Pearl Buck - My Several Worlds

Had I been able to foresee the strange atmosphere that has pervaded my country since 1946, where good men and true scholars have lost their jobs and their reputations because of their knowledge and their understanding of the areas which, without American leadership, have gone over to Communism, I should have been confirmed in my decision. For though The East and West Association never sent a Communist or political figure to any American community, yet today it is dangerous even to declare belief in the brotherhood of peoples, in the equality of the races, in the necessity for human understanding, in the common sense of peace — all those principles in which I have been reared, in which I do believe and must believe fearlessly until I die. No, but I would have closed The East and West Association also because I would not have been willing to subject my friends from Asia to the lies and suspicions and false accusations so rife in our times. Yet I am grateful for those ten years in which we were able to meet each other face to face, good citizens from Asia and good citizens in the United States, and now and then the seed sown still bears its fruit.

Much of my life, my thought, my time, my money for ten years went into this work. Through it I, too, learned a lesson. A nation, like a child, cannot comprehend beyond the capacity of its mental age. To teach calculus to a child of six is absurd. One has to begin at the beginning, one has to wait for maturity and it cannot be hastened.

It was increasingly difficult as the war years went on to gain even for myself a true picture of what was happening in China. There was much pleasant propaganda about our Chinese allies, but the sad truth, as I discovered from honest Chinese friends who in rueful talk admitted what I had feared, was that in the positional war which Chiang Kai-shek was waging by remaining in Chungking without much active resistance, the armies under his control were gradually deteriorating. Poor food, irregular pay, a stagnant life were combining to take the heart out of the men. They were growing impatient and bitter as well as idle, while they waited for the World War to decide their fate. Inevitably, too, corruption set in and secret and unlawful trade with the enemy began to flourish. The West would win, they were told, and since they were the allies of the West, it remained only for them to wait until Japan was defeated. The Communists meanwhile carried on a brisk war, and not entirely unselfishly either, for they were consolidating the peasants behind them in the rural areas, penetrating even into Nationalist-held territory. The two parties had no communication with each other, except in a formal fashion in Chungking between Communist representatives and those of the Nationalist government, and they made no mutual military plans. Since neither told the other what it was doing resistance was divided. Their very hopes were divided. Chiang wanted a quick end to the war while his position was still strong enough to claim the leadership in peace, whereas the Communists hoped for a long war, because in the interval they could consolidate more and more territory under their control in the guise of resistance to the aggressive enemy. Civil war was actually being waged, though undeclared, and thus it continued until 1945 when Germany surrendered.

Japan did not surrender at the same time and Chinese of both parties thought that the war would still go on perhaps for many years, the Nationalists fearing, the Communists hoping for such a situation. I remember that my Chinese friends in New York argued with me that the United States must certainly send forces to land upon the Chinese coast and face Japanese troops in hand-to-hand battle. If this were done, they promised, the Nationalist troops would be at their side. The Communists, I reasoned, for I had no means of knowing, would do their best against such an outcome, for by it the whole southeast area which they had begun to penetrate through their guerrillas would automatically be restored to the Nationalists.

My Chinese friends were wrong, as any American might have guessed they would be. We did not, and doubtless never had planned to land American troops on the Chinese coast to meet the Japanese face to face. Instead, as everybody now knows, the Japanese forces were much nearer collapse than had been supposed, and when suddenly and without warning to anyone the atomic bombs were dropped, the end came. Chiang Kai-shek acted with speed. With the power of his office as Commander in the China Zone, he demanded that his troops be taken by American airplanes to the occupied areas and that the Japanese not be allowed to surrender to the Chinese Communists, but only to his own representatives. Upon this the Civil War flared into the open.

We Americans were in an embarrassing position. We were obliged to fulfill Chiang Kai-shek’s demands, and yet by so doing we put ourselves on the side of the Nationalists as against the Communists, and this made impossible the atmosphere of neutrality essential to the position we assumed later as arbitrators. That is, the compromise so heroically worked for by General Marshall was always hopeless in view of what had already taken place. The situation was only the first of others that were to follow, the most notable and dangerous one being our support of France as a colonial power in Indo-China. I am convinced that such a position is abhorrent to all good Americans, for in spite of confusions and betrayals we are committed by conviction and by choice to the independence of peoples, and yet, because we stand against Communism, we feel ourselves compelled to accept as allies those with whom we are most deeply incompatible. It has always been and is now, however, a mistake to assume that we are actually compelled to such compromise. An enlightened leadership by men informed of the actualities of life in Asia would have found an alternative that could have given to American democracy its true expression. I say American, and yet the power and the attraction of our way of life, based upon the deep principles of the human heart, lie in the fact that what we believe in is what all mankind craves, the freedom of the individual within the limits of universal law. Had we been able to fulfill ourselves, we might have found world friendship and peace far easier to achieve. Instead we have slipped unwillingly into the place of the burden-bearers of Asia, responsible for old sins that we never committed.

General Marshall went to China in 1946, therefore, with a vain hope. He faced two lawless parties, each equally lawless, for neither was the elected of the people. Chiang Kai-shek had never made a real — that is, a constitutional — government, and the members of his Cabinet were merely his lackeys, without security of tenure except as they were loyal to his person. Long ago the hope of any organized government had been taken from them. Chiang Kai-shek remained a military leader and no more.

But the Communists had nothing better, either. They also were not elected by the people. They, no more than the Nationalists, had set up an organized legality, within which the people could express their choice. The framework of the nation was gone, the old patterns were destroyed. Had there been no revolution, no Sun Yat-sen, at least there might have been the throne to seize, the Imperial Seal to possess. Even the Old Empress had been careful, however often she fled, to take with her the sacred seal, which alone could prove her right to rule.

Our brave old American general faced two groups of warring men, neither of them with the right to rule a great people, for the people had not spoken and could not speak. Even though a compromise were reached, a government had still to be made. It was indeed a hopeless task, and thinking of it in these days I wonder if he knew it. And why, I wonder, did not our own government know it? A few educated Chinese clung to a vague shred of remaining hope that if a short working compromise could be made they themselves could plunge into the effort of creating a government. They were older and wiser than they had been in the first years of the Nationalists, and though now they no longer believed in Chiang’s government, they were not yet won to the Communists, either, and in their no man’s land they kept their resolution and tried to form a new group, the Democratic League. The only result of this was to be called pro-Communist by the Nationalists and pro-Nationalist by the Communists, and the little effort soon faded, although it was courageously begun.