved, and so on...

...The fact that the Communists were able to use this situation to their own advantage does not disprove the sinister nature of Communism but does prove the moral collapse of the Kuomintang...

...Thus, Gen...

...Finally, there were cautious and conservative gentlemen who regarded a possible Communist victory as an unmitigated tragedy, but a tragedy which could not be prevented unless the Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek, radically modified its direction...

...Wedemeyer, is the uniformity of their observations, however different their interpretations...

...If the Kuomintang's "sins of omission" (which were not unaccompanied by sins of commission) had existed in a vacuum, they might have had no results...

...In spite of the vehemence with which she advances the argument concerning ammunition, there is a lingering feeling on the part of our ex-Communist author that the nature of the Kuomintang may have had something to do with its defeat...

...They concluded on the basis of their observations that there was little that the United States could do to save Chiang's obdurate regime and that the United States would be wise not to waste more of its substance in this bottomless pit...

...Barr's report', which is essentially a treatise on the poor leadership, unwillingness to heed advice, and low troop morale of the Nationalist Army, appears in this book to prove that the Nationalist troops did not collapse because of corruption and that the Chinese Communists were real Communists...

...The Kuomintang's tragic and final alienation of both the masses and the articulate public after the last war is conspicuously absent from these pages...

...There were those who regarded the Nationalist cause as so hopeless that they ardently hoped that the Chinese Communists might be persuaded onto new paths...