Chiang, the Teacher

Soviet Russia in China: A Summing-up at Seventy, by Chiang Chung-cheng (Chiang Kai-shek). 392 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. $5.00 His thirty-year experience in trying to “get along” with Soviet Russia—with all its problems, mistakes and vicissitudes—is now told by President Chiang with “the earnest hope that the bitter lessons China has learned may prove instructive to countries and governments, especially those in Asia, which now face the same threat of Communism.” If by baring the record of China’s efforts and errors other countries (especially the neutralists) can be saved, Chiang feels the sacrifices and sufferings will not have been in vain. The question may come to mind: can one country be saved by the experience of another?

Chiang Kai-shek is not himself learning by hindsight. On his early visit to Moscow (1923) his observations were keen. Lenin was too ill to receive him. He noticed that “the feud between the internationalist clique headed by Trotsky and the domestic clique headed by Stalin continued to rage furiously within the Russian Communist Party even as Lenin lay seriously ill.” He also felt that “once the Russian Communists consolidated their regime, the possibility of a revival of the political ambitions entertained by the Czarist regime certainly could not be ruled out.” He reported to the KMT Standing Committee that in his opinion “the Russian Communist Party is not to be trusted,” that in dealing with China it “has only one aim, i.e., to make the Chinese Communist Party its chosen instrument.”

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Geraldine Fitch

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Soviet Russia in China: A Summing-up at Seventy, by Chiang Chung-cheng (Chiang Kai-shek). 392 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. $5.00 His thirty-year experience in trying to “get along” with Soviet Russia—with all its problems, mistakes and vicissitudes—is now told by President Chiang with “the earnest hope that the bitter lessons China has learned may prove instructive to countries and governments, especially those in Asia, which now face the same threat of Communism.” If by baring the record of China’s efforts and errors other countries (especially the neutralists) can be saved, Chiang feels the sacrifices and sufferings will not have been in vain. The question may come to mind: can one country be saved by the experience of another?

Chiang Kai-shek is not himself learning by hindsight. On his early visit to Moscow (1923) his observations were keen. Lenin was too ill to receive him. He noticed that “the feud between the internationalist clique headed by Trotsky and the domestic clique headed by Stalin continued to rage furiously within the Russian Communist Party even as Lenin lay seriously ill.” He also felt that “once the Russian Communists consolidated their regime, the possibility of a revival of the political ambitions entertained by the Czarist regime certainly could not be ruled out.” He reported to the KMT Standing Committee that in his opinion “the Russian Communist Party is not to be trusted,” that in dealing with China it “has only one aim, i.e., to make the Chinese Communist Party its chosen instrument.”