December 7, 1965
It is always a joy to see the pastoral beauty and scenic serenity of the New England countryside, be it in spring, summer, autumn or winter. For each season and the interstitial period within the seasons bring forth a plenitude in natural proliferation of brilliant or subtle colors which lend themselves to an evocation of infinite and oft delicate moods. They seemed to me during my college days to be conducive to fruitful industry, perky aspirations if not ambitious dreams as well as scholarly pursuits and intellectual ruminations all ineluctably part and parcel in the development of the person and the mind.
It is doubly a pleasure to me to come to these parts where I had spent four consecutively happy years of my student days and where I had been imbued with the atmosphere of quiet gentility, of mutual consideration, of the inspiriting of personal integrity, and of intellectual recherche and exchange of ideas and ideals so necessary to an enriched life. To my mentors and friends who helped to make me what I am by their constant guidance, encouragement, and instruction l owe a debt of gratitude. These happy times, in reminiscence, were only possible within the purified walls, enchanting woodlands and spacious grounds prior to leaving Wellesley for the hard and often inhospitable world outside.
But it is not my nonce today to count with you your many blessings before cares and responsibilities overtake you upon graduation. It is, however, my wish to convey to you in some measure that yours is the good fortune to be here as it was once mine many, many years ago.
It is my purpose today to speak to you about my country at the behest of Miss Margaret Clapp (president of Wellesley), and to give you a short and cursory resume of the Republic of China, the de jure and thus the legitimate government of all China, which seat of government is now provisionally in the province of Taiwan.
When V-J Day finally came, you were yet at an age of insouciance, and, without being facetious, if you will, still literally babes-in-arms when the China mainland was overrun by the Communists.
For centuries China remained within her own domain, a continuing civilization older than any other existing in the world. Contact with foreigners from the Nestorian Christians to Marco Polo did not change many of her ways. At times she was subjected to foreign rule, that of the Mongols and the Manchus, but these invaders were soon as simulated by the Chinese people. China throughout the ages was a land of self-containment and self-content, of sequestered glory and of unbroken traditions, of Confucianism, of Taoism, and of Buddhism.
With the advent of the 19th century, old ways began to change. Following the industrial revolution in England and the abridgment of geographical distances with the invention of the steamboat by Robert Fulton, the Western powers had no wish to leave China alone in her chosen policy of "splendid isolation", and the Western countries, one after another, kept knocking at her door. They were looking for new markets for their wares and for new sources of raw materials, for the so-called most favored nation treatment for colonies and for concessions.
And China, under the rule as well as misrule of the Manchus, was sadly unprepared to meet the challenge of the new world.
The war of 1839-1842 with Great Britain, commonly known as the "Opium War", when China took measures considered high-handed in preventing the importation of opium into the country by Western merchant resulted in her first humiliating defeat. Four more wars with foreign powers were subsequently fought but lost. They were: the war of 1858-1860 with Britain and France, the war of 1884 with France, the war of 1894 with Japan, and the war following the so-called "Boxer Rebellion" in 1900. These resulted in the loss of Chinese territories, opening of ports for trade under the unequal treaties, and heavy indemnities which drained the national coffers. In addition, the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 was fought on China's soil in the northeastern provinces also known as Manchuria. Domestically, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1964 laid waste the southern half of the country.
After decades of painful experiences and frustrations, the Chinese people, completely disillusioned with the Manchu government, began to hearken to the revolutionary movement of Dr. Sun Yat-sen.
With intense fervor, the revolutionists raised the standard of revolt at Wuchang in central China on October 10, 1911. Immediately province after province rallied to the revolutionaries and the Manchu Emperor abdicated. The Republic of China was formally established on January 1, 1912. Manchu rule had lasted 267 years from 1644 to 1911 with ten emperors.
Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Father of the Republic of China, had hoped to establish a republic based on the Three Principles of the People, namely, nationalism, democracy, and social well-being. His ultimate objective was the attainment of China's economic independence from foreign domination and political freedom for her people.
Since the establishment of the Republic, with its capital first at Peking (the northern capital) in 1912, the task of national resurgence as well as reconstruction met with a series of reverses. First, between 1912 and 1926, there occurred a period of internecine warfare between the northern and southern war lords for the control of the central government. This unfortunate turn of events almost undid the lifework of Dr. Sun. After his death in March, 1925, his followers redoubled their efforts and rallied under the flag of crusade in Canton to oppose the northern warlords. In 1926, the revolutionary government of Dr. Sun, the George Washington of modern China, appointed Chiang Kai-shek commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army, which succeeded in breaking the power of the warlords in two years. The seat of government was then moved from Canton to Nanking.
With the nation on the way towards total unification, the work of national reconstruction based on Dr. Sun's teachings began in earnest. From 1928 on, great progress was made in every field of endeavor within the country, and China was headed towards true independence and freedom. Social and economic stability became apparent—all too apparent—and she as a nation was on the high road towards modernization. At this time, a second misfortune befell her in the form of Japanese aggression.
Knowing that China was becoming too strong for further exploitation and colonization, the Japanese militarists engineered on September 18, 1931, the Mukden Incident and occupied the northeastern provinces (Manchuria) by force of arms. Continued arrogant, and petulant harassment by their militarists and "ronins" were followed by innumerable acts of aggression. Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that almost every week there was some crisis provoked by the Japanese ronin, official, civilian or military. Month upon month, year after year, with monotonous regularity, trumped-up "incidents" occurred culminating in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937, and the outbreak of an all-out war.
China on the verge of putting her house in order was pitted against an infamous militaristic Japan. Under the leadership of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese fought bravely, nay, heroically, against all odds to resist the invader.
Pursuant to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941, China had a staunch ally in the United States, and finally victory came to hand in 1945 which projected her to the forefront. In the same year, China together with the other war-time principal allies, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, sponsored the San Francisco Conference at which the Charter of the United Nations was signed and the United Nations Organization was established. Through mutual agreement with her allies, China abolished the unequal treaties forced upon her in the last 100 years while Taiwan and the Penghu Islands (Pescadores) were returned to the mother country after 50 years of Japanese occupation.
In the meantime, the Chinese government once more embarked on its program of reconstruction and proceeded in the establishment of a constitutional government. With little time lost after the V-J Day, the pre-National Constitutional Assembly was convened in Nanking on November 15, 1946. It was attended by 1,559 delegates elected by the people on a nation-wide basis. On December 25, the assembly adopted the Constitution based upon Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People. Considering the myriad of complicated undertakings consisting of repatriation of Japanese nationals, the disarmament of Japanese troops, the relocation of refugees, the normalization of governmental functions in formerly occupied areas, and the receivership of former enemy and quisling properties and of other financial and economic organizations, the task was enormous.
The first National Assembly under the Constitution was elected on November 21, 1947, and held its first plenary session in Nanking on March 29, 1948. It elected Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek as the first constitutional president of the Republic of China.
It seemed that China was on the point of finally achieving Dr. Sun's principles of political freedom and national independence. But unfortunately this was not to be. With the defeat of the Japanese militarists, a still more formidable enemy spawned in the early 1920s in the form of Communist imperialism which had fattened on idlest and grown fat on encroaching ad vantages gained during the war with Japan. The Communists stood by on the side-lines huzzaing and grand-standing while government troops did the fighting.
The Communists carped and caviled against the National government at every opportunity; at the same time they propagandized their own non-existent victories over the Japanese and labelled government victories as theirs. With the help of their global connections, they succeeded in bemusing the world with the magnitude of their contribution to the war effort and created a nimbus around their collective heads.
After eight years of war and devastation, China, exhausted, needed time to bind her wounds. But the Chinese Communists, true to form, forthwith took advantage of the situation to start a nation-wide insurrection to overthrow the legally constituted government. Thus with gull and gall the Reds undid the hard-won gains of the Chinese people.
Following the fall of the China mainland in 1949, the Chinese government moved its seat to Taiwan. Since then it has successfully carried out the "land-to-tiller" program, implemented local self-government and made it into a model province and an island bastion standing athwart the Taiwan Straits, ever prepared to meet the Chinese Communist menace.
As you all know so well, Communism is international in character, and the Chinese brand of international Communism is the new and more potently vicious imperialism of the latter half of the 20th century. Through its belief in foisting world chaos, it has come to take over forcibly or by stealth and cunning the world Communist leadership that was once with Russia. Under the iron boot of the Chinese Communists, hundreds of millions of the people have been murdered or put into concentration camps known euphemistically as "communes" or "work camps", and the best traditions of the Chinese people have been deliberately and systematically destroyed. Since 1958 all peasant households have been duressed into "people's communes". Private property, except for bare personal belongings, has been completely escheated. Violent uprisings have taken place in many areas, and the more prominently reported in the world press were those in Kansu in 1958 and in Tibet in 1959. For four consecutive years since then, the mainland suffered poor and exiguous harvests due primarily to Communist inaptitude or mismanagement and only secondarily to natural calamities and passive resistance of the people. An exodus if 75,000 refugees into Hongkong in May, 1962, high-lighted only one of innumerable such flights at peril of life. They testify to the conditions under Communist control. Externally the militant Chinese Communist regime has gone on fomenting what it termed "wars of liberation" in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And surely you are not unaware of the ideological conflict with Moscow that broke into the open in the summer of 1963 over the question whether nuclear wars are avoidable on Communism's road to world conquest. The Chinese Communists propound the conviction that the attainment of world revolution, which in Communist jargon is synonymous with world conquest, justifies what ever means to be employed in its realization. In other words, world conquest justifies the inciting of thermonuclear war.
The government of the Republic of China now on Taiwan, as one of the founding members of the United Nations, dedicated itself to upholding world peace with freedom and justice for all peoples. It believes that peace in Asia and the world can be possible only with a free and united China. Its avowed policy is to free the Chinese people on the mainland from Communist serfdom. And in this task it has the support of all Chinese, wherever they may be. Who desire a free and happy China.
So much for a vest pocket review of the history of the Republic of China. I feel, nevertheless, that my talk is incomplete without leaving with you some morsels of food for thought, for life is made of sterner stuff other than persiflage and raillery. Therefore, I shall take upon myself the role of a Dutch Aunt Sans Appel, if I may coin the term, and talk unfashionably of what is only too obvious but never admitted, let alone finding an efficacious antidote for the mortal peril that faces the free world, and ironically enough also Soviet Russia.
In recent years, the free world has been deluged with what I would call ambivalent thinking on fundamental issues and principles; issues and principles upon which the United States was founded. Guided by agile spirits who aim to corrode the moral and spiritual values of all within reach to serve their purpose of Communist imperialism, these same agile spirits create an amorphous view of problems and situations by propagating so-called "facts" which are slanted or incontestably half-apocryphal. And these are given great and wide currency. The "agit prop" forever harboring turbid thoughts of subversion particularly prey on the "delayed" adolescents with a high intelligence quotient who, whatever their age, are enamored of themselves. Under blandishment, provocation, imprecation, material incentive, blackmail, and such means, these "adolescents" assume an air of studied condescending hauteur or fiery zeal as if by these poses they have suddenly become giants of intellect and the final arbiters of right and wrong, as well as the fount and repository of all civic virtues and social justice.
Also there are those who pride themselves upon their broadmindedness by bending backward in being tolerant. Tolerance of opinions other than one's own does not mean either tranquilizing reason or shutting one's eyes to what experience has taught or giving credence to the mere plausible. Keeping an open mind in examining all possible facets of a given situation without fear, vanity, prejudice and passion should not be precluded in reaching the conclusion.
Then there are the sincere but naive do-gooders, the idealistic goofs, who in their "con science of ignorance" bound to their narrow tribal limits of obligation to what they regard as their own kind, impede rather than help the cause of freedom and justice by their unwilling espousal of the Communist line.
It must be said in fairness that the search for truth is only obtainable through the methodology of pluralistic thought, and pluralism. It should be noted, however, that if abused or misused, they have within themselves the seed of cynicism, acrolithic sophistry, and deceit. The greater uncertainties of our time tend to accentuate and push on this trend of ambiguity and guile until "mass man" (Ortega y Gassett), in order to appease consciously and unconsciously the anxious collective self, yet still thinking himself the rugged individual, declaims in essence a pragmatic song of despondency, often known by its other name- realism, his kind of realism.
These followers of the agile schema as anointed and self-anointed high priests teaching a galloping apathy and doom whilst becalling others warmongers and proponents of escalation are unknowingly themselves the cat's paws, pawns, and minions of their masters who direct them and do the thinking for them. For theirs is the fate doubly tragic, since they in turn are the victims of their own web of duplicity and perdition.
In contradistinction, may you as true daughters of Wellesley with far ranging resourcefulness and robust minds (from Sir William Holdsworth Blackstone's commentary) reserve always the right to think for yourselves and exercise the faculty to discern the ingenuous from the specious, and lastly but furthest from the least, may you in fortitude, perseverance, and good cheer find in your requited guest the blue bird of happiness (from Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird) living in the light of truth.