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PARTISAN R.EVIEW
HOW CHINA WAS LOST
THE CHINA STORY. By Fred" Utley. Regnery. $3.50.
The delusion that we can concentrate on Europe to the
exclusion of Asia
is
as dangerous as the contrary delusion that the issue
will be settled
in
Asia alone. Whichever bloc succeeds
in
arming the
overwhelming manpower reserves of
Asia
with the techniques, cultural,
political and industrial, of the West, will win the world. Therefore, the
most important political problem of the moment
is
to determine how
we lost 450
million
allies
in
China. It
is
the fact that she addresses
herself
with wisdom
and sobriety to
this
problem that makes Freda
Utley's
The China
Story
one of the most important books of the last
decade.
The Chinese culture whose
disruption
the present generation
is
witnessing, whether measured by the length of time which it has en–
dured or by the number of human beings which
it
has organized into
a comparative homogeneity of blood and language and outlook, is the
most successful of all the civilizations which man has so far known. In
its
very success,
in
the pressure of its amazing population upon its
resources; in the eruption of the Western and semi-westernized powers
into China with the aid of the superior material force of a machine
culture; in the need to industrialize and to master the military-mechani–
cal aspects of the invading civilization in order to oust the invaders and
restore China's dignity and independence-here lie the real problems
of the Chinese Revolution. The very age of this civilization, its early
superiority and high achievements, have tended to slow up the rate of
change, and make change more difficult, more necessary, more un–
settling. Yet neither does it need to "abolish feudalism" (it did so
in the third century B.C. and its basic agrarian problem is the pressure
of a teeming population on the divided and subdivided pocket-hand–
kerchief farm); nor can the Chinese Revolution be properly regarded
as a mere obligation to "catch up" with the West or reproduce the fear–
ful patterns of the Russian Revolution and Counter-Revolution in
telescoped form.
Until 1945,
without
our fully recognizing China's problem as one of
transforming herself in terms of her own ancient heritage, America
nevertheless looked upon China with sympathy and for a half-century
had followed the traditional policy of seeking to preserve her ter–
ritorial integrity and independence. At Yalta, in 1945, the United States
reversed this policy and agreed to the dominion of the Soviet Union
