Our China Policy: A Reminder

Somewhere in every purposeful book one can find a few passages which give the gist of the author’s message and also give a clue to the reason why he sat down and wrote it. So it is that in the body of David Nelson Rowe’s Modern China: A Brief History (Anvil-Van Nostrand, $1.25) the reader comes upon the following three revelations of purpose:

1. “In respect to China, as in Korea and Germany, the United States and its chief allies seem resigned, at the most, to a policy of military protection of the territorial status quo, combined with economic and political support of South Korea, West Germany and Taiwan. The more positive concept of carrying even economic and political warfare to the enemy comes under increasing attack from the allies of the United States and from those elements in the United States who believe that the mitigation of hostility between the Communist world and the free world is feasible and desirable. These governments and people evidently do not accept the Communist analysis, according to which ‘Bolsheviks’ and their enemies—all nonBolsheviks—have essentially nothing in common; there is no shared standard of value between and above them!”

RG

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Rodney Gilbert

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Harry S. Truman

Somewhere in every purposeful book one can find a few passages which give the gist of the author’s message and also give a clue to the reason why he sat down and wrote it. So it is that in the body of David Nelson Rowe’s Modern China: A Brief History (Anvil-Van Nostrand, $1.25) the reader comes upon the following three revelations of purpose:

1. “In respect to China, as in Korea and Germany, the United States and its chief allies seem resigned, at the most, to a policy of military protection of the territorial status quo, combined with economic and political support of South Korea, West Germany and Taiwan. The more positive concept of carrying even economic and political warfare to the enemy comes under increasing attack from the allies of the United States and from those elements in the United States who believe that the mitigation of hostility between the Communist world and the free world is feasible and desirable. These governments and people evidently do not accept the Communist analysis, according to which ‘Bolsheviks’ and their enemies—all nonBolsheviks—have essentially nothing in common; there is no shared standard of value between and above them!”