Authors: Pearl S. Buck
I do not know whether even Mrs. Roosevelt knew how accurately and richly Wang Yung portrayed the Chinese peasant woman that night in the stately East Room of the White House, but I felt a deep happiness as I watched. Here at last, in the very heart of my own nation, a Chinese woman revealed her people. And I had the same happiness months later in New Orleans, where I went to meet the troupe on its journey. In that wonderful and beautiful city, where the old life of Europe mingles with the modern world we Americans have made, again I saw our young Chinese appear before a great audience to give a play of just such intermingling of old and new in China.
The American audiences could not of course appreciate the delicate nuances of the Chinese play and I did not expect it. But they caught, perhaps, the reality of life and love in conflict between old and new, and this human struggle is the same everywhere. I wish that we could have continued with our travelling troupe, for their work was vivid and true, but expenses are always high for such a venture and even generous gifts from Chinese in America, whose sympathies were with the Nationalists, could not maintain the troupe and so its work came at last to an end.
By such simple means good people from Asia went into many American communities, and though I had thought primarily of my own people, it gave me satisfaction that the visitors took back to Asia new understanding of Americans, too, and a very favorable one. Our “East and West” visitors were not always Asians, but sometimes white men and women who had special knowledge of Asia and occasionally of other parts of the world. But Asia was my primary concern, naturally, because it was the field of the most profound American ignorance.
Why did that most interesting and, I hope, valuable work ever end? For after ten years I did suspend its activities, although it had been an education for me, too, for it had brought me to many communities, myself, and into contact with large numbers of Americans whom I might otherwise never have met. There were two reasons, one financial, for though local communities paid their own expenses, the growing demand for the Asian visitors, as speakers and entertainers and friends, made necessary an increased office staff, and for this I was never able to get any help. Foundations give for research or charity, and The East and West Association was neither. It was an educational experiment, designed for friendship and mutual understanding between the peoples, especially of Asia and the United States. There was nothing very daring or even very new in the idea, but the practical application of an ideal, however old, may be alarming to persons who have not thought of such a possibility before. There was another reason. It was too late, and so I had feared even as early as 1946, when our chief American representative announced at the San Francisco conference in the presence of many distinguished Asians, that American policy for the future would not concern itself with the independence of colonial peoples in Asia.
What a death blow were such words to those Asian peoples who knew our history far better than we did theirs, who had glorified George Washington because he fought for the freedom of his country from an imperial power, who had revered Abraham Lincoln because he had freed dark-skinned slaves! Their hopes, their own ideals, they had found expressed in our American Constitution and Bill of Rights. And now, they heard, these were not principles for all peoples, as they had supposed, but only for Americans. I knew instantly the words were spoken that nothing anyone could do now could prevent the inevitable future. China at least would be lost to our leadership, and perhaps the whole of Asia. It was incredible to me that the words could have been uttered, that any man could be so incredibly naïve and ignorant of the world, both historically and in the present, as to utter them at such a moment in such a place. I went into mourning for many months, literally. If I did not wear black garments on my body, my mind was clothed in shadows and my heart was desolate. We closed
Asia Magazine
in 1946, and four years later, convinced that there was no way to bring about human understanding in our dangerous age, I closed The East and West Association. The organization remains, if ever the time comes to revive it again, but it is inactive. Yet here and there groups of people still gather by their own efforts, under its name, determined to learn understanding by knowing men and women from Asia. But they are independent.
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.
Between these two equally selfish forces, the people were all but lost. War-torn and weary, their homes destroyed, the remnants of their families gathering again, they wanted only peace—peace from foreigners, peace to save what they could of their old life. The Communists made quick propaganda for that end. The Americans, they proclaimed, were backing Chiang for their own purposes. A new imperialism was growing in the West. The old European and English empires were ended, but the United States was a rising young power, white men again hungry to possess the world. As loyal Chinese, the Communists declared, they would fight if the United States handed China back to Chiang Kai-shek. Even if this meant years of civil war, they would never yield.
The weary people counted their cards. They cared nothing for Communism and knew very little about it anyway. But they did not want civil war. If Chiang took over the government, civil war would drag on year after year, for the Old Tiger was stubborn and would not acknowledge defeat so long as he lived. Had he not carried on such a war for years before the Japanese attacked? But the Communists promised peace.
The people chose peace, even though it was only a promise, against the certainty of war. And when the people of any country choose peace at all costs, not even generals can make war. The people chose peace, not Communism. It is what Americans must remember, now more than ever, for in this one fact lies the hope for our future friendship in Asia.
When it became clear to me that we had lost, as day after day the Nationalist armies surrendered without battle, handing over their American-supplied arms to the Communists, I spent much thought upon what could next be done. I had no blame in my heart for those yielding soldiers. Soldiers? They were not soldiers. Chiang’s real army had been kept intact and would retreat with him to Formosa as had been planned long before. No, the soldiers who faced the Communists were for the most part just country boys, sent in from the provinces upon order. They had been seized, impressed into army service as in the American Civil War our own men were impressed, taken by force if no consent were given, tied with ropes and chained and compelled to march perhaps hundreds of miles, to the battle scene. There guns were thrust into their hands and they were told to fight. But why should they fight? What had the Nationalist cause ever done for them or for their families? They were the sons of average Chinese parents, home-loving and hating war. Of course they surrendered easily and why should they not? Perhaps they did not even know how to fire the American weapons they held.