“Against the tide of alienation from Chiang’s regime and temptation by the Communists battled one of China’s greatest liberals: Lin Yutang.
Lin returned to China in 1943 for only the second time since moving to America in 1937.
In a rebuttal in the Nation magazine the following month, called “China and Its Critics,” Lin acknowledged American public opinion was not on his side. China’s Communists had become “America’s sacred cow.”
He had been a longtime critic of the Nationalists’ political oppression, but Chiang’s depredations were a garden party compared to the regimented thinking imposed in the Red Zone.
Throughout the war leftist newspapers were able to publish in Nationalist territory, books and magazines routinely attacked the Generalissimo, and demonstrations organized by the Communists and other political parties were tolerated off and on.”
Lin made an important point about American “China Hands.”
Though many of them could speak Chinese, few could read it.
They never bothered to check Communist Party documents and relied instead on “what the communists say to foreigners on a conducted tour.”
When Mao was carrying out the Yanan Rectification campaign, journalists like Edgar Snow hadn’t bothered to read his writings.
“To study Chinese events of the past years without studying Chinese writings is to go blindfolded,” Lin declared.
Lin had once described himself as a man on a tightrope, teetering above Communist totalitarians on one side and Nationalist authoritarians on the other.
Now he had jumped and had chosen Chiang Kai-shek.
Knowing a civil war loomed, he called on America to provide Chiang with the weapons he needed to win.
Any attempt to piece China together with mediation, he said, would be “naive.”
Lin asked his old American friends why the Chinese didn’t deserve freedom.
“The consigning of 500 million to totalitarian rule does not even arouse a ripple of phlegm, I have no country to return to.
I suppose Edgar Snow thinks I am a fool not to jump into the Communist heaven.”
The Chinese Communist Party’s success in convincing most of the State Department diplomatic corps it was patriotic, moderate, and willing to fight Japan had a significant effect on the outcome of China’s civil war.
It weakened support for the Kuomintang and enticed too many Americans to believe the Communists were an acceptable alternative to Chiang Kai-shek.
As World War II drew to a close, it also reinforced the notion the Communists would be responsible members of a coalition government and not be dedicated to seizing absolute power later on.”
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