The National Press Club in the past through your presidents, extended invitations to me and as I was then unable to accept them, it is with profound satisfaction that I can come and meet you all today.
Another reason why it gives me pleasure to be here is that heretofore my relationship with the ladies and gentlemen of the press has always been at the end where I was being interviewed - as it were, at the receiving end. But now I shall take pleasure in reversing our roles for a change since it is my intention to ask the question for you all to ponder over, and give me an answer at the usual question time. The question I have in mind is rather long and involved, and while it has not the virtues of brevity and concision, I hope that you will find it worthwhile exploring.
I feel that I am one amongst the many particularly qualified, to ask it because you are, so to speak, at the nerve center of the free world where reports of facts and events of domestic and international significance incessantly keep pouring in. Washington is the hub of the free world where decisions of momentous import are made whereas being several thousand miles distant, in Taiwan, I, like many others, have not been continually flooded with the interminable cascade of papers, foolscaps and ticker-tapes. With this definite if dubious advantage, I have been able consistently to study one problem in greater detail - the Communist problem - with its enormous ramifications. The Cominform through its world-wide apparatus, members and propaganda setups while artfully relegating public awareness of the danger of Communism into the background has vigilantly advanced its cause wherever and whenever it could.
Three Prognostications
Let me expatiate a little more. A year and a half ago Mr. Khrushchev made three prognostications. First, the catastrophic defeat of the West in the Middle East. The denouement following this prediction resulted in a renewed tense predicament in the Middle East culminating in the present consternating situation. Although Lebanon now is far from being lost to the anti-Communist world, Nasserism has already begun placing itself astride the land-borne oil supplies for Europe, and Iraq, as we have just seen, has become the next victim of International Communism. The fate of Jordan and that of the other Middle East countries are indeed in dire peril, for what happened in Iraq cannot but whet the appetite of the voracious Russian bear. Should all these countries go Communist then one can well imagine how untenable Israel's position would be.
The Russians by making use of Arab nationalism and whipping it up to a blind excitement have made many countries in the Middle East serve the Communist purpose. Those Arab leaders who are deliberately playing with Russia must surely be aware of Russia's sinister aim. Either they serve willingly their Russian masters as "gauleiters" in their assigned areas or they feel that in time they can always out-smart the Kremlin after they have made full use of the Russians. But can they?
The geographic position of Russia vis-à-vis the Middle East plus crafty Russian imperialistic designs make such a line of reasoning fatuous for the Kremlin leaders are past masters in deceit. Some of you doubtless have noted that the Communists employ the Islamic institutions in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Western China as cultural show places to visiting delegations from the Moslem world. The visiting Moslem religious and political leaders have been shown ostensibly prosperous and active Islamic institutions of worship and learning. The "cultural exchange" program has been particularly effective in making neutralist Moslem leaders counteract free world amity for Islam.
Many of the Islamic leaders have taken at face value the Soviet and Red China assurances that freedom of religion prevails in the Communist world, and they in turn have passed on this misinformation to their own people. The President of the United Arab Republic was amongst those given the red carpet treatment. Yet hardly had he left his hosts than Radio Moscow began to unleash a vitriolic attack on the Moslem religion.
40 Year War On Islam
A Soviet professor with the name of L. I. Klinovkih also called for an intensification of Communism's forty-year war on Islam and inveighing against many of the sacred tenets of the Moslem faith. In collating these events, the volte-face is so glaring that it seems unbelievable, but if we would only recall how the Communists in the past have practiced blatant duplicity, we would understand why this paradox passes muster. It was said of Hitler: "It would not be far wrong to say that one of the major ingredients of Hitler's astonishing success - the refusal of the then ordinary folk - and of the ordinary sort of people who normally come to power under the parliamentary regime of the West, to believe that he was not as wicked as he said he was." With the change in name this quotation is equally applicable to the men in the Kremlin.
The second prognostication Mr. Khrushchev made was the dissolution of the Atlantic alliance. The developments in France in recent weeks showed the alternate use of Communist cajolery and resistance to the constituted authority. The French Communists owe their power to a solid block of 142 votes in the French Chamber of Deputies poised to throw their weight whichever way the Kremlin dictates. And their proportional preponderance was really brought about by five years of occupation of France by Hitler's wehrmacht that induced a political climate not conducive to a stabilized national government in France. It cannot be ruled out that in order to immobilize the Atlantic alliance the Russians may try to tantalize some NATO members with promises of restraining and refraining from interference with their internal affairs as a quid pro quo.
The third prediction dealt with the launching of the Sputnik into space.
These predictions passed quite unnoticed at the time, but in retrospect, they became alarmingly accurate. To Mr. Khrushchev should be ascribed the uncanny powers of a seer for his first two predictions, were it not for the fact that their very accuracy show that they were planned beforehand in minutiae by Moscow.
The Soviet propaganda for peace today has a flavor of mockery and threat. Following the launching of the sputniks, the spontaneous outburst of urgency if not bewilderment and alarm on the part of the American people bespeaks Russia's implied smugness that the anti-Communist world had been mesmerized by Russian lullabies at a time when it had a superiority of power and had lost the opening gambit to use it to good purpose.
In this post-Sputnik era, since formerly the initial advantage was not utilized, Russian logic concludes that the United States policy should be more malleable. The fear psychosis that the Russians today wish to impress upon us is the danger of total annihilation in a Hot War.
Red Economic Offensive
In reality, the danger today is not a hot war; the danger is the outcome of the soft tactic which the Russians have used so far with such skill. Like able poker players the Kremlin has consistently played on our timidity and diffidence.
They bluster time and time again to support their bluffs. In concert with this psychological offensive to impress us, Soviet Russia has made great inroads in winning over the so-called neutralists and smaller countries of the world by dangling before them economic gratuities and by buying some of their agricultural surpluses. This policy is in line with Mr. Khrushchev's tactic of declaring war with trade upon the non-Communist and neutralist countries.
President Eisenhower has alerted us to the danger when he said on May 6th that since 1953 the Communist nations have signed almost one hundred new trade agreements with less developed countries and have loaned to them two million dollars at attractively low interest rates. It goes without saying that this economic offensive has won enormous goodwill and popularity for Russia.
Bald Trick
The recurrent Communist offensive camouflaged behind disarmament negotiations ably seconded by the friendly neutrals and Russian satellites is an often used bald trick. The barrage of Russian proposals for cessation of nuclear tests and "about free zones and mutual troop withdrawals" from Europe are made with the intention of absorbing and engaging the best brains of the anti-Communist world to the futile tasks of patching up the NATO alliance and on how to accommodate the Russians. In meeting Russian proposals the free world is making two assumptions: First, the assumption that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union will ever start a war. Second, and even more important is the assumption that Russia is actively fostering and earnestly offering peace.
Erroneous Concept
The patent and explicit implication is that since Russia is offering peace and if it is not accepted we bring on to our heads their wrath in catastrophic proportion. This clever insinuation is all the more effective since this conclusion is derived through the power of auto-suggestion.
It has been said that the threat of the hydrogen and atomic bombs is so decisive that their use would mean total destruction of civilization and mankind. The reason for this thinking presumes that first of all the aggressor in launching the first blow has also launched the final blow in the sense that it has to be a knockout blow. But this reasoning precludes the use of a retaliatory force of even a modest size, for the existence of such a force could mean the total destruction of the aggressor country. In other words, it is easier to destroy a nation than to destroy a nation's power to retaliate.
We furthermore know for a fact that the destructive power of the hydrogen bomb does not increase in the same ratio as the TNT equivalent, for the hydrogen bomb becomes less lethal with increasing distance from the explosive center. It has been estimated that about fifty megatonnage hydrogen bombs exploded at certain altitudes about great cities will pretty much effectively end the national existence of even a country as large as the Soviet Union.
According to available reports one atom bomb of twenty kilo-tons has a radius of destruction of one and a half miles. One hydrogen bomb of twenty megatons has a destructive power equivalent to twenty million tons of TNT and covers an area of forty-eight square miles with a radio-active fallout covering more than ten thousand square miles.
USSR More Vulnerable
This calculation is based on one of the official statements that the hydrogen bomb has the TNT equivalent of several tens of million tons.
Assuredly this destructive potentiality is relevant to the United States; it is equally relevant to Russia. But in the case of Russia should her leaders run amuck and decide to try a Pearl Harbor it is all the more penalizing; because industries in the Soviet Union are concentrated in a few regions such as the Moscow area, certain southern parts of the Urals, the Donets Basin, the Trans-Baikal region and the Central Asiatic Plateau.
But characteristically enough the Russian Communists are using their very weakness as if it were strength by telling the countries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia that world war III is inevitable and that the only way for these countries to escape destruction is to detach themselves from the Western bloc of nations.
The Russians, too, fail to point out that in case of a retaliatory attack on them, Russia lacks wide dissemination of knowledge of machinery and technology which are today the most valuable resources of a nation, and that retaliatory action means that with the destruction of the industrial cities, power will fall to the Kremlin's arch-enemy - the Russian peasant.
For these very real reasons it would be just as unthinkable for Russia to wage total nuclear and hydrogen war as it would be for the United States, with the difference that Russia is not fettered with the same fears and concern.
Soviet Russia by the very nature of her approach and thinking is free from any manner of let and hindrance whereas the United States correlates her action with the ever-present concern of being subjected to a nuclear and hydrogen war. In other words, Soviet Russia has obtained a wide new freedom of non-nuclear advantage and aggrandizement by her possession of nuclear striking power whereas the free world feels bound because of the calamity nuclear and hydrogen war may bring. This is synonymous with playing Russian roulette with a thug who insists that the rule of the game entitles him always to spin the chambers of the revolver while holding it at the head of the gullible and unhappy yet willing victim who wants to please even though it has dawned on him that it bodes him ill.
Soviet Imperialism
The Communist strategy of imperialism since 1953 varies with its technique of political warfare and graduated violence. It is so coordinated as to form a nexus which runs through the whole scale from peace offensives, loans, material and technical aids, cultural exchanges and red carpet treatments calculated to feed the vanity of the recipients. It also prescribes a modus operandi of lingering death for the opponent over a period of time through feints and psychological maneuvers and divers forms of violence, whispering campaigns and character assassinations.
Here I would like to quote BBC's diplomatic correspondent in the "Listener." "The foreign policy of the Soviet leaders conforms to a pattern that has remained unchanged since the time of Peter the Great and the definition of it that Lord Palmerston supplied about one hundred years ago remains perfectly valid. 'The Russian government,' he said, 'while perpetually declaring that they want no increase in territory added large areas to the empire of the Czars every year.' The foreign policy of the Soviet government has much more in common with the old Russian imperialism than with the revolutionary precepts of Karl Marx."
Stalin in the first flush of victory after the defeat of Japan in 1945 triumphantly recalled that Russia had waited forty years to avenge the defeat of the Czar in 1904. His words gave the lie to almost every utterance the Communist leaders in the intervening years have said about imperialist wars.
Price of Recognition
What logic prompts those who say that recognition of the Chinese Communist regime will bring "marginal benefits" or that the "reason for having diplomatic relations is not to confer a compliment but to secure a convenience," I can never understand. Let me take these assertions in their order. Ever since British recognition of the Chinese Communist regime, British investments to the tune of nearly two billion dollars have either been taken over by devious means or they have been expropriated outright. The devious method resorted to is to extract further money in the form of exorbitantly high taxes so that the British firms anxious to keep their assets and properties constantly remit money to the China mainland. This in turn means foreign exchange to the Communist coffers. Has such paying through the nose brought "marginal benefit" to the blackmailed?
As to "convenience" I very much fear that it is a one-way traffic "convenience" for the Communists. Granting that the proven code of international behavior was thrown overboard for the sake of "Convenience" in this nuclear age, wisdom still points to standard of morality if we are to survive. As Mr. Dulles pointed out in his speech in San Francisco last year:
"We know that the materialistic RULE of international Communism will never permanently serve the aspirations with which human beings are endowed by their creator." This conviction is refreshingly sane in its perspective balance in contrast to Russian bombast.
Folly of Containment
In 1946 the Communists were contained from Norway to Japan and the free world felt safe and satisfied with "containment." Actually this outcry for containment was put in slogan form for the free world "to buy" in order to forestall the possibility of any retardation to Soviet plans. It was with this overcast in the adequacy in "containment" that mainland China was lost. By flanking movements mainland China became the immolation to the intrigues of the Russian conquerors. It was in the same belief of the adequacy of "containment" that the Korean War became a stalemate; the only modern war that was fought to a draw.
From 1945 to 1951 the Communist octopus literally grasped with its tentacles some fifty square miles an hour in Eastern Europe, on China mainland, North Korea and northern Indo-China. Here I quote Mr. J. Edgar Hoover: "Within four decades Communism, as a state power, has spread through roughly 40 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the earth's surface." By consistently promoting fear and diversions - a technique which Hitler used with consummate skill during the Munich era, the Kremlin has alternated threats with mellifluous words of invitation to negotiate, calculated to bring about a flaccid and atomic state of affairs in free world firmness and unity.
Marxian-Leninism of world conquest euphemistically called "world revolution" is no longer the preserve of the scholar, the "dedicated" and the "privileged" to read and translate into action, nor are Communist techniques of operation so unfathomable that we cannot recognize them: nor is Communist intension so opaque that we cannot understand when Mr. Khrushchev says: "We will bury you."
The Question How
What I have said here is but a recapitulation of facts and events open to the public. They are simple deductions which you, guardians of public opinion, in the course of your work have, I am sure, come across innumerable times. My question today, gentlemen of the press, is how to best the continuing challenge of the Communists. My question today is still: How?
***Editor's Note: This is the text of a speech by Madame Chiang Kai-shek delivered before the National Press Club, Washington, on July 17, 1958.