Peace or War with China?

Abstract

XI TE cannot separate ourselves from the realities we see before us. VI VSo says Mao Tse-tung in his New Democracy, the work which is now described by Chinese Communist spokesmen as new contribution to the treasury of Marxist-Leninist thought. The advice is certainly sound. The realities will in the end determine events, and the task of statesmanship is to distinguish these realities from the wishful thinking and cherished fallacies of interested groups. There are in the present relationship between China and the Western powers three great realities which both sides must recognise. The first, that the Chinese Revolution, for good or ill, has come to stay, and that the government of Peking is the regime with which the rest of the world will have to deal in the foreseeable future. The second, that the alliance between China and Russia gives to both sides satisfactions and securities which neither can afford to dispense with, and that therefore Western policy cannot at present hope to detach China from the Soviet orbit. The third, that the Western powers are determined to contain Communism in Asia, and thus to obstruct the expansion of Chinese influence in the countries which were formerly part of the Chinese Empire. It will be objected, from one side or the other, that these propositions are not in fact realities at all but preconceived views. The Right will claim that the Chinese Revolution is a product of Russian intrigue, unsupported by the Chinese people, and that the Nationalist Party in Formosa, or some unpredictable uprising of the people, may yet unseat the regime of Mao Tse-tung. The Left will still believe that the Chinese Communists can be wooed away from Russia by friendly gestures, by recognition, admission to the United Nations, and offers of economic assistance. The Chinese Communists themselves will still count on the weakness and divisions of the West in Asia to give them all they seek in the southeast of that continent. The argument that the Communist regime in China has not fulfilled all of its promises, that the peasants are disappointed, the merchants dissatisfied, the intellectuals frustrated and the regime increasingly based on terror, may be founded on some realities; it is very un-