txtv v i . tjt r t j ' T " ' ! ! ! ! : 0 ' '

' 3 3 c \ / U L x l 2 j TvC O1 / ^

THE TABLET

J rU D I iS n cCz 2 P 2 f v t ^ s p a p C r

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

SEPTEMBER 20th, 1958

NINEPENCE

Collegiate Britain : Working Out the Catholic Response The Right to Use Force: I. The T radition in In ternational Law. By David Johnson

Appealing to F rance: Prospects for Next Sunday’s Referendum. By F rank MacMillan The Stratford Festival: II. Tragedy. By Robert Speaight

Catholic Higher Education: An Address by the Bishop of Salford

Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

TALKING AND FIGHTING

|rp H E talks in Warsaw over Quemoy coincide with a

. new session of the United Nations, where Chiang Kai-shek’s representative represents China. Legally, as far as the United Nations are concerned, the fighting is an internal matter : that one of their members is faced with a formidable rebellion. And Chiang is legally entitled to say, just as other Governments always do, that an international organisation need not, and should not, try to concern itself with an internal matter, between two groups of Chinese, one of the legal Government and the other insurgents. If the United States takes any part, it is at the invitation of the legal Government, and there is nothing for the United Nations to excite itself about.

This, the technical legal position, has only to be stated to show its utter remoteness from the realities of power these last ten years. The Communists are the de facto rulers of the Chinese mainland, and they have now had ten years to settle firmly in the saddle. The morale of the Nationalists on Formosa has been kept alive by talk of the day when they would land and liberate the country, rather in the way that Sir Winston Churchill in 1940 said that even if Great Britain were occupied, so that the Government might have to move to Canada, it would come back with liberating forces. The dream of invasion has gyown fainter, but it has never been abandoned, and the Nationalists’ lodgement on the off-shore islands has acquired a symbolical value, which explains Chiang Kai-shek’s refusal to agree to give them up, for to give them up would be to admit that China is not going to be freed from the Communists by the army in Formosa. Then the future role of Formosa is not that of a base, but an advance post, a bastion in the defence system of other countries, Japan and the Phillipines. For patriotic Chinese, this is a very different and much more discouraging role, negative instead of being positive. From feeling like General de Gaulle during his years in England, Chiang Kai-shek is asked to feel like the exiles who have had to resign themselves to exile.

This attitude of Chiang Kai-shek tends to be overlooked, as though it were not he but Mr. Dulles who is holding Quemoy. The difficulty in which Mr. Dulles has landed himself is that, on his stark premises, conversations with Communist China must be a mistake. All American policy in the Far East rests on the recognition that there is, in fact, a war going on ; that Chinese Communism is aggressive and dynamic ; that to give up Quemoy and Matsu is merely to bring nearer the day when the Communist will announce that they are about to liberate Formosa. To let Formosa go would be the prelude to losing the Phillipines.

Some of the Sunday paper commentators, notably Lord Boothby and Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge, have been insisting that there is no parallel with Munich twenty years ago, because there is here no question of truncating a neighbouring State, but only of letting the Communists possess themselves of islands that arc part of the mainland. But if there is no parallel with Munich, there is a real parallel with Hitler’s re-occupation of the Rhineland by force of arms in 1936. The Americans are reacting as the French reacted then, wanting action, and the British are reacting now as the British reacted then, thinking it a perfectly natural ambition on the part of the Chinese Communists, as on the part of Hitler, to want to be the masters in their own house.

Mr. Macmillan, refusing Mr. Gaitskell’s suggestion that Britain should publicly disassociate herself from an intransigent American policy, has taken his stand on the underlying principle that changes must not be made by force ; the Chinese Communists must not be allowed to take Quemoy just because they are stronger than the Chinese Nationalists. The American interest is not that Chiang should hold the island, but that Asia shall not see the spectacle of the Chinese Communists taking what they want at their pleasure, lest the conclusion be drawn that no one can withstand them.

The Americans can count on a great deal of support