The Free China Review bids its readers a Happy New Year. May the New Year bring them peace, happiness and prosperity.
We place peace at the head of our wishes not because we expect war but rather because we think that under the constant threat of Soviet imperialists and their satellites, the world will increasingly feel the need for peace as time goes by. In fact, unless the Soviets mend their ways, the world would hardly have a moment of peace, by which we mean freedom from worry and fear of war.
To a great part of the world, the year that has just gone by was no unmixed blessing. The economy of the free world was on the upgrade, though the beginning of the period witnessed a recession which for a while looked ominous to the United States and some other countries in the Western world. But before the year ended, recession had become a memory and the nations most threatened had worked out their own salvation. This was greatly aided by good crops the world over. Here too it was not an unmixed blessing, for some of the countries with farm surpluses were once again faced with the difficulty of marketing their abundant harvest, whether it was wheat, coffee, rice, or cotton.
The political scene during the last year was grievously darkened by the Soviet imperialists and their Chinese satellites. It was the time after the first and second Sputniks, and though the Americans had in time orbited Explorer I, it did little to lessen the anxiety of the world over what the' Russians would do to further their aggressive designs, now that they seemed to possess workable long-range guided missiles. The Russians, therefore, played up their lead in space satellites and missiles for what it was worth. This meant cold war in an aggravated form, and Khrushchev kept on rattling his intercontinental ballistic missiles to intimidate the world. He wrote letters to all the Soviet neighbors who had concluded defensive alliances with the United States requesting them to renounce their defensive pacts, or else face total destruction by long-range missiles and nuclear war.
The first victim of the Soviet stepped-up aggression was Iraq which was taken over by agents trained in Russia and Egypt. Though people like to call it indirect aggression, there is little choice between being conquered by Russians or by their stooges. Indeed, Communist stooges have a tendency to compete with their Russian masters in cruelty and oppression of their own people, as has been clearly shown in China and Hungary.
Khrushchev's attempt at repeating his performance in other Middle Eastern countries was frustrated by the timely landing of American and British forces in Lebanon and Jordan. In order to retrieve his prestige at home and abroad, he set his Chinese stooges to attack Kinmen. Due to the bravery of the Chinese Kinmen garrison forces and the prompt massing of American naval and air units in the Taiwan Straits, the Chinese Communist attempt to take the offshore islands proved to be a costly and dismal failure.
Before the end of last year, Khrushchev wanted to make yet another attempt at aggression. This time he tried Europe; and, offering to withdraw from Berlin, he requested the United States, Britain and France to withdraw their troops from that city too. Upon the refusal of the three powers, he threatened to start a war in six months' time to eject them. This threat is either a bluff or a test of the solidarity and the determination of the Western powers to stand on their own rights. The three Western powers met the challenge in the only way compatible with the dignity and self-respect of an independent nation-downright refusal of the Russian demand.
Thanks to American leadership and determination in resisting aggression, as the New Year begins, the three areas, which the Russians have chosen as objects of their probing attacks, remain intact in the hands of their Owners. But the tension created by the Russians and their satellites in these areas are far from removed. Judging from our past experiences with Russian imperialists, we may be faced in the present year with new tension created elsewhere by them or increased pressure in the three areas mentioned. In wishing peace to the world, we also wish that there may be greater determination and greater solidarity among the free nations, for on these qualities alone the salvation of the world will depend.
Atlas and the Political Fence
Among all her friends and allies, the Free Chinese are probably the only people that have placed consistent, implicit faith in the United States in her attempt to win the race in missiles and satellites with the Russians. In our last February issue after the launching of the feeble Explorer I against the two Sputniks, we said: "The war is still to be fought, and let us save our joys until the day when the American man-made moon would shine through the Iron Curtain to bring freedom to the enslaved millions." Commenting on the subject of earth satellites, the China Post, an English daily published in Taipei, called the attention of its readers to the fact that while the American way of allowing different government and private organizations to engage in the competitive building of rockets and satellites may mean inefficiency and wastage, it will, at the point of general breakthrough, result in greater varieties and probably better quality than the Soviets' concentrating the development in one or two organs. The orbiting of the Score fully justified our confidence in our American ally.
As the leading nation of the democratic world, the Americans cannot afford to stay behind the Russians in the missiles and satellites race for any length of time. The orbiting of the Atlas satellite under ideal conditions marked the beginning of the time when the Russians will lose in the race. From now on Khrushchev will be weaned from his habit of brandishing his missiles in one hand and demanding abject capitulation from his neighbors. It is true that the race is not altogether won, but the world can have a sigh of relief under the dark shadows cast by the Sputniks.
In echoing the jubilation of the free world over the American success, we find it imperative to add a note of caution at this juncture. Despite misgivings of the Americans themselves, they have all along been leading Soviet Russia in general armament and scientific achievements, excepting a short period after the Sputniks. Neither from military might, nor from scientific achievement should there be any reason for the Soviet imperialists to make as impressive gains in territory and population and wield such vast influence over the yet non-committed countries as they have made in the last ten years.
Many explanations can be given. But the most important and most unforgivable sin of the free countries under American leadership was for them to make gratuitous presents of a whole people or country to the Communists, or concede to Communist aggressors territories which they failed to win through war, or purposely wink at Communist aggression in the false belief that the acquisition of a piece of disputed territory would bring a period of peace and would stop the aggressors from casting a covetous eye in other parts of the world. While the free countries may disagree in many an important policy, they have oftentimes shown singular unanimity in these ways of appeasing Soviet and Chinese Communists. If this condition should persist, it is just a question of time when the Soviet imperialists would conquer the whole world, with or without ICBM's.
While the Americans and their friends are basking in the limelight of the Atlas satellite, they should wake up to the importance of mending their political fence in time. Together with their advance in science and military power, they should beat the Soviet and Chinese Communists in political and spiritual warfare.
Nasser's Honeymoon
It seems that Nasser's honeymoon with the Communists is over. News dispatches from Cairo say that after his outburst at Port Said against Communist activities in Iraq, the U.A.R. authorities are cracking down on the Communists and the splintered groups in Egypt and Syria. If this were true, we hope that Nasser's awakening is not too late.
Nasser must have been warned that buying arms from the Communist bloc and receiving Russian aid are like taking poison; when sufficient quantity of it is absorbed into the system, it will kill the patient. He must also have been warned that fellow-traveling with Communists will sooner or later reach a point where he will be crowded off the road by them. But after the Russians have heavily infiltrated Egypt and Syria with agents disguised in a hundred and one ways and after they have been installed in important airfields and military bases as advisers by the hundreds, it may be too late to eject them.
However, before greater details are known it will be folly to jump to the conclusion that the Egyptian dictator has parted ways with the Communists. What if he should purge a few Communists? They might be some of those that Khrushchev himself would like to have purged. With the constant shifting of the Party line, there would be many Communists, Egyptian and Russian alike, in the U.A.R. who are found to be deviationists proscribed by the Communist Party for liquidation.
It will be remembered that before the Chinese Communists gained control of the Chinese mainland, their sympathizers and journalist friends pictured them as a different breed of the Russian Communists. Because of the notorious brutality of the Russian Communists, this dissociating of the Chinese Communists from them created for Mao Tse-tung and his gang a favorable impression among the leftist and so-called enlightened elements in foreign countries. It is not impossible that Nasser's sympathizers are introducing this strategem to work for his benefit.
But if Nasser should really split with the Communists, Moscow would have a very delicate problem on its hands. He has served long and well as Moscow's front man. He has up to the present fighting Moscow's wars and carrying out its designs in the Middle East. To be lenient with him would encourage future dissenters, but to deal harshly with him would enrage other neutralists who are serving the Communist cause just as well as Nasser. With his desertion, the whole fabric of Russia's design for the conquest of the Middle East would fall to pieces. And what about the immense amount of arms credit and economic aid that have. been extended to him? These and other problems will make a sad man out of Khrushchev. Eventually it will give a severe test to his favorite bait, co-existence, which he has talked so glibly about and peddled all over the world. If he cannot co-exist with someone who has served him so long, so well, how could he co-exist with nations which he said openly he would bury?
It would be foolish, however, to think that Khruschev would sit idly by to watch Nasser liquidate the agents he has so carefully planted in Egypt and Syria in the last few years. Even if Nasser should restrict his attention to domestic Communists in the U.A.R., he will find that they are highly involved with the international Communists who take their orders from Moscow, and Moscow simply will not give them up at this stage of the game. It has worked too long, too hard to realize Russia's age old ambition of conquesting the Middle East to let it be upset by a lunatic who thinks that he can become a dictator to the Arab world by the grace of Moscow. So either Nasser will have to put up with his domestic Communists, or there will be trouble for him. His fate is likely to serve a warning to all those who think they can make use of the Communists to achieve their ends without paying through the nose.
The 'Great Leap' into Inhumanity
The Free China Review presents on these pages a special report on the "people's commune," written by its editorial staff on the bases of Chinese Communist material, so that its readers may get a panoramic view of the most terrifying experiment with human lives and relations ever recorded in the history of mankind.
If this system should succeed, it will mean an end to almost everything we treasure and which from the basis of our society. Man will have lost all privacy, individuality and dignity of a human being. The family will cease to exist, because all bonds that hold it together will be broken. Children will grow up without the care and love of their parents, for which there is no substitute, and without faith in any religion or creed except Marxism.
In short, it will mean the emergence of a society more cold-blooded, cruel and bent on self-destruction than the one pictured by George Orwell. Whatever utopia the Chinese Communists might paint for the future, no material comfort, indeed nothing on earth is worth the price which they have asked the people to pay. And pay they must, unless the Free World does something about it.
It is true that after the plenary session of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in Wuhan last month, the means in pushing through the commune system has been modified somewhat. But the 99 percent of peasant families already impressed into communes cannot hope to regain the properties and freedoms lost. And the aim of ultimate communization remains the same. The Chinese Communists have not retreated a single step from where they stood, they are merely consolidating their position in face of rising unrest and opposition on the part of the peasants.
The Chinese Communists dared not retreat, because they know that once the dam is broken, they themselves would be swept away by the torrent. By going slow in taking away from the peasants the little that is left to them, the Communists are biding time until they can march forward again. There is no doubt that the intensified disgust and disillusionment of the over-worked peasants will one day reach such a level that general uprising would be the only course open for them. And when that day comes, it will be the end not only for the communes, but for communism too.