THE RED CHINA PAPERS: What Americans Deserve to Know About U.S.-Chinese Relations

Another survey of Sine-American relations by the author of How the Far East Was Lost, Communism at Pearl Harbor, and so forth. This is more than a conservative tract, since the 1940's in particular are covered in considerable and interesting detail -- though one wonders how much of this has already appeared in Kubek's earlier volumes. And, for all the particulars, the book makes its key points by flat assertion: Kubek absurdly insists that the Kuomintang did bravely fight the Japanese while Mao's forces subverted the effort -- and his use of euphemism is something to behold. The KMT massacre of part of the Fourth Red Army is referred to as ""steps to disarm and disband"" it, while the 1927 slaughter of thousands is termed a little purge of the Kuomintang. Next comes Kubek's mania about poor Harry Dexter White, the Morgenthau subordinate who allegedly succored the Russians by encouraging Japan to fight the U.S. and not the Soviet Union. Kubek has a lively time with the Stillwell-Marshall-Hurley period of U.S. intervention in China, but fails to convince us that Chiang's corruption and incompetence have been vastly exaggerated, or that ""most of the postwar problems in China"" were caused by Soviet troops in Manchuria. In covering the Nixon turn, Kubek falls into mere China-Lobby-style muttering about how Hitler took in Chamberlain and how ""On Taiwan the Chinese individual possesses all the dignity of his ancestors."" Had he stopped seeing Reds under every official desk, Kubek could have made something out of his material, e.g., by investigating the 1930's-1940's Institute for Pacific Research and its Morgan-Carnegie backing as a liberal counter-insurgency institution, not a Russian conduit. As it is, the book seems redundant.