Focus on Formosa
A note of reserve marked the references made by the Russian propaganda services to China during the official celebrations of Marshal Stalin's seventieth birthday ; though she was welcomed as a promising recruit to the Communist team, it was made fairly plain that she had not yet been given, so to speak, her colours. Mao Tse-tung seems to be still in Moscow, where the terms of the Sino-Soviet Treaty are almost certainly being reviewed. What Russia wants from Communist China, apart from a reaffirmation of her extensive privileges in Manchuria, is not known ; but pretty certainly one of the things that Communist China wants from Russia is help in building up both an air force and an air transport system. She will probably get it. Meanwhile Formosa has been publicly classed, with Tibet and Hainan Island, as a target for Communist military strategy in 1950 ; and among the fallacies _which are helping to bedevil American Far Eastern policy, whose tendencies are discussed in a leading article, is the belief that the presence of American advisers pn the island might make a decisive contribution to its security. If the Americans want to keep the Communists off Formosa they can only do so by sending an expeditionary force there and putting the whole island under American command. The idea that it can be held by its Nationalist garrison, with Americans playing the same role there as they did in Greece, is not one that will work in real life, and no one ought to know this better than the Americans themselves after their experiences on the Chinese mainland.
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