Soviet Policy in China

Abstract

THE spring of i950 would appear to be a particularly suitable time for a discussion of Soviet policy in East Asia. So rapid has been the of events during the past two years that the entire Far Eastern scene has been transformed. When David Dallin published his important book' on the subject in i949, he was able to take his narrative up to the beginning of the previous January. At that time the position of the civil war in China, despite the Communist victories of I947, still seemed to indicate as its probable result a division of the country, for a period, along not unfamiliar lines. There would be, some observers believed, a Communist regime in the east and north, supported more or less overtly by the Soviet Union, while southern China would be governed from Canton or Chungking by a Kuomintang regime aided by the United States and recognised by the non-Soviet world as the legitimate government of China. As in Europe and Korea, so in China, the Soviet and the Western worlds would for a time stand face to face along a line of demarcation. In the space of two years the whole picture has changed decisively. The Kuomintang regime has collapsed so completely that there seems to be no prospect of its recovering authority on the mainland of China, whatever fate may have in store for its Communist successor. It remains to be seen whether its surviving stronghold in Formosa will secure the external protection that may be necessary for its long-term survival, or whether, as seems more likely, the outer ring of American sea power will be drawn so as to exclude this island. On the Chinese mainland the government of the Chinese People's Republic, whose leaders are still apparently the men of the long march of I934 and of the subsequent Communist regime at Yenan, is now at least nominally in command and is recognised internationally not only by the U.S.S.R. and its associates but also by Great Britain, the Republic of India and other countries. An important, perhaps all-im-