The Grounds for Hope

On NBC's Meet the Press last week, Nationalist China's Madame Chiang Kai-shek asserted: "All over China they are crying out right now for the return of the Nationalist government." The Generalissimo himself has never ceased to insist that one day he will go back, although he has adjusted his thinking to changing circumstances.

For the first five or six years after the retreat to Formosa, the Generalissimo regularly spoke of reconquering the mainland "next year." Today it has become "soon" or "when the time is ripe." Aware of U.S. fears that a Nationalist attack on the mainland might lead to World War III, Chiang has also come to emphasize that "there is no need for a world war or for the U.S. to participate, directly."

Chiang is under no illusion that he can reoccupy mainland China by sheer force of Nationalist arms. What he is waiting and hoping for is a fullscale, Hungarian-style uprising. He wants to be ready to support it--as the West was not ready to support Hungary. Says he: "The Hungarian type of revolt is not only possible in the future, it has been happening increasingly in Sinkiang, Tibet, Chinhai and on the borders of Yunnan and Szechwan . . . The time will come for a national revolution against Communism."

Chiang's statements have a basis in fact. The Communists themselves have broadcast evidence of restiveness--although so far they have always been able to control it. Last January Lo Jui-ching, chief of Red China's secret police, casually admitted that in the preceding two years his men had found it necessary to investigate 18 million workers for "counterrevolutionary thoughts," had smashed 3,000 "revolutionary cliques" and uncovered 100,000 active counter-revolutionaries--5,000 of them in the Communist Party itself.

No plebiscite has ever been held in Red China on the issue of Chiang Kaishek, and none ever will be. But there have been two occasions when Chinese were offered a free choice:

P:In Korea, offered the option, 14,000 Chinese prisoners of war (out of 20,000) refused to return to their homes and families in Red China, chose Formosa instead. P:When the Nationalists evacuated the Tachen Islands off the coast of Chekiang province in 1955, the islands' civilian populace was given the choice of evacuation to Formosa or acceptance of Communist rule. Of the islands' 18,500 inhabitants, exactly 19 chose to remain and await the Communist administration.

On the two occasions when they have been given a free choice, these ordinary Chinese chose exile in Chiang's Nationalist China over home in Mao's New China. On such evidence, Chiang bases his hopes.

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