The Naked Communist

of constitutional government without fear of constant insurrection.

This line of reasoning did not appeal to the State Department. Three different times Chiang was ordered to issue an unconditional cease-fire. To make it stick a U.S. embargo was finally placed on all aid to China. Only after United States aid abruptly halted did Chiang reluctantly agree to a cease-fire. General Marshall stated: “As Chief of Staff I armed 39 anti-Communist divisions (in China), now with a stroke of the pen I disarm them.”

This proved a great boon to the Communists. While the Nationalists were being held down by U.S. diplomatic pressure the Communists re-grouped their forces and prepared for the all-out campaign which later proved fatal to China. It is strange that even after Chiang had surrendered his own best judgment and issued a cease-fire, the U.S. embargo was not lifted. The Nationalist forces sat idly by, consuming many of their supplies which they feared would never be replaced. Later, when the Red tide had begun to roll in on Chiang, Congress did finally force through an “Aid to China” bill, but actual delivery of goods was not processed in time to be of any significant assistance.

From 1947 on, the morale of the Nationalist army disintegrated. It seemed apparent to Chinese military leaders that they were the victims of Communist aggression on the one hand and the victims of a total lack of insight by U.S. and British diplomats on the other.

After Chiang issued his unconditional cease-fire, General Marshall appealed to the Communist leaders to reopen negotiations for settlement. The Communists replied, but talked as though they were victors and made demands which even General Marshall labeled as completely unreasonable. They wanted all the rich areas of Manchuria from which they had just been driven. They wanted the National Assembly dissolved and demanded a predominant place in the proposed coalition government.

It was obvious that any hope of settlement under such circumstances was impossible. General Marshall accepted this as a Communist pronouncement that the Communists were no longer interested in mediation and he therefore ended his mission by having President Truman call him home. He returned to America in January, 1947, and immediately became the new U.S. Secretary of State.

The Wedemeyer Report

There were many leaders in the United States Government who were completely dissatisfied with the way the Chinese Civil War had been handled. Therefore, in the summer of 1947, General Albert C. Wedemeyer was sent to Asia under Presidential orders to find out what was wrong in China. Upon his return he submitted a report which was extremely critical of the entire formula for peace which had been followed by General Marshall and the diplomatic corps. He indicated that not only had the interests of free China been violated, but the self-interests of the United States and all her Allies had been subordinated to the whims of the Communists. He recommended prompt and voluminous aid to the Nationalist Government and predicted that the situation could still be salvaged if help were provided in time.

Unfortunately, this report fell into the hands of the very people whom General Wedemeyer had criticized. Consequently, it was buried in department files for nearly two years and was not brought to light until long after it was too late to take the action it recommended.

Meanwhile, the forces of collapse were rapidly moving toward their inexorable climax. During 1947 and the early part of 1948 the armies of Chiang Kai-shek held up remarkably well, but toward the latter part of 1948, the lack of supplies and the internal disintegration of the Chinese economy took its toll. The fall of the Nationalist forces was not gradual—it was sudden and complete. Many thousands abandoned their positions and raced southward in disorganized confusion but other thousands threw down their arms and surrendered to Chinese Communists on the spot.

By September, 1949, the Communist leaders were already wildly celebrating their victory as they set up the “People’s Republic of China.” Shortly afterwards Chiang acknowledged he was temporarily beaten and abandoned the mainland of China in order to flee with the straggling remnants of his army to Formosa.

The State Department White Paper of 1949

The fall of free China produced a wave of boiling indignation throughout the United States. Both political leaders and lay citizens felt that somehow an old ally had been subverted or betrayed. At the time few Americans were really aware of what was involved in the Chinese debacle, but they knew Chiang Kai-shek and America’s interests had suffered a catastrophic defeat. There was widespread demand for the facts.

The men who had engineered the fatal Chinese policy quickly collaborated on a report designed to justify their handling of America’s interests in the Far East. It was called “United States Relations With China” and was published as a “White Paper” in 1949. To many people the arguments in this paper were highly persuasive, but not to all; in fact, the loss of China brought a startling awakening to some of those who had been with General Marshall and had trusted the Communists almost to the very last.

One of these was America’s ambassador to China during that critical period, Dr. John Leighton Stuart.^{88} As a former missionary to China and president of Yenching University; he could not help but evaluate the fall of China as a vast human disaster. He criticized himself for having a part in it and censured his colleagues for trying to cover up their mistakes in the White Paper.

Dr. Stuart frankly declared: “We Americans (who were carrying out the China policy) mainly saw the good things about the Chinese Communists, while not noticing care fully the intolerance, bigotry, deception, disregard for human life, and other evils which seem to be inherent in any totalitarian system. We kept Communist meanings for such adjectives as progressive, democratic, liberal, also bourgeois, reactionary, imperialist, as they intended we should do. We failed to realize fully the achievements to date and the potentialities of Chinese democracy. Therefore, we cannot escape a part of the responsibility of the great catastrophe—not only for China, but also for America and the free world—the loss of the Chinese mainland.”

Concerning the White Paper he said: “I was, in fact, merely one of many persons who were perplexed and filled with apprehension by what they found in this extraordinary book…. It is clear that the purpose was not to produce a ‘historian’s history’ but to select materials which had been used in making the policy in effect at the moment. What had been omitted were materials rejected in the making of policy, materials which had not been relied upon.”

This had been General Wedemeyer’s complaint. The diplomatic strategists were not willing to neither recognize the realities of the situation nor reverse their evaluation of Communist leaders even though the evidence of duplicity was everywhere.

An Amazing Development

By 1949 there was little excuse for any alert American to further deceived by Communist strategy. Dozens of American-Communist spies had been exposed, the leading American Communists had been arrested by the FBI and convicted of conspiring to overthrow the U.S. Government by violence, Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley and a swarm of exCommunist agents had laid bare their souls, the Western Allies had gone through the vicious squeeze play of the Berlin blockade and the United States had spent billions in foreign aid to keep Russia from consuming all of Europe the same way she had taken over China. But in spite of all this, a meeting was sponsored by the State Department in October, 1949, which almost defies explanation.

It was held for the announced purpose of deciding what the “experts” believed should be done in the Far East. The meeting was presided over by Philip Jessup of the State Department, and those in attendance included not only State Department officials, but many select guests who were interested in Asia. Dr. John Leighton Stuart was present and afterwards expressed deep apprehension concerning the slant of the entire discussion. Harold