In the Japanese incident, the Chinese Communist regime showed extreme effrontery in speaking for China. Where were the Communists when the Republic of China was resisting the Japanese aggressors for eight long years? They were holed up in caves, polishing their weapons for attacks on the National Government once Japan had been defeated. Only in a few battles did the Communists resist Japan's onslaught.
Where were the Chinese Communists when the rape of Nanking was in progress? Where were they when Shanghai was being put to the sword and the torch? Except when it became essential to defend their own territory, they left the fighting to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who defeated the Japanese with his masterly strategy of scorching the earth while he lured them into the interior and then fought them where victory was possible.
In all the years that the National Government opposed the Japanese, reaching back to 1931 and Japan's march into the Northeast Provinces, the Communists did nothing. Instead, they tried to turn Japanese aggression to their own ends. Their pledges of support for the government turned out to be lies.
When it comes to rewriting history, the Communists make the Japanese look like pikers. They have tried to usurp the National Revolution of Dr. Sun Yat-sen and take over his Three Principles of the People. When it is convenient, they present even Confucius as a kind of Marxist. Today they pretend that they are the legitimate sovereign of China and the lawful titleholder to Taiwan, a land on which they have never set foot.
Peking has no right to speak for China against the Japanese representations. When President Chiang Kai-shek and the National Government forgave the Japanese and sent them home without even asking for reparations, the Communists were colluding with the Russians to move into areas of Japanese occupation, and taking over Japanese weapons to be used against the Chinese people and their legitimate government.
Today, the Chinese Communists and the Japanese are as thick as thieves. Peking denies that the Japanese have so much as the right to speak to those who treated them so generously after the war. Even as Japan was trying to rewrite its history, the Liberal Democratic party of that country sent a high-ranking group to the Republic of China to explore trade and other mailers. The Chinese Communists protested vehemently, maintaining that the Japanese were visiting a Red Chinese possession without Peking's permission.
The Republic of China can attest - as the Communists cannot - that Japan was guilty of aggression that can be compared only with Hitler's in this century. First they infiltrated and subverted. Then they pretended they were building an Asian co-prosperity sphere. China was the first victim of a war that subsequently spread to the farthest jungles of the South Pacific and the borders of India.
Free China fought the Japanese longer and harder than any other defender of freedom. Pearl Harbor was bombed once. The Chinese wartime capital of Chungking was bombed repeatedly. The air raid siren was as much to be expected as the rising sun. There was a time when the Japanese expressed regret. The great Japanese leaders of the years just after the war signed a peace treaty with the Republic of China. They never failed to note the great-hearted kindness of China's Generalissimo.
Times and leaders change. As Richard Nixon made his turn toward the Chinese Communists, the Japanese rushed to get to Peking ahead of the Americans. They did, and cared not at all that this was at the expense of their benefactor, the Republic of China. They sought huge contracts to modernize the Chinese mainland, only to find out that the Communists didn't have the money to pay for them. Meanwhile, they took advantage of Taiwan's prosperity to run up a huge trade surplus and turned a deaf ear to all demands that Japan buy more goods from those to whom it sold its products.
As the Chinese Communists protest the rewriting of Japanese history, they are only playing politics. As the Republic of China protests, it is quoting from a record through which it lived and fought. What lies behind the attempt to tell Japanese children that their country was only "advancing" into China to civilize the poor Chinese people and convey to them the benefits of Japanese-style civilization? Is there a new Japanese militarism in the offing? Are the Japanese preparing for new "advances?"
The people of Korea and Taiwan can speak to this as well as the people of China. Both were occupied by the Japanese - Korea from 1910 to 1945 and Taiwan from 1895 to 1945. Japan was in effective control of Korea for a further five years. Chinese from Taiwan and Koreans from both the North and South of today were compelled to fight Japanese battles in World War II. Yet, just recently, the Japanese refused to pay men of Taiwan for services rendered their military machine.
From East Asia all the way to India, not one country was left untouched by the Japanese "advance." If there were not benefits for the Chinese, neither were there any for the Filipinos, Indonesians, Malays, Thais and Burmese. People of Singapore and Hong Kong were cruelly treated. For years after the war, Japanese were not safe on the streets of Manila. Today's ASEAN countries trust neither the Chinese Communists nor the Japanese.
Some Japanese have joined other Asians in speaking out against the effort to falsify history in teaching a new generation. They, too, are concerned about the possible revival of militarism. They know that Japan aggressed - as attested in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as in the no-war constitution. The brainwashing of another Japanese generation would be a great calamity, leading straight down the road to another Pearl Harbor and the reoccupation of lands that knew the heel of the Japanese oppressor for up to half a century.
-Miss Hu Na disappeared from the Santa Clara (California) hotel where she was staying during a tennis tournament. That was on July 20. Miss Hu asked for asylum in the United States. When it was not immediately offered, the Republic of China held out its hand of love and sanctuary in Taiwan.
Why should a 19-year-old girl who had been treated comparatively well by the Chinese Communists and who had traveled the world to play tennis want to defect? The answers are not hard to find. Fox Butterfield of the New York Times wrote eloquently of them in his recent book China. One of the young men with whom he became friendly asked why the Chinese Communists had not been able to do on the mainland what the Republic of China has done on Taiwan.
Writing of Miss Hu, Butterfield has said she may have come under political attack for "being too westernized and bourgeois." According to tennis players from Taiwan, she had complained of having to undergo self-criticism after returning from other tours abroad. In sessions lasting many hours, she was taken to task for being too carefree and for wearing her hair loose instead of braiding it. A young girl giving her best for Red China in a sport of worldwide popularity had had enough. She wanted out, just as Mr. Butterfield's friend did.
This is an old story to the free Chinese of the Republic of China, but not so well known in the United States. Mr. Butterfield said one reason for the angry reaction of the Chinese Communists, who threatened to reduce cultural relations with the United States if political asylum were extended to Miss Hu, was the fact that few athletes, writers and musicians have defected from the mainland. This is not because they have not wanted to but because the opportunities have been so few.
Only recently have such persons been allowed outside the mainland. Even now they are carefully watched and permitted to leave their quarters only in a group accompanied by a watchdog cadre. Nevertheless, there have been defections by millions of people since the Communists usurped the mainland in 1949. Most of the people of Hong Kong arrived there as refugees. More than a million and a half reached Taiwan. Defections among some 7,000 mainland students studying abroad have been limited only by the fact that hostages - mothers, fathers, siblings - are held in Red China. They will be punished for any runaways.
Miss Hu is not a great tennis player. She is not of Martina Navratilova's caliber-at least not yet. She is, as Mr. Butterfield points out, "gifted and graceful" but "not even (the mainland's) top-rated female player and has never won a major professional tournament." She doesn't expect to play tennis for a livelihood but wants to learn enough English to go to a college where her tennis might help her get a scholarship.
Mr. Butterfield also writes from knowledge gained in reporting from the mainland: "Miss Hu's decision to defect offers some unusual glimpses into the normally closed world of sports in (Red) China. For years, while chairman Mao Tse-tung was alive, the Chinese (Communists) insisted they put friendship before winning in international sports, and Peking still says that all its athletes are amateurs.
"In fact, however, (Red) China maintains a widespread system of special schools, camps and dormitories for training young athletes, and pays members of its national teams a salary so they do not have to hold jobs." Miss Hu reportedly was separated from her parents and sent to an athletic camp when she was 14 years old. For two generations, her family has been engaged in sports. Mr. Butterfield remarks: "Despite Mao's attempt to create a classless society, it is common in (Red) China to find families who still pass on their own positions to their offspring.
"An American woman who met Miss Hu when she first came to play in the U.S. in 1979 recalls her as a 'wonderfully sweet, naive child, with great big luminous eyes that captivated everybody.' At the time, she wore baggy blue (Communist) Chinese clothes.
"But when the American next saw Miss Hu last year, at a tournament in Florida, she had switched to foreign made blue jeans and was wearing make up. Many young Chinese (of the mainland), tired of years of drabness, now like to wear foreign clothes, though they often must do so in private."
Miss Hu may not know it, but she speaks for hundreds of millions of people - especially the young - caught up in the hopelessness of Red China. They want the better life of the Republic of China on Taiwan. Even more than that, they want an end of the compulsory self-criticism sessions. They are fed up with bearing false witness. They want to be free.
The Republic of China has athletes, musicians, writers and others going out across the world. The ordinary citizen can now travel the world, if he wishes. No one runs away to Red China. Why should anyone prefer slavery to liberty? Young people are not put in a straitjacket. They can wear their hair as they please. They can go to work after junior high school or seek a Ph.D. The choice is theirs; they are limited only by their inherent abilities and their willingness to work hard.
-Young people will seek to escape the Chinese mainland as long as the Communists tyrannize and oppress them. That was the reason for the attempted hijacking by five young men. Another hijacking attempt was reported subsequently but not verified.
The Republic of China has not advocated that the Chinese people of the mainland resort to hijackings to escape the Communists. Hijacking is piracy and endangers the lives of innocent people. Yet the people of free China could not help but sympathize with those who made the attempt. They had been driven out of their minds by the average young man's hopeless prospect. They wanted to come to Taiwan and enjoy the blessings of freedom and prosperity, even as the friend of Fox Butterfield.
The hope of China resides in courage and the desire for freedom. Both have been expressed in the freedom flight of Miss Hu and the attempted flight of the hijackers. The freedom fight of the Chinese people continues. It is intensified day by day and will not fail.