What to make of President Biden’s kid-glove treatment of Communist China? Secretary Yellen is off to Beijing to implore the mandarins to trade more fairly. This follows Mr. Biden’s phone call pleading with President Xi to stop aiding Russia’s Ukraine war and for help on the fentanyl scourge. Mr. Biden’s attempt to collaborate with Beijing reflects the naiveté that was decried by that legendary anti-communist, and head of Free China, Chiang Kai-shek.

Chiang, the protégé of the pioneer of Chinese democracy and New York Sun contributor Sun Yat-sen, warned the free world against “foolish and doomed hopes,” as the New York Times put it, “that there can be peaceful coexistence with communism.” After succeeding Sun as the head of Free China and fighting with the allies during World War II, he was dismayed as America withheld postwar support as he fought, and lost to, Mao’s communists.

Chiang’s decades of fighting communists led him to observe that only when they are “in need of a respite in which to consolidate their gains, or to prepare for their next move,” do “they tolerate” and “sometimes even encourage” the idea of working peacefully with free nations. The communists’ intention, Chiang said, is “to paralyze their opponents’ will to fight and thus to render them easier to subdue.” 

Chiang’s warnings fell on deaf ears, even during World War II, when he was startled that “young and naive American military officers in China believed” the communist party’s “propaganda,” as biographer Jay Taylor notes, and, even worse, “senior officers” at Washington did, too. Such messages depicted the communists as democracy-loving agrarian reformers, leading America’s left to shrug off the possibility of a Maoist takeover of China.

After the communist conquest, Chiang relocated Free China to Taiwan, where capitalism flourished and democracy later bloomed. All the while, he urged America to back his effort to reverse Mao’s takeover of the mainland, along with campaigns to defeat puppet states in Vietnam and Korea. “We will carry the manpower burden,” said Chiang of armies from Taiwan, Free Vietnam, and Free Korea. “All we need from the West is moral and material assistance.” 

To Chiang’s chagrin, not only did this aid fail to materialize, but America warmed to Beijing — and even abandoned our ally at Saigon. In 1972, Nixon, on his famous trip to Beijing, crooned to Zhou Enlai that “a strong China can help provide the balance of power in this key part of the world.” By then Chiang “had been lecturing Americans on what he perceived as their extreme naiveté regarding the Chinese Communists” for 30 years, Mr. Taylor notes. 

The walls of Chiang’s conference room, the Times reported in 1958, were decorated with “six-foot scrolls” in the “personal handwriting of Sun Yat-Sen,” whose democratic principles Chiang was incubating on Taiwan. “Pursue the logic of the matter to its very source,” one scroll read. Did such clarity of thought, inherited from Free China’s founder, enable Chiang to view Communism with a sang-froid lacking in America’s policy toward Beijing?

After all, it’s hard to see the logic in President Carter’s move, 45 years ago next week, to betray Taiwan and cast America’s lot with Beijing, followed by welcoming Communist China to the global trade system. This caused the “China Shock,” as cheap imports eviscerated America’s industrial heartland, and rising aggression by Beijing. Now Mr. Xi is demanding “concrete actions” by Mr. Biden to show America does not support Taiwan’s independence.

“The Taiwan question is the first red line that must not be crossed,” Mr. Xi lectured Mr. Biden. He meekly replied, the Times reports, that he supports the communists’ “One China policy,” which sees Mr. Xi’s tyranny “as the sole legitimate government of China.” Count on Ms. Yellen to pay similar obeisances at Beijing, despite rising provocations against our ally Taiwan, the one freely elected government in China. Chiang must be rolling over in his tomb.