MIA > Archive > Glass (Li Fu-jen)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 31, 3 August 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Well-supplied with American weapons and munitions, ranging all the way from coastal and river warships and planes, to rifle and machine-gun ammunition, Chiang Kai-shek’s military forces have launched large-scale offensives
on several fronts in China with intent to deal death blows to the Stalinist-led Eighth Route and New Fourth armies. The military campaign is being accompanied by an unbridled reign of terror in the cities, directed against any and all opponents of Chiang’s bloody rule.
It is necessary to understand that the new military drive and the reign of terror are aimed not merely at the Stalinists. They are directed toward the wiping out of the spearhead of the popular opposition to the Kuomintang dictatorship which the Stalinists represent in the present stage of Chinese political development. Every oppositional element is in danger. What is occurring is an attempt to strangle the beginnings of the new Chinese revolution.
Opposition to Chiang’s rule is seething throughout the length and breadth of China. Never in the 19 years of the Kuomintang dictatorship has hangman Chiang’s regime been so weak, so isolated, so universally hated by the masses as it is today.
One thing and one thing only stands between Chiang and the revolutionary wrath of the Chinese people: American imperialism which maintains its armed forces in China to hold open Chiang’s lines of military supply and communication, and which furnishes Chiang with the implements of war.
On two fronts in North China, the peasant soldiers of the Eighth Route Army are being pressed back by Chiang’s troops in the provinces of Shantung and Shansi. In the region of the lower Yangtze, in east-central China, fighting is raging in the Kiangsu-Anhwei triangle where Chiang’s forces are trying to envelop the battling peasant forces of the New Fourth Army.
Hour after hour, according to press dispatches, planes are taking off from Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek’s capital, on bombing and strafing missions against the Stalinist lines. Chinese peasant soldiers are being blasted by bombs and bullets made in America and dropped from planes also made in America.
The intervention of U.S. imperialism in the civil war in China is undertaken solely with the aim of saving Chiang Kai- shek’s vile regime from revolutionary destruction by the Chinese masses, so that China may be made safe for colonial exploitation by the money hogs of Wall Street and converted into a base for future war against the Soviet Union.
The presence of American armed forces in China, and the continuing flow of American munitions and supplies to Chiang Kai-shek, has aroused bitter opposition among the Chinese people. Tremendous demonstrations in Shanghai have demanded an end to American intervention.
Mme. Sun Yat-sen, widow of the founder of the Chinese republic and a liberal opponent of Chiang’s regime, has added her voice to the growing demand that American intervention in the Chinese civil war should cease.
In a statement issued July 22 in Shanghai and addressed to the American people, Mme. Sun declared:
“The United States apparently intends to issue her aid and assistance to the Chinese through the Nationalist Government, which is permeated with the forces of reaction. Under such circumstances we can hardly welcome this aid and assistance for we know it will be used to enlarge the civil war.
“Your lend-lease loans, surplus property, marines and military mission will lead China into a protracted state of civil war, for the Chinese people will fight relentlessly for a termination of fascism in their country. We therefore ask you to prohibit your government from destroying our chances for peace and democracy and for maintaining useful diplomatic, economic and cultural relations with you.”
Diplomatic representatives of reactionary governments are notorious as liars, but one could scarcely imagine a more fantastically false statement than that made in Washington July 24 by Dr. V.K. Wellington Koo, Chiang’s new ambassador to the United States, in reply to Mme. Sun Yat-sen.
Questioning her right to speak for the Chinese people (as if HE possessed such a right!), Koo said he “could not understand” why demands were voioed for the withdrawal of American troops from China, because “the great bulk of the Chinese people know that the Americans are there for the specific purpose of disarming and repatriating Japanese soldiers.” (N.Y. Times, July 25). This professional liar added that “the Chinese are grateful for the American assistance.”
Meanwhile, supplementing the military drive against the Eighth Route and New Fourth armies, Chiang Kai-shek has loosed a reign of terror in the cities, reminiscent of the “purge” which he carried out in 1927 after the crushing of the Chinese revolution.
Five hundred government police, armed with tommy guns and machine-guns (made in the United States!) surrounded the campus and dormitories of Futan University in Shanghai at dawn on July 22 and after a thorough search carried off two students suspected of anti-Kuomintang activity. The Chinese press was not permitted to report the raid, but news of it was cabled abroad by the United Press.
Additional hundreds of Chiang’s uniformed thugs carried out raids on bookstores and magazine stands, the news agency reported, stripping them of “dangerous” reading matter. At one Shanghai bookstore all books that bore such words as “democracy,” “people” and “emancipation” were seized and carried away.
At Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province in the southwest, two professors prominent in the Democratic League (a federation of petty-bourgeois groups which oppose the Kuomintang dictatorship) were murdered in cold blood by Chiang’s secret police gunmen. Representatives of the same organization who went to Nanking from Shanghai to protest against the spreading civil war, were set upon by Chiang’s gangsters and severely beaten.
Last updated on 18 June 2021