Word: chiangs
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...difficult to chart a realistic and honorable settlement. No statements about hope for peace--no matter how much they reassure the United States public and ease the immediate crisis--can cover up basic contradictions in U.S. Far Eastern policy. For the United States is at once attempting to support Chiang Kai-shek militarily, to keep the Western alliance together, and to negotiate a "modus vivendi"--to use the President phrase--with Communist China...
...Chungking in the 19305, has now maturely channeled her fierce independence to good cause. With the informal, sometimes gabby style of her China Coast pieces in The New Yorker, and of her bestsellers (China to Me, The Soong Sisters), she has written the first popular biography to examine Chiang in the only way he can be understood: as a singularly great man, a lonely combination of Confucian self-discipline and Methodist virtue, forced to fight at once against centuries of obsolete custom, Japan's armed invasion, and a vicious, un-Chinese revolution inspired by Moscow...
Stalin Outguessed. Without belaboring the point, Author Hahn lets the facts prove that Chiang was awesomely right in recognizing the Communists as the greatest threat of all. After a trip to Moscow in 1923 he wrote: ". . . Some of our Chinese Communists who are in Russia always scold other people as slaves of America, of England and of Japan, never realizing that they themselves have already completely become slaves of Russia...
...preparing to lead his Nationalist army north to Peking, Chiang threw out the Communists who had edged themselves into powerful positions in the Kuomintang-including the head of the Nationalist propaganda department, one Mao Tse-tung. In 1927 he turned irrevocably and ruthlessly on the Communists, both in the army and in the Red industrial stronghold of Shanghai. Says Author Hahn: "On [this] 'white massacre' that began April 12 Communists are eloquent. Chiang did not wait to be betrayed; he committed the unforgivable sin; he outguessed Stalin and struck first...
Communists Outfought. The Communists withdrew southward to Kiangsi and Hunan Provinces, boldly resumed their offensive while the Japanese were striking in Manchuria in 1931. Chiang alienated many a patriotic student and intellectual when he turned the Japanese invasion over to the League of Nations and prepared to turn his armies on the Communists instead of the Japanese. "If China ventures to fight the Japanese," he said, "the Communists will attack from the rear and chaos will quickly overtake the whole country...