Trump To Meet an Emboldened Xi Jinping

President Trump says he looks forward to what he calls “a very important trip” with Communist China’s dictator, Xi Jinping. The parley will take place at a time of waxing confidence on Mr. Xi’s part. In the past week, Mr. Xi halted the American acquisition of a Mainland tech firm and told Chinese corporations to defy American oil sanctions. Such moves suggest that Mr. Xi is emboldened by China’s economic rise and military prowess.More’s the reason, then, for Mr. Trump to avoid the credulity with which Americans, since Mao’s era, have approached China’s communists. In this regard the best guide is Mao’s late foe, Chiang Kai-shek, America’s World War II ally as the leader of Free China. Chiang was the protégé of the pioneer of Chinese democracy, Sun Yat-sen, a New York Sun contributor. When it came to China’s communists, Chiang lamented, “Americans are easily deceived.” Chiang was writing after World War II, when America and China had jointly defeated the Empire of Japan. Yet Mao’s communists, backed by the Soviets, were fighting Chiang’s Nationalists for control of China. President Truman dispatched George Marshall to try to make peace between the two factions. Chiang grasped that a deal was impossible. Marshall, as Chiang put it, “fails to understand” of the communists “that they are absolutely insincere.” Chiang wrote privately that American naïveté toward Mao’s movement meant that “it is not difficult to make fools of them.” This, Chiang added, “is even true of such hardened warriors as Marshall.” Chiang attempted to buck up the American statesman, who was no fading flower. “One should not engage in empty blathering with the Communists,” Chiang cautioned. “Instead, gathering one’s strength, one must switch to active measures.”That advice resonates today as Mr. Trump prepares to head to Beijing. It comes, too, amid a larger reappraisal of Chiang’s career and his staunch opposition to Chinese communism. When he died in 1975, the Times sneered that his ambition to restore the free Republic of China on the Mainland was “a monumental delusion.” The Times mocked, too, the esteem for Chiang on the right as the “lingering zeal of an American missionary generation.”To be sure, Chiang’s “hard-line posture” against the communists led some in an earlier generation to deem him “rigid and extreme,” reports sinologist Orville Schell. Yet “in retrospect it’s hard to fault Chiang’s more realistic assessment of Mao’s intentions,” Mr. Schell concludes. Too, Frank Dikötter’s recent book “Red Dawn Over China” offers an antidote to the myths that Mao’s dictatorship had popular backing among the Chinese or that it was inevitable.Correcting the record on this head is important, in part because of Mr. Xi’s attempt to rewrite history to suit Beijing’s triumphalist narrative. That includes his pretensions to conquer the island democracy that blossomed on Taiwan after Chiang’s government fled the mainland in 1949. Mr. Xi calls this reunification, but the communists never controlled Taiwan. It’s a point Mr. Trump might want to raise with the noble comrades.Mr. Xi expects that he has “cracked the code” with Mr. Trump, reports Lingling Wei of the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Xi, she adds, anticipates that Mr. Trump “can be exhausted and outwaited” in a campaign of “calibrated escalation.” This vindicates a warning from Chiang. Failing to grasp the nature of China’s communists means, Chiang predicted, “the United States will find it extremely difficult to maintain its preeminent authority in East Asia.”

Trump To Meet an Emboldened Xi Jinping

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