Lesson From China

Within two weeks, Chinese Communist armies have swept across the Yangzte River to capture the Nationalist capital, Nanking, and encircle Shanghai. Dramatic as the advance is, there is nothing surprising about it. Everyone who understands the situation in China and the Far East has seen the move coming for more than two years. The people who cry now that the U. S. is responsible exhibit a complete failure to study the lesson which must be learned from Chiang Kai-Shek's costly fiasco.

Since the end of the war, Chiang has received more than $3,000,000,000 from the U. S., much of it in actual war material. Still his armies have melted before Mao's Communists. The reason is obvious--incompetent leadership, corruption, and lack of popular support.

Meanwhile, the Communists have successfully sold themselves as the true reformers, the genuine nationalists, the fighters against imperialism. Their agrarian program, their well-behaved armies, and their recent firing on British warships support these claims.

But Mao's speedy military success forces him to start fulfilling his promises. To control the heavily populated and industrial South, he has had to shift his attention from rural areas to the immensely more difficult task of governing cities and running trade and industry.

Reports from the North already indicate dissatisfaction with the Communists' program. Lacking personnel of their own, they have had to retain old officials and management. They have also restricted workers' demands to keep production from collapsing altogether. Feeding huge cities, such as Shanghai, without the rice shipments supplied by the U. S. may well upset the agrarian program, until now the Reds' best advertisement.

Only when Americans realize why Chiang lost will they be able to-take advantage of these failures. More guns than he could use did not win him the essential support. The Chinese have rejected his reactionary government of warlords and bankers. They have rejected the United States for supporting it.

The West will never preserve its influence in Asia by backing governments which have nothing to offer but anti-Communism. It must choose allies who can show that Western democracy has more to offer the people of Asia than the Communists. This is the lesson of the collapse in China.