Americans will soon be called on to make fateful decisions about these places, whether to hold fast or cut and run. Decisions based on ignorance may be disastrous; so it is the duty of Americans to learn the facts. An informed public opinion must "ride hard" on the decisions of statesmen.
Having spent nearly two years in Taiwan, during which I have twice visited Quemoy, I should like to present a few of these facts, so join me on the little military transport plane that is about to take off from Taipei for Quemoy.
Quemoy (or Kinmen) is only 114 miles from Taipei, but the direct course would take us near the mainland before we reached Quemoy. No use inviting trouble. Instead, we head down the length of the island, parallel to the China coast. Look down. Blow us the hilltops rise like islands from a sea of rice fields. Every hillside is terraced until the slope exceeds 45°. Every river bed, every ravine, is cultivated on ascending levels.
They grow three or four crops a year here, and there will be time for this crop and yet another before the monsoon rains come. Irrigation ponds glitter everywhere. Splendid mountains rise two and a half miles high on our left. No wonder the Portuguese called the island "Formosa!" (Beautiful).
Some 150 miles SSW of Taipei we make a 90° turn to the right and head WNW across the Pescadores toward Quemoy, to approach it from the side away from the mainland. We fly low over the whitecaps of the Formosa Straits to keep below mainland radar beams. When we touch down on Quemoy, there is no slowing-down. We taxi at almost take-off speed to the far side of the field, then suddenly brake, drive through a cut in the hillside and come to rest in a parking space just big enough to turn the plane around in, almost completely surrounded by the rocky walls left by its excavation. Nothing that strikes the airfield proper can touch it now; it is safe from anything but a direct hit. Even at that we are hurried from the plane to a car by the English-speaking brigadier general (a Cambridge graduate) who meets us.
Once we are out on the open road, everyone relaxes. The airfield is a natural target, though out of reach of any but the Communists' largest guns; but the island itself has an area of 62.4 square miles, and promiscuous shelling is not an appreciable danger. Even when the Communists made their futile all out attack in 1958, and saturated the island with nearly 10,000 shells to the square mile, only about a hundred civilians were killed. The alternate-day shelling since then, although a vicious nuisance, produces no serious results, and is not even intended to. It is merely a face-saving device by the Reds to try to conceal their complete defeat. The day of President Eisenhower's visit to Taipei, the Reds vented their spite by dropping 165,000 shells on Quemoy. Not a single person was injured, and the damage done was less than the salvage value of the scrap iron, which has since been collected.
We are driven all over the island and allowed to photograph nearly everything. A range of granite hills hundreds of feet high runs the length of the island on the side toward the mainland, protecting most of it from observation or direct fire. All along the foot of this range, on the enemy's side, are subterranean emplacements of big guns, each with its own "ready" supply of shells. These guns are not only deeply buried; they are protected from Communist observation and direct fire by an additional range of low hills between them and the sea, over which they fire. Great tunnels through the granite hills give protected access to the guns. We walk or drive through thousands of yards of these tunnels, visiting command posts, communications centers, divisional and general headquarters. We see the openings of great chambers wherein are stored food and munitions to last half a year.
Well-dispersed along the face of the hills away from the mainland are the almost invisible openings of countless rock-hewn living quarters of individual platoons. More visible are the mouths of tunnels from which peer the ugly snouts of tanks, each the first in a file stretching back into the mountain until it vanishes in the darkness. Here, in perfect safety, they await the day when the Reds, forgetting the lesson of the past, attempt another invasion.
Ten years ago, before the island was fortified, the Reds tried an invasion and lost 15,000 men. Now, every field is fenced with barbed wire, and barbed wire entanglements are hidden in all the new groves of trees that grace the formerly barren-looking landscape. Everywhere, in the most unexpected places, close observation reveals the openings through which invisible machine-guns can fire. People who think Quemoy is "a tiny island" have seen it only on a map. Those who call it "an indefensible speck of rock" have never been there. Quemoy is far stronger than Gibraltar.
This island can never be taken by assault. It can be defended forever, unless we withdraw the Seventh Fleet and give the Reds control of sea and air. No American lives are being risked in its defense. The only danger to American lives would lie in the loss of this bastion and the Matsus, a hundred miles NNE. These islands now protect the Seventh Fleet in its goings and comings between Japan and Singapore as much as it protects them. This defense rests entirely upon the young, well-trained Chinese army and air force. President Chiang Kai-shek's army is not aging. Free China has universal military service just like the United States.
A dozen years ago the 40,000 civilian inhabitants of Quemoy were mostly fishermen, and lived very poorly. The situation is much better now. The government has helped to bring nearly 40 per cent of the island's area under cultivation and has taught improved agricultural methods. Wheat fields and vegetable gardens are everywhere. Each village has its rows of new concrete pigsties full of porkers at all stages of growth. The fields and fisheries of Quemoy supply nearly everything needed except rice and hardware.
Ignorant and rash proposals have been made that we urge free China to withdraw from the off-shore islands, abandoning them and their people to Red slavery. From the human point of view this would be a deed of deep damnation. From the point of view of our own national interests it would be suicidal. It would advertise us to the world as a faithless ally, warn the rest of Asia to get on the Communist bandwagon, and might even convince the Kremlin that we would stand for their taking Berlin. And of course this would not appease Peiping, it would merely whet the Reds' appetites, just as appeasement at Munich did Hitler's.
The Reds want Quemoy for one reason only, as a springboard from which to invade Taiwan. This is their repeatedly avowed intention. This is not merely because they regard Taiwan rightly, as an integral part of China. It is because it hurts them so badly to have reports of happy, well-fed people in Taiwan continually seeping back to their hungry, slave-driven subjects on the mainland. (Just the way it hurts Russia to see prosperous free Berlin.) Nor would the Chinese Reds be satisfied with Taiwan, any more than the Soviets would with Berlin. (See "The World is Ours, Comrade", in the August 1960 Reader's Digest) We can no more have Communism without the fixed, unchanging goal of world conquest than we can have Christianity without the Sermon on the Mount. This was frankly and baldly stated in the latest Communist Manifesto last December. With all the chilling candor of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" (that unheeded warning of the 30s) it pledges International Communism to destroy free governments by every possible means, including war. It is their unyielding intention to promote support and supply leftist and Communist revolution against every non-Communist state anywhere in the world.
Taiwan is, in a very different way, as fine a showcase of freedom as is West Berlin. One of the prize exhibits is an agrarian reform, which (unlike the Communist one on the mainland) really works. Landlords were required to sell farmlands in excess of seven acres to the Government, but a fair price was paid which has left little ill-feeling. The land was resold to those who actually tilled it at two and a half times of the standard annual main crop yield, payable in 20 installments over a period of ten years. The successful implementation of this reform, together with other improvements made in the agricultural field, has greatly increased the agricultural productivity in Taiwan. As a result, agricultural production is now 250 per cent of what it was under the Japanese! Although the population of Taiwan has increased 75 per cent in the last 10 years, the Taiwan diet provides more calories per capita than any other in Asia and leaves as surplus for annual export 1,500 tons of bananas, 750,000 cases of pineapples, 250,000 tons of rice and 1,000,000 tons of sugar.
Great advances have been made in education. Fifteen years ago 2,000 students were attending one university and three colleges. Today there are 30,000 in 7 universities and 20 colleges. Junior and senior high schools have increased, and more than 95 per cent of Taiwan children now receive complete elementary schooling.
The political situation on Taiwan has been criticized. It is true that the Kuomintang has as unshakable a majority here as the Democratic party does in many of our southern states. In both cases, therefore, the main contests are for the nominations. Nevertheless, candidates of minor parties, and independents, do run and many of them get elected. The ten-year prison sentence of Lei Chen, an opposition leader, for sedition has been condemned as political in many countries. For example, The Christian Century (Oct. 26, 1960) said, "The Formosan government can hardly be called free" on account of it. But all these criticisms from abroad have been fully reported in the Taiwan newspapers, together with their own criticism at times, which doesn't seem too much like absolutism. Besides, the Lei Chen case, judging from the Chinese point of view, is not without any justification for it was conducted in conformity with the sedition laws of China.
Mrs. Roosevelt stated recently that it would soon be "impossible to maintain the fiction that the Taiwan government represents the Chinese people", and implied that the United States should withdraw its opposition and allow Peiping to replace the Republic of China in the Security Council of the United Nations. Actually the government here is very fairly representative of the people of China. Natives of every province including a reasonable number of Taiwanese, hold office in it. The Red regime in Peiping, on the other hand, represents nothing but the naked power of the evil conspiracy, which is International Communism. That it does not in any way represent the people of China is testified to by the millions of Chinese who have fled from it into Hongkong and Macao, and the ten thousands more who follow them every month at the risk of their lives, arriving empty-handed, but thanking their gods to be free at last.
Why is it that so many government leaders seem to form their opinions of the state of affairs in Communist countries from the reports of travelers who have seen only what they were shown and heard only what their Communist guides told them, instead of listening to the refugees who know what Communism is like, who have lived under Communism or dealt with Communists? This is simply unconceivable.
The United States must therefore steer the narrow, but wise, course between the Scylla of Communist enslavement on the one hand and the Charybidis of nuclear destruction on the other, a navigational risk, which may continue for weary years. But [if we will make use of all available information from authentic sources, and work as hard for what we believe as the Communists do, the outcome is assured for freedom.
Editor's note: Whether the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu should and could be defended seems to be open to debate to those looking at the question from a distance. But to others who have visited these islands in person, there is never any doubt. The following is Dr. Ewing C. Scott's view on the question. The letter, which he wrote and appeared in the May 3 issue of the Christian Century is reprinted here because it goes with the article.
March 20, 1961.
Editor, The Christian Century.
Sir:
My teaching and executive duties are heavy enough to make me very reluctant to engage in any additional activity, even when my conscience suggests it. This explains, though it does not justify, my long delay in protesting The Christian Century's position on Red China and Communism. I refer specifically to "Strain Quemoy-Matsu Gnats; Gulp China Camel" on October 26, and "The China Problem" on November 2 of last year. It has been a long time, but my conviction that it is my Christian and my patriotic duty to do so, has finally driven me to write to you.
The final paragraph of "The China Problem" reveals your own doubts as to how Christian it is to preach compromise of duty, appeasement of aggression and submission to wickedness. You try to smother your own doubts, and those of your readers, by an appeal to "recognize the realities." But there is a moral question. And as you talk about "realities" you are being fantastically unrealistic.
Prostitution exists. Do you therefore propose to recognize it and make it respectable? Thieves break through and steal. Shall we then agree to accept them as Church members provided they agree to rob only people whom we don't know very well? The Syndicate battens on gambling, prostitution and the dope traffic, corrupting officers of the law and maintaining internal discipline by murder. All our efforts have failed to destroy it; so I suppose that to be "realistic" our government should enter into a treaty with the Syndicate! If so we must of course leave ourselves plenty of "room for maneuver in negotiations"—perhaps we could agree that one murder a week would be permissible if the Syndicate would promise in return to "push" only heroin and marijuana, and not cocaine or morphine!
Communism is wicked. It is not only Godless; it is virulently anti-religious. Communism denies the existence of any absolute standard of right and wrong. Only expedience is to be considered; lying, treaty violation, the murder of millions,—all are virtues if they serve the interests of the Communist oligarchy. Resistance to Communist attacks is "aggression". The treacherous and bloody crushing of the Hungarian freedom-fighters, the annihilation of the simple Tibetan tribesmen,—these are "internal affairs of the People's Governments". But our attempts to bring peace in the Congo or Laos are "American Imperialism".
Because Communism is a crime against God and man, any proposal to aid its advance (even such a "small" advance as selling the. 50,000 free civilian inhabitants of the Quemoy and Matsu islands into Communist slavery), even a proposal to stop fighting Communism and peacefully co-exist with it, is morally wrong. We should as soon propose that the Church stop fighting the Devil, and peacefully co-exist with his workers. So much for "the Christian touch"; now for "the realities of international power".
There are just two powers in the world today; one is the United States and its more or less able and dedicated allies, the other is the Soviet Union and its satellites. The neutrals do not constitute a third power; they 'have no power at all. They hardly even amount to a bloc, since they have nothing in common save poverty, mutual jealousy, and a psychopathic fear of a vanished colonialism. Red China is not a third power; it is part and parcel of International Communism. Its vast manpower is a weapon in the hands of the ruler of the Kremlin. Without Russian hardware, Russian planes, Russian rockets, it menaces only its immediate neighbors. Peiping may explode a nuclear bomb some day soon, but if it does it will be simply because Moscow wants to threaten the Free World with "another nuclear power".
If a Chinese bomb is ever delivered against any of our friends, the hand will be the hand of Peiping, but the voice that ordered it will be the voice of Moscow. There is friction and jealousy between Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung, as there is between all Communist leaders, but those who take these little family quarrels seriously are deceiving themselves with wishful thinking. To ask Russia to agree to restrain Red China is as naive as asking the Devil to restrain his left hand with his right.
Although your proposals for strengthening the neutral nations are based on the false premise of the possibility of a real split between Moscow and Peiping, they are Christian and wise. They are not even controversial, since both the late and the present Administration have agreed on them. Your whole attitude toward "the China Problem", however, is both wrong and dangerous.
"Non-recognition has failed," you say. How true! It has failed to give Peiping the cachet of respectability and the green light to take over Southeast Asia. It has failed to surrender Taiwan to a Red bloodbath. It has failed to subject us to the humiliation of having an unreceived ambassador cool his heels for years (as the British ambassador did). It has failed to lift the American embargo and encourage everyone to ship the sinews of war to our deadly enemy.
If non-recognition has failed, how has recognition succeeded? Has Britain's recognition made Red China a peace-loving nation? Has India's recognition protected 'her borders from Red invasion? Is recognition even possible? Red China has stated positively that it will not accept recognition unless we turn over Taiwan (which is not ours to give away) to them. This, of course, is unthinkable. Even to withdraw our protection from Taiwan would be a deed of deep damnation. It would also be unutterably stupid, for it would destroy all confidence in us as an ally.
The same holds true for Quemoy. Incidentally, Quemoy is not "a tiny island". Its area is 62.4 square miles, and a range of granite hills hundreds of feet high runs down the side, which faces the mainland. I have been through thousands of yards of the great tunnels which shelter command and communications centers and hold half a year's supply of food and ammunition. I have seen the well-dispersed rock-hewn living quarters of individual platoons and the subterranean emplacements of the great guns, which are hidden, behind the coastal hills (over which they fire). I was not surprised to learn that when, on the day of Eisenhower's visit to Taipei, the Communists vented their spite by dropping 165,000 shells on it, no one was even hurt, and the damage done was less than the salvage value of the scrap iron which has since been collected. Quemoy is stronger than Gibraltar - and its own fields and fisheries provide all of its food except rice. It is held by free China not merely as a matter of sentiment, but because it corks up the best harbor from which the Reds can launch their continually threatened invasion of Taiwan, namely, that of Amoy. The Matsu group, a hundred miles NNE, similarly blocks Foochow, the only other possible invasion port.
In conclusion, I wish to comment on the misconception evidenced by your use of such expressions as "guarantee by Russia and America" and "bringing the two major powers into agreement". This shows a complete failure to comprehend the nature of the evil conspiracy, which is International Communism. This failure is all too general in the Free World. You think that Communists can be led into agreements by considerations of justice and humanitarianism, but Communists despise justice, and they are not humanitarians; they are Communists. You think that Communists will keep the next agreement, although they have broken every agreement they have ever made. You think that we can be friends with them although they have openly averred again and again that the United States is "the chief enemy of the peoples of the world".
These mistakes are strange, for the true nature, goal and tactics of Communism are clearly laid out for all to read in the works of their God, Marx, and their Christ, Lenin, and in their Gospels, the Communist Iv1anifestos. The 1960 Manifesto has all the chilling candor of Hitler's "Mein Kampf". The unchanging goal of Communism is frankly and baldly stated; to destroy free governments by every possible means, including war. It is their unyielding intention to promote, support and supply leftist and Communist revolution against every non-Communist state everywhere in the world. Are we going to pay no more heed to this than we did in the '30s to Hitler's self-proclaimed plans?
The objective of Communism cannot change. You can no more have Communism without this fixed, unchanging goal than you can have Judaism without the Ten Commandments or Christianity without the Sermon on the Mount. The tactics of Communism are completely fluid. By Lenin's own directive, diplomacy is merely a branch of war, taking advantage of weakness, stalling off strength, fostering complacency, and concealing intentions. To build the structure of our defense upon Communist" agreements" and "guarantees" is to build a house upon quicksand, and great will be the fall thereof.
I don't expect you to publish this letter, because of its strongly polemic nature. But if I have at all convinced you by my arguments, I hope that you will print the enclosed more factual article. You owe it to your readers and to America to show the other side.
Sincerely,
Ewing C. Scott
Dean, College of Science Tunghai University
Taichung, Taiwan, China