 pollution in China, bloodiest and most terrible of all. An entire civilization blown apart. There are 700 million Chinese today, one quarter of the human race, and they are taught to hate. Their growing power is the world's greatest threat to peace and life. Fifty years of torment bred madness. To deal with madness, we must understand its roots. See China's revolution through the eyes of those who were there. For seven pivotal years, author historian Theodore White lived in China, knew the men who now control her destiny. With him, we shall look back at a century of tragedy. We of the West have been excluded from China. We can pace along this barbed wire border at Hong Kong and try to squint inside or strain out sounds. But all we hear is echo of disaster, past and present. When we ask why, there is no other book of answers but the history of this century. For both of us, Chinese and Westerners, have shared the blunders that transformed our greatest friend in Asia into our greatest enemy. Theodore H. White recalled, Those of us who lived in China in the crisis decade remember it all so differently. So close they were in friendship to us. Fingertip close. And now their fists are bald in anger. They were looking for some entry into the modern world. And nothing in their ancient culture could give them any guide to the turbulence they found. Now could we help them? It was a quest, a 50-year search for some new kind of government, some new form of order. And in the end they moved from tyranny to tyranny. From the tyranny of Confucius and the Manchu emperors to the tyranny of communism and Mao. And in between, we have only fitful glimpses of what happened, snatches of photography so tantalizingly incomplete to explain what happened. It all began in mystery and goes on today in mystery. For 2,000 years we tried to read this Chinese mystery, but read it for a book of myths. And trancing age-old myths brought back by travelers from beyond the mountain walls of Asia, where they had found a land of changeless wonders. A strange serenity of spirit graced its hills with beauties. Bridges arched across the rivers as much to soothe the eye as helped the Wayfarer. The silent shriek of violence in art might catch attention, but that was echo of an anger we did not fathom. The same mythical serenity rested on all the fields of this land of peasants, a biblical rhythm carrying men from sowing to harvest, from birth to death in apparent contentment. The old myth held that China had solved the great secret of government. Confucius, half god, half sage, had taught order and duty. These make government. Each man fixed in place, bound in obedience to those above, as those above were bound in obedience to the will of heaven. The emperor they called the son of heaven, Tianzi, because only he interpreted the will of heaven in his land. For 1,500 miles ran the Great Wall, sealing in a nation so proud it knew itself only as Zhongguo, the central kingdom. All other men, barbarians. For 2,000 years behind this wall, proud China knew herself invulnerable. For centuries, China let barbarian westerners dock only at Canton to buy her precious silks, her porcelain, her tea. To pay for these, Englishmen introduced opium from India. By 1830, this trade was booming. China protested, burned the opium, and the bark of English warships as war broke out in 1839, first shattered myths of Chinese power. The result? Defeat. Disaster. A board of British warship in 1842 came humiliation, with China forced by treaty to yield Hong Kong outright and open four more coastal cities to British merchants and their opium. Where Britain led, others followed. Rival powers raced each other to carve proud China as spoils. English, French, Americans, Germans, Russians demanded privileges, colonies, concessions. In 60 years had won the right to govern, try, punish Chinese in their own land. In China's capital, Peking, where from these ancient altars countless emperors had sought the mandate of heaven, the myth of heavenly rule persisted still. But deep within the palaces where China's Manchu emperors reigned, by 1900, that myth too was dead. For here ruled China's evil spirit. The Empress Dowager Zhou Xi, a Manchu concubine, bedmate to an emperor for whom she had produced an heir. A woman with a gift of malice, said to have poisoned her own son upon his throne, installed her infant nephew as emperor, killed his mother, had then imprisoned him in 1898. An ignorant woman, but unchallenged ruler of the empire, her court a whispering of ladies-in-waiting and eunuch favourites. Chief among them, eunuch Li Lianying has depraved as she. When told China needed ships to fight the foreigners, they used naval appropriations to build a marble pleasure boat in a nearby lake. Only one conviction bound her to her people, hatred of the contemptuous foreigner who tramped her land. A thousand villages deep in China mirrored her primitive hatred of the foreign devil. Moreover, their passions had found flag and leaders, as a secret brotherhood the boxers began to flourish. Kill the white man, burn his mission, said the boxers, claiming magic charms could make their bodies impervious to western bullets. With the Empress' consent, in early 1900, they began to kill. One of America's Greek novelists, then a missionary child, was at the time in China. Miss Pearl Buck recalls, The Empress Dowager had issued an edict that all white people were to be killed. And many had been killed, especially in the north in Shandong, where men, women and children, missionaries and business people too, had been killed. But we were so fortunate because we lived in the province of Jiangsu, and we had a very good viceroy, an intelligent man. And he knew that it was folly for the old empress to think that she could gain anything by killing the missionaries and the business people because there would be a terrible retribution. And so he was so courageous as to insert a negative, a no, a not, into the imperial edict, so that it read, we were not to be killed. And that's what saved our lives. Here at Peking, within these massive walls, for almost two months, 3,000 foreigners and Christian converts gathered under siege to fight for life. Their sandbagged embassies of bastion against boxer fanatics. From around the world, navies rushed troops to raise the siege. Britons, Americans, Russians, French, Germans, Japanese, raced with field guns and modern rifles, whose bullets no boxer magic could resist. Victory was swift, punishment ruthless. North to south, foreign force patrolled the country. Japanese soldiers began to explore China's wealth and covet more. In the shadow of Peking's mighty ramparts, American soldiers tasted war on Asia's mainland for the first time and froliced, China forever humbled. Foreign diplomats and generals debated China's fate. This land of endless villages, crowding each other against the skyline, was it really a nation or only a geographical expression? These peasants was their recent outburst of passion, of passing madness or something deeper. Their government smashed, still they toiled as they had for centuries, in the three great river valleys falling from the heights of Central Asia to shape their country. In the north, Manchuria and the valley of the Yellow River cradled one kind of Chinese for home Peking, the Manchu capital was their center. Here, dry northern wheatlands rolled over an unknown treasure store of minerals which Russia and Japan both sought. In the center, the valley of the mighty Yangtze with its key cities, Shanghai, Nanking, Hangkou, Zhongqing, where British and American power turned the wheels of industry, oiled the way of commerce. In the south, the third valley, the west river flowing by Canton to empty at Hong Kong in the sea. In the steaming Southland, peasants stooped in patties to plant rice and spoke a dialect no Peking Chinese could even faintly comprehend. The coastal cities where most Westerners lived squirmed with jostling people, animal energy, humans used as beasts in street and field. Most still war pigtails forced on them a symbol of submission to the Manchu dynasty and its son of heaven. But within the old forbidden city, there was no government, no son of heaven. The aging Empress Dowager, her spirit broken by the Boxer War, lingered dying until 1908. And then, for all intents and purposes, the throne was empty, save for an infant of three years installed to sit in it. And then it vanished. Simply vanished. The Manchu dynasty disappeared overnight. Nothing like this has ever happened in all history. 2000 years of tradition, the whole structure of the imperial Confucian political thought dissolving to dust. The Chinese give it a name and a date. They call it Shuangshu, double ten. The date being October 10, 1911, when a riot occurred in the Yanxi Valley which they couldn't suppress and five weeks later. The regime had disappeared. The dynasty overthrown never to reappear again in history. And out of this turbulence, there emerge two types of Asian leader, arch symbols, the man of guns and the man of ideas. And these two types, the gunman and the dreamer, have perplexed all our efforts in Asia for the 50 years since and they still perplex and haunt all our policy even today. In Asian politics, gunmen rise first. General Yuan Shikai seized power at Peking, turned loose lesser generals to ransack provinces. Briefly, he gathered a puppet assembly, imported an American professor to write a constitution for a republic. But old ways were easier. Returning to Confucian order in 1915, Yuan named himself emperor and six months later died. His rival, Sun Yat-sen, was the man of dreams. The dream of China, powerful, free of emperors and foreigners, made him from his youth a revolutionary. Students, teachers, merchants, meeting in such secret headquarters joined his conspiracy. On postcards, he scrawled a rising sun, emblem of a new flag someday to be. For 20 years, he planned destruction of the Manchu tyrants to see his dreams betrayed by Yuan Shikai. But his ideas were catching fire. In 1919, students throbbing to his fiery message, sick of chaos, furious at foreign pillage, angered by Japan's demands for more of China, filled the streets with protest riots. But students had no guns, ideas, no armies. Armies belonged to warlord generals, the heirs of Yuan Shikai. Power and force were theirs, whether trained to fight with Manchu broadsword or equipped with secondhand artillery. Laughable to Europeans, in China such troops struck terror. Their purpose, simple, to rule by killing. For 15 years, a dozen regional overlords subdivided morseled out provinces to lesser feudal warlords by the score. Warlord armies came in all shapes and weaponry as colorful as such grotesque commanders as giant Jiang Songjiang of legendary sexual appetite. Yan Xishan, the treacherous drug addict. Wu Pei Fu, lover of flowers and gardens. They never thought of the grain. They thought it was foolish to go out in the rain and fight. So if it was a rainy day, you were quite safe and comfortable. And then, of course, they all usually began at a certain time. They seldom began before 10 o'clock after everybody got his good breakfast and all that. They always took off for lunch. And then, by sunset, doesn't matter how hot the battle had been, when the sunset, everything stopped and quieted down for the night so we could get a good night's sleep and be ready to fight the next day. China watched such troops in shame. Craving order, knowing sorrow. Overlord in Manchuria was Jiang Sulin. Beginning life a common bandit, this scheming marshal had learned to mock all Chinese law, flout all patriotic need. Bribed by Japanese industrialists, protected by their garrisons, his soldiers let the Japanese aliens exploit this northern treasure land at will. Even the best of warlords, Feng Yuxiang, the Christian general who baptized soldiers with a fire hose insisting cleanliness is next to godliness, groped in vain to find a spark to unify his nation. In every valley, town, and village, men trembled at the sight of warlord soldiers. Death came by twitch of trigger in gusts of senseless cruelty. And life became so cheap that death itself became a spectacle. Children growing up became enured to violence, a culture of scholars transformed by killing. In flight from warlords, drought and taxes, from loot and ravine, refugees knew that only in the colonies and concessions of hated foreigners could they seek safety. Here, beggars for their bread, they might find mercy. A former State Department officer, Ernest Price, remembers China in the mid-twenties. We hit the country at a time of terrific heat wave and at the same time, drought in the great valleys. As our train pulled through this area, little boys at the stations would come out, potbellied, spindle-legged, holding out their hands and saying, Da lao ye, da lao ye, please, master, please. We were horrified. We'd never seen anything like it. Our legation officials said, now, boys, I want to tell you something. Don't let this get under your skin, this sort of thing. You're going to see a lot more of it in China. In the western enclaves of the coast, life for foreigners went on unchanged. Here, the skyline walled from passing tourists the sight of Chinese anguish. While permanent expatriates returned each afternoon to homes of splendor, where countless servants made for master and his missy lady, a sunlit way of life, old China hands still mourn. From Shanghai, foreigners controlled most Chinese industries, mines, mills and railways. They set her tariffs, collected taxes. Prosperity rested as it always had on foreign guns and gun boats. Within whose shelter, western pleasures undisturbed rolled on. At race courses and at resorts, Chinese appeared, as always, servants only. At western clubs, the tinkle of ice and cocktails rose above the muffled sound of warlord guns outside. Yet even in Shanghai, if one listened, one could hear another note. In the streets, students were calling for revolt, middle-class youngsters, yet their message caught the ear of workers, too. By 1925, a ferment unsettled every major city. Symbol of all protest was Sun Yat-sen, who called on China to slay the dragon of imperialism. Slowly, through the early 1920s, Sun Yat-sen had somehow built a government, won a tiny southern foothold at Canton, ringed by hostile warlords. By 1924, the aging revolutionary had learned ideas and guns must go together. Ideas he hammered into three principles called Sun Min-Ju-Yi. First nationalism, next democracy, then socialism. To his nationalist party, the Guomindang, he now insists to conquer China, they must fight to throw the warlords and imperialists out. They will get guns, for he has found them. Spurned by the West, in 1923, he tells the New York Times, we have lost hope of help from America, England, France. The only country that shows any sign of helping us in the South is the Soviet government of Russia. Flatly, this report concludes, the prevailing foreign estimate of Dr. Sun has been that he is a dreamer and therefore dangerous. Arch symbol of Russian help is Michael Borodin, veteran agent of the Comintern, who brings the guidance of the Bolsheviks to Sun's dreaming. Counseling, scheming, urging, the mentor-communist becomes an all-pervasive influence, induces Sun Yat-sen to let the tiny Chinese Communist Party, 430 members, join Sun's nationalists. Sun gathers new-style Chinese officers to fight for country, not for loot. Of these, his favorite is Zhang Kaixuek. Sent hastily to Russia for training, Zhang soon returns, directs the Huangpo Military Academy at Canton, where patriots are trained by Russians to officer armies that will give the dream fresh muscle. Some scholars say that at this point, the Chinese leader recoiled at communism, prepared to break with Russia, but no one knows. For in March 1925, death cuts across the revolution. Sun dies of cancer. Mandarins, scholars, warlords, soldiers vile by his beer in homage. All claim his message as their legacy, scuffle for his mantle. The year's turmoil thrusts up the air. Sun Yat-sen's soldier favorite, Zhang Kaixuek. At 38, he seizes leadership at Canton headquarters of the Guomindang. This man is known to Westerners only as a fiery nationalist and revolutionary. As he mobilizes under Sun's new flag, all China waits for him to strike against the warlords. July 9th, 1926, Bei Ba, March North. Against Zhang's slim divisions are marshalled half a million warlord troops. A political earthquake rends the land, for these are soldiers of a different kind. Fighting for a cause and country, they storm through villages and fields, victorious as much by spirit as by guns. Accompanied by Borodin, a Russian staff, their wives, Zhang's headquarters pushes north by train. A forward fan of young revolutionaries, nationalist and communist alike, precedes the troops. Calling to arms peasants and workers, who surge to join the banners of the New Day dawning. Among them, then unnoticed, is a communist intellectual, Mao Zedong, then 33, directing scores of peasant agitators to summon fury for the revolution. By fall they take Hangkou. The nationalist revolution moves its capital there, and then exultantly raids the British concession, burns down foreign buildings, tears down foreign flags. The tide rolls on from Hangkou down the river. In April, Zhang Kaisek has reached Nanking, and then apports. Zhang waits. Upriver in Hangkou, left wing leaders of the Guomindang no longer trust their army's leader at the front. Borodin is urging, get rid of Zhang Kaisek. In four short years, the communists have grown to 60,000 members. They urge the left wing nationalists. No revolution is complete until peasants own their land, workers their factories. Zhang disagreed. Scholars of Chinese history still debate with enormous fury exactly what happened next, and why. But I think it's the classic revolutionary question. Who gets power? To whom the fruits of victory? No one knows what went on in Zhang Kaisek's mind, but I think one thing must have been clear to him. Either they were going to get him, or he was going to get them. And he wasn't about to be dismissed the way Sun Yat-sen had been dismissed from power by warlords so often. It was a question of who would strike first, and he struck first. April 12, 1927 in Shanghai was the night of terror, as young troops rounded up and butchered hundreds of communists, students, union leaders, anybody they suspected. And when the day rose, he was in complete control of all the lower Yangtze Valley. And after that, for months and months through 1927, it becomes a great big bloody boiling stew as left wing and right wing fighting warlords get into the act and communists try to stage uprisings. And it all ends... it ends in tragedy. Because for so long, this country torn apart had waited for a government to give it unity and dignity. It expected so much of this revolution. And now they've found that revolutionaries can be butchers too. And this long, tormented quest for a new order was to end in this squalor. And it ended finally in December, 1927 in Canton, when, on orders from the Komen Turn, the communists attempted to stage a massive uprising and seize that industrial city, and the Guomandang struck back with counter-terror. Professor Earl Swisher witnessed the event. The National Forces came in on Tuesday afternoon. There was fighting and burning of parts of the city during the night, and then the Motha came on Wednesday morning, after the coup had lasted only about 48 hours. Identification of communists was a very simple matter. They had wrapped red kerchiefs around their necks to identify them as communists, and when the coup collapsed, these were hurriedly stripped off to remove the identification. But in the rather humid climate, the red scarfs left marks on their necks, and so that a communist was anyone with a red neck. The destruction of communists was a very simple process of rounding up everyone with a red stain on his neck and executing it. Some thought communism in China forever quenched, but Mao Zedong did not. He had escaped and watched in hiding. He would return to fight another day. In the cities of the Yangtze, children and teachers, businessmen and soldiers pulsed to Zhang's call. To north, south and east, warlords still ring him round, but the winds of fortune favor his expansion. May I introduce to the audience the President of the National Government of the Republic of China. Long live the Three Peoples' Principle. Long live the revolutionary spirit of the nationalist China. A fresh new face enters his life, the beautiful Mei Ling Song, sister of Madam Sun Yat-sen, American trained, well-educated. Zhang takes her hand in marriage. She is to be a major shaping influence in all his future thinking. By 1929, Zhang has built a majestic mausoleum for Sun Yat-sen at his new capital, Nanking. There, the body of the hero is brought. Pearl Buck remembers that day. Zhang Keshik came and roused great hopes in everyone. I remember the first time I ever saw him was at the funeral of Sun Yat-sen. Four years after Sun Yat-sen died, his embalmed body was brought to Nanking to be buried in a great new tomb on the mountain there. The first time I saw him, face to face, a very striking man with very striking bold black eyes. And he had a presence, and I think that he might have been a great first emperor if there had been a throne to sit upon. That was the tragedy, that the very structure of government was destroyed by the revolution so that there wasn't a government. And he had to begin that government from the bottom, and he didn't understand government. He was a soldier, and he didn't know how to make a government. And he had plenty of advisors, most of them young PhDs from the United States, very impractical and idealistic, and they didn't know how to make a government. And all the time he had the communists to fight, and he also had the Japanese threatening. It was a very difficult situation. I've never inclined to blame him. To westernize, this soldier's rule seems like the first firm government of China in many years. Jiang too was changing. For his wife, as much American in thought as Chinese, leads him to see the United States as friend, a source of loans and help. As new railways stretch their tracks across the country, the new Guomindong order Jiang has brought begins to offer comfort and luxuries to the cities he controls. Industry booms, production sores, engineers and young industrialists find for the first time careers opening to modern talents. Universities flourish, parade their graduates full of hope. In cities, department stores begin to offer Chinese taste of every modern wear. Modern dress takes subtle hold on Chinese fashion, while rich Chinese, in centers like Shanghai, begin enjoying privileges until now saved for foreigners. Not such fraud, however, but the primordial appeal of Chinese nationalism is changing Asian politics. Even in Manchuria, the call of patriotism twinges the conscience of warlord Jiang Solin, causing him to flout his Japanese protectors. Travelling by rail in summer 1928, Jiang Solin meets his death. A Japanese plot, blasting him to bits, punishes him for what they call his treachery. His son, young Marshal Jiang Solin, succeeds to power in Manchuria. This junior warlord knows he must serve Japan as puppet or go with nationalism. He chooses Jiang. In Japan, this switch sets off alarm. Military men control Japan. They mobilize. They must strike soon. They know, if Jiang extends his sway to vast Manchuria, if China's 400 million people unify, then they must certainly lose the Asian mainland. September 18, 1931, attack begins which Marshal Jiang Solin's warlord soldiers cannot stop, and Jiang Kai-shek is powerless to help. Striking simultaneously at half a dozen different points, the soldiers of Japan seize towns and rails. By spring of 1932, they hold all Manchuria. Rename it Manchukuo, a puppet state at their command. The age sweeps China. Generals exhort their troops to stand by for the counter blow, demand a war of national resistance to Japan right now. For Jiang, the problem pinches. His foot soldier armies may be stronger than old warlord armies, yet they lack tanks, have old artillery, are just beginning to understand the airplane. He knows they cannot match the modern weapons of Japan. Not only that, he leads a nation still divided. The communists, struck down for good in 1927, have somehow swelled by 1932 to major force again. It was as if a ghost had risen from the dead. When Mao had fled in 1927 with his thousand communists, he was already disgusted with Borodin and clumsy Russian doctrine. He felt the key to revolution in Asia lay in the peasants of the countryside, not the big city proletariat. Eighty percent of all Chinese peasants lived in bleak and filthy villages, treated like brutes, imprisoned by official landlords, loan sharks, and Mao's idea was simple. Turn the hidden peasant anger against the local gentry, the local rich, as well as the unknown foreign. Let terror claim revenge by stealth and night, use pitchfork, guns, knives, grenades. Give guns to anger. Out of this idea, he created this black miracle of his, the doctrine of partisan warfare. Divide the land among the landless. Rip out roads, bridges, railways formal armies will have to slog on foot, dissolve in garrisons, bog down, transform the countryside into a total environment of hate. Let women, children, everyone not be afraid to die. There's political warfare raised to the nth degree, and by 1932 he controlled a good chunk of the two provinces of Hunan and Jiangxi and claimed the loyalty of nine million people. Jiang insists he cannot resist Japan unless he first has crushed this enemy within. From 1930 to 1935, he drives his troops to fight. His narrow military politics sees only one solution. Force must root out Mao's ideas with bayonets, with communism no compromise. Year after year, this civil war goes on as expedition after expedition grinds into failure in peasant ambuscade guerrilla war. An American newsreel of the early 1930s innocently reports this nameless civil war. Troubled China turns on the enemy within her gates. These bombing planes of the Nanking government get ready to attack the rebel strongholds in Jiangxi. Contact! This movie-tone flies with the air forces of President Jiang Chai-shek. This is an actual bombing raid, and as we sight the first of the rebel villages, we commence the attack. Jiang Chai-shek is making desperate efforts to unite the various provinces of China, many of which are torn by internal dissension, and if he can't do it one way, he tries another, including bombs and the ancient culture land of bloodshed, rebellion and war. By 1934, Jiang has forged a blockhouse ring around Mao's communists, and squeezing ever tighter, feel certain they are trapped. One of the most amazing episodes in history is the joys they oozed, dissolving into tie-bands they oozed through his fingers. In October 34, 90,000 men and women set out. Not just an army, but the government, an idea carrying all their records with them on these little yo-yo sticks on what they called the Long March. It's a thousand-mile trek they made from Jiangxi in Hunan, south to Guizhou and up to the Guizhou Plateau, and up across the foothills of Tibet, and then down again out of the mountains, down into Shaanxi, where in these dry and wind-swept hills, they made their base. 90,000 had set out. They arrived a year later in October 1935. 20,000 left, and there they were to dig in. This is how westerners saw them in these yellow barren hills, where, calling peasants to their cars, they finally fended off Jiang's pursuit. In 1936, however, Mao's line changes. He calls for unity against Japan. Rich and poor must stand together and end to civil war. Nationalist, communist, warlord all must stand as brothers against the alien threat. This new line appeals to millions, but not to Jiang Kaishik. He, his inner councils and his generals persist. Final mop-up of the communists must still go on, entrusted now to friendly warlords in the north. Yet mysteriously, this final mop-up stalls. The most important front against the communists is held by soldiers of Manchuria, driven out by Japanese. These homesick troops have little stomach for killing other Chinese. In the young marshal Jiang Suryang, they itch to tackle Japanese. In December 1936, Jiang flies off to see the young marshal in Xi'an, to plog him on to sterner effort. In Xi'an, however, communists have convinced the young marshal that civil war must stop. Then that happens. One of those episodes that sounds as if they were written in the book of Make Believe. And again, we have no photographs because no one invites a photographer to witness a kidnapping, which was what happened next. Jiang was there to urge them to fight the communists. And on the night of December 11th, he was sleeping in a villa outside of Tao when he was awakened by gunfire. And the young marshal and his troops were shooting their way into his villa and trying to kidnap him. Jiang was in his night shirt and bare feet. He slipped out the back way, tried to climb over the wall, fell. He hurt his back. He lost his false teeth. His feet were bleeding as he ran over the rocks. And the young marshal's soldiers caught him and brought him back. It sounds mad, but that's the way China was and it got even madder. Because when they brought him back, they invited the communists down from North Shanxi and on December 15th, the communists, the young marshal and Jiang, all sat down to talk. The communists and the young marshal said to Jiang Kaishak, it's time to end the civil war. We must all unite against the Japanese or else they could have killed him, but they didn't. And Jiang Kaishak agreed. He would halt the civil war and he would form a united front against the Japanese. And so on Christmas Day, they gave him a plane and Jiang Kaishak and the young marshal flew down to Nanking to announce the civil war was over. But Jiang had made no promises to the young marshal so he imprisoned him immediately and kept him prisoner ever after even to this day in exile on Fumosa. Christmas 1936. At Nanking, members of the government await their president's return. In pain, he hobbles out, announces to the world, a popular front of Guomindang and communists will now, united under his command, turn to face the menace of Japan. Japan's imperial tradition has, however, a cardinal rule. Always strike first. July 1937. The war is on. The Japanese now seek total conquest, not just another chunk of territory. They blast the heart of China in the Yangtze Valley, with Shanghai first to take the shock. The Imperial Navy shells Shanghai at point-blank range. A century since Britain first blasted China open. A generation since the bloodshed of the boxers. Babies have grown to manhood without a year of peace. Over 25 years, China has lived with warlords, guns, and terror. But now it must drink deeper of the cup of bitterness. Nanking this morning has its 28th raid. I am speaking to you just as the echoes of exploding bombs have died down. Death comes from the clear blue sky, just as it has come to thousands of our innocent people throughout the length of our land. November, Shanghai falls. December, Nanking is sacked and raped. Through winter and spring 38, the Japanese push up the Yangtze, destroying the decade-long achievement of Zhang Kai-shek, ravaging the cities on which all future hope of nationalist China rests. In the north, a different vision of tomorrow's China guides the communists. In a village at a mountain gulch, they make a capital, Yan'an. Headquarters have paper windows, furnishings of bamboo. Their troops are called the Chinese Eighth Route Army. But the United Front dissolves. Red generals ignore Zhang's orders. Their strategy makes an independent war against Japan. In rear areas like Yan'an, soldiers raise their food. Mao himself grows tobacco. Zhu Du, the Red Army's commander-in-chief, and cabbage patch. Peasant women spin and sew the cloth for uniforms. Fashions straw sandals for the soldiers. The mind of Mao Zedong sees warfare differently from other men. I remember Mao Zedong saying to me that Americans thought the communists would lose. That they saw the communists in the hills of Yan'an, walking around with straw sandals, a ragamuffin army. And he said that any wise European who had seen George Washington's people at Valley Forge would have said that George Washington was going to lose. He said it's true, he said, that the Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek have electricity, airplanes, tanks, and we have nothing, he said. But then he said, the British had all those things, and George Washington didn't have electricity. And yet George Washington won, and he suddenly realized with a start that Mao Zedong was not really sure of when and in what century electricity was introduced, that his the structure of his knowledge was totally different from the structure of Chiang Kai-shek's in ours. Mao's knowledge of Asian war, however, is unmatchable. With these generals, he lifts the doctrine of partisan warfare to new levels. Lin Biao directs Kang Da for guerrilla leaders. Jiu Dui deploys guerrilla bands hundreds of miles in Japan's rear. The people are the sea, says Mao Zedong. Guerrillas are like fish who swim in the sea. Within a year, such troops gather 200,000 peasant soldiers. The Japanese may see cities, but the Eighth Route Army holds all North China countryside about them. In the Yangtze Valley, however, all through summer 38, fortress after fortress of Chiang Kai-shek falls, the Japanese crunch on. By October, his last two citadels are doomed. First Canton, then four days later, Hangkou falls. Killing prisoners, spreading horror where they go, the Japanese convince themselves that sheer stark terror will now at last persuade the nationalists to quit. The war is won. Yet still, their prey eludes them. From Hangkou, Jiang has planned retreat. His government is to settle at Zhongqing in China's deepest mountain fastness, Sichuan. The nationalists set out. Pack laborers salvage from the burning cities what few machines they can. Students haul away school libraries. Beyond the mountains lies the safety of the Sichuan basin. It's only entry by the cleft the Yangtze cuts. A steeper climb, say Chinese poets, then the climb to heaven itself. Retreat continues all through winter, expression of a will to fight that no disaster has diminished. Up through these gorges, they pull or pull their boats. Until finally in 1939, the rearmost echelon of the sad procession drags through. They scorch a trackless belt of no man's land to guard these last interior strongholds from the Japanese. Zhongqing is now the wartime capital, a city of another age, almost unchanged in sight or smell or sound from Manchu, China. And here among these backward peasants, the government digs in. Spurning all Japanese peace proposals, the Chinese brace themselves for certain havoc. And in the spring of 39, it comes. Bombs continue. Yet Zhong persists. Powerless to strike back, Zhong knows only America can help. His diplomats in Washington seek aid. Yet, he has other troubles too. It was about this time in 1941, at the height of the bombing that I had my first talk with Zhongkai Shek about the war against Japan and its strategy. And at the end, almost as an afterthought, he said, remember, the Japanese are a disease of the skin, but the communists are a disease of the heart. It seemed odd to me because at that time the Japanese were bombing the daylights out of both Zhongkai Shek and the communists, both of whom were allied against the Japanese. But now in retrospect, it seems to me an almost prophetic remark, almost a vision of an apocalypse to come. Those who the gods destroy, they first make mad. On December 7, 1941, madness seizes the Japanese. Striking at Pearl Harbor, they hope to force America's consent to their conquest of China. Now China has a mighty ally. America's arms will soon be theirs. Geography destroys this hope. Supplies must crawl across the ocean to get to India, then be flown to China across the Japanese blockade. American pilots brave the topless Himalayas to fly the hump and carry what they can, yet average only a few thousand tons a month for the army of four million Chinese soldiers. Feeding an elephant with an eyedropper, an American veteran calls it. Discouraged Chinese leaders say our arsenals make only 15 million bullets a month, just four per soldier. How can we fight? Americans discover there are other reasons for poor Chinese morale. Graffed in their armies, generals corrupt incompetent. The soldiers ill-shod, underfed and sick. Major General Frank Dorn recalls his training mission at the time. A visiting American general from Washington asked me if he could see some Chinese troops marching on the road. So we drove out, and the first thing we saw, of course, was that the majority, majority of the men, had dogs of one kind or description, size, anything that they could have stolen along the way, on ropes, on leashes, on anything. And he smiled and said, here they are, the GIs the world over. They all love dogs. And I said, yes, they certainly love these. And he wanted to know what I meant by that. And I said, well, this is their rations. When they run out of rice and other food, the dogs go into the crook pots. Commanding general for America is Joseph Stillwell. A soldier-soldier, his mission is to train a Chinese army to strike back. In India, training thousands of Chinese flown back across the hump, Stillwell learns to know their true ability. But he grows bitter at their government, which cannot nourish them. He feels they can attack and win if led by honest officers. He insists that Zhang reorganize his army to throw incompetence out. In Chongqing, this pressure irritates the generalissimo. He knows that victory is guaranteed by efforts of his allies. His thoughts are on the aftermath of victory. The final struggle for power yet to come. A weariness of spirit seeps through his government. Something fades. They wander alien through this anachronistic city. The fronts are far away. America's flying tigers guard the skies. Their background of big city life cuts them from direct involvement with these peasant people. Little luxuries, little pleasures occupy too many mines, too long exhausted by the years of sacrifice. Yet nonetheless the prestige of Zhang's government grows. Foreign diplomats court his favor, do him honor. In 1943 at Cairo's wartime summit conference, he sits with Roseville and Churchill, accepted now as equal of the great, consulted on the strategy of global war. Assured of China's freedom, China's greatness in the post-war world. From Ye'nan's Tawny Hills the communists watch all this and brood. Unrecognized by foreign powers, they know their strength is growing. Not foreign aid, but peasant emotions give power. And Mao too is hardening. Like Zhang, he thinks beyond the war to what must follow. Twenty years of flight and fighting have toughened him to hardship. But his memory too is scarred. By Zhang, by white men, Russians and Americans alike. His troops swell daily behind enemy lines. His self-assuredness freezes to dogma. He has been right so often when others made mistakes. His truths become for communists a holy script. Colonel David Barrett, chief of the American military liaison team in Ye'nan watched all this and recalls. They emphasized that they had to give the troops political training because the political consciousness of the peasants who made up the Chinese communist armies was very low. So therefore, they said, we have to give them political training. I told them, I said, in the United States army we look with disfavor on giving political training. We think we should devote our whole time to military training. That's the case in our army because we consider military training and political training as equally important and one cannot be neglected for the other. Judo agrees with Mao. Power is what comes out of a muzzle of a gun. But ideas, politics must motivate the man behind the gun. A concept the nationalists only dimly grasp. Theodore White recalls how powerful communist motivation could be. I went with a group of Chinese nationalist guerrillas who were organizing resistance behind the Japanese lines. And there was a young nationalist lieutenant and two horsemen and myself and we traveled behind the Japanese lines for, oh I'd say, two or three days and then the Japanese flushed us and we ran like mad and they chased us all day and by the time we arrived in the northern village at night the horses were completely worn out saddle-gold on their flanks heaving and we were as tired and just as scared and we asked the villagers to give us water and fodder for our horses and I heard the young Chinese officers say, woman shibalu jun we are of the 8th root army and I said to him, look we're nationalists not 8th root army guerrillas and he said, shut up these Chinese nationalists they won't feed our horses or water them it was the first sense I'd ever had of the political grip the communists had acquired on the minds and the hearts of the people in the occupied areas as war wears on American aid increases and Zhang is pleased reviewing the new division still well has trained and equipped towards these splendid forces they will be useful later still well violently objects he wants to use them now against Japan he has no interest in future civil war still well feels unless Zhang purifies his government not only is he no help in this war but once the war is over surely the communists will win their quarrel grows from Washington flies a mission to heal the nasty breach under Major General Patrick Hurley an Oklahoma politician Zhang sees this as more white man's arrogance a meddling in the politics of China no compromise is possible and still well as relieved of command in 1944 certain American involvement in Asia will be long and tragic the world rejoices as in 1945 the Japanese surrender the guns they hope forever stilled to sign the document of surrender aboard the Missouri the allies, America, England, Russia invite Japan's first victim China in their eyes China's only spokesman is Zhang Kai-shek who sends nationalist generals to represent his people the communists are absent for Chinese this is but the curtain to enact the climax yet to come and clash with communists to stop this dreadful prospect General Patrick Hurley now named ambassador flies off to Yanan he urges Mao the war is over, let there be peace let Mao and Zhang divide the country politically but unify both rival armies under a central government America will underwrite the deal Hurley puts a plane at Mao's disposal to explore the proposition in Jun King thus Mao arrives on the first plane flight he has ever taken his safety guaranteed by Americans this is his first face-to-face contact with the Guomindang since the killings and uprisings of 1927 six weeks of negotiation will produce apparent agreement as Zhang plays host to Mao before departure the plans that lurk behind their smiles however deceive all western eyes for in the field a race is on across the land the broken Japanese must sign defeat yield cities, garrisons and guns but which Chinese will take the guns and occupy the cities communist or nationalist the nationalists with all the transport of America at their disposal and plane their troops to seize the cities of the Yangtze Valley this ease of movement will lead them on to larger appetite dispersion of their forces up from the Yangtze to seize the cities not only of North China but beyond Manchuria with its vital industry they will not be able to fight the war against the Japanese nor will the communists sit still together Mao and Zhu like Zhang decide the key lies in Manchuria they choose Lin Biao as field commander to make the dash from Yunnan and North China they will strike east and north while Zhang is readying troops to move from Yangtze ports and airfields by foot and pack train Lin Biao sets out the Russians have temporarily occupied Manchuria by the surrender terms with Japan communists expect to get from Russians surrender Japanese equipment and guns and hold the countryside before Zhang arrives the rumble of inevitable clash causes America to replace Hurley with General George Marshall this architect of global victory is sent to save the peace for which so brilliantly he labored received by Zhang Kaishik Marshall drops for American solution to the bitter revolutionary surges of a strange Asian nation torn by barbarisms a generation old to his Chongqing headquarters he invites a communist delegation led by Zhou Enlai chief communist negotiator to meet with Zhang Kaishik spokesman Marshall suggests and they agree to an American answer for China's groping search for order a federal government peacefully permitting the two parties to govern provinces they now hold politically freedom of speech permitted everywhere and disputes resolved by talk not guns in January 1946 both parties celebrate a truce with a handshake no paper truce however can mend a nation ripped apart by 50 years of killing within two months troops are on the move again each side blames the other but a hundred savage skirmishes now flair to full-scale war Manchuria is the cockpit of the struggle the industry Japan has built and left is the greatest prize in China Zhang's American equipped troops sees all major cities to find a hollow triumph the Russian occupiers have looted every factory before withdrawal ripped out sockets show where great machines once stood for Mao the fighting in Manchuria is prelude to the climax of his theories a day when guerrilla bands group into formal armies and shove frontal combat at a weary enemy he fights for more than safety now his ambition seeks to mold all China to his theories I asked Mao Zedong what their policy was with regard to freedom of the press and he said they believed in absolute freedom of press and absolute freedom of speech and it wasn't going to be like Chongqing when they won everybody would have the right to say whatever he felt it wouldn't be censorship the way John Kai-shek had in Chongqing so I said do you really mean that? and he said of course we mean it I said do you mean that if you come to power anybody will be able to print anything he wants in a newspaper or publish any newspaper he wants and Mao Zedong said of course he said except for enemies of the people nor did he ever define I was too young to ask him to define what he meant by enemies of the people obviously now it means anybody who disagrees with him in summer 46 Zhang returned his government to Nanjing and once again as 17 years before reports the victory of his cause at Sun Yat-sen's mausoleum the fighting in the north is only distant thunder in the Yangtze Valley American advisors urge he sees this moment to win the hearts and firm the loyalties of his people by new reforms thus in Nanjing Zhang convenes a congress to write a modern constitution in one last try to govern China by the order Sun Yat-sen has preached but the thrust of all his background is still military his troops must win by force of arms with American arms he feels the communists can be crushed but his troops dig in to garrison rail junctions cities they have occupied American advisors insist on such static defenses major error they say he pins down his best divisions where communist guerrillas will isolate them Queen city of Zhang's victorious China is Shanghai restored at last to Chinese rule all foreigners concessions wiped out while battle flares in the northern provinces Shanghai seems to thrive the long wars dislocation has filled the streets with hungry refugees and homeless laborers who offer muscle energy for little more than rice to feed them but after 50 years of suffering such sites are almost normal what worries Shanghai landers most is this their money for slowly then more swiftly through 46 and 47 the cost of distant civil war destroys the value and the meaning of these bundled paper dollars inflation ruins the vital middle class of all the cities the one great source of Zhang's political support novelist Steven Becker remembers the panic years the inflation was heartbreaking when I got there in August of 1947 the exchange rate was 60,000 yuan to one American dollar and when I left in September of 1948 it was 20 million yuan to one but people on relatively fixed incomes were just ruined in the summer of 1948 my wife and I had a continental dinner at one of Shanghai's best hotels and the check came to 250 million yuan who lost China to the reds ignorant men will someday ask but now in 1948 sorrow scrawls its signature clear too many years of death and flight too many dreams betrayed in 50 years of barbarism a gangrene of the spirit has set in erasing pride and will and hope peace whisper the communists to weary minds peace an end to roaming now submit peace they say accept our mastery and peace land they say to landless peasants refugees join us they promise and the land will be divided all throughout China slipped their cadres calling meetings to share out the landlord's feels which soon they plan to snatch away again in summer 1948 Mao makes his master move assault by frontal armies in Manchuria guerrilla bands emerge from hiding form up in full divisions equipped with captured tanks artillery and guns Zhang's garrisons are isolated by ruptured railways hostile peasants November 1948 Manchuria falls panic begins among the cutoff nationalist garrisons in North China surrendering by scores then thousands then full divisions the equipment America has given them falls to the reds to America her second homeland flies madam John Kaishik in November 48 to make a last appeal for further help but Harry Truman has had enough reluctantly he tells her American involvement must end and now the nationalists pursued by rap as they in years gone by did once pursue the communists gather its you Joe last bastion guarding access to the mighty yang seas valley for two full months Zhang's troops fight on in January cut off they must surrender half a million soldiers lost the communists poor south his spirit heavy burden Zhang resigns his leadership hoping other men may court the communists for better terms on April 1st the nationalists send emissaries to Peking to plead with Mao Zedong but they have passed the point of no return no mercy say the communists the new mandate of heaven requires all nationalists to lay down arms within three weeks three weeks later to the day the communists uncoil to cross the Yangtze first target is Nan King the hallowed capital of the Guomindan but in that capital the will to fight has turned to dust no man will stand the ramparts abandoning positions troops trudge away as silent people stand and watch too many warring armies have passed this desolate way to make them want to fight for any faith or any politics no mainland refuge now remains and fleeing nationalists embark what troops they can to cross the ocean for the island of Formosa Shanghai hears the message clearly as foreign businessmen board up their shops go now go quickly for communism marches take what you can but flee in Pelmel haste the western powers evacuate the city they have built for good and bad alike must leave the businessman come for profit as well as missionaries come to heal must say goodbye as out the Yangtze steams the last of western influence and farewell to a century May 27th, 1949 down Shanghai's princely avenues the pleasure boulevards of yesteryear rolls the victorious red tide in six more months all china will submit red star triumphant hoisted over the world's most ancient nation silently the crowds observe their newest conquerors today in 1967 the marble altars of Peking still beseech the will of heaven as always chinese still gather here to listen to the voices that interpret heaven's will for 18 years this man alone has tried to shape their thinking has offered them his universal truths a dogma changeless as confucius to freeze their muffled discontent and end their quenchless modern turbulence the image shown his people has been a teacher grandfather benign yet all have learned that those who cannot read his lessons will be crushed his aging mind still lusts for permanent strife the theme he preaches to old and young alike is hate we are small militia men fighting u.s. imperialism uncle we must grow up quick and go to liberate taiwan taiwan the object of their hate we call for mosa this rocky island 90 miles off the mainland has many meanings to statesman it is the last remaining redoubt of the guomindang where chang kai shek with american arms has re-equipped an army 600,000 strong and dreams reconquest but chang is pawned to american policy he cannot move these troops or fuel them unless america lets him do so now 80 chang kai shek bespeaks for mainland china another threat after for mosa in his flight chang has carried the ancient imperial museum of peking the treasures of 800 years of chinese art symbol of another china beauty past it is this echo of the past that has bedeviled Mao who seeks erasure of all past yet how Mao struggle goes we cannot tell at the american consulate in hong kong there are cascades, mountains, piles of translations that come in from the chinese and these are sandy gritty, gravelly little bits of information that are meaningless because we don't know who does what to who in peking we don't know how they think or how they make up their mind because no matter how hard we study china we cannot predict such a thing as the great leap forward in 1958 we can't predict such a thing as the redguard purge of 1966 as if there were a struggle of seamonsters going on deep deep beneath the surface of our vision and only these bubbles come to the surface to tell us that these are terrible struggles but we don't know what they're struggling about today in total ignorance we strain to know of china as once our ancestors strain to peer across the mysterious wall not knowing myth from fact we know industry grows steel production swollen 10 times to 12 million tons a year light industry soaring but what comfort it gives the people we cannot judge we know beyond this wall live people of dazzling historical ability the forefathers of these students first invented paper printing, books, gunpowder to block the compass in 1967 they loft rockets in 65 they synthesized insulin in 64 they unlocked the atom secrets from behind the wall rise boastful statistics but we know that china's people hunger have barely survived one of the worst famines in all history that driven by communist cadres peasants work in communes today still beasts of labor as their fathers were within these walls tyranny has tried to reach beyond the body to the inner recesses of the soul I woke at midnight and saw my little brother smiling I asked him why he smiled and he said I dreamed of chairman Mao the purpose of all learning is to fathom what goes on in chairman Mao's mind this mind holds all the truths that ever were or will be neither age nor place nor class has allowed escape from pounding the chanting of Mao's litany and railroad stations in stores at work even those who built the wall so long ago must be forgotten they have been told no history but Mao's the aging leaders who shared the hills of hiding 40 years ago trekked the long march with stood Japan, America, the Guamindang must now again pass judgment on their revolution they writhe and split within these walls they clash they seek replacement for a chief whose triumphs make him think himself the voice of heaven this is their bomb in ten years time there will be more the nightmare problem of our time shapes clear to reach the minds of Mao's successors with reason before unreasoning bombs of the dialogue it does no good to mourn the past we pass along a road of time which always turning never brings us back to the crossroads marked again perhaps we should never have disturbed the slumbering civilization of China or else it wake of itself and reach for us perhaps China is too vast to be governed by mercy yet if Chinese mind craves order they must be brought to recognize they are the biggest factor in the world's disorder and we must untangle the madness of their mind the most difficult task in the world is to reach the minds of men who hate you we do not flinch from the immediate tasks to guard our skies friends we cannot flinch from tomorrow's task to reach the mind of China we race today to reach the moon to reach that mind is a task of equal difficulty and far greater urgency