I

In general, the answer to the first question is that for 14 of its 26 years of conflict with the communists the Chinese Government under the Kuomintang (The Nationalist Party) did not take measures to restrain communist ideas and propaganda. Indeed, it could not possibly take such measures in these years, for it was cooperating with the Chinese communists—first during the period of Nationalist-Communist “Collaboration” (1923–1927), and ten years later during the period of the so-called “United Front” against Japan (1937–1947). It was only during the years when the Government was actively fighting the communists that measures could be and were taken to restrain and suppress the spread of communist agitation and propaganda.

Page 259 →The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921, four years after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, at a time when many forward-looking people throughout the world cherished great hopes for the revolutionary regime in Russia. Dr. Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Chinese Revolution and father of the Chinese Republic, was especially impressed by the Russian success in reorganizing the army and re-unifying that vast country so quickly after the Revolution. In his desire to reform his own political party, the Kuomintang, into a “revolutionary party,” and to build up a “revolutionary army” to overthrow the northern war-lords who had betrayed the original purposes of the Chinese Revolution of 1911–1912, Dr. Sun voluntarily invited the assistance and cooperation of the Communist International and of the Soviet Union. The trusting Sun Yat-sen made his party admit Chinese communists and even communists of other countries, supposedly on an individual basis, to membership in Kuomintang. Thus was begun in 1923 the four-year period of Nationalist-Communist “Collaboration,” during which the Soviet Union in the name of the Comintern sent to Nationalist China all-out aid, not only in military materials, but, more significantly, in the form of political advisers like the astute Mikhail Borodin and military advisers like General Galen.

Stalin was directing the Comintern’s China adventure throughout those years of collaboration, and there is no doubt that he was determined to make full use of this most extraordinary opportunity to carry out his strategy of world revolution in one of the most important strategic areas of the world—China.

The Chinese Communist Party rapidly increased its membership, captured one-third of the seats on the Central Committee of the Kuomintang, and by 1926 gained control of all the important government departments. Many communists became the Kuomintang party representatives in the army. The training centers in Moscow were sending back well-trained young organizers and propagandists to work in the party, the government and the army.

In short, the years 1923 to 1927 were the heyday of communist propaganda and agitation, sometimes very thinly disguised under Dr. Sun’s “Three Principles”—Nationalism, Democracy and the People’s Livelihood—but more often without any disguise at all. The Communist International was making serious efforts to convert the Chinese Nationalist Revolution into a communist revolution. This great conspiracy, called the “great Chinese Revolution” in most communist literature, might have succeeded if Chiang Kai-shek and the elder statesmen of the Kuomintang had not thwarted and Page 260 →destroyed it in April and May of 1927 by purging the Nationalist Party of the communists.

After 1927, the Chinese Communist Party was outlawed for nearly ten years during which time the National Government nearly unified China, gaining complete supremacy except for the armed rebellion of the communists and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931), Jehol (1933), and North China (1935–1937).

When in 1937 China was forced to take up the desperate war against Japan, there began the period of the “United Front” (1937–1947), during which the Red Army was nominally incorporated into the National Army and leading communists sat as members of the People’s Political Council or served in the National Government. The basis of the “United Front” was supposed to be found in the “Manifesto on Unity” issued by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on September 22, 1937. In this manifesto, five principles were “solemnly declared,” the third of which reads:

The policy of resurrection which aims at the overthrow of the Kuomintang political power, the policy of land-confiscation, and the policy of Communist propaganda, shall be discontinued by the Chinese Communist Party. (Emphasis supplied.)

As a matter of historical fact, under the protection of the “United Front” the Chinese communists were carrying on a powerful propaganda offensive in China and abroad. Their party was once more an open and legal party with its official representative stationed in the war capital of Nationalist China. A number of communist leaders made full use of the forum of the People’s Political Council to voice the grievances of the Party and to glorify the military and territorial expansion of the Party’s communist armies. Chou En-lai, the official liaison officer between the Government and the Communist Party, was made Vice-Minister of the Political Training Board of the National Military Council. The Communist Party freely published its daily newspaper, Hsin Hua Jih Pao (New China Daily), in Chungking throughout the war years. Chinese communists moved freely among their Chinese and foreign friends, in and out of the foreign embassies and special missions, and among the foreign journalists and VIP’s.

It was in those years of the “United Front” that the communists succeeded in creating abroad the myth that they were not communists at all, but mere “agrarian reformers,” and that Nationalist China was “feudal Page 261 →China” and communist China was to be more accurately described as “democratic China.”

In short, this period of the “United Front” was another heyday for communist propaganda. By carefully playing on the gullibility of their foreign, and especially American, friends, they successfully planted in the minds of policy-making leaders of China’s wartime allies what may now be termed the Yalta doctrine for all “liberated” countries: coalition government with full representation for the Communist Party. That was the Yalta formula for liberated Europe. That was the demand put forward by Mao Tse-tung at Yenan in April, 1945. That was the formula of the Presidential Directive for the Marshall Mission to China in December, 1945.

Such were the peculiar historical situations which gave the Chinese Communist Party the unique opportunity to carry on its propaganda freely and in the open for fully fourteen years. The Chinese Government could do little to restrain the propaganda work of an open and legal party with which it was at one time “collaborating” in a great revolution, and at a later time co-operating in a “United Front” against a common enemy.

II

During the years 1927–1937 and 1947–1949, however, the Chinese Government did promulgate measures for the curbing of communist propaganda. In most cases these measures were inadequate, partly because of circumstances peculiar to China and partly because of the conspiratorial nature of communist propaganda itself.

Chief among the circumstances impeding effective repression of communist propaganda was the existence of zones of immunity along the Chinese coast—the British colony of Hong Kong and the foreign concessions and settlements over which the Chinese Government had no control. Hong Kong and the foreign concessions in Shanghai, Canton, Amoy, Hankow, Tientsin and other “treaty ports” were the birthplaces of the free press in China. They were also the places where the Chinese rebel and political exile first found refuge and asylum. It was in those cities that the first anti-Manchu and anti-monarchy revolutionary periodicals and newspapers were edited and published and circulated into the interior provinces. It was in Shanghai that the Chinese Communist Party was organized and held its first Party Congress in 1921, and that the first communist papers were published. DuringPage 262 → the years when the Chinese Communist Party was outlawed in Nationalist China and when the foreign settlements and concessions were either partially restored to Chinese juridical control or, later, completely abolished, there was still the British colony of Hong Kong where the British tradition of the free press was maintained and where literature of the Chinese communists and their front organizations continued to be freely published.

It has been said that without Hong Kong and the foreign concessions and settlements in the treaty ports the Chinese Revolution of 1911–1912 could not have succeeded so soon and so easily. It may be said with equal justice that without these foreign zones of immunity the communists probably could not have had so easy a success in their early organization and in the spread of their propaganda literature.

The second circumstance making it impossible for the Chinese Government to deal effectively with communist propaganda in many parts of China was the fact that the Chinese Communist Party, ever since 1927, has had a formidable army of its own. Before 1937, the Red Army of the Chinese Communist Party was many times defeated and nearly broken up and destroyed by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces. But even in those early years the Red Army overran several provinces and often occupied mountainous areas for months and sometimes years. The occupied areas were, of course, subject to communist control and indoctrination.

After 1937, when the Red Armies were made a part of the National Army, they were thereby given unlimited opportunity for numerical growth and territorial expansion. In April, 1945, Mao Tse-tung claimed that the area “liberated” by communist armies “now extends from Inner Mongolia in the north to the Hainan Island in the south, penetrating into 19 provinces and containing 95,500,000 people.” These figures may not reflect the actual state of affairs, but the fact remains that in all regions where the communist guerrilla forces penetrated with their propaganda and agitation, the laws and regulations of the wartime National Government could no longer be enforced.

These two factors—the existence on the China coast of Hong Kong and the various foreign concessions and settlements, and the 22 years (1927–1949) of Red Army activity—should help to explain the tremendous difficulties which the Chinese Government had to encounter in its attempts to restrain the spread of communist propaganda.

But the fundamental difficulty in dealing with communist propaganda lay in the clandestine and conspiratorial nature of the whole communist Page 263 →movement. As stated in Thesis 13 of the Second World Congress of the Communist International, 1921:

The Communist parties must create a new type of periodical press for extensive circulation among the workmen:

1. 1) Legal publications, in which the Communists without calling themselves such and without mentioning their connection with the party, would learn to utilize the slightest possibility allowed by the laws as the Bolsheviki did at the time of the Tzar, after 1905.
2. 2) Illegal sheets, although of the smallest dimensions and irregularly published, but reproduced in most of the printing offices by workmen (in secret . . .), and giving the proletariat undiluted revolutionary information and the revolutionary slogans.

What is contemplated, of course, is the publication of propaganda in the name of all kinds of front organizations formed “under the most diverse circumstances and, in case of need, frequently changing names”186—written and published by “Communists without calling themselves such and without mentioning their connection with the party.” Against this kind of masked activity no measure of restraint, in China or in any other country, has ever been adequate or effective. In a country like the United States, of course, the Constitution prohibits restraints on the freedom of any publication issued in the name of freedom, peace, justice, humanity, democracy, race equality, and so forth. And even in a country like the Republic of China, where the Government had been fighting the communist armed rebellion for years, there were no adequate means to curb or suppress the mushroom growth of publications that sprang up “under the most diverse circumstances,” under such names as the “New Learning,” the “New Social Science” or the “New Sociology,” and, more often, espousing the cause of patriotism or anti-imperialism.187

Page 264 →III

We now reach the third question: was the victory of the communists assisted materially by insufficient restraint on the free exchange of ideas? Was that victory materially aided by the failure of the Chinese Government to curb the spread of communist propaganda and agitation?

Naturally communists and in particular the Chinese communists like to think that their successful conquest of continental China was a triumph of communist ideology. And I am afraid that there are at least a few politicians and military men in Free China today who believe that the failure to stop or to restrain the spread of communist and pro-communist propaganda did materially aid the communist victory on the mainland. But I have studied and thought over the question and have come to a different conclusion.

I believe that the communist conquest of China, like the communist conquest of the Eastern European states and Hitler’s conquest of many free European nations 14 years ago, was primarily a military conquest, a conquest greatly assisted in this case by the cold war situation and aided materially by Soviet Russia, the consolidated base for world revolution and world conquest. It is now generally understood that the Russian strategy for world revolution and world conquest presupposes three necessary conditions: (1) a strong Communist Party in every country, preferably one armed with an army of its own; (2) a fully consolidated Soviet Russia as the base for the support and assistance of the revolution; and (3) a war situation, preferably a world war situation. In the case of the conquest of the Baltic states and the states in Eastern Europe, it was not even necessary to have all three conditions. There was no strong Communist Party in any of those states. All that was necessary was the overwhelming power of the Soviet Union coupled with the war situation which gave Russia the opportunity to use her power for conquest and for military occupation.

In China, all three conditions were required before she was defeated. To begin with, the Chinese Communist Party was fully armed for 22 years before the Chinese mainland was completely conquered. Even then, communism might never have succeeded in subjugating China if Japan’s aggressive war and later the greatest war in human history had not intervened. Finally, World War II made Soviet Russia the greatest military power in Europe, and then in Asia. The secret Yalta agreement of early 1945 invited and bribed Russia to enter the Page 265 →Pacific war, and Russia returned to the Far East as the greatest military power in the entire Asiatic continent. Yalta gave Russia the right to occupy Manchuria and North Korea, thereby supplying her with a contiguous base for supporting and assisting the Chinese communists.

In conclusion, then, the victory of the Chinese communists on the mainland was not the result of, nor materially assisted by, the failure of the Chinese Government to restrain the free flow and exchange of ideas. No. It was the military collapse of a nation worn out by eight long years of fighting a desperate war against one of the greatest military and naval powers in the world, and finally hopelessly defeated by a peculiar combination of all of the three fateful conditions necessary for the military victory of communism over a major power.