THE NEW RULERS OF CHINA
FOR the past year three things have been inevitable in China, and during the past fortnight two of them have come to pass. The Communists have set up their own Government at Peking, and Russia has recognised it. The third development— the recognition of the Peking administration by the Western Powers—still lies in the future, but it is bound to come. It is bound to come because you cannot put 400,000,000 people into a sort of international Coventry and, with due respect to any in Washington who advocate this course, it is both foolish and dangerous to try to do so. America's China policy, in so far as such a thing can be said to exist at the present juncture, seems to be strongly influenced by the theory that to establish any sort of relations with the de facto rulers of most of China will nourish and sustain the cause of World Revolution, and that any step likely to have this effect must be avoided at all costs. This concept partakes both of the academic and the pusillanimous, for it involves an attempt to evade realities. There are fortunately no signs of a similar tendency on the part of the British Government, and it seems fairly safe to assume that we shall enter into diplomatic relations with the new Communist Republic when a suitable opportunity to do so presents itself.
This may not, in practice, occur for some little time. Though the Nationalist Government has ceased to govern, it still exists on paper, and even when Canton falls it can (and probably will) continue to play a game of fox and geese upon the vast chequer- board of China ; and sooner or later we shall have to take the distasteful step of officially withdrawing recognition from what is in effect an impotent, dwindling and discredited clique. Greater embarrassments, with more important implications, are already taking shape at Lake Success, where the original folly of allotting China a permanent seat on the Security Council has produced a potentially Gilbertian state of affairs. Russia will naturally press the claims of her protégés in Peking to the international rights at present being exercised by the representatives of a government based on Formosa, which is not Chinese territory at all ; and they are claims which can hardly be resisted without serious damage to the moral status of U.N.O. The fairest,,the most practical and in the long run the safest course would be to accept forthwith a fait accompli which would greatly strengthen Russia's hand on the Security Council but which would not weaken such pretensions as U.N.O. has to be a fairly and realistically constituted body. The trouble, of course, is that Nationalist China, with her permanent seat on the Security Council, can veto her own expulsion.
It is sometimes forgotten that the people principally affected by events in China are the Chinese. It is impossible not to be struck by the relative moderation of the methods by which the latest phase in their revolution has been carried out. There has been little serious fighting, and the wanton acts of cruelty and violence which in their early days made it difficult to distinguish the Com- munists from bandits have been the exception rather than the rule. One major outrage was indeed perpetrated against ships of the Royal Navy on the Yangtse, but that seems to have been due to sheer irresponsibility, and need never have happened if our own authorities had used the minimum of common sense. Otherwise, though Chinese xenophobia can hardly have grown materially less in the course of two decades, there has been a marked absence of the grave incidents involving foreign lives and property which characterised the last major revolutionary crisis in China, when the Russian-backed fanatical leaders of the Kuomintang—the very men now execrated as feudalistic reactionaries by their Russian-backed, fanatical successors—seized power in the 192o's. The relative Immunity enjoyed by foreigners from anything worse than acute economic hardship is, of course, largely due to the fact that, bereft of concessions, extra-territorial rights and other legacies of the " Unequal Treaties," they present less provocative targets than they used to ; but not a little credit must be given both to the foreigners themselves for having learnt to combine courage with compromise in an emergency and also to the latest brand of Chinese revolutionary for showing a higher degree of discipline and self-restraint than China's turbulent recent history led anyone to expect.
Since American military aid to the Nationalists ceased the out- side world seems, wisely, to have been at some pains to avoid getting its fingers burnt in the Chinese conflagration. Even the Russians, though lavish in their provision of moral support to Mao Tse-rung, seem to have been chary of direct intervention. Twenty-odd years ago, when we were strong and rich and Soviet Russia was weak and poor, we both took an active open part in the then current phase of the Chinese Revolution. We sent the Coldstream Guards to Shanghai, the Russians sent Borodin to Canton. Our object was to protect our commercial interests, their object was to further their plans for world revolution. We both succeeded, up to a point. But Borodin, and the thirty or forty "advisers " who accompanied him, had in the end much the same experience of Chinese fickleness and ingratitude towards their foreign benefactors that the Americans have had this time. When he had got what he wanted from them Chiang Kai-shek turned against the Russians, and Borodin and his colleagues had to beat a precipitate and humiliating retreat across country to Russia. This incident made a deep and painful impression on Russian opinion at the time, and as far as anybody knows no contemporary counterpart to Borodin has been placed at the disposal of Mao Tse-tung. Nor, if gold from Moscow has been poured into the revolutionary coffers, has its presence there had the slightest effect on the depressed exchange-value of New China's currency. If the establishment of a Communist government in China is a victory for Russia's policy it has been a remarkably inexpensive victory.
That she will reap benefit from it in the councils of the United Nations seems certain ; and it is not less certain that it will be a source of moral and eventually, no doubt, material support to Communists in other parts of Asia. But to assume that China herself will henceforth be a puppet of the Kremlin is to mis- interpret the character of the Chinese people. Within the frame- work of the alien ideology she has borrowed China will work out her own destinies. She has scant affection or respect for any of the white races, and least of all for the Russians ; and though she may sometimes do what they want her to do it will only be because either it suits her own purpose or it costs her nothing to do it. The Chinese have got rid of a Government which was bad, oppressive, corrupt and based on no coherent political faith. They have acquired a Government which is oppressive, which seems (so far) less bad and much less corrupt than its predecessor and which is based on a well-defined political faith, most of whose tenets conflict with the markedly individual outlook of the Chinese. No alternative exists in the country either to its present rulers or to their political doctrine, and the people know it. Being realists, they will settle down to make the best of what they have got ; and if, in the course of this process, they convert it into something which differs sensibly in practice from what it aspires to be on paper, it will not be the first Chinese institution to undergo such a process of adaptation. As far as this country is concerned, nothing that has happened has altered the fundamental facts that we have important and legitimate economic interests in China, inescapable responsibilities to the enterprising individuals who have established them there, and a long tradition of friendship—oddly genuine and, still more oddly, reciprocal—for the Chinese people. A united, peaceful and prosperous China is as much a British interest as is the security of Hongkong ; and the fact that it happens to have been united under a Communist dictatorship, which is a form of government we much dislike, need not prevent us from wishing it peace and prosperity. China has had little enough of either ; and if Mao Tse-tung and his fellow-Marxists can provide a measure of both, any extra-mural activities in which they may indulge will be of secondary importance to their main achievement.
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