Our Chances in China
by JOHN K. FAIRBANK
1
PROFESSOR Wen I-to was a leading scholar of Chinese literature in the refugee universities in Kunming. He was a follower neither of the Kuomintang nor of the Chinese Communists but had joined with other professors in that loose union of liberal individuals and politicians without party known as the Democratic League. On July 15 as he was emerging from the office of the Democratic Weekly, of which he was an editor, he was shot down by an unknown assailant.
The Democratic League has taken a stand very similar to that of the Chinese Communists, in favor of coalition government and against the continued one-party dictatorship of the Kuomintang; there can be no doubt that this political assassination, like other recent assassinations, beatings, and terrorism against Chinese liberals, was the work of the right wing of the Kuomintang.
Professor Wen was American-trained, a graduate of the University of Chicago and a symbol of the American interest in China. He was killed by agents of those who hold the real power in the Chinese National Government, which the United States recognizes and has been supporting, the same die-hards who have been using American planes, gasoline, supplies, arms, and ships in civil war against the Chinese Communists.
In this post-war period, we face in China the dilemma that confronts us elsewhere: how to foster stability without backing reaction; how to choose between authoritarian extremes of communism and incipient fascism; how to nurture in a backward country both the economic well-being which only a strongly centralized control can ensure and the individual freedom which goes with representative government and civil liberties; how to reconcile socialism and liberalism. The established regime which we recognize (the Kuomintang) is incompetent to give the mass of individuals economic security, and in seeking to retain power is also averse to allowing them political expression. Alternatively, there is danger that if a new authoritarian regime (the Chinese Communist Party) wins support by giving the individual economic security, it might end by withholding from him political liberty.
Revolution will endanger our liberal interest, yet reaction is even now destroying it. The liberalism in which we believe may be crushed between two authoritarian extremes, neither of which we wish to support. But we seem to prefer the known evils of reaction to the unknown dangers of revolution. Thus we become conservatives, and events now move so fast that conservatives soon become reactionaries. What have we really been doing in China, and what is our true interest there?
When General Marshall went to China last December it was not our intention to back the Kuomintang in civil war. His statesmanlike objectives were to help stop the civil war and to help achieve a coalition government of all parties, in which the Communist Party would be represented and have political rights to seek adherents and thus compete with the Kuomintang for the support of the Chinese people. This coalition government would end oneparty dictatorship by the Kuomintang and usher in a two-party system; at the same time the two parties would merge their armies in a newly reorganized national army, which the United States would help to build. The new coalition government, founded on a new constitution, would receive economic aid from the United States, and China would be set on the road to unity, democracy, and national strength.
This admirable program was agreed to by all parties in January of this year and the Executive Headquarters in Peiping was set up to carry out the cease-fire agreement by sending truce teams composed of Nationalist, Communist, and American representatives to all points where civil conflict might flare up. The Headquarters put on a superb performance.
But the basic agreement for coalition government was nullified by those who had the most to lose by it — that is, the right wing of the Kuomintang. These die-hard anti-Communists used the Russian despoiling of Manchuria as a means of whipping up Russophobe passions and diverting attention from the problem of domestic coalition. They used the Kuomintang party meeting in March to alter unilaterally the terms of the agreement on which coalition government would be based, and so to retain the monopoly of power which they had promised to give up. General Marshall was absent in the United States and this rebuff to his efforts was allowed to pass without public rebuke.
The Kuomintang propaganda directive continues to give priority to all news which plays up RussianAmerican friction and identifies the Chinese Communists with Russia. Increasingly the party secret police have terrorized liberals and advocates of coalition, as if to make it plain that compromise is impossible and further negotiation futile. Thus the Kuomintang right wing, which controls the party that controls the government of China, has sabotaged General Marshall’s efforts.
The Chinese Communists on their part have broken solemn promises and contributed to the flouting of the agreements. But on the whole they stand to gain from coalition government both a recognized political status and an opportunity to spread their influence. In the mixed fighting and negotiation of recent months they have espoused peaceful settlement but have used force when they felt it expedient.
Our support of the Kuomintang has consisted of the fact that, in spite of the collapse of the political part of last winter’s settlement, we have taken steps to carry out our economic and military part of it. Without waiting for the creation of a coalition government which would genuinely represent all China, we have begun negotiations for a half-billion-dollar loan, promised to continue Lend-Lease aid in addition to the 600 million dollars advanced since V-J Day, sold surplus war supplies, transferred ships, and trained Chinese naval forces, all to the benefit of the recognized government of China, which is an unreformed one-party dictatorship. This has strengthened the Kuomintang right wing, which has openly prepared its civil war against the Communists.
We back the Kuomintang for several reasons, legal and practical, but mainly because, with all its evils, it is a known quantity and looks to us for leadership in international affairs. We fear that if it collapses, Russian influence in China will supplant ours.
Because of this fear, while we sincerely profess liberal aims in China, we actually back Kuomintang reaction. We find ourselves as individuals aghast at the corruption and gangster methods of a regime which we nevertheless collectively support. Can it be that our liberal faith does not apply to China? Or do we misconceive the way it should apply?
2
THE American faith of individualism has two tenets: that the ordinary person, “the common man,” should have a chance at economic security, and that he should have liberty to express himself in politics. In our new continent the tenet of economic security has been expressed in the tradition of economic opportunity. The present generation has learned that opportunity is less plentiful than it once was, and that the security and minimum wellbeing of the average citizen must be socially provided for. As a people we are still debating the degree to which this is necessary.
As a people we have no doubt, however, of the need of civil liberty; and the right of the individual to vote and express himself concerning his government, in assembly, in speech, and in writing, is a chief tenet of our faith.
It is because we apply our political faith to China directly, with no allowance for Chinese conditions, that our thinking has become confused. Even now we are cutting our own throats in China, allowing sinister forces to destroy the very things which we have so carefully tried to nurture there.
For a century past we have fostered liberalism in China. Our missionaries have carried the message of the worth of the individual. Chinese officials have studied our Anglo-Saxon institutions. Chinese leaders in education, journalism, banking, and industry have followed our example. Modern China as we know it has been built by men who have used our experience.
How can this leadership, nurtured in American ways, be a passive party to the shooting of liberal professors who dare to speak out on politics as any American would do?
The first thing for us to realize about modern China is that beneath the veneer of westernization and the hopeful developments of our lifetime, the Chinese political tradition still remains authoritarian. The most cursory glance at Chinese history shows that from the earliest period the ruler was above the people, their father and not their representative. The ruler intervened between mankind below and the forces of heaven above. On behalf of the people he performed ritual observances, and the proper performance of these rites maintained the harmony between man and nature. When this harmony failed, as when drought or flood upset the agrarian economy, the emperor not only performed sacrifices but took full responsibility before his people for all natural calamities.
Bearing this total responsibility, the emperor exercised a personal control over his officials, from whom he expected a personal loyalty. The imperial administration was a pyramid capped by the emperor, who was the final arbiter, the One Man, by whose virtuous example all were inspired and on whose favor all things depended. This authoritarian system was buttressed through the centuries by making entrance to official life depend upon a mastery of the Confucian classics, which inculcated loyalty to the ruler.
China was governed in terms of the Confucian tradition until 1911, long after Chiang Kai-shek and all his leading ministers had come into the world and were growing up in it. It is certainly to be expected that there should be in the present Chinese government one man at the top, who makes all final decisions, whose favor is indispensable, who rules without reference to election processes, who sets an example of right conduct in his personal life, and who puts the highest store upon the loyalty of his ministers to him personally.
Another concomitant of the Confucian tradition was the imperial regime’s monopoly of organization. No group of persons might meet, no association be formed, without official sanction; this was essential in a land where a few thousand civil officers maintained a government over millions, ruling superficially by virtue of tax collections, the imperial prestige, force in reserve, and the acknowledged right to a monopoly of government. It is consistent with Confucian tradition, if not with Western liberalism, that all associations and meetings for whatever purpose in China today, like all publications and other forms of organized expression, are required to be registered with the Ministry of Social Affairs and are subject to police control.
There has never been a two-party system in China that worked; and there has always been a monopoly party in power, a party of officials organized on the basis of loyalty to the ruler. We should recognize that behind all the rapid modern development of China and the statements made to us about Chinese democracy there lies the inertia of centuries, which inheres in the mass of a whole continent. We cannot expect democracy in China soon or on our own terms, but only on terms consistent with Chinese tradition, which must be gradually remade.
3
A SECOND thing we must recognize in our approach to China is that economic security comes before political freedom in the wants of mankind. A man will think of food before he thinks of free speech. Our own tradition of political liberty has grown to maturity in an expanding economy, where the individual’s standard of living has been rising. We have grown accustomed to a freedom of the individual which is unknown among Asia’s millions — freedom to go and come, freedom to buy what we will, to read what we choose, to say what we think, to live as we please. This freedom goes with an economic life above the subsistence level. It is the product of our economic well-being, which makes literacy, education, travel, and leisure available to average people.
Our aid to China today is based on the realization that we cannot preserve our own freedom politically if the rest of the world lives hardly above the subsistence level economically. If the Chinese peasant, to keep his belly full, must acquiesce in dictatorship and forgo political self-expression, our own political freedom is sooner or later threatened. We want to see liberal democracy develop in China, but we cannot expect political progress to be based on economic deterioration, and we therefore hope for agrarian reforms and wise industrialization which will raise the peasant’s standard of living, allow the government to help improve his livelihood, and permit him to become an educated citizen who participates in the process of government.
Unfortunately we find that the Chinese Communists, who we suspect may be eventual enemies of the political freedom of the individual, are the most effective protagonists of the economic well-being of the peasant. By helping the peasant to meet his economic wants, they gain his political support. Americans may see in this a mere device to get political control; the fact remains that it works and we should do well to study it.
There is no simple answer on the Chinese Communist question. Little as we like to do it, we must hold in mind facts and opinions both good and bad. If we look at North China and see only the specter of Russia, we shall not get realistic conclusions on which to base a policy.
The essential fact which underlies the growth of the Chinese Communist movement is that Chinese life now faces the possibility of rebirth. The potentialities of change are at hand. The technology of modern science can be applied to the life of the peasant on the land, and both the peasant and his way of life can be re-created. This amounts to a revolution of thought, of tradition, in an entire civilization.
We can easily acknowledge the pressure for change in China. The impact of Western industry has destroyed the ancient handicraft economy. Western medicine has stimulated the survival rate, so that more girls reach the childbearing age, and the already excessive population is increasing still further. Modern scholars have remade the ancient language. The Confucian ethic has been discredited, but no new ethic has taken its place. Women have been emancipated. The ancient culturism of the Middle Kingdom has been transmuted into nationalism, pride of culture providing the stuff for pride of race and nation. All these revolutionary changes of Western life during the last several centuries have been set down before a vigorous people whose traditional way of life has been shattered, and they are left to choose. We have given enough Chinese enough education for them to see visions of what might be done. Small wonder that students of the leading Americansponsored Chinese universities are the most active recruits among the Communist cadres in Yenan and Kalgan; they are there to use their modern education in remaking Chinese life.
4
THE Chinese Communist Party has capitalized upon this pressure for change. It has become the acknowledged champion of agrarian reform, in a land of farmers, and has thereby set up its claim to be the party of progress. Chinese intellectuals generally recognize that the Communist Party is the party of change and is now the leading force in the Chinese revolutionary process.
This is not surprising when one looks at the Kuomintang. Year after year the same faces have appeared in its high positions; offices are reshuffled, but still the same old faces appear at different windows. Together as a group under Chiang Kai-shek the Kuomintang leaders came to power in the nationalist revolution of 1925-1927, determined to unify their country and to free it from foreign domination, and in this they have largely succeeded. Having succeeded, they have developed no higher aim than the preservation of Kuomintang power. And since the revolution, if allowed to continue on its course, would inevitably bring new leaders to power, they have perforce held back the revolution.
For this reason, during the war they avoided popular mobilization. They have also opposed a literacy movement of mass proportions because that would create mass organization not easy to control. Unlike the Communist Party, the Kuomintang could not arm a peasant militia for mass resistance during the war because the Kuomintang had no program of change for the peasant by which to retain his allegiance and control him once he was armed. The Kuomintang has little desire for change because it represents classes in power — landlords in the countryside, and money manipulators in the cities — who are at one with the officials in having nothing to gain by revolution.
It has therefore not been possible during recent years for the Kuomintang to take advantage, except by lip service, of the tremendous potentialities of the Chinese revolution of which it was once a protagonist. During all this time any genuine Kuomintang effort to organize the Chinese peasant masses for their own betterment could have got results. But only the Communists have done it effectively.
The ideals in terms of which the Communist Party enlists the allegiance of young China deserve our careful attention. Leaving aside ideological terms, the Communist appeal is made as follows: —
1. The object of the revolution is a new life for the masses of China. This new life must begin with the economic betterment of the peasant; to this he will respond, not to mere slogans or ideology.
2. The economic betterment of the peasant, involving his literacy and technological training, can be achieved only by the exercise of political power, which is now the vested interest of the landlord and moneyed official classes.
3. To attain political power it is necessary to have a political organization stronger than any number of uncoördinated individuals; the impotence of the individual in China is being proved every day now, in the assassination of liberals.
4. A party can be effective only if its members submit to party discipline; in party councils all may have a voice, but once the party decision is taken, all must obey it. In self-defense the party must work partly in secret. In self-defense it has an army.
5. The revolution must be guided at every step by the needs of the peasant. Party cadres must live in the villages, work with the peasant, eat his food, lead his life, think his thoughts. Only thus can the party draw perpetual sustenance from the masses and lead them in their regeneration.
To an observer, the most striking thing about these Communist Party articles of faith is the fact that they are posited upon the Chinese peasant’s primary need of economic betterment, the urgency of which can be seen in the obvious suffering of millions, rather than upon any need of political expression, which the Chinese peasant has never known. Ideally, when a recruit joins the cause, his party training changes his life. Work for the masses and loyalty to the party become a religious creed, and lesser selfish aims wither away. The virtue of unselfishness endows the Communist leadership with a moral claim to conduct the government, and the Communist regime gains that tacit acquiescence of the populace which in ancient times was said to constitute the mandate of heaven to rule the empire.
As Communist Party political control is extended, the movement is spoken of as a liberation, freeing the peasant from feudal bonds of exploitation and ignorance. The Yenan paper is the Liberation Daily. Visitors to Kalgan stay at the Liberation Hotel. Party workers in the villages help the peasant to express himself, teach him to read, to discuss his problems, and to vote in elections, try to give him a new self-respect and a new personality as a cooperative and politically-minded citizen. This effort at spiritual regeneration, however limited it may be in practice, outshines the Kuomintang effort.
5
FROM these considerations we may conclude that an authoritarian one-party system is not abnormal in Chinese politics, and it will require long-continued efforts to implant a two-party or multi-party system there. The authoritarian nature of communism, which would be an obstacle to its success in this country, is no bar to its success in China. Secondly, material want presses so heavily upon the Chinese farmer that he will support any regime which gives him economic well-being, whether or not it gives him political freedom to participate in government. Thirdly, the Chinese Communist movement in its ideals has a spiritual vigor, a moral claim to leadership, which cannot easily be extinguished.
The facts pose these questions: Must we not prepare sooner or later to come to terms with Chinese Communism ? What chances are there that the terms will be satisfactory? Will not the Chinese Communists side with Russia against us in time of crisis? Here we must estimate our chances soberly and objectively, knowing that extremist answers are often easy but not helpful.
The Chinese Communists are genuine communists and are proud of it. Their affinity with Soviet Russia is doctrinal and theoretical; it does not need to be practical or procedural. Concrete evidence of their maintaining close contact with the Soviet Union is surprisingly scarce; the Russians on their part maintained a surprisingly correct record of wartime aid to Chungking, not to Yenan.
The Communists’ affinity to Russia is based also on the similarity of Russia’s actual problems and experience in remaking a backward agrarian society. Nothing in American experience is so similar.
The Communist Party regime is plainly not a Moscow puppet. It is composed solely of Chinese, who for twenty years have faced Chinese conditions without appreciable outside aid and have painfully worked out a program suited to the Chinese soil. North China is not a counterpart of Eastern Europe.
The Communist Party record is patriotic against Japan. They gained strength by rousing and organizing the Chinese farmer against the Japanese invader. They understand the latent vigor of Chinese nationalism, which the Kuomintang has often turned against them. Anyone aspiring to lead modern China must reckon with the nationalist movement for independence from foreign domination. This means that any Chinese Communist allegiance to Soviet Russia would need to be practical and expedient, even circumspect, rather than blindly fanatical and unquestioning.
We must understand that the Chinese tradition in foreign relations — “Use barbarians to control barbarians” — has not been extirpated. For years past the Kuomintang government (together with the Catholic Church in China) has been doing all in its power to stimulate us to take care of its Russian and Communist problems, just as it relied upon us to take care of the Japanese problem. This trick of balancing one foreign power against another goes far back in Chinese history and is part of the manipulative genius of the Chinese middleman in politics and diplomacy. Just as the cleverest Chinese entrepreneur is he who becomes a middleman in trade, and profits from the transactions of others, so the national instinct in international relations has been to find the middle ground between foreign antagonists and so maintain a bargaining position with them both. Unless we force the Chinese Communists to depend upon Russia for their very survival, which they do not do at present, we might expect them to remain in future as relatively independent of Russia in their domestic affairs as they have been in the past. But if in our fear that they will support Russia in power politics we now supply their opponents with arms, we are likely to force them into the very thing we dread, a Russian alliance.
Will not the Chinese Communists develop a police state in order to preserve their power? Is it not inherent in the party dictatorship that it must be preserved by a Gestapo terror? Can we afford to let China fall under such a regime?
Since Kuomintang China is living increasingly under Gestapo control, with its complement of concentration camps, organized bullies, and intimidation, this last question is losing much of its force. China is already a kind of police state, and our choice is between two evils.
We should never forget our limitations. We can hinder or accelerate the revolutionary process in China, but we cannot stop it. At present, for better or worse, it is a Communist Party revolution. At some future time the revolutionary movement may cease to be led by the Communist Party But the important question is not whether it will develop, but how. Into a bureaucratic tyranny or a people’s commonwealth? Another despotism or a new type of democracy, adapted to Chinese conditions? By evolution through coalition government and political methods, or by violence and prolonged destruction?
Our problem is, therefore, how to influence the Chinese revolutionary movement in our proper interest so that it will not sacrifice the individual to the state, will not subordinate China to a foreign power, and will not surround itself by an iron curtain which cuts off contact.
In this connection we should remember, for example, that the present Russian xenophobia stems partly from the Allied attack and blockade of the Bolsheviks after the First World War. In China the iron curtain has thus far been the Kuomintang blockade of Communist China, not a blockade created by the Communists but one raised against them. Already the Chinese Communists show the evil effects of this blockade, which has starved them intellectually as much as materially. They are long on theory and short on facts, lacking in detailed knowledge of the outside world but ready with general conclusions about it.
Even their leadership is an easy prey to its own propaganda, prone to accept doctrinaire answers to questions which we feel must be answered by practical experiment rather than dogma. The spiritual fervor which gives their movement strength leads them to a priori conclusions, and they readily jeer at British socialism as a sham and foresee the utter collapse of capitalism in America, expecting that unemployment, inflation, and the Negro problem will sooner or later tie us in knots. They doubt that capitalist America can have a fundamentally friendly policy toward them. When we confirm this doubt by giving Chiang arms to use against them, we are ourselves being doctrinaire, and are ourselves setting lines of inevitable conflict. This is not to our interest.
We should also note that humanitarianism is an important part of the Chinese Communist dogma. Whatever may have happened in Russia, this ideal has not yet been perverted in Communist China, and Communist cadres there are sincerely intent on the uplifting and regeneration of their fellow men. Meanwhile the Communist propaganda toward Kuomintang China has been increasingly on a liberal line, protesting violations of civil liberty, demanding freedom of speech, assembly, and publication, and denouncing the callousness of officialdom to human suffering. However ruthlessly the news and propaganda monopoly of the Communist Party may try to control thought in their own areas, it is plain that they seek to align themselves with the Chinese liberal tradition, which is mainly the tradition of individual self-expression on the part of the scholar class. From early times the courageous scholar has been the man entitled by his learning to speak out against the misdeeds of authority. This tradition is one hope of liberalism in China.
Whether Communist China can eventually reconcile a socialist economy with individual liberty we do not know. As industrialization and education progress, it is not likely that modern China will acquiesce forever in government by a Gestapo, either right or left. But in any case we cannot erase Communism from the Chinese political scene, however many tanks and planes we give to Chiang. If we oppose the revolution blindly, we shall find ourselves eventually expelled from Asia by a mass movement.
These considerations suggest that our best chance lies in developing and maintaining contact with Communist China as fully as with the rest of China — the opposite of a policy of quarantine or cutting adrift. For example, American universities should develop direct contact with, and lend the most active support to, leading Chinese universities, including the few which are growing up in Communist areas. Students should be exchanged with all areas.
We should see that relief supplies go where they are most needed, regardless of politics. Our technical, financial, and other assistance should be available freely to all sides. We should be less immediately concerned to secure freedom of commercial opportunity for our own benefit than to secure freedom of information and of the press and of travel — in short, freedom of contact.
Freedom of contact, meaning reciprocal contact, is our chief hope of avoiding fatal misconceptions on our part as to Chinese realities, and of contributing some of our own liberal faith and values to the revolutionary process in China. In the long run it is our best chance of nourishing and sustaining both liberals like Professor Wen I-to in the face of Kuomintang reaction and those humanitarians in the Chinese Communist Party who seek the liberation of the individual. If our liberal political principles are as universally valid as we believe, we must wait for modern China, communist or otherwise, to realize it. We cannot compel her to do so, and the continued use of American force, masked as Lend-Lease or other aid to Kuomintang armies, will only invalidate our cause and rouse force against us.