The fact that a supposedly pacific people should emerge safely from the purgatory of a brutal foreign invasion only to end up by hurling themselves at each other's throats appeared, on casual glance, shocking. Fighting across the heart of China, both inside and outside the Great Wall, the Nationalists and Reds, after a brief truce engineered by George Marshall, had by the middle of 1946 begun snarling over the bones of Chinese civilization with a ferocity they had seldom shown in fighting the Japanese.

　　This admittedly horrible phenomenon was attributed by different people to different causes. The Old China Hands ascribed the outbreak of civil war to the barbarous nature of the Chinese people who were incapable of governing themselves, while the New China Hands put it down to corruption of the Chiang government and the intransigent power lusts of the Reds. The Chinese students found the cause in the fact that Chiang's gestapo murdered their professors who were advocating peace; the Chinese intelligentsia found it in the arms America was pouring into Chiang Kai-shek's war machine; and ex-Ambassador William C. Bullitt in the Yalta deal whereby President Roosevelt invited Stalin to come into Manchuria and join the war against Japan. All of these reasons suggested by every variety of personal prejudice may have satisfied their advocates, but in the light of historical facts they appeared quite unconvincing.

　　Take only one example - the Yalta deal. If we were to believe the logic of Mr. Bullitt, had President Roosevelt not invited Stalin to fight Japan in Manchuria, Chiang Kai-shek would have won complete control over all of China and made the Communists so weak that they either would not have dared to resist China's dictator or they would have been wiped out within the space of a few months. Such a logic, of course, ignored the fact that the Communists had been fighting Chiang Kai-shek for twenty years and had never been wiped out and what is more had fought the Japanese for eight years and instead of growing weaker, as did Chiang, had actually grown stronger. More important, however, if one were searching for causes, was the fact that wars had been going on in China ever since the Western powers blew open the doors of the Orient and produced such fatal contradictions in that ancient Confucian society that th had not been solved to this day. The Opium War of 1840, brought o by the British, the twenty bloody years of the Taiping Rebellion, the Mohammedan Uprising, the Western powers sacking of Peiping, the Boxer Uprising, the Communist-Kuomintang civil wars and the very terrible, but nevertheless true fact that there had been scarcely a single year of peace in China since the 1911 Revolution overthrew the Manchu Empire - all these bloody events were undeniable proof not only that the Russians were not responsible for the civil war in China and had very little to do with it, but were also convincing evidence that this war was practically inevitable.

　　Therefore, as I sat in America watching the unfolding of still another civil war in China, I was not unduly surprised, but I was sad for I was very fond of the Chinese people. The tragedy of the war was that so many Chinese were against fighting it, not only the common masses, but even some of Chiang Kai-shek's older generals and members of his party - the Kuomintang. These men, however, were lackadaisical in their opposition, and it remained for liberal quarters to raise the loudest voices in favor of peace. The opposition of these liberals was particularly strong during the Marshall truce negotiations when a number of professors tried to stand up against the rightist clique in the Kuomintang which was the most active force in China against peace and for all-out civil war. A vivid picture of this suppression of Chinese intellectuals comes from a quarter where you might least expect to find it. I refer to the writing of an American missionary Dr. James G. Endicott, who spent twenty years in China, was once an adviser to Chiang Kai-shek on social problems, and also a secretary to Madame Chiang Kai-shek. In 1947, Endicott left China and soon made public his reason for doing so.

　　He wrote: There were increasing signs everywhere that Chiang did not intend to keep his promises [to General Marshall] and was preparing for all-out civil war.
At the time he was anxious to silence all liberal opposition. . . . Accordingly in June, 1946, just before he tore up the Marshall truce agreements and launched full-scale civil war, his gestapo was ordered to murder in cold blood this committee of 12 professors [a group of Chinese professors, some educated in the U. S. who were active in trying to promote a middle-way compromise government].

　　The first one, Professor Li Kung-po was shot down on the street together with his little son. The next day a famous old classical scholar, Wen I-to, was shot while coming away from a meeting. That night all the other 10 of the committee were marked for killing. But one of them got to the U. S. consulate and persuaded the U. S. consul that they were the victims of political persecution. This courageous U. S. consul put on an army uniform, put the U. S. flag on his jeep, and went out and collected nine of the io and took them to the consulate for refuge. The 1oth took refuge in a high school which had a high wall around it.

　　The 600 Chinese students manned the walls that night and beat off the gestapo agents who made several unsuccessful attempts to get in. In the end, the U. S. government intervened on behalf of these professors, and they were flown out and given a chance to go in hiding or else leave the country.

　　The murder of Li Kung-po and Wen I-to was a shock to me for I knew both of them and they were fine men. But like all Chinese liberals, they had no armed forces and they were nearly helpless. Perhaps that is why other scattered groups in China who did have arms refused to give them up to Chiang Kai-shek.

　　At the conclusion of the Japanese war, the Nanking government had called on the Reds to lay down their arms, but not only had the Reds remained armed, but thousands of peasants and students who had allied themselves with the Communists to fight Chiang Kai-shek also held fast to their arms and prepared to fight any invasion by Chiang Kai-shek's troops of their local areas. Why? What inexorable force drove these non-Communists to support allies that were black-listed by the recognized government of China? Did they really think that with the Japanese gone the rest of Chinese society would support them against the well-armed generalissimo? Even if they were afraid that Chiang might take away some liberties they had won during a painful guerrilla struggle, would it not have been better for them to give up their chimerical loyalty and take their chances with the generalissimo, instead of committing suicide with the Reds?

　　For at that time, opposition to Chiang Kai-shek did seem suicidal. The generalissimo had an army four times that of the 8th Route Army, with a correspondingly greater fire power in artillery, machine guns and rifles. Moreover he had an air force, railways, gunboats and motor transport while the Reds had none. Chiang had a comparatively potent economy in the fertile fields of the Yangtze Valley and the Canton delta; he held all the big cities and had the most powerful arsenals in Mukden, Shanghai and Hankow. The Communists were isolated in one of the poorer sections of China, had no cities of any size and only a primitive armament industry in the hills. Still more, Chiang held almost the entire seacoast, had access to foreign trade and was recognized by foreign powers, including the Soviet Union, as head of the legitimate government of China, but the Reds were shut up in the interior, carried on trade by bicycle and mule cart between primitive villages and were looked upon as rebels by the outside world. Unquestionably Chiang had the superior-looking war machine.

　　"The Communists are babies; they don't know how to fight," said one Kuomintang officer. "The war will be over in three months," Chiang's top-ranking generals declared. American publications echoed these sentiments, and with no other news from China, it was hard to believe that the Communists had a chance to resist successfully, much less to win the war.Then in the middle of 1946 friends began to send me news of an amazing situation that was developing in North China - a situation which was later to culminate in continuous defeats for Chiang Kai-shek and a complete overturn of Chinese society.

　　Though not very definite, this news consisted of several striking points. The Communists' 8th Route Army, driven back by Chiang Kai-shek, refusing to stand up and give battle, and abandoning all large cities, railway points and fortresses, had nevertheless not only maintained guerrilla bases in Chiang's rear, as it had done in the Japanese war, but was expanding everywhere in the countryside and slowly isolating the Nationalist army. As a result, though Chiang was still winning victories his progress had slowed down and a long war appeared in prospect. Faced by this bleak future, many of Chiang's generals were covertly trying to halt the war, believing it could be decided only by political means. At the same time, hundreds of students, strait-jacketed by Chiang's intellectual terror, were running over to the Communist side and giving leadership to the peasants. More amazing still, businessmen, weighted down by heavy taxes and losing their factories in some cases to Chiang's so-called program of nationalization were becoming so wroth at the national government that they were actively organizing the shipment of American arms and ammunition to the Communists. In the middle of this explosive situation, the Reds, abandoning their ten-year reformist policy, had suddenly hurled a revolution like a bomb at the head of the generalissimo.

　　There was not a word about this revolution in the papers. It seemed quite incredible. Nor did any of the pronouncements of our government officials, special investigators or China experts contain the slightest mention of this revolution. How, I wondered, could anyone hope to understand the events in China without knowing what the Communists were doing to the people in their areas? The answer was they could not. Not only news, but also policy, it seemed, was being made on entirely false premises. That was depressing.　　

　　I knew that the only way to learn anything about this revolution was to go there. I excused myself by saying that life in China was filthy, miserable and boring - all of which was true - and that I was fed up with war, which was also true. Then I thought about the thousands of lives that were being sacrificed in China's civil war, about Li Kung-po and Wen I-to who had been murdered while trying to make peace, and about millions of starving farmers whom the Communists had hurled onto the bitter road of revolution. Could the comfort of one foreign life be better sacrificed than in trying to find out what this war and revolution was all about?

　　In this somewhat solemn frame of mind, I packed my suitcase, said good-by to my wife and boarded a slow boat to China.