893.00/1–1049
Memorandum by the Second Secretary of Embassy in China (Davies)
Will the Communists take over China?
The Chinese Communists are so strong between the Great Wall and the Yangtze that they can now look forward to the postwar control of at least North China. They may also continue to hold not only those parts of the Yangtze valley which they now dominate but also new areas in Central and South China. The Communists have fallen heir to these new areas by a process, which has been operating for seven years, whereby Chiang Kai-shek loses his cities and principal lines of communication to the Japanese and the countryside to the Communists.
The Communists have survived ten years of civil war and seven years of Japanese offensives. They have survived not only more sustained enemy pressure than the Chinese Central Government forces have been subjected to, but also a severe blockade imposed by Chiang.
They have survived and they have grown. Communist growth since 1937 has been almost geometric in progression. From control of some 100,000 square kilometers with a population of one million and a half they have expanded to about 850,000 square kilometers with a population of approximately 90 million. And they will continue to grow.
The reason for this phenomenal vitality and strength is simple and fundamental. It is mass support, mass participation. The communist governments and armies are the first governments and armies in modern Chinese history to have positive and widespread popular support. [Page 671] They have this support because the governments and armies are genuinely of the people.
Only if he is able to enlist foreign intervention on a scale equal to the Japanese invasion of China will Chiang probably be able to crush the Communists. But foreign intervention on such a scale would seem to be unlikely. Relying upon his dispirited shambling legions, his decadent corrupt bureaucracy, his sterile political moralisms and such nervous foreign support as he can muster, the Generalissimo may nevertheless plunge China into civil war. He cannot succeed, however, where the Japanese in more than seven years of determined striving have failed. The Communists are already too strong for him.
Civil war would probably end in a mutually exhausted stalemate. China would be divided into at least two camps with Chiang reduced to the position of a regional warlord. The possibility should not be overlooked of the Communists—certainly if they receive foreign aid—emerging from a civil war swiftly and decisively victorious, in control of all China.
Since 1937 the Communists have been trying to persuade Chiang to form a democratic coalition government in which they would participate. Should the Generalissimo accept this compromise proposal and a coalition government be formed with Chiang at the head, the Communists may be expected to continue effective control over the areas which they now hold. They will also probably extend their political influence throughout the rest of the country—for they are the only group in China possessing a program with positive appeal to the people.
If the Generalissimo neither precipitates a civil war nor reaches an understanding with the Communists, he is still confronted with defeat. Chiang’s feudal China can not long coexist alongside a modern dynamic popular government in North China.
The Communists are in China to stay. And China’s Destiny is not Chiang’s but theirs.