Struggle for Peace; Prologue: An Interview with General Eisenhower

The following program is from N-E-T. Good evening. I'm Tom Brady. Earlier last week, the United States people were introduced officially to a new name among the world's nations, the People's Republic of China. Nearly a year ago, in what may have been a signal of what was to come, President Nixon used that title in an address to the American people. Last week's vote in the United Nations made it official. Before next May, the President will pay a visit to a government we once called Chi-Kam. To Americans, this sudden emergence of a power we didn't approve is like the sudden emergence of history. We have to learn what was hidden from us, partly through obscurity, partly, because we didn't want to know. What happened to make China a communist power?

What was the role of the United States? Why did Chiang Kai-Shek lose out in the struggle? To understand the answers to these questions and others, it is necessary to review 75 years of foreign domination, revolution, and war. N-E-T has procured a film coverage of those 75 years. The struggle for China. And before we show it to you, I'd like to introduce you to a man who knows the history well. Former Ambassador Chester A. Ronning of Canada was born in China in the last days of the man's shoes. He taught school in China beginning in 1923 and represented his country there beginning in 1945. He was there again last May. He saw the events you were about to see. He knew the men you were about to meet. Mr. Ronning, before we begin, let me ask you one question. Does the admission of China to the United Nations change the balance of world power? I think it does. The change of representation from Taipei to Peking makes a great deal of difference. Why does it make a difference? Because the reality of power was there all the time.

Oh no, the reality of power was not there. The reality of power was not recognized as a reality. By the United Nations, it will be recognized as a reality. And in the United Nations, in my estimation, may become much more effective, not overnight. But this balance of power between the most powerful nation and the USSR, I'm talking about the United States when I talk about the most powerful one, and the most populous one, China, has been unrepresented in the United Nations. This will bring that whatever balance of power is more satisfactory, balance of power is procured. It will bring it into the United Nations. I see, you mean that power isn't power, unless it's really recognized by all people. That's right, particularly by the United States. So what is even more important than what took place last week in the United Nations is that President Nixon may carry out his objective of normalizing relations with China. Nothing more important in the world than the relations between the United States and China.

Well, let's see how that Chinese government we're about to have relations with, got started. China, at the turn of a new century, the 20th. In her teaming cities and boundless country beyond lived a quarter of humanity. Out of every four people in the world, one was Chinese. They were asked at the wisdom of an ancient civilization. Before the Romans colonized Europe, the Chinese had developed the principles of government which cemented their empire for 2000 years. They had invented the wheel, had learned to tell the time, had observed the movement of the stars. They invented gunpowder and printing, and made the first magnetic compass. In the 16th and 17th centuries when European Buccaneers, merchants, and missionaries had first come to China, they found

not a race of primitives, but a nation rich in learning, in art, philosophy, and culture. Of this great mass of isolated, proud peoples, Napoleon had said, There lies a sleeping giant, letting sleep. When he wakes, he will move the world. The 19th century merchant adventurers and the soldiers and missionaries who followed them broke the traditional isolation of the middle kingdom. They set in train an upheaval, which only now has begun to rock the universe. The Great Wall of China was started three centuries before Christ, to protect China from invaders who

threatened her isolation. Stretching for 1,700 miles through the harsh mountains of China's ancient frontiers, the wall is one of the great feats of human engineering skill. Of it used to be said, that of all the works of man, this alone was visible from the moon. But it was built in vain. Wave after wave of barbarians swept into China from the north. By the end of the 19th century, even the imperial family which occupied the dragon throne of all China was descended from a race of invaders, the Manchus who had conquered China in 1644. The actual ruler, the Dauge Empress, 65 years old, corrupt, cynical and ruthless.

Her advisors, a court of Manchu princes and a retinue of sinister unix. Her instruments, the mandarins, steeped in tradition, preserving the rituals of centuries. Even the entrance examination to the imperial civil service to which they belonged had been formulated hundreds of years before. Innovation or experiment was suppressed. The Manchus, few in number, meets the teaming Chinese, were guardians of a way of life and death, that had to be protected from any hint of corrupting change. An observer wrote, it was in their interest to interdict all efforts of change, to seal the country, so that the repetition of their own exploit or disaffection with their own rule would be impossible. But change was coming. By the turn of the century, six major nations held a place in China.

Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy and Japan. Between them, they controlled her banks, railways, major waterways, iron mines and works, shipbuilding and customs. They claimed for themselves privileges, one in wars and enshrined in unequal treaties. They're so just paraded in the streets, guarding their national interests, while their masters enjoyed the best of everything that China could provide. But, bit by bit, the foreign devils had sewn in China seeds of discontent,

which were to sweep them away, and hearts of the Chinese grew a result to become stronger than the foreign devils, to expel them from China. In 1898, posters began to appear. Notice, the patriots of all the provinces, seeing that men of the West transgress all limits in their behavior, have decided to assemble on the 15th day of the fourth moon, and to kill the Westerners and burn their houses. Those whose hearts are not in the port with us, are scoundrels, men of bad character. Enough! No more words are needed. Revolution caught fire in 1900. In North China, mystic society of peasants called boxes inflamed the people against the foreigners and against the Manchu government. In the ensuing slaughter, thousands mostly Chinese died. For 55 days, the foreign enclave and

peaking lay under siege. In reply to this threat to their trade concessions and to the lives of their nationals, the troops of the Western powers and Japan suppressed the rising with an nauseating ferocity. The national revolution was suppressed. The foreigners stayed. The price of peace, yet further concessions which the Manchu government had no choice but to grant. The grim cycle of life and death went on. But for the Manchu, this was the beginning of the end. Now too late, the Dowager Empress tried desperately to still be growing unrest of her people. She introduced a series of reforms, new schools, new ministries, new armies and the promise of

a new constitution. But by now, this was not enough. Across the length and breadth of China, there was growing a hunger for change. For generations, the peasants had suffered heavy taxation and ruthless exploitation at the hands of landlords and moneylenders. They had seen their sons led away to forced military service. They had endured the floods which roared down the valleys of the Yangtze River and suffered the famine that so often followed the rushing waters. Gradually, acceptance turned to action. They blamed the Manchu's, cursed the foreign devils. Revolution in China was only a tiny flame. Students sent away the study abroad, talked, intrigued, ate, slept. And when the imperial secret police caught up with them, died. Revolution.

The principal custodian, Sun Yatsen, a doctor trained in Hong Kong. His political party, the Kuomintang, the National People's Party. In 1905, in its manifesto, Sun wrote, the Manchu's of today were originally Eastern barbarians, beyond the Great War. Their cruelty and tyranness have now reached their limit. China is the China of the Chinese. The government of China should be in the hands of the Chinese. Our revolution is based on equality. In order to establish a Republican government, made up of members publicly chosen by the people. The end of 2000 years of imperial rule came almost by accident.

In 1911, in Hanko, a revolutionary bomb went off too early. There was rioting, there was mutiny. And suddenly, no one had any further confidence in the imperial regime. The Dowager Empress had died three years before. Pu Yi, the tiny child who ruled in her place, abdicated. This was the opportunity of which Sun Yatsen had dreamed. Arying back from exile abroad, he assumed the presidency of the Republic of China, a parliamentary democracy. Sun had the support of the revolutionist, but he was a civilian leader. Now he was to learn that without a loyal and powerful army, he was powerless to unite China. The troops who reviewed were at best loyal only to their old commanders. And many of these generals neither understood nor approved of the

new state. Sun was trying to set up. Without their help, there could be no revolution. Sun yielded to the powerful commander of the North, Wanshekai, the ex-imperial commander in chief. Wanshekai ruled China briefly as a military dictator and then aspired to make himself emperor. But the generals who had supported him were not prepared to grant him this limitless power. His bid was foiled and he died within a year, some say of a broken heart. But the Chinese who observed the passing of the dictator's funeral saw not only the spectacle, but also the end of any chance of a strong, stable, controlled Chinese government. China, without an effective leader, became a prey to a galaxy of ambitious warlords, each more bizarre and medieval than the next.

They ruled whole provinces of China as though they were their own private kingdoms. They imposed their own taxes, one even levied them 30 years in advance. Some promoted the prosperous opium trade and each imposed his own brand of tyranny. The endless campaign to the warlords fought over the countryside of China, made unity unlikely, modern progress impossible. In Russia, the Soviet revolution swept away the Tsarist government, giving China a new revolution in labor, pledged to the International Expansion of Communistism. In 1917, Dr. Sun established a new government in Campton.

He declared China a democratic republic. He said about strengthening his party sufficiently to unite China. Then in 1919, the peace conference sitting in Versailles recognized the wartime helped not of China, but of Japan. Japan had emerged as a world power. Have fleet was the third largest in the world. As a reward for her help, the statement of the West gave Japan the German concessions in China. An ally during the war, the Chinese were being treated as a defeated foe. Once more, Angus swept through China later. On May the 4th, the students poured into the streets as they protested against this further example of the perfidious ways of the Western powers.

Their demonstrations spread through the major cities like the Fire. Refused help from the West, Sun appealed to Moscow, where layer source of apparently disinterested aid, Sun turned to Lenin. The Russian sent aid and advisors to help reorganize Sun's Guamindang Party. The infant Chinese Communist Party was instructed by the Russians against it will to join with the Guamindang. Sun accepted their aid, and the first united front was born. It aim to fight revolution reward. The lessons of his first brief period of rule ten years before were etched in Sun's mind. This time he must have a loyal army, strong enough to come back to warlords. In all, a thousand Russian advisors arrive to train a new Chinese army. Training headquarters, the military academy at Prompu.

The commandant, a promising young officer, Chanka Shek. Now on the brink of military action to unite China, Sun died. Sun's achievements had been tremendous. For a quarter of a century he had fought the tyranny of the Manchus, and their beans worked away. He laid the foundations of a modern democratic state, and promised a form of parliamentary government for China. The people who watched his cortege as it passed, mourned with real sorrow, the demise of the first democratic leader China had known. So that was the beginning of our history. Mr. Ronning, what sort of a human being was Sun Yatsen?

Sun Yatsen was, of course, the most influential revolutionary leader in the early part of the revolution. I know from my father's school, where a Sun Yatsen cell had been organized. Although my father didn't know about this, the students called, because my father had almost a modern type of beard and whiskers, that young people have today, they called him old whiskers, and but they didn't dare to tell him that in his school there was an organization by Sun Yatsen, a revolutionary cell. Was this a militant revolutionary cell to overthrow your father in the military? No, not to overthrow my father to use my father's aid help if they could get it to overthrow the Manchun dynasty, because it was the internal rottenness of China coupled with the oppression and exploitation and domination of the West

that made the Manchun government completely ineffective to deal with this. And they wanted to overthrow that and establish a republic. As a matter of fact, I became acquainted with the declaration of independence of the United States through this revolutionary cell in my father's school. They used our declaration. All they did was to change George III to Empress Dowager, and then they listed all of her sins, as you listed all of the sins of George III in your declaration of independence. Well, were the foreigners that were in the foreign enclaves at that time, were they sympathetic to Sun Yatsen, or were they sympathetic to the Manchun? Well, I think they were, most of the foreigners were sympathetic to Sun Yatsen. They wouldn't have been if they had known that he intended to overthrow the extraterritorial privileges that we had, and to cancel the unequal treaties. They might not have been in support of him, but they did want a republic,

because the Chinese students and the teachers that were organized by Sun Yatsen, the intellectuals of China that were organized by him, wanted a republic like that of the United States. I was born in America, and I was still an American at the time that I became acquainted with. You were naturally sympathetic, but what about our governments, and your present government, were they sympathetic to Sun Yatsen? At that time? Yeah, I think so. More sympathetic to Sun Yatsen. Why didn't you? Because you see, China had fallen into the hands of warlords, and they were hoping that Sun Yatsen would reunite China. Why didn't Sun Yatsen, if he was a real revolutionary, believe in force and use force, build up an army? Oh, he did. Of course he did. You see, in the first place, by his organization of the intellectuals of China, that gave the impetus to the revolution. But Sun Yatsen had to organize an army before he could get anywhere, and that's why you had the organization of the whole Northern Expedition,

and that's why Jiang Kai-shek was invited to take over the military aspect of the revolution. Why Sun Yatsen? Why Sun Yatsen? Did Sun Yatsen recognize Jiang Kai-shek as a great soldier? Was that it? Yes, he recognized him as the best soldier that China had, and so he invited Zon Lai to indoctrinate the members of the Northern Expedition, and it was through that indoctrination, and through the objective they had, through the enthusiasm they had. This was all created by Sun Yatsen, and Jiang Lai, the present prime minister of China. Many of my friends were assistant political commissars under Jiang Lai for the Northern Expedition, and this was the first time that any army in China had an ideal to fight for, and that's why they were successful. And that's why the revolutionary government was eventually set up in Henkau.

I was in Henkau when that revolutionary government came into power. Let's go ahead now with the second part of our history, and follow Shang Kai-shek on his great Northern Expedition. Shor of his own power, ignoring the hesitation of the Russian rises, Jiang set about achieving the Guamintang's first gold national unity. His weapon, the newly forged Chinese army. In July, Jiang launched the great Northern Expedition. In the same way, to break the power of the warlords, make United China under the power of the Guamintang. The six main armies of the Guamintang swept north on a wave of revolutionary enthusiasm. They gathered strength each mile advanced, the peasants in their path rising to help them. Opposing local armies turned to join them.

Ankau fell. Jiang's army turned east down the Yangtze, through to Nanjing. No warlord had the strength to halt the advance, and those that tried were wooselessly exterminated. In the path of the advancing armies lay the foreign concessions. There, each Guamintang victory brought mounting fear. As Jiang's armies approached, none could predict where they would stop, nor if the very existence of the European settlements could be guaranteed. Wives and children were sent away to safety as foreign troops poured into Shanghai. And gathering tension,

they waited the oncoming armies of Shanghai shake. Refugees clamoured for protection and shelter. Soon Shanghai was a fortress, as a handful of Europeans faced the gathering might of China. Within the city revolutionary agents organized the workers. Armed unions seized police stations, government buildings, and factories, and then took control of the city. A march to the 22nd, they turned it over to Jiang's army as it marched victorious into Shanghai. Moment of crisis passed for the foreign concessions.

Jiang's shake was now concerned less with the foreign imperialists than with the communists inside China. Although he had accepted communist aid in the first half of the northern expedition, Jiang harbored no illusions about them. The aim of the Russian Party is to make the Chinese Communist Party its legitimate heir. They want to make Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet each a part of their Soviet, and even as to China proper, they are not without the wish to put their finger in. In April 1927, making use of the notorious criminal secret society, the green gang of which he had once been a member, Jiang said about the massacre of the communists in Shanghai. But if you subvert. Estonishingly, Moscow still ordered the shattered remnants of the Chinese Communist Party

to continue their united front. But the Guomindang gradually consolidated behind Jiang. They expelled the communists and put to death or imprison those that they could find. With the nationalist behind him, within one year the victorious Jiang had carried his standard into Beijing. For a brief moment it seemed as though China was about to be united. But the hard-pressed people had 20 years more of terrible stripe in front of them. On September 1931, the imperial armies of Japan struck Manchuria.

For 30 years Japan had been laying the foundations of an empire in China. She had intrigued, fermented border incidents, and infiltrated the rich industrial provinces of Manchuria. A full-scale campaign of conquest was the culmination of years of frustrated ambition. Now Jiang embarked on the road that was to end in his discredit. Although he had 140,000 troops facing the Japanese invaders, Jiang decided not to resist. The first China must be united. Everything else must take second place. The troops of the Guomindang were withdrawn, and the Japanese became masters of Manchuria. They set up an autonomous satellite state named it Manjugwa or Manchuland.

As puppet ruler, they chose Pu'i, the last of the Manchul emperors, making his third appearance on the dragon throne. But the pomp and ritual of Pu'i's coronation was only a thin facade, masking Japanese presence and Japanese ambition. Then Vizich Manchugwa as a springboard, from which they could capture total control of China's vast reservoir of manpower and resources. It was a deadly threat to the survival of China. Japan's armies began to press outwards into North China. But astonishingly, Jiang still saw resistance to the Japanese as only second priority. Fear and hatred of communism dominated him. The Japanese are an illness of the skin, but the communists are an illness of the blood. They kill the body.

After the bloodbath of 1927, the few communists who survived and scattered into the countryside, it was here among the country's 400 million peasants with the heart of the revolution wave. Mao Zedong said in 1927, in a short time, hundreds of millions of peasants will rise with the fury of a hurricane. No power have a strong unrestrained. Imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials and gentry will meet their doom at the hands of the peasants. The peasant was deaf to every revolutionary slogan but one. Sunyad Sen's principle of the land to the tiller. Now it was the communists who promised them that. In Yanxi and other central south provinces, the communists had set up Soviet-style governments. And for the first time began to tackle this basic problem, redistributing the land among the 9 million people under their control.

Yanke Sheikh, depending on the League of Nations to solve the Japanese problem, turned from them to exterminate this state within a state. His Air Force reigned bombs on them from the air. Four times between 1930 and 1933, Zhang held his arms against the communists instead of against the Japanese. As the ring tightened, the communists saw that they must break free or die. So in 1934, the Red Army embarked on one of the great feats of history, the Long March. They set off soldiers, their women and children, household positions, the paraphernalia of government, to find safety and time to regroup beyond the reach of the nationalist armies.

90,000 men, women and children, set off on this epic quest. They covered 6,000 miles as far as from Glasgow to Cape Town. Fort a battle each week, an engagement every two days, across 18 mountain ranges, of which permanent snow covered five, and crossed 24 rivers. After 23 months, only 8,000 of the original 90,000 arrived at their destination, the only Soviet now left in China, surviving in a distant backward mountain region of Shenshi. Here they set up their headquarters at Yanan.

Their ordeal created legendary heroes, born of epic deeds, a new Red Army, and above all, it threw up a hero, destined ultimately to leave them, Mao Zedong. The treacherous policies of the Guamintan, wrecked the United Front, unity was replaced by civil war, democracy by dictatorship, and a China full of brightness by a China covered in darkness. But the Chinese Communist Party was neither cowed nor conquered nor exterminated. We picked ourselves up, wiped off the blood, buried our fallen comrades, and went into battle again. Implacably, Jung still sought their destruction, and as Chinese fought Chinese, the Japanese invaded, drove deeper and deeper into China. The Manchurian leader, the young marshal Chang Shuai-Liang, whose homeland and fallen to the Japanese, rebelled against Chang's senseless policies.

Chang flew to the front to restore discipline, and the Manchurian army made him a prisoner. Presented with a choice, a united front with the Reds against Japan or death, Chang reluctantly chose the former. Chang kept his word, a second United Front was formed. The Red armies became national armies. At last the Guamintang and the Communists sat at the same conference table, planned a joint strategy, united in a common purpose. The Communist Military Representative, Chao Nlai. This uneasy coalition spelled out the two things the Japanese most feared, a united China and the Communist Menace.

Japanese High Command resolved to crush China, before it became united or read or both. It was now or never. In 1937, they unleashed the full enormity of modern warfare upon the hapless Chinese people. They bombed Chang Hai. And the startled and horrified Western world could witness the true devastation of aerial warfare. No one to this day can count the loss, either in life or property. Chang Hai suffered a savage holocaust. The terrified population sought safety in the foreign enclave. For surely the Japanese would never attack Western power.

But the Chinese suffering had hardly begun. The relentless advance of the Japanese army continued. The Japanese High Command encouraged the troops to put the city to rape and to pillage and to murder.

The full horror as armed men took their will of a helpless civilian population was recorded by a missionary and the films smuggled out. For the Japanese High Command, Tera was a deliberate instrument of policy to break the Chinese will to resist. The effect on the national morale was the opposite. A flood of recruits joined the armies of the Guamintang of the Communist. A new determination to fight to the end was born in the heart of China. General Chang Hai's check achieved a new stature as a national leader.

The intransigence, which was later destabilized to stubbornness, inspired the people's resistance to the foreign invader. But in vain, try as they might. The Chinese soldiers could not stand the flood of Japanese condolences. Outgunned and outgenrolled, the Chinese battled on. Battle after battle was joined, the bell-riching men encouraged their head, and out of the weapons nor the leadership to halt the enemy. By 1938, almost half of China proper had fallen. A major cities were taken, a railways and industries gone.

Only the most primitive lines of supply remained, and the task of transporting what food and materials they could master seemed superhuman. In the face of such incapacity, nationalist China could hardly survive. But as an American observer wrote, the strength of the Chinese was not in their cities. It was in the hearts of the people. China was primitive. So primitive that the destruction of our industries, our railways and machinery did not upset her. China had just emerged from chaos, but was still so close to it that the disruption of war could be fitted into the normal routine of her life. It, for example, it was necessary to move government, industry, people, and army into the interior. Away from the reach of the invading Japanese, it could be done. China brought on a giant retreat to the west. Those who decided to follow him into exile carried with them not only their homes, but their factories.

They stripped their land, and took with them anything that might have been of use to the enemy. They transported many of their hospitals, their universities, and their schools. Then, the retreating Guamintang took up the railway lines to slow the Japanese pursuit. Many chose to stay behind when he cooperated with the Japanese. It is many as 20 million people, wearing this incredible migration which carried China's new capital to Chongqing,

set deep in the mountain fastness of central China. But even here, there was no safety. The Japanese ruled the skies. French mission ruled. Chongqing, Chiang Kai-shek's capital, is one vast, blazing mass. Quick help when it takes to tell, beams crack, walls crumbled, telephone lines collapse amid showers of sparks and tangled wires.

People run without knowing where to go, stumbling and flundering, trying to escape the flames that close in from every side. The wounded are screaming as they realize they're about to be burned alive. Three a drop, the silence I heard once more, horrified people rush shouting, crying that a corpse is everywhere. Survivors roam through burning buildings searching feverously for trace of some relative, that as a woman bent and crying over half a corpse. I ask myself whether such horrors are possible at all, or whether I am the victim of ghastly hallucinations. Yes, it is possible it rarely is true. Chongqing has become one vast cemetery.

Chong, in his beleaguered fortress, was hopelessly cut off from the vast country he nominally ruled. China's truncated industry could now produce only four bullets per man per man. An American observer wrote, The Japanese tanks darted almost at will across the yellow plains of northern China. Their columns thrust down the railways and highways to occupy successive objectives on schedule. They sat and looted. They raped the women until their lust was worn. They branded the centers they held with terror. And yet, about them, picking at them, bleeding them, grew a conspiracy of resistance that seemed to nourish itself from the earth alone.

The China was still not a nation. The nationalists drew their strength and support from the cities. The Guamintang was largely a party of the middle classes, of industrialists, of merchants, and in the countryside of landlords. But in remote areas, there were still Chinese who would never even heard of the Japanese, who did not even know that the emperor had been deposed. The Communist Party learned that to survive, it must win the support of the present minions. The lesson was this. Control of the countryside is more important than control of the towns. There but islands in the middle of a powerful, turbulent ocean, the people. It was Mao Zedong's theory of the people's war.

In the process of fighting the Japanese, the nationalists began to decay, the Communists to grill. And then, a miracle happened. December the 7th, 1941, Japan had attacked America. America is a word the Chinese might like, but we Americans at the time called it by other words. Ambassador Ronning, we see the two protagonists emerging here, Shankai Shek and Machitong. Can you match them as characters, as individuals? Well, I would say that Mao Zedong is the man who deserves the credit for having come to grips with a real problem of China. That's the problem of the peasants of China in the land reform. Yes, not only the land reform. That was one of the important phases of it.

But it was his ideology that inspired the peasants of China to overthrow not only the landlords, but the corrupt regime that was in control of China. Corrupt because it did not deal with the basic problems of China. Mao Zedong saw that if you're going to have a revolution in China, you must organize the peasants of China. Previous revolutions and phases of the revolution had failed because the peasants were not sufficiently involved. You think you did not see this? Shankai Shek understood that the China was an agricultural nation and that the strengths of China lay in this field. But Shankai Shek's attitude was rather to return to a stabilization of the people of China by Confucianist principles.

You mentioned that Chairman Mao's ideology was a strong one for the peasants. Was that a Russian ideology? No. Was it communist in that sense of the word? It was based on Marxism-Leninism certainly, so it's communist in that respect. But it is not Russian communism because when it comes through the Chinese mind and made practical to the situation in China, he took those phases of Marxism-Leninism which he knew would appeal to the Chinese people. And remember that this was worked out by trial and error long before even the Northern Expedition because he saw. And he was found persona non-grata amongst a lot of the communist in China because the orthodox theory is that revolution is possible only on the proletariat. Well, Mao Zidong said we have no proletariat and of course they didn't have a proletariat. The real proletariat of China was the peasants of China.

And he was the one who first saw the importance of dealing with the problems of the peasants of China. Doesn't the story we've just seen though make clear that they had another distinction, another difference between the two men was that Mao wanted to fight the Japanese. That's right. And Chiang apparently did not. Well, I'm not so sure that he didn't want to. I've never been convinced of that. But he thought that it was better to yield first and then eventually overcome them. But of course that was a fallacious analysis. The Japanese, if they had succeeded, would never have given up. And Mao Zidong, but and Dorn Lai, perhaps Dorn Lai more particularly because Dorn Lai was the organizer. Dorn Lai was the administrator. And he was the one that arranged the combination between the nationalists and the communists after Jiang Xuelian. You knew Zhou Enli? Of course. I've known him for many many years. Is he a brilliant man? He's not only a brilliant man. Dorn Lai is a man of purpose. He's a sincere man. And extremely capable.

He is a magnetic personality. And this magnetism that he has has never allowed him to set himself up as the greatest leader. He could have done this at one time, but he recognized in Mao Zidong something that he didn't have. What was it? And that was the ideology that appealed to the peasants. He himself, Zhou Enli, not being a peasants. Zhou Enli being more of an intellectual. Well, Zhou Enli came from a Mandarin family. But of course he was an intellectual. And Mao Zidong is also an intellectual and a Chinese scholar. But he came from a peasant family. And he understood the problems of the peasants much more clearly. But here you had the wonderful combination. In China, nothing happens until the peasants and the intellectuals combine.

Let's go on now to the last portion of our film. Now the United States in the war and see how that revolution was won. Overnight from fighting a distant desperate war, the Chinese nationalist government became heroic allies in the struggle against Japan. In the air, the flying tigers of General Shen O had fought a desperate private battle against the might of Japan's air force. Now the young American volunteer flies, but the foreigners are fast official American aid. To open the way for desperately needed supplies, a million Chinese, with little bit their bare hands, built airfield after airfield in southern China. Once the sweating laborers had performed their task, one of the most dramatic air lifts in the history of war could begin.

Over the hump, from upper Asam to the plateau of Yunnan, at first carrying 80 tons of supplies a month by the end of the war, 80,000 tons a month. In the process, the hump drove American airmen mad, killed them, sent them back to America, wasted with tropical fever and broken for the rest of their lives. But strain as they might, die as gallantly as they did. The airmen of the hump could never meet the demands of the beleaguered garrisons beyond the mountains. The supplies they brought were no mere words of encouragement. This was the very substance of resistance, the sinews of military power. But it was not enough. The construction of the Burma Road began.

Poor and most things, China was rich in manpower. Again, with bare hands and straining muscles, the Chinese laborers built a fantastic highway over the mountains and built it in less than 12 months. It was a new lifeline for the nationalists. More and more American aid could pour into China. The Americans provided not only materials but advice, just as the Russians had done at the birth of the Kuomintang. Their advisor, General Stillwell, the brilliant soldier. He trained Chinese recruits in American methods and techniques, forging a remarkable fighting weapon from the Kuomintang brigades with which he was entrusted. But as Chinese strength grew, confidence in Shanghai's government slumped. An observer wrote,

More and more taxes were being imposed on the hard-pressed people. Prices in the shops were rising. Industrial production was stagnating. The middle classes and the intellectuals who had supported the Kuomintang from its very birth became disillusioned with the trappings of dictatorship which proliferated everywhere. While profiteers grew rich, the nationalist armies, ill-fed and ill-closed, poorly armed and often robbed of even their meager rations by their own officers, showed little will to fight. Turning on those more miserable than themselves, they plundered the peasants and lost the good will of the very people they were supposed to be fighting for. The military bankruptcy of the Kuomintang was soon revealed when the Japanese lost their 1944 spring offensives. 60,000 Japanese troops crushed aside half a million of Chinese soldiers. A nationalist retreat became a route.

American doubts about Zhang's regime were growing. Military conferences were attended by leaders from both the nationalist and communist armies, but the alliance was in appearance only. Zhang seemed to be blockading the red armies. In front of evidence of corruption, intrigue and inefficiency, vinegar gel, as still was called, took an acid view of Chiang Kai-shek. He maintained his diplomatic affront as he could, but privately referred to the Generalissimo as Peanut and wrote in his diary. We were fighting in jail to tear down the Nazis. One party government supported by the Gestapo. China, our ally, is being run by a one-party government, supported by a Gestapo. Zhang disliked and mistrusted this blunt American. Still well must go, he told Rosefeld.

The new American embassy soon saw only two clearly mounting evidence of nationalist dishonesty and disarray. In November 1944, the Japanese attacked again. Once more, the defending arm is collapsed before them. Desperately, American fighters and bombers struck at Japanese concentrations and the endless columns that snaked across the plains of China. Panic overwhelmed, all eastern China, as Shano's air bases were overrun. In 1944, almost half a million soldiers were lost by the Chinese. The entire coast was cut off, and a population of more than 100 million had been ripped from the direct control of Chiang Kai-shek.

And all the while, secret reports were being dispatched from American observers in China to Washington. They pointed out that while the Kuomintang was pursuing a suicidal policy, the Chinese communists were following policies that were historically and evolutionarily sound. Far from sitting out the conflict waiting for the Americans, the Reds are spearheading a war against the Japanese, aggressively waged by a totally mobilized population. The peasants have been given something to fight for. Because of the mass support, mass participation, the communist movement now encompasses 338,000 square miles and 90 million people. Observes had visited Yannan at the communist headquarters. Here they saw the Red community constructing a society based on the social program they had formulated during their exile in the countryside. They saw Red government schools and hospitals. In November 1944, observers reported to Rose Felt.

It would take a foreign intervention on the scale of Japan's invasion of China to make it even probable that Chiang could crush the communists. Since this is improbable, the communists are in China to stay, and China's destiny is not Chiang, but theirs. The war against Japan ended as suddenly as it had begun. But the surrender of the greatest military-enabled power the Far East had seen was only the end of a phase in China's revolution. As the Japanese formula surrendered, Chiang Gaishek could reflect that now the Japanese had been beaten for him by the Americans, he was freed to settle the score with Mao and the Red Army. Both the nationalist and the communists in their stronghold as Shenshi laid claim to the Japanese leaving.

A wild race developed between Mao and China to take responsibility victory. The Japanese had overrun practically the whole of eastern China, together with the immensely rich and developed areas of Manchuria. Chiang appealed to the Americans. They provided him with planes, and with American aid, 110,000 nationalist troops were airlifted to strategic areas in Manchuria. Their role to occupy this vital region and hold against the approaching communists. But the Russians had beaten them to it. Stalin had declared war and invaded the province only days before the war ended. Chiang's troops took possession not of a rich industrial area, but a shell. Heavy machinery had been torn from its concrete bed. Rolling stock and even rail road had been wrenched up and taken back to the USSR. It was as though a giant swarm of steel devouring locusts had swept through the land. When all Japanese held territories had been reoccupied, Chiang possessed most of the important towns and railways, but he was hopelessly overextended.

And all around his garrisons led the countryside, and the Red Army gathering strength. It must have been obvious to all that sooner or later there would be a final showdown between the Kuomintang and the communists. Even during the war there had been serious clashes between the Red Army and the nationalists. Now the conflict was to be for real, and the time had come. Spring 1946. Chiang believed himself unchallengeable. Civil war will last only a few months people believed. The Red Bandits will soon be stamped out. But it was not a simple question of military might. Mao had the peasants, something which Chiang had never had. The popular support of the peasant peoples of China. In the vast rural areas which they controlled, the Red set about dividing up the land and settling ancient scores with the landlords.

Here lay the real roots of revolution. The Americans tried vainly to stand between the two factions. General Marshal arrived with a brief that he should keep the peace. With a considerable effort of diplomacy he got the two sides together, and agreement was signed. After all, the Americans reasoned the war is over. Marshal warned Chiang that he could never defeat the communists by force. But the control of Manchuria was vital to Chiang economically, politically, and for reasons of prestige. Chiang struck at pockets of communists in Manchuria, and in their own stronghold in Yemen. At first it seemed that the Kuamintang were carrying all before them, Yanan fell, and was heralded as a great victory.

But by now Mao Teton had formulated his theories of revolutionary warfare. When the enemy advances, we retreat. When the enemy escapes, we have us. When he retreats, we pursue. And when he gets tired, we attack. In the spring of 1947 the communists exploded in a series of quick offenses which left the nationalist garrisons in Manchuria days to be confused. The Red Army swept town after town under its control, until only three major cities in Manchuria remained in nationalist hands. In June the communists swept into North China, an account for offensive which neither the nationalists nor their American advisers had believed possible. With Chiang's armies struggled fairly to halt it. That front line, such as it was, disintegrated.

By the end of 1947, Red troops had reached the Yellow River, and the Red Tide had engulfed much of northern and central China. Mao Teton declared the Chinese People's Revolutionary War has now reached a turning point. Red morale was high, well-clad, well-fed, and well-led. Their soldiers' discipline was good. And above all, they knew what they were fighting for. Losing observer, the leaders of the Communist Party were a highly interesting group. Their primary characteristic was their sense of unity. They had been fighting together for 20 years against the Kuomintang and then against the Japanese. Their families had been tortured, murdered, lost. They had been subjected to every form of police espionage and suppression. The week had fallen. The faint of heart had surrendered. Those who were left were top as leather, hard as iron. They trusted one another and hung together in a unity that showed no fissure of factionalism.

What disputes they had were locked within themselves. The Red Offensive had forced nationalist armies everywhere onto the defensive. Their morale was disastrously low. Increasingly harassed by red guerrillas, now defeated almost always when their faced units of the Red Army, betrayed by their officers, Chang's troops deserted, fled, or simply lost the will to fight. Defeat followed defeat, severing the last threads of hope, which held the shattered nationalist cause together. By February 1948, the Red's winter offensive and isolated Manchuria. American military advisors urged Chang to cut his losses and abandon it to the Reds. But the Generalissimo refused even to discuss it. The loss of face was more than he could contemplate. But he was to have no choice. Half a million Red soldiers had surrounded Mukden, Manchuria's capital.

The garrison who had fortified the city was overwhelmed. In a series of bloody battles, Chang lost 200,000 troops. It was a disastrous defeat. In all, the nationalists lost nearly half a million men in Manchuria, 85% of the American equipped. In the last four and a half months of 1948, the nationalists lost 45% of their total forces. In the same period, the Red Army increased its strength by almost half. Even the bare military odds were no longer on the side of Chang. On the 1st of January, he came. The Red Army was received as liberators by a large proportion of the populace.

Chang appealed once more to the Americans. They had beaten the Japanese. Now they must turn their war machine against their true enemy, the communists. Madame Chang went to America to plead with Truman. But for the Americans, the war was truly over. And the scales were falling from their eyes. Now they saw the Guamintang as hopelessly inefficient and corrupt. Chang demanded, as of right, huge loans, without any guarantee, as to how they would be spent. This time, the Americans had had enough. They began to withdraw. The Guamintang was defend for itself. Disaster after disaster struck the disheartened nationalist as the Red Army closed for the kill in the battle of Huaihai. For 65 days, more than a million troops fought it out in the planes beside the River Huai. In this great epic battle of Huaihai, Chang Kai-shek lost 600,000 men, including the last of his American equipped divisions.

The armies of the Generalissimo began to melt like snow. Whole divisions changed sides. Thanks which only hours before had been the pride of Chang's army were fighting for the Reds. Generals and entire regiments embraced the Red Corps wholesale. An American observer wrote, in a sense that Guamintang leaders are pitiful. They could supply no social dynamic to rally men forward, because they saw men, not as men, but as servile persons. In the nationalist capital, Moral slumped as the news from the front spoke each day of terrible defeat and disaster. Crisis soared, the black market was right.

Under the intolerable strain of supporting the war effort, the currency collapsed. Money became quite literally not worth the paper it was printed on. Millions faced ruin. The middle classes were always supported, Guamintang lost faith at last. All the hopes that it sustained the people through terrible years were dashed. As the age of privilege disappeared, the foreigners began to pack their bags and return to Europe. There was to be no timely intervention by European troops this time. The last of the foreign devils took ship from Shanghai. The Red Army regrouped for its final offensive. Before it lay the Yangtze River, slow-flowing and muddy, almost a mile wide.

It was the opinion not only of the Guamintang, but the Americans that it was impossible. The Red Army enlisted the transport of the junk dwellers to carry their forces over. Half a million Guamintang troops guarded the far back. But, the morale broken, they put up only a token resistance and then fled. The Reds resumed their spectacular advance. In April, Nanking fell. For 30 years this ancient capital had been the symbol of the Chinese Republic.

It was here that Dr. Sun Yatsen took the oath as president of the newly-born Republic. And it was here that Jankai Shek could set up his capital in headquarters for his war against the communists. Now, postman guided peasant soldiers if they move through the unfamiliar streets. The tides were done. Now, on average, the Red armies were capturing three cities a day. The Guamintang was putting up only token resistance. Jankai Shek fled to safety in Formosa, taking the shattered remnants of his army with him. In October, Red Army vanguards reached the vicinity of Hong Kong. Kanchan fell, and all effective resistance was at an end. The mainland of China, with its 600 million inhabitants, had a new ruler, Mao Tidong. The Reds prepared to celebrate victory.

One million people gathered in front of the gates of heavenly peace in Beijing. And amid wild popular rejoicings, Mao Tidong proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China. The date was October 1st, 1949. Ambassador Ronning, were you there? Yes, I was a member of the diplomatic corps in Nanking. That afternoon, we had been asked to meet in the foreign office. And out onto the platform came my friend Huang Hua, who is now the Chinese ambassador in Ottawa. And I was surprised that he made the announcement about the new government inviting us to recognize it and to establish diplomatic relations with it. He made this announcement in Chinese. And the diplomatic corps, there was only one person that understood Chinese. So the Australian ambassadors stood up and said, Mr. Huang Hua, we didn't understand a word you said.

May we have the Canadian representative to interpret for us. Huang Hua didn't answer. I was secretly proud that the Chinese at last dared to use their own language in talking to foreigners. We both realized that this history we've been looking at is 22 years old. And that for 22 years, as far as the American people were concerned, we really didn't know much about what was going on there. You went back there recently. Yes, I was back this summer. What would you say has happened in those 22 years that are almost a vacuum in history? Well, I was there for two years before I closed the Canadian Embassy. So I saw the beginning of reforms. I saw the beginning of reforms and the achievement of some reforms that I didn't think were possible in the course of my lifetime. Such as what? Such as stabilization of currency. Such as stabilization of the price of rice. So that the peasants didn't have to sell their rice with depressed prices. And then when the rice corporations got control of it, they started in storehouses and with the prices so high that it couldn't all be distributed and it rotted.

Rice was rotting in storehouses in China when I came to China in 1945 and there was famine in Hunan. Peasants were dying by the thousands and there was rice rotting in China. And Mao corrected this very, very quickly. Yes. But what happened? He not only stabilized the price of rice, but by stabilization of the price of rice, he was able to export rice to Ceylon in exchange for rubber. But these were only two of the many other reforms that were started. I wanted to go back and see this summer with two daughters what the attitude of the Chinese people was. What the attitude of the people was in my hometown. So I visited my hometown. I planned my whole trip and I went every place I went to, I planned where I wanted to go and what I wanted to see because the doors were open to me to do this. And I wanted to talk without anybody else present to the people that I knew. I hadn't been in my hometown for 44 years, but I knew many of the people because they were important officials in the Nationalist regime in Nanking when I was there representing Canada.

Were they still there? Well, they were still there. And I met many of these people and some of my students that I hadn't seen for 44 years. Has the Nationalist officials been mistreated? The Nationalist officials. Well, they had to undergo what is now known as May 7 schools. They had to be re-inductinated and they had to work with their hands. And many of my friends had to do this and they actually enjoyed these courses. For the first time, they had found the Chinese scholar never used his hands for anything else but doing beautiful calligraphy with holding a brush. And to get his hands into the dirt or get his hands into Greece, we don't understand this because we're proud of using our hands. But they despised the use of their hands. This was the old tradition. And this is one reason for the cultural revolution. Tell me about the cultural revolution because I'm not sure I quite understood why Mao started a revolution in effect against himself.

It was not against himself. It was against what they called revisionism, but which is actually traditionalism, particularly against the sort of thing I was just talking about. The Chinese tradition, to establish a new elite of the intelligentsia. Of course, the aristocracy of the intelligentsia was one of the things that enabled China to exist from ten millenniums ago, and particularly through the last three and a half millenniums of recorded history, as the only civilization that has existed in all phases down to the present time. But it's not good enough when China came into conflict with the West. China was crushed. And Mao Zedong feared the reestablishment of this momentum of Chinese history.

Let me ask you about what lies in the future. I read, been reading, what some of our senators and representatives have been saying about China's recognition by the United Nations. We have some people saying it there. We've now ruined the United Nations and the China will come in and practice subversion in the organization. Do you believe that? Well, as I said a moment ago, I think that the United Nations is going to profit a great deal by representation of a quarter of the human race in the United Nations. And of course, when the Chinese exert their influence anywhere in the world, and they're just as anxious to exert their influence as we are in Canada, or as the United States is, or as the Soviet Union is, when we exert our influence, then it's always beneficial. But as soon as the Chinese start exerting their influence, it's always subversive. It all depends upon your point of view. I think that for the people of China, nothing better could have happened than what has happened. And it was absolutely inevitable that it did happen.

When people in the United States blame President so and so for not having done so and so in order to save China for the free world, nothing could have prevented what has happened in China. It was absolutely inevitable. And today, you know, we have the West. We blame the Chinese for calling themselves drum war, the central kingdom, and regarding all others as barbarians. We think that we are the only ones that are capable of giving the Chinese a policy that they should follow. And we continue to bear the burdens of the Chinese. Many of our university professors have written complicated theses about what the situation is. And much of this, I think, has been dreamt up. And then they propose what the policy should be. The Chinese are quite capable. They have been capable for 10,000 years of solving their own problems. Let us leave them to solve their own problems.

Well, what problems do you think Mr. Nixon will have to try to solve when he goes to China? Well, I think what happened last week in the United Nations is going to be very beneficial to President Nixon if his ideal is to do what he says that it is, that is to normalize relations with China, because that question is no longer an obstacle. The United States has accepted the majority opinion of the United Nations, and will no longer make any effort to replace speaking by Taipei. So that obstacle is out of the way. The next obstacle he has to face is to leave the Taiwan problem to the Chinese themselves to solve. What is your guess is to what will happen to Shankai Shek? Well, I don't think anything. The Chinese communists were prepared to make peace with Shankai Shek. Yes, I know. And don't forget that his son spent 12 years in Moscow and became an art communist, so you can maybe see his son going to peaking on a mission rather like Mr. Nixon.

Well, no, not like Mr. Nixon, because he can't represent a foreign power, and Mr. Nixon represents the greatest foreign power. So it won't be on that level at all. But at all. No, it's quite possible that they will settle this thing peaceably. I think they will settle this thing peaceably. A lot of the history we saw tonight involved a great Chinese fear of Japan, and you could see why they feared Japan. What problem do you see for Mr. Nixon there? Well, this problem, I'm glad you raised it, is associated with the whole problem of Taiwan. If this new talk about an independence movement for Taiwan takes place, or if that should blossom into an independent Taiwan, the Chinese know perfectly well that because Taiwan is now already in trade commerce in the orbit of Japan, and the Japan depends a great deal upon Taiwan, and one of the reasons why the people in Japan who want to normalize their relations with China haven't been able to do so is on account of the agreement they have with Taiwan.

If Taiwan drifts back again into the hands of the Chinese, that's going to be the most dangerous situation that the Chinese will face. United States. Into the hands of the Japanese. What did I say? You said Chinese. Oh, yes, no, into the hands of the Japanese. If Taiwan drifts into the hands of the Japanese, and it was a colony of Japan for 50 years, that would be the most dangerous situation for China. That is one reason why the Chinese insist upon that not the United Nations, not the United States, suggest to them how to solve this problem. Let them solve this problem themselves, and this is what I think. So that's why Nixon perhaps is one of his principal problems in seeking independence. I think so. We've watched some fascinating history tonight, and Ambassador Ronning has given us some important first-hand perspectives. He said a moment ago that the struggle for China was still continuing. The events of the last few months have made it clear that we shall have to play an informed role in that struggle.

China will be watching Japan, watching Russia, watching us, and our relationships with Japan and Russia. From now on, the people of our country will have to understand and concern themselves with the unfolding history of the nation whose birth was depicted this evening. Thank you, Ambassador Ronning. This is Tom Raiden, for any tea. Good night. Let's go! Let's go!

Let's go! Let's go!