CHINA: The Long Reach

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In the last ten years, few leaders on the world stage have been so praised and so damned as Chiang Kaishek, the intense, durable revolutionary who is Generalissimo of China's Nationalist armies, President of China's Nationalist Government, and boss of China's Nationalist (or Kuomintang) Party. This week a growing list of Americans are at long last getting inside Chiang's shaven head.

Two competing editions of China's Destiny* —Chiang's preachment on the Chinese revolution and Asiatic reconstruction—have sold a total of more than 10,000 copies. The independently translated Roy edition carries bitterly partisan and critical commentary and annotations by Philip Jaffe, pro-Communist editor of Amerasia. The "official" Macmillan edition has a preface by Philosopher Lin Yutang. The Roy edition includes a complementary work by Chiang: Chinese Economic Theory.

"To Act Is Easy." Written in 1942 and subsequently revised, China's Destiny displays a Confucian approach to the organization of society interestingly at odds with the democratic constitution adopted in January (at Chiang's urging) by China's National Assembly. Throughout both Destiny and Economic Theory, Chiang 1) attributes China's revolution (and the need for it) almost entirely to the Westernizing "corruption" of the unequal treaties; 2) rejects democracy in the Western sense in favor of the class "equilibrium" of Confucius; and 3) advocates a "Chinese" system of economics which rules out free enterprise capital as a dynamic factor on the one hand, and rejects the class struggle on the other.

The Generalissimo quotes Confucius: "The people may be made to follow a course of action, but they must not be expected to understand." From this, Chiang derives a guiding maxim: "To know is difficult, to act is easy." As developed in the supporting text, this maxim envisions a knowledgeable elite (the Kuomintang) which will "know" and rule the unenlightened mass of the people, according to the ancient precepts of "harmony," "benevolence," "justice," and "love."

This implies a paternalistic (or authoritarian) society in which the only vital components are men and land. Says Chiang: "The economic duties of the Government are twofold: to satisfy the people's wants, and at the same time restrict them. The former involves positive support, the latter precautionary control. . . . The application of these principles in social, political and economic organization will result in correct systems and policies."