Over the Yangtse

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 515, 6 May 1949, Page 5

Over the Yangtse

HE crossing of the Yangtse by the Chinese Communists will . perhaps induce the democracies to do some realistic thinking. It is not realistic to say that the troubles of the Communists will now begin; that they will not be able to feed their armies or control them; that their lines of communication will be stretched to breaking point; and that they

are not Communists anyhow. It is not even wishful thinking to interpret the situation like that. It is not thinking at all. Nor is it sufficient to see that this may be one of the great disasters of history. We should all see clearly that the Communists have only revealed the disaster. They crossed the Yangtse because there was nothing to stop them; neither courage, nor competence, nor leadership, nor integrity. The disaster began when bribery, corruption, and incapacity defeated the at--tempts of the reformers and patriots to remake China and

clean it up; and that was not this year or last. We are all blind some of the time; but we don’t have to go on being blind all the time, and deaf and stubborfi too. It is not months but years since American and British correspondents began ‘urging us not to deceive ourselves any longer about China — denied most of the woolly nonsense still in circulation about a Chinese democracy and warned us about the showdown that has now come. But most of us took no notice. Even when the United States stopped sending war material-washed its hands of China in the sight of the whole world-only a few woke up. Now our technique is to say that China will not prove a_ springboard for Communism but a bog. This may in fact prove true; but it is time to realise that bogs can be drained and made firm and that moonshine will support nothing at all,