AID FROM ASIA

"You never hear the one that hits you," the soldiers say. This observation, both comforting and terrifying, applies also to the great nations and civilizations now on history's casualty lists. When disaster comes they are looking the other way, or else they are certain that the disaster does not matter to them.

Of Calves' Feet & Sorrow. Last week U.S. leaders were looking at disaster in China--but not looking very hard. Their detachment clearly said that this bullet did not bear their number. As good humanitarians they would continue to "give aid" to China, with something of the air of a squire's lady bringing calf's-foot jelly to the drunken and dissolute mother of 13. If mother & brood went Communist, that was solely because of her moral disorders. One had, after all, brought the jelly; only so many calves had so many feet; and there were the deserving poor, the non-corrupt poor, the understandable poor on the west side of the village who had to have some jelly, too.

So a smug and desultory debate on "aid to China" droned along in Washington conference rooms. Nobody seemed to think --certainly nobody spoke--of how the U.S. was to get the aid from China it would need in the years to come. Nobody said: "This is our war, and this is a major battle." Nobody asked for whom the bell tolled.

Western leaders, convinced that China is about to fall, are sorry for the Chinese. It does not occur to them to be sorry for themselves and for their children, who may have to fight to retrieve what has been lost in the last month in Asia.

Of Capabilities & Intentions. As of last week, Washington had arrived at these conclusions about China's prospects:

1) Chiang Kai-shek may be defeated by the Reds, largely because too many of his aids are "corrupt."

2) No special effort will be made to help him in his extremity, nor will the U.S. pressure him to step down and make way for anyone else.

3) A coalition government of Communists and non-Communists will wind up under the complete domination of the former. Some Washington advisers who recognize this still think that the U.S. should aid a coalition government in the hope of strengthening the nonCommunists. How this would work out was not made clear.

4) Washington has given no serious thought to the question: What next? It has no plan for stopping a repetition of the Chinese tragedy elsewhere in Asia. It has no estimate of how hard it would be to liberate China, once Communists got full control.

Interviews with leaders in London and Paris last week produced identically worded hopes that the U.S. would not "throw good money after bad" in China. Dr. J. H. van Roijen of The Netherlands delegation to U.N. hoped that no additional efforts would be made to save China. In the next breath, he went on to express the fear that if China went Communist all other Asiatic countries would sooner or later follow suit. "In Indonesia the repercussions would be disastrous," he said.

If the fall of China meant a Communist Far East (as European statesmen assumed that it ultimately would) then Marshall Plan dollars would not be able to help Europe much. All ERP could do for The Netherlands, for example, would be to tide it over until it regained a large part of its former trade with Indonesia. A Communist Indonesia would shut off that possibility. In Malaya the British were fighting a desperate and, at the moment, a winning battle with the Communists. Among their allies were the vast majority of the million Chinese-born in Malaya, who are at present antiCommunist. If China went Red, those Chinese would tend to shift; Communists might then close off Malaya, which now produces trade dollars at the rate of $200 million a year.

The grand strategy of the Kremlin was based on the belief that Europe could not recover if East Asia went Red. Europe apparently did not know that, and neither did those Washington leaders who spoke of Europe as a "better investment" than Asia. It was the same investment.

Deeper Than Blame. The tragedy of the West's underestimate of Communist strength in Asia was not to be found in the mistakes of Chiang Kai-shek or George Marshall. It was deeper and broader than personal or partisan blame could encompass. A whole generation of Western diplomats, soldiers, journalists, scholars, missionaries and businessmen had applauded Westernization and progress in Asia without fully understanding that these facts had destructive as well as constructive effects.

The best reappraisal of the Asiatic crisis was a recently issued 100-page pamphlet, bearing the imprint of Subcommittee No. 5 (chaired by Congresswoman Frances P. Bolton) of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Americans expect almost anything of their Congress except cogent prose. Yet this document was written with analytical precision and moral passion. It explained the Communist success in China as a pattern that could be repeated again & again in any industrially backward country outside the main stream of Western progress.

The Bolton report said:

"China did not begin to move in terms of techniques, the use of industrial power, and production and organization until the 19th Century, about 400 years later than the time the Renaissance enlivened Europe . . . China had to face 19th Century progress with 15th Century politics. Even in Europe the rate of progress generated forces as explosive as those of the great religious wars and the French Revolution . . .

"In medieval Europe, before the growth of the modern state and modern politics, law was based upon immemorial custom . . . Government as a legislature making new law for new conditions, law that nobody knew before it was made, law that would change continually in the future, was unknown. The shift from custom functioning as law to law made by a legislature means a tremendous change from the domination of ideas, doctrine, tradition, toward the authority of command, of organization, of what we call bureaucracy. It is a change in the nature of everything that holds society together and makes a human community into what we call a nation or a state . . .

"Medieval Western man agreed or consented to the substance of known and constant law. Modern Western man has never fully known his future law, for it is always still to be made. Agreement or consent is given not to the substance, but to the authoritative source that has the right to make it. In order to establish democracy, one has to establish not only free choice of representatives; one has first to establish the legislative function that representatives are to exercise. The implanting of democracy in custom-ruled societies requires simultaneous performance of two great tasks which, in the West, were carried out in sequence ...

"Chinese society remains one where ideas in everybody's mind still have a greater role, and organized government a smaller one, than in the West. This is a favorable condition for Communism, with its elaborate and ambitious theoretical doctrine, ready for sale to anyone shopping for new doctrine to replace the old . . .

"We in the West have some faith in our own ability to go forward without a handbook, to find the unpredictable solution of a problem by working it out, because we have done so for several centuries. That is not a readily transmissible faith; it has not been packaged like Marxism."

Under the Foam. Even with this ideological weapon, Communism could not have won China without violence.

The role of the Chinese Red army has never been clear to Westerners, who have been taught to look upon it as a sort of sustained Wat Tyler's rebellion of enraged peasants. Says the Bolton report:

"The army is the necessary basis for the greatest element in Chinese Communist strength, the control of territory. No area in China has become Communist since 1928 otherwise than through military occupation."

The Communists in China welcomed war because it hastened the undermining of society that Western progress had begun. The Bolton report describes the process:

"The Chinese have not, for much longer than a decade, been able to take for granted, as Americans take for granted, that the basic political order of the present is stable, and that all private calculations can be based on such an assumption. Thus the Chinese commercial class cannot make long-term contracts with confidence that the Chinese state will endure as long as the contract . . . Corruption thrives on these conditions, but corruption is but one aspect of the consequences. The tendency to milk the soil instead of conserving it, to spend before money loses value instead of saving, to reap a quick profit instead of engaging in long-term constructive efforts, to maintain what the monetary economists call 'liquidity of assets,' but in easily salable goods rather than money--all these underlie the corruption. Corruption is only the froth and foam on the crest of this massive ground swell of civic demoralization."

On the Larger Battlefield? The corruption of many Chinese leaders is given as the reason why the U.S. cannot effectively "aid China" against the Communists. Against the background given by the Bolton report, corruption takes on a different look. It is not just an old Chinese custom, nor a piece of bad luck. It is the normal situation that the U.S. has to face in the three-fourths of the world which is industrially backward. That three-fourths, as the British and others have learned, cannot be kept indefinitely in a state of tutelage to Western ideas. It will move into the stream of nationalism, industrialism and progress. When it gets there, it flounders. The Communists then play a dual role. They increase the confusion and hold out a "packaged" hope of progress--their kind of progress.

This Communist program for backward countries was worked out in China. It is the great political invention of the 20th Century, far more deadly than Fascism, because it can be applied to nearly all the 1,400,000,000 people who are at present neither thoroughly democratized nor thoroughly communized. If the new weapon cannot be defeated in China, there is no reason to suppose it can be defeated anywhere in the three-fourths of the world upon whose support the struggle between Communism and the West depends.

In the Truman Doctrine the U.S. accepted responsibility in the world struggle against Communism. On the relatively easy battleground of Western Europe it is gaining, slowly and not surely. On the larger battleground it is losing.

A U.S. defense that rests solely on the few countries now industrially developed is today's defense, but not tomorrow's. Within ten years the Communists may have industrialized a large part of the now backward and demoralized world and turned it against us.

Our objective in China is not that of aiding our friends. It is to roll back Communism in order to save our own--and Chinese --necks. Our purpose is to give the Asians time to organize aid from Asia in the fight against totalitarianism.

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