(Yan’an, Xinhua, the 16th) Despite repeated appeals from the Chinese people and all democratic parties urging it to cease fueling China’s civil war, the U.S. authorities have resolved to continue providing military assistance to Chiang Kai-shek’s government—the instigator of the conflict. According to a dispatch from the U.S. News Bureau in Washington dated the 14th: “Secretary of State Bernays today (the 14th) submitted a bill to the Senate requesting approval for the provision of military training and technical assistance to China. In an accompanying letter, Mr. Bernays pointed out… that the continued and uninterrupted delivery of military aid to China is of paramount importance. He stated that China has requested the dispatch of a U.S. military mission to its territory, one whose character would be similar to those the United States has sent to Latin America. The bill authorizing such military assistance to China was jointly drafted by the Army, Navy, and State Departments. I firmly believe that the national interest— including our own in the reconstruction and maintenance of peace and security in Asia—requires the United States to help China organize and sustain a sizable, modernized armed force, so that China may contribute to peace and security in that region.”

Local observers contend that, at a time when Communist representatives in Nanjing are engaged in negotiations with the Nationalist government through General Marshall, striving for comprehensive and lasting peace in China, while the Nationalists themselves are openly calling for a protracted, all-out civil war, the U.S. administration’s introduction of this bill encouraging civil strife constitutes a decidedly unfriendly gesture toward the Chinese people’s desire for peace. The facts stand in stark contrast to Mr. Bernays’s assertions: if this legislation is enacted, China will be plunged into grave instability and insecurity, and both the interests of the American people and the standing of the United States as a nation will suffer severe damage as a result. Both Chinese and international public opinion have repeatedly emphasized that the massive military aid provided by the United States to the belligerent, dictatorial Nationalist regime is the sole fundamental condition accounting for the outbreak, escalation, and near-irrepressibility of China’s present civil war. The Chinese people cannot comprehend on what grounds the U.S. government would seek to impose civil war and dictatorship upon China, reducing it—along with Latin America—to a mere sphere of U.S. influence or to a component of America’s “national interests.” Nor can they understand by what right the U.S. administration is undermining President Truman’s declaration last November that “the United States will not intervene militarily to affect the course of any internal conflict in China,” as well as the principles set forth in the communiqué issued following the November 1945 Moscow Foreign Ministers’ Conference on the Chinese question.

Authorities in Yan’an have stated: Peace and democracy in China are the sacred rights of the Chinese people; no one may interfere with or deprive them of these rights. Should the reactionary forces within China, relying on foreign support, persist in their campaign of civil war and dictatorship—openly and directly transforming the present Nationalist government into a regime akin to those headed by Qin Hui, Zhang Bangchang, and Liu Yu, and turning the current Nationalist leader into a boy emperor who bows in subservience to foreign powers—then it may be confidently asserted that the Chinese people will resist to the very last drop of blood.