The Road to Paris

(See Cover]

Lenin wrote: "The road to Paris lies through Peking." The man who took that road for Bolshevism was China's Red Boss Mao Tse-tung. Four years ago Mao squatted in a cave in northwest China's Yenan wilderness. Last week he lived in a Peking palace and he stood, by able and accurate proxy, at Lake Success defying and denouncing the United Nations. His armies were giving the most powerful nation on earth the worst beating in its military history. The proud and ancient chancelleries of Europe quavered at his name and shrank from his power. Washington was paralyzed by the blow he had delivered and by the prospect of world revolution and disintegration that lay ahead.

Wu's Knees. In two awful hours of rasping vituperation at Lake Success, Mao's proxy, an unknown general named Wu Hsiu-chuan, had torn away all (or almost all) of the free world's illusions about Mao and Chinese Communism. The Mao presented there by his scar-faced servant Wu was none of the men painted by the soft China hands of American "liberalism."

This Mao who spoke with Wu's harsh voice was not an "agrarian reformer" (as the U.S. State Department had called him), nor a "town-meeting democrat" (as Owen Lattimore had called him), nor a Tito faithless to Moscow (as London and Washington had hoped). The Mao who spoke through Wu was China's most successful warlord since Kublai Khan. He laid down the terms for all Asia's subjugation. Upon that, Mao's senior partner, Stalin, prepared to build for the enslavement of the West. Together, Stalin and Mao had traveled more than halfway on the road that leads from Moscow to Paris, via Peking.

Modern history has no more dramatic scene than Wu's speech at Lake Success. The world heard only by dim and dignified hearsay of Hitler raging at statesmen who came to Berchtesgaden; it saw only the absurd arrested motion of Hitler's triumphant jig in the Forest of Compiegne. Millions by television and radio saw & heard Wu spew forth Communism's unappeasable hatred, cloaked in Communism's lies and muscled by Communism's paranoid vocabulary of denunciation.

U.S. Delegate to the U.K. Warren Austin had asked Wu to explain why Communist China had invaded Korea, just as the U.N. police action there was on the eve of success. Said Austin: "Will there be peace or war in Asia? The world awaits anxiously the answer."

While Austin talked, Wu had sat tense as a coiled spring. In appearance, the Wu at whom the statesmen and television viewers stared for an answer bore no resemblance to his master in Peking. Where Mao is fat, moonfaced, stooped and aging (at 57), Wu is well-knit, slant-headed and fortyish. Wu's hands were clasped in the lap of a cheap black suit. As many Orientals do, he betrayed his tension by nervous knee-knocking. When he rose, Austin quickly had his answer: Wu offered war or surrender. Not his knees, but a large part of the free world's were knocking before he finished.

Wu's Speech. The U.S., he said, is the historical foe of China: "The American imperialists have always been the cunning aggressor . . . never . . . the friends of the Chinese people . . . The Open Door was in fact an aggressive policy aimed at sharing the spoils with other imperialists."*

The U.S., he said, has instigated the war in Korea to cover up its invasion of Formosa and to further "its fanatical design of dominating Asia and the world." Screamed Wu: "Who has shattered security in the Pacific? Have Chinese armed forces invaded Hawaii, or have U.S. armed forces invaded . . . Korea and Formosa? . . . The real intention of the U.S., as MacArthur has confessed, is ... to dominate every Asiatic port from Vladivostok to Singapore."

The U.S., he said, has gulled the 52 nations sharing in the police action in Korea. .Shrilled Wu to the 52, in a patent move to splinter the already divided U.N. majority: "Do not be taken in by the U.S., do not pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the U.S.--because . . . you must bear the consequences of your actions."

The U.S., he said, follows in the footsteps of Japan and is using Japan for the enslavement of Asia. In contrast, Russia's conduct is "righteous."

The Chinese people, he said, have arisen. "The Chinese people, who victoriously overthrew the rule on China's mainland of Japanese imperialism, and of American imperialism and its lackey Chiang Kaishek, will certainly succeed in driving out the United States aggressors and recover Taiwan [Formosa] and all other territories that belong to China ... As a result of the victories of the great Socialist October Revolution of the Soviet Union, of the anti-Fascist second World War, and of the great revolution of the Chinese people, all the oppressed nations and people of the East have awakened and organized themselves.

"Regardless of the savagery and cruelty of the American imperialist aggressors, the hard struggling people of Japan, the victoriously advancing people of Viet Nam, the heroically resisting people of Korea, the people of the Philippines who have never laid down their arms, and all the oppressed nations and peoples of the East will certainly unite in close solidarity. Yielding neither to the enticements nor to the threats of American imperialism, they will fight dauntlessly on to win the final victory in their struggle for national independence."

To Kiss a Buzz Saw. Throughout, Wu never recognized the fact that the forces in Korea under attack by his master were United Nations forces. In fact, Wu demanded that the U.N. apply "severe sanctions" against the U.S. for sending troops to Korea. He demanded that U.N. force an American "withdrawal" from Korea and Formosa* (i.e., turn both over to the Reds). Whether the U.N. did so or not, militant Red China, leading all Asia, would chase off "U.S. aggressors."

As the Chinese Red envoy barked on, the U.S.'s Austin sat, large and unhappy in a rumpled brown suit, wearing his translation phones like a crown of thorns. Britain's Sir Gladwyn Jebb listened with the urbane equanimity a Foreign Office man must pull on along with his drawers and socks while dressing each morning. Secretary General Trygve Lie, a ponderous, uncomfortable figure in blue, his hand plunged deep inside his coat, seemed a Falstaff, cast, under protest, as Napoleon. Yugoslavia's Ales Bebler, presiding, wore a sleepy, slit-eyed look of boredom. Nationalist China's T. F. Tsiang sat with the uninterested look of one who had known all along what was coming, and finally appeared to be dozing. All except Tsiang had held such high hopes of Wu's visit to Lake Success. They would make a deal with Mao's agent. They would reassure him about the West's intentions. They would disabuse him of the Moscow propaganda line.

Wu's words, however, left no basis for hope that Mao could be dealt with, reassured or weaned away from Moscow. To think of appeasing the master of the rasping, threatening Wu was to think of kissing a buzz saw. What stood revealed after two hours at Lake Success was naked military force.

The Hunter. To Wu's climactic moment at Lake Success, to the triumphant onrush of the Chinese Red army in Korea, the master in Peking had long dedicated himself. In a quarter-century of conspiracy and armed aggression against his own people, Mao Tse-tung has never lost his vision of the Chinese Communist movement as a prelude and vital part of the greater international Communist drive for world rule.

Ten years ago, in The New Democracy, using the jargon of the comrades, Mao wrote: "The world now lives in an era of revolution and war, a new era, where capitalism is definitely dying and socialism is beginning to flourish. In the international environment of the middle of the 20th Century, there are only two ways open to all decent people in the colonies and semi-colonies. They must either go over to the side of the imperialist front or take part in the world revolution. They must choose between these two. There is no other way."

Last year Mao said it again, even more distinctly: "We belong to the anti-imperialist front headed by the U.S.S.R., and we can only look for genuine friendly aid from that front and not from the imperialist front. . . We also oppose the illusion of a third road ... In the world without exception one either leans to the side of imperialism or the side of socialism. Neutrality is a camouflage." He flavored his pronouncement with a Chinese metaphor: "You have to choose between killing the tiger or being eaten by it."

Last week the world could see that Red China, with Red Russia, had gone ahunting after the tiger of freedom. And Mao had even voiced his scorn for the quarry --"a paper tiger."

The Weapon. A hunter needs a weapon. The formidable one that Mao bore, the Chinese Red army, had been forged with Russian connivance in a manner that the West did not yet widely comprehend.

"One historical fact differentiates the Chinese Communist Party from Communist movements in any other country outside of Soviet Russia, a fact essential to a clear understanding of what has been happening in China during the last quarter of a century," wrote Dr. Hu Shih, China's foremost scholar and onetime ambassador to the U.S. "The Chinese Communist Party, partly by design and partly by extraordinary circumstances, has possessed a formidable army of its own almost from the very early years of its founding. This unique feature has been the most important source of its strength, which Stalin, the masterful strategist of world Communism, has been able to nurture, support, and in the course of 25 years develop into a most powerful instrumentality for subjugating China and thereby dominating the whole Asiatic continent."

Stalin himself, in a telegram sent through the Comintern in 1926, ordered the Chinese Communist Party to raise its own army (20,000 tested comrades to lead 50,000 armed peasants). At that time the Reds were still accepted in the Kuomintang (Nationalist) revolution, which Chiang Kai-shek had led up from the south to subjugate the warlords and unify the nation. A Red army had already been urged by Mao, then one of the Communist Party's lesser figures and often berated by his less realistic comrades as a starry-eyed opportunist dreaming of "romantic Soviet republics in the mountainous wilderness." The Stalin-Mao decision to form an army, was, in effect, an undeclared war on Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist regime. Chiang hit back hard, sent his Soviet Russian advisers packing, dispersed the Comintern agents, forced Mao into the "mountainous wilderness" of inland China.

While Chiang fought the northern warlords, Mao became a warlord in his own right. On Chingkan Shan, celebrated bandit mountain lair, he joined forces with the local outlaws, soon merged them in his new Red army.* It was a guerrilla force, highly mobile, terroristic, levying an ever-expanding countryside for recruits and supplies, fighting not for the ordinary warlord's booty but for a Red revolution within the Nationalist revolution.

Through Defeat. All of Mao's cunning in guerrilla tactics could not save the first Chinese Red army. By 1930 it had grown to 60,000 men. Then Chiang, advised by a German, General Alexander von Falken-hausen, closed in with overwhelming numbers. Five years of dark and bloody Nationalist "annihilation" campaigns against the Reds finally drove Mao's remnant into the retreat now famous as the Long March, an epic ordeal of one year and 6,000 miles. Less than 20,000 Red army survivors reached their chosen base around Yenan, in remote northwest China, as near as practical to Stalin's Russia.

As Chiang slowly moved toward Mao's hideout, Stalin moved to Mao's rescue. The new Comintern slogan was "united front" against the mounting fascist threat of Japan. It was successful. Chiang's campaign against the Communists was deflected and dissipated into resistance against a more powerful aggressor. The Chinese Red army was saved. It proceeded to expand spectacularly. During the eight years of the Japanese war, following Mao's directive "90% against the Kuomintang, 10% against the Japanese," it grew from 25,000 to 910,000 men, claimed control of 50 million people.

Though skillfully led and well-indoctrinated, it was still a guerrilla force, unable to face the Japanese or the Nationalists in open battle. The changeover to a regular army with decisive striking power needed Stalin's helping hand. Once more it was given, in Manchuria during the Russian occupation between August 1945 and April 1946.

In those nine months, large contingents of Mao's men trekked from below the Great Wall into the Russian-held northeast, were equipped with Japanese arms, retrained and sent out again. Within three years, not without heavy casualities of their own (1,600,000 killed, wounded and missing, according to their own estimate) and greater losses to the Chinese Nationalists (8,070,000, boasted Ambassador Wu last week before the U.N.), they won the China mainland.

To Victory. Military power, embodied in China's Red army, has been Mao's special creation, his fierce pride & joy. The strategy and tactics of guerrilla war have absorbed a good deal of his scholarly study. His trusty Commander in Chief Chu Teh and his brilliant field generals Lin Piao, Chen Yi and Liu Po-cheng have been the fighting brawn directed by his own bookwise brain.

For his guerrillas, Mao years ago reminted some good advice originally coined by Sun Tzu, China's sth Century B.C. Clausewitz: "When the enemy advances, we retreat. When he escapes, we harass. When he retreats, we pursue. When he is tired, we attack." For comrades everywhere he wrote a military treatise, Strategic Problems (published in Yenan in 1941), that probably ranks as a classic on irregular warfare. Its precepts boldly give directions for destroying "an enemy 20 times our number."

Mao's most vivid literary images are devoted to the military art. "Guerrillas," he once wrote, "should be as cautious as virgins and as quick as rabbits . .. [They] are like innumerable gnats which, by biting a giant in front & rear, ultimately exhaust him." He exulted in armed struggle: "A Communist war which lasts ten years may be surprising to other countries, but for us this is only the preface . . . Historical experience is written in blood and iron." No warlord has left a more gory trail of death than Mao, not since the mad General Chang Hsien-chung, who slaughtered 30 million in Szechuan during the Ming Dynasty and left an engraving in stone which read:

Heaven created ten thousand things for the use of man.

Man has not one thing to present to Heaven.

Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill

The Chinese are not a militaristic people and not many Chinese poets sing the glory and grandeur of war. Mao is one of those who does. Most of his verse has not been publicly printed, but in the three poems known to the West, he plucks harshly the blood & iron string. Sample lines:

We shall not be heroes unless we reach the Great Wall . . .

In the Red army nobody is frightened by the rigors of the Long March.

The thousand mountain peaks and the ten thousand rivers fail to intimidate us . . .

Genghis Khan was favored by Heaven in his generation,

Yet he could only shoot arrows at eagles on the wing.

Not Appeased. By June 1950 Mao, too, was ready to hunt an eagle.

The U.S. had pulled out of Korea and had washed its hands of Formosa, where Chiang Kai-shek's diehard Nationalists prepared their last stand. Mao's army, harassed by Chiang's naval & air blockade, stood poised for an invasion. Then Stalin's North Koreans moved across the 38th parallel. In a dramatic turnabout of policy, the American eagle soared from its lackadaisical perch.

Harry Truman proclaimed that security in the Pacific meant no aggression in Korea. Truman also said: "I have directed the Seventh Fleet to prevent any attack on Formosa." From where Mao sat, this might mean that the whole U.S. policy had suddenly and rashly changed. It might mean that the U.S. would not only try to defend Korea, but would also make the Communists pay for aggression in Korea by protecting their intended victims in Formosa. Mao sat quietly waiting to see if the U.S. would in fact try to regain the initiative in Asia.

He soon saw that the eagle, though roused, was still a muddled bird. Truman's action on Formosa did not mean all that it could have meant. The U.S. still had had no change of heart toward the Chinese Nationalists; it would still refuse to cooperate with the only Asiatic force that had steadfastly recognized and resisted the predatory league of Mao & Stalin. Washington obviously persevered in the opinion that Secretary Dean Acheson expressed last January: "No one in his right mind . . . suggests that . . . the Nationalist government fell because it was confronted by overwhelming military force . . . Chiang Kai-shek's armies melted away . . . the Chinese people in their misery . . . completely withdrew their support from this government . . ."

While the Seventh Fleet steamed toward the Formosa Straits, Washington ordered Chiang Kai-shek to stop his air and water raids which were playing havoc with Communist shipping. Later, it brusquely turned down Chiang's offer to send 33,000 troops to Korea, where they might have come in handy last week. Washington's policy was directed by the fear that any action strengthening Chiang would bring the Chinese Communists into the Korean war and by the belief that appeasing Mao would keep them out.

When Douglas MacArthur went to Formosa in August, the dismay of the U.S. State Department was audible all the way to Mao's palace. When MacArthur decided to warn publicly against the loss of Formosa, against "those who in the past propagandized . . . defeatism and appeasement in the Pacific," he was silenced by presidential command. By last week the net result of the U.S. action on Formosa had been to suspend the Nationalist sea-air blockade and thereby to open the ports of Red China for copper, oil and armaments from the West.

Mao was not appeased. He struck on Oct. 26, and when the U.N., the U.S. and the British tried further appeasement, Mao flung back taunts and prepared for his great effort.

Mao's army has the immediate advantage of numbers. In the year since the conquest of China, Mao has built up his forces steadily. They are 2,500,000 strong, divided into four huge field armies. Their rigidly enforced discipline is the marvel of China. They are intensively trained by vigilant officers, intensively indoctrinated by even more vigilant political commissars. The best is Lin Piao's army; it overran Manchuria and North China, now leads the assault in Korea.

The Army Comes First. Stalin has supplied Mao with arms as well as thousands of Russian advisers. The Chinese Red air force counts some 500 planes, including MIG-15 Soviet jet fighters. Behind the Chinese horde stands the full military, diplomatic and propaganda might of Russia. Red Russia and Red China are formally allied by treaties signed in Moscow last February by Mao and Stalin. Their actual bonds are closer: identity of aim and lifelong Communist discipline.

As has always been the case with Mao's brand of Communist warlordism, other parts of his program have lagged far behind the growth of military strength. Most of Mao's social and economic promises to China's people have been put aside. Although many Western observers expected a rise in living standards to follow the end of the civil war, the opposite has happened. Living standards in most of China have fallen since Mao took over, largely because of the disruption and liquidation of the merchant (distributor) class. Railroads and other public services are much more efficiently managed than during the civil war. Inflation has been checked, largely because taxes are more ruthlessly collected. Official bribery has undoubtedly decreased (because Communists are by nature more susceptible to the corruption of power than to corruption by money). No significant systematic land reform has taken place. There have been some paper land-reform measures, plus a sort of reform by political boodle, i.e., some supporters of the Reds have grabbed property owned by enemies of the Reds. The Communist propaganda hold on the lower and middle schools is increasingly effective. Many of the people are bitterly disillusioned with Communism, but they have no program for resisting or combatting it.

Peking admits that 400,000 armed "bandits" (i.e., Nationalist or other anti-Communist guerrillas) are still fighting the Red rule. Formosa's Nationalists claim that the armed resisters number well above a million. But this popular force is not yet effectively organized. The U.S. shows no present intention of encouraging or using the anti-Communists of Formosa or the mainland to undermine Mao in his own backyard. This in spite of estimates that, with a little help from outside, the anti-Communist Chinese could pin down half the Chinese Red army.

"Go On Advancing!" Like many a dictator before him, Mao tries to divert the minds of his people from his unkept promises by emphasizing "foreign encirclement." His press keeps up a din for the conquest of Formosa and Tibet.

Radio Peking last week blared the order of the Red day, exhorted Mao's men on: "The imperialist armies under command of MacArthur await their fate of being totally crushed . . ." The entire people of Korea, of China, of Asia and the whole world are watching your glorious struggle with unbounded respect.

"Advance boldly, advance and go on advancing ! Strike down . . . and continue to strike down! We say again: Strike!"

That was loud talk, but as Mao's troops were proving in Korea, it was not empty talk. It was a set of directions for the road to Paris--and beyond.

* Such American liberals as Owen Lattimore and Harvard's Professor John Fairbank have impugned the motives of the U.S. Open Door policy, by which Secretary of State John Hay in 1899 protected China from a growing web of foreign "concessions"; Hay insisted that China have a right to trade with all nations. In spite of this policy, U.S. investment in China was never large. It reached $122 million in 1937, about a quarter of the U.S. investment in Mexico, and much of the U.S. China investment was in hospitals and schools. Ironically, many U.S. traders in China falsely denounced by the Communists as the mainspring of "U.S. imperialism," joined with the liberals and the Communists in tearing down Chiang Kaishek. Few of the U.S. China traders ever had any drive toward imperialism or any sense of the real nonimperialist meaning of the Open Door policy, as explained by the late Henry Cabot Lodge. Said he, prophetically: "We only ask that we be admitted to this great market [China] upon the same terms as the rest of the world. But within a few years, we have seen Russia closing in upon the Chinese empire. If she succeeds, we will not only be excluded from these markets, but we shall stand face to face with a power controlling an extent of territory and a mass of population the like of which the world has never seen. In the presence of such a colossus of despotism and military socialism, the welfare of every free people is in danger." Lodge said this in 1899, long before the military socialism of the czars had degenerated into the military socialism of the Bolsheviks.

* Total U.S. military and civilian government employees now in Formosa: 44.

* But Mao never fought as the other warlords fought. Though they all double-crossed and intrigued, they also observed certain amenities. They disliked to take each other prisoner, settled battles with silver bullets (.i.e., cash bribes), often left one city gate open for retreat when they had surrounded a rival, even provided transport for the defeated general's belongings (they hoped for a return of the courtesy in reversed circumstances), considered it boorish to attack in bad weather. Mao fought for keeps.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.