With due respect for what the Generalissimo attempted to do in China and what he has accomplished on Formosa, I would like to quote one paragraph from a scholarly article entitled: “What Americans Don’t Know About Asia,” appearing in the June 4, 1951, issue of Life Magazine, written by James Michener, Pulitzer Prize author of “Tales of the South Pacific”:
“To appreciate the greatness of our loss (of China) one must visit Formosa. This island today is the bright spot of Asia. The Nationalist government, shaken to its withers by the debacle on the mainland, has matured astonishingly in the chastisement of defeat. It has established an enlightened commonwealth. Nowhere in Asia is the food problem more fairly handled. Nowhere are justice, human safety and property—those universal measures of good government—so respected and secured. The American cannot visit this island without one lament filling his mind: this might have been China today.”
Let us, in the United States, so act in the moments left of the immediate and perilous hours of this half-way-mark of the Twentieth Century to preclude a similar “chastisement of defeat.” May it never be said, by some lone survivor of an atomic attack, tossed upon a distant isle, the beauty, dignity and grandeur of which is strangely familiar, yet defies Paradise itself: “This might have been America.”
Chapter VIII
Behind the Red Curtain
Immediately after the Communists gained control of China and occupied it from North to South, Russian technicians and advisors poured into the country. Everyone was asking: “What are the Russians doing in China?”
From a few foreigners and Chinese, who had made an early escape from behind the Red Curtain, and from letters later smuggled out of the country, came the revealing truth. Some of the informants had lived under the Communist yoke for as long as eight and nine months, and among these was a United Press correspondent, Chang Kuo Sin.
“The Russians,” he said “began at once to fit China into the political-military bloc of Soviet dominated States which, by the end of 1949, extended from the Danube River to the Pacific Ocean. Their organization was beyond anything China had ever seen, and it certainly proved that they had been planning it for a long time. I was frankly shocked by the influence they seemed to have on the Chinese, from the very beginning.
“The ‘Big Noses,’ as the Chinese called the Russians,” he continued, “took over as fast as they could. They tried to make a good impression on the Chinese by moving right in with them. They ate Chinese food and fumbled with chopsticks, and even wore Chinese Communist uniforms made for them in Russia. They had already learned to speak Chinese and to write a certain number of characters before they arrived. Also, they had been taught some of the old Chinese customs, such as raising the rice bowl as a gesture of friendly greeting.
“The Russians brought in about seventy railroad engineers to supervise the rebuilding of the railroads and bridges damaged by the war. They were especially interested in everything military and sent movie units around to make films of Chinese strategic areas. A friend of mine, who saw them taking pictures, told me that Chinese officers, who had been trained in Russia, were showing them all of the defenses of the country.”