Does U.S. China Policy Kowtow to the Reds?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 11, 2004

Byline: Ralph de Toledano, INSIGHT

It is politely called the People's Republic of China (PRC), but the people are pawns of a ruthless dictatorship, it is not a republic, and in philosophy and character it is Chinese only because it sits athwart the Asian landmass. For Red China is and always has been an amalgam of Asian national socialism and Stalinism, with some booted military imperialism thrown in. Against this there are the Chinese on Taiwan a solid and prosperous and sometimes raucous democracy, as demonstrated by the recent razor-thin and still-contested election of President Chen Shui-bian in March. But Red China has never had any free elections at all.

Chen wants to write a constitution and put it to the people in a referendum in 2006, a decision that has scared the lace off the pants of the State Department crowd. They sent Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly up to a congressional hearing the other day to warn that any steps toward independence "will avail Taiwan of nothing it does not already enjoy in terms of democratic freedom, autonomy, prosperity and security."

Several decades ago, Lt. Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer, then the best-informed strategic thinker in the United States, told this writer, "Communist China could probably successfully invade Taiwan, but it would cost them a million casualties." Military experts even today point out that Red China's air force is badly trained and could not stand up to real opposition. Its navy is still embryonic. And its land forces seem better able to goose-step and to shoot down students in Tiananmen Square than to fight a major war.

Kelly's testimony was just another step in the ongoing Operation Doublecross. It began under the Roosevelt administration and continued its bipartisan way with the major skulduggery under Presidents Nixon, Carter and Clinton. The establishment historians tell it differently, but they had to suppress and invent to make their point. The record, however, is clear. From the early 1940s, the efforts of the Red China lobby in the State Department and the Roosevelt White House worked mightily to torpedo the nationalist Chinese government and to replace it with the communists "agrarian democrats," we were told, with Mao Tse-tung their George Washington.

These efforts were supported and encouraged by the New York Times, the New York Herald-Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post bellwether newspapers that turned over their pages to Owen Lattimore and the State Department triplets, John Carter Vincent, John K. Fairbank and John Stewart Service. At the same time, the ponderous foreign-policy quarterly, Amerasia, and the Institute of Pacific Relations two Soviet-controlled operations blanketed Washington officialdom and the media with the party line on China.

The atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the Soviet Union into the Pacific. The vast arsenal the Soviets captured from the Japanese after the surrender was turned over to Mao Tse-tung. The United States gave virtually nothing to the nationalist Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek. The records show that he got little more than some barbed wire. Chiang saw that he could not survive, and in an operation as astonishing as the Israelites crossing of the Red Sea, Chiang moved his government, his armies and a host of his followers across the Formosa Strait to Taiwan.

Operation Doublecross continued. Quietly encouraged by the State Department, the Red China lobby and the liberal establishment began pressing for the admission of Red China to the United Nations. This was blocked by the quick establishment of the Committee of One Million. Not only did a significant number of congressmen and senators join it, but Gen. George Catlett Marshall gave his support and endorsement. The committee received more than 1 million signatures and presented them to President Harry Truman. But the Doublecross continued. The CIA earmarked $3 million to assassinate Chiang, a fact confirmed to this writer by Vice President Richard Nixon, who added that the CIA also had made an attempt on the life of Syngman Rhee, president of South Korea.

The first Double Doublecross was engineered by President Richard Nixon and was the byproduct of a deal he made to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1968. Needing the support of the eastern Republican establishment, the former vice president had gone cap in hand to Nelson Rockefeller to win his support. The cost, as Nixon subsequently would tell this writer, was the appointment of Henry Kissinger, a major Rockefeller employee, to head the National Security Council. Contrary to published denials, Kissinger persuaded Nixon to approach the Chinese Communists and Kissinger secretly traveled to Beijing to arrange the president's trip, making the "opening" to China. President Jimmy Carter was responsible for the second Double Doublecross, in effect giving the Republic of China's seat on the U.N. Security Council to the PRC, and full diplomatic recognition to Beijing, making Taiwan a semipariah state.