By F. A. Lumley
Barrie and Jenkins London
1976 167 pp.,
£5.50 (de luxe edition)
£2.50 (popular edition)
Reviewed by S. C. Chen
"I did not travel to Taiwan to praise or condemn Caesar," says the author, who read economics at the University of Edinburgh and is now editor of Executive Guides. Even though some points he makes could be challenged, it is still a pleasure to read a book about the Republic of China that does not set out, as so many have done, to denigrate this country.
"The Republic of China Under Chiang Kai-shek" was published as part of the World Realities Series edited by Brian Crozier. The back cover gives the official translation of the Chinese seal on the front cover, a quote from the statement the late President Chiang Kai-shek made after the Republic of China was replaced by the Chinese Communists in the United Nations in 1971: "Be firm with dignity; be self-reliant with vigor. Do not be disquieted in time of adversity."
"No one," he says of President Chiang, "has braved international derision and eclipse with greater equanimity." The author pays full tribute to the president for his achievements in the building up of Taiwan, but says that so far as the history of this island province is concerned, the Generalissimo made a major error in appointing General Chen Yi governor in 1945 after Japan's World War II collapse. He also pays full tribute to the late Vice President Chen Cheng for the land reform program carried out in Taiwan. He says that Premier Chiang Ching-kuo's popularity has grown.
Lumley's book is based not only on intensive academic research but also on extensive travel within Taiwan during which he interviewed fishermen, factory workers, students and many other persons.
In one of his judgments, Lumley says: "There is much to criticize in Taiwan, and it would be a poor world if we all thought that we lived in the best of worlds. Yet anybody can go to Taiwan easily, travel freely, and whatever a visitor may feel about the industrial transformation of the society, he must attest to the increasingly high living standards of the population. It is rare to see any house without a television aerial and the moment you arrive in a town you can see from the shops, the supermarkets or department stores that you are in a consumer society. The real dilemma for the Taiwan people is that they would not be prepared to come down to the common denominator of sharing living standards with the Communist mainland."
Although some of his assessments could be challenged, no one familiar with the situation in Taiwan could dispute the author's contention that "The continued existence of Free China means the continuation of Chinese culture and history." The same applies to his statement on U.S. aid: "It can be claimed that not one dollar was misused..."
In a salient passage the author says: "Although the Kuomintang has not created in Taiwan a democracy in Western terms... this does not mean that the electorate might not have voted for the government party anyway. After all, their record is good, the country is now honestly and efficiently governed.
"Were a referendum ever to be held there would be no support, either from Taiwanese or mainlanders, in favor of integration with Communist China. In purely practical considerations, why should a people vote in favor of coming down to the common denominator of mainland Chinese living?"
The reviewer would like to suggest that any future editions of the book should correct the inadvertently erroneous statement that the Han dynasty (206 B. C.-221 A. D.) instead of the Hsia dynasty (2205-1766 B.C.) was China's first. This also ignores the seven legendary emperors dating from Huang Ti, the inventor of the compass (about 2697 B.C.).
The author lists in an appendix valuable tables on population growth, the land reform program, foreign trade, overseas Chinese, foreign investment and so forth.
CONVERSATIONS WITH MIKHAIL BORODIN
By Madame Chiang Kai-shek
China Publishing Co., Taipei
1977, 98 pp., US$1
Reviewed by Chen Pin
This is a handy paperbound version of the lengthy Madame Chiang article which appeared in three installments of this magazine. Those readers who missed the serialization will be interested in this small volume.
Borodin, who disappeared in one of Stalin's purges, was a man of many parts. He was, as Madame Chiang makes clear, virtually "Russia's proconsul" in the Republic of China during the mid-1920s.
Much of the book consists of Madame Chiang's recollections of what Borodin said about Communism and democracy. He was the ultimate propagandist and pragmatist. He must also have been intelligent enough to realize that his advocacies were full of black holes.
Madame Chiang was not much more than a slip of a girl at the time, although even then she was filled with the desire to serve her country and her people. She was a "liberal" of the "new China." Borodin obviously was unable to understand why he couldn't make a Communist of her.
The reason shines through her article. Soong Mayling, who received her higher education in the United States, was from the first a confirmed believer in freedom and democracy. Supporting this conviction was her Christian faith.
"Conversations" thus becomes an attestation of Madame Chiang's unwavering belief in the dignity of man. She might also be called the best foreign friend and most penetrating critic of the United States. Her faultfinding comes from love of America and its institutions, and from realization that the torch of liberty will be held high by the United States or dashed into darkness by the Communists.
How is it that Communism has succeeded so well in implementing the lies that Borodin was trying to peddle to China half a century ago?
Communism is a terrible failure. Russia cannot feed itself. The Soviet space lead was quickly overcome once the Americans put their minds to aiming at the moon. The Communists suppress freedom and repress the individual. They are afraid of their own people - so much so that the Russians would risk detente because Jimmy Carter insists that dissidents should be heard.
As Madame Chiang sees it, "Marxism-Leninism has been able to sell itself well because it took recurring ills of the time in diagnoses in greater minutiae and projected them as pro noses…" Many unthinking people accepted the diagnoses as prognoses and "fell into step with pied pipers. Marx and Lenin played on the all too common assumption that since the premise-in-fact is correct, it follows that the conclusion must also be correct."
The Marxists also manipulated mass communications. "By marinating the Liberal elite in cupfuls of cajolery and smarmy or by shock treatment, they manipulate...it...With the advent of relatively inexpensive availability of electronics in the form of telephone, telegram, radio and television, cheap newsprint and cheap in flammable reading materials, it has made the conversion task by far easier and the amenability of emotional eclat so much more formidable."
Communists learned the lessons of Barnum and Hitler and other masters of big and little lies. They have not yet had to reckon with the finding of Lincoln that you can fool some of the people some of the time but that you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Communism is a deceit and a sham. It doesn't deliver. Its dictatorship of the proletariat is a tyranny of the elite and the antithesis of democracy.
But is Madame Chiang discouraged? Not at all. The world may be full of toil and trouble. The legacy of Borodin seems to go on and on. Life is imperfect, and so is democracy. But once the artifices of Communism have been exposed, democracy is what we have left, and it is precious. Flawed and cumbersome it may be, as Madame Chiang says, but it is the essence of the progress of humankind and human society - in Walter Bagehot's expression, "the polity of discussion."
So this small work has dual value. In the person of Borodin, it shows how an urbane sophisticate can sink into a morass of intellectual self-deception. That is good to know. The anti-Communists too often fall into the error of thinking that all Communists believe and act as they do because their arms are being twisted. But even more important is Madame Chiang's accentuation of the positive. Democracy is a true, a beautiful and a triumphant expression of man's evolutionary maturation. Communism doesn't stand a chance.