The Bookshelf

In the closing years of the war Americans slowly began to feel the tragedy of China. Bound to the land by centuries of feudal control, divorced from the future by leaders who were not sure whether the enemy lay across the China Sea or in the communes of north China, a nation of 400 millions was slowly dying in the arms of its desperate allies. By analyzing the forces that are now out of control, the authors of this majority opinion on the Chinese crisis have thrown light on past American mistakes. The gravity of these errors is evidenced by the civil strife in China today, an end product of the American ignorance or defiance of the revolutionary surge that sweeps the backward East to violence.

Throughout the Chinese War, American emissaries with rare exception were willing to identify peace in China with the only stability that this nation had ever known. A succession of peacemakers, led by the Indian-fighter Hurley, allowed the de jure status of the Kuomintang government to whitewash the true structure of a monolithic, one-party government. For those in Chungking, the Chiang regime meant the law and the established order plus the only chance of carrying the Asiatic war to the interior lines of the enemy.

But Mr. White would tell us differently. If the Chinese people were to rally behind this Japanese war, he claims, they should have been allowed to win a peace that held promise. But Chiang's war meant conscription into an army that was corrupted from its headquarters to its provincial encampments, and this war meant payment of taxes to landlords who would grow fat as they had in Chinese conflicts since the ancient dynasties. Most of all, if the Chinese people were to rally to this fight, they had to be led by a program of land reform as well as by the personality of the Generalissimo, by a guarantee of release from feudal bondage as well as by promises of a government that seemed paralyzed by its own weight.

Yet these reforms could not be achieved under Chiang. Having broken with the Communists in 1927, Chiang's alignment with the right-wing of the Kuomintang is portrayed by the authors as his retreat from dynamism into the morass of warlord-infested intrigue government. Mr. White and Miss Jacoby are not alone in diagnosing complete cynicism and corruption as the secondary invaders of the diseased Kuomintang body politic. This accusation is not fiction, but page after page of documented fact that will force thinking Americans to search about for an alternative to an ally-government that is bringing China to misery.

But are the Communists that alternative? They have redivided the land and instituted basic economic changes and have maintained a correct aloofness toward their Soviet God-fathers. Yet the label of "agrarian liberalism," as applied by the authors, cannot quell fears of democrats who have watched police states entrench themselves in the vacuum left by moderates who are terrified by change. Theodore White and Miss Jacoby feel that American policy has more to offer than an endorsement of a social structure that the great mass of Chinese rejects. By pressuring the Nanking government into the widest possible program of reform, the State Department can set out on the lone path leading out of the Chinese political jungle. "Thunder Out of China" is a revolutionary document but it advocates that type of revolution-by-consent that holds the last hope for the future of China, with or without Chiang Kai Shek.