The recent secret diplomacy between the United States and Russia that excludes Ukraine invokes plenty of ire and memories for Chinese. Historic examples of treachery enacted by the United States to her allies are aplenty. During World War Two, the Republic of China was an American ally, but during the Yalta Conference in February 1945, a secret agreement was reached between the United States and the Soviets to hand over the Chinese territories of Manchuria and Outer Mongolia as condition for the Soviets to enter war against Japan. In August 1949, the United States government issued the China White Paper, slandering the government of the Republic of China and hastened the fall of China mainland to the communists. In October 1971, the United States government was instrumental in forcing the departure of the Republic of China from the United Nations in favour of Communist China. In January 1979, the United States established diplomatic relations with Communist China, ending recognition of the Republic of China, its adverse consequences are still being gradually revealed and even recognized by Americans themselves.
History can illuminate the present, we therefore republish an article by the late Alfred Kolhberg titled Can Chiang Trust America? Kolhberg was a prominent anti-communist figure in America, and was a vehement supporter of the Republic of China for decades. This article was originally published in the New York biweekly magazine The Freeman on 27 November 1950.
Curatorial and Editorial Department
Front cover of The Freeman, dated 27 November 1950
Article by Alfred Kohlberg titled Can Chiang Trust America? published in The Freeman
On November 6 Senator Knowland of California demanded that Communist China’s invasion of Korea be answered by permitting General MacArthur to accept the troops offered by Chiang Kai-shek last June. And in the Freeman of November 13 Rodney Gilbert proposed that we use Chiang’s guerrillas on the Chinese mainland to overthrow the Mao Tse-tung dictatorship. These are logical proposals, but they pose an important question: Would Chiang Kai-shek dare to commit himself on the American side in the Far Eastern war?
Photograph of President Chiang Kai-shek taken outside the Presidential Office dated 1 March 1950
The record of our government in dealing with wartime allies is not one to inspire the American people with pride, or other peoples with confidence. It betrayed the Polish underground leaders to Stalin, who promptly framed and jailed them; and it abandoned Mihailovich to Stalin’s puppet, Tito, who murdered him. Now let us consider its record in China.
Photograph of Dragoljub Draza Mihailovic of Yugoslavia, abandoned by America and shot by Tito
During the years 1942 and 1943, when America had no arms or ammunition to spare for China-not a single rifle, not a single cartridge-President Roosevelt in message after message urged Chiang to fight on. During 1943 and the succeeding years Japan made attractive peace offers to Chiang Kai-shek through neutral embassies. In each instance Chiang advised President Roosevelt secretly of the offer and his refusal to consider it, and received President Roosevelt's thanks in return.
Chinese poster of The Cairo Declaration, 1943. Photograph courtesy Mr. Roy Delbyck
When for the first time President Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek met face to face, at Cairo in November 1943, detailed understandings of the objectives for which they fought in the Pacific were put down in a public document called the Declaration of Cairo, This promised that all the areas Japan had stolen from the Chinese, including Manchuria and Formosa, would be restored to the Republic of China, that is, to the government, then and now headed by Chiang Kai-shek. Since then embargoes of supplies to Chiang’s government, refusal to permit it to take over North China and Manchuria in 1945-46, denunciations culminating in the White Paper of August 1949, must have proved to Chiang Kai-shek that the American government, as represented by its present Administration, is an untrustworthy ally.
When in October 1948 Prime Minister Nehru told an American reporter that the question that faced his government was whether it dared be an ally of the United States; and when the following autumn he came to Washington and after high-level discussions announced that India would be the friend of both the East and the West and the ally of neither, he was expressing a conclusion as to American reliability that must also be in the mind of Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang may feel that America as an ally is not to be trusted. He may suspect that if, on more American promises, he should land on the Continent of China and involve himself again in an all-out war with the Communists, we would turn on him once more if it happened to suit our immediate expediencies, and for the sake of a temporary peace again cut him off from supplies and make a deal with his Communist enemies.
But Chiang is not in Nehru’s position; he can not remain even temporarily a friend of both East and West and the ally of neither. Temporarily secure on his island of Formosa, with 1,600,000 guerrillas (as he claims) on the mainland loyal to him and maintaining liaison with him, he is, of necessity, committed to the death to the anti-Communist cause. If we become involved in a full-scale war with the Chinese Communists in Korea, he can not too long remain neutral. However, he can bide his time and demand, as the price of entry into full-scale war on our side, written and public understandings that no American Administration in the future could betray.
Portrait of Alfred Kohlberg
In the summer of 1949, when I met Chiang Kai-shek for the first time and spent two days as his guest in his retreat in the mountains of Formosa, we discussed Sino-American relations. He was a disillusioned, but not a bitter man; he looked forward to the days when the exigencies of world conflict would force America again to seek Chinese allies. He asked me to take home the message that a Nationalist China meant 450,000,000 friends for America in the world conflict slowly developing toward a crisis, while a Communist China meant 450,000,000 enemies in that crisis. How important this difference would be to us is now fully apparent from the havoc that just 8,000,000 North Koreans, armed and directed by Russia, have created.
For the moment Nehru has complete freedom of choice. He can choose the side of freedom or the side of communism; or he can choose to remain neutral. Chiang has a very limited choice. He may choose the side of freedom against communism, or he may, if only temporarily, remain neutral. America has no choice at all in Asia. Having involved itself in Korea, it must fight communism or accept defeat.
If we are to win against the forces of communism in Asia, we must have the alliance of Chiang Kai-shek and his much greater forces on Formosa and on the mainland of China. If we do not, we can not win; the best we could hope for would be a stalemate. And to win we must convince Chiang that we are allies to be trusted. The first step in that direction would, of course, be the removal from influence in American affairs of all those men who have engineered his betrayal since 1944.
Should the war in Korea develop into a war with Communist China, the United States would be the true “have not” power. We would be the “have not” power in terms of manpower, a most essential factor in ground warfare. Chiang Kai-shek has this in unlimited quantities. Will he now trust us sufficiently to throw that manpower in to balance the scales?
Chiang is a simple and direct character and a deeply religious Christian. He is extremely likely to put his trust in works and not in words.
Map of Taiwan, anti-communist bastion for the recovery of mainland China. Photograph courtesy Mr. Roy Delbyck
