Petition in Bankruptcy
|
|
China, the most important U.S. ally in the world outside Western Europe, was gone. This chilling calamity was ponderously proclaimed last week in unusual fashion—by a 1,054-page State Department white paper, weighing three pounds and selling for $3. Gone beyond recall beneath the Red tide (the U.S. was told) was the whole great heartland of Asia: the millions who had suffered first and longest the Axis onslaught, who had survived to resume their old fight against the armies of Communism. Bidding this nation bitter farewell, the U.S. Government seemed perilously close to adding: good riddance. For the U.S. people, as for its State Department, this was a moment of rare anguish; an autopsy on a friend is not nice work. With such diplomatic surgery, Secretary of State Dean Acheson (and the staff of 80 who had worked on the white paper) had operated on the prostrate body of Nationalist China. Their task was complicated by the fact that the body was still stubbornly squirming with life. “Frank Record.” What had caused the disease and the disaster? The State Department’s answer, said Dean Acheson, was “a frank record of an extremely complicated and most unhappy period in the life of a great country.” The record, reviewing U.S. relations with China back to 1844, prefaced by a 15-page lawyer’s brief by Acheson, and displaying some studied flourishes of erudition, added up to a savage indictment of China’s Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his regime. Acheson summarized it: “The government and the Kuomintang . . . had sunk into corruption, into a scramble for place and power, and into reliance on the United States to win the war for them … Its leaders had proved incapable of meeting the crisis confronting them, its troops had lost the will to fight, and its government had lost popular support . . . History has proved again & again that a regime without faith in itself and an army without morale cannot survive the test of battle . . . The Nationalist armies did not lose a single battle during the crucial year of 1948 through lack of arms or ammunition . . . [They] did not have to be defeated; they disintegrated.” In its fumbling, vacillating attempts to help Nationalist China, the U.S. had actually spent $2 billion. It was a sum, said Acheson, “of proportionately greater magnitude in relation to the budget of that Government than the United States has provided to any nation of Western Europe since the end of the war.” |