The Two Chinas
At Peking the Chinese Communists are assembling a People's Political Consultative Conference which will shortly bring into being a central Government for the vast and steadily increasing areas which they control. It is rumoured that Madame Sun Yat-sen, the widow of the founder of the Chinese Republic, may lend dynastic prestige to the conference by presiding over it. In the south the Nationalist Government—holding on by its teeth in three centres—ekes out the last months of its existence at Canton, Formosa and Chungking. The hard realities of the Chinese situation are producing—have, indeed, already produced—one major unreality in the international sphere. China's position as a permanent member of the Security Council is presumably inalienable under the United Nations' Charter ; but her present representatives can hardly claim to repre- sent a country in which the party to which they belong, and the Government which appointed them, have been virtually wiped off the map. Present indications are that when a Communist Govern- ment is set up it will be accorded, sooner rather than later, some form
of recognition by this and by other countries, though probably not by America. Peking will certainly press its claim to the Chinese seat on the Security Council, and it is a claim that can hardly be resisted indefinitely, however averse America or anyone else may be to an adjustment so calculated to strengthen Russia's hand at Lake Success. The original mistake—the acceptance of a polite fiction whereby China was constituted one of the Big Five—was perhaps unavoidable at the time ; but the seed of unreality which it planted seems likely to bear some bitter—or anyhow curiously tasting—fruit.
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