Sorrowful Advice

Only a year ago, K. C. Wu was Nationalist China's bright, particular star. He was an outspoken advocate of democracy among the Kuomintang's quarreling cliques, an honest official among many who were not. Chiang Kai-shek himself had picked able Administrator Wu as the governor of Formosa.

But last spring Wu abruptly resigned, went into voluntary political exile in the U.S. For ten months, Wu watched from a modest hotel in Evanston, Ill., lectured in U.S. cities, and kept his silence. Three weeks ago he sat down at his dining-room table and wrote a long, careful letter to the National Assembly meeting in For mosa. Last week, charging that the National regime had suppressed parts of it, Wu published its contents. Said he: "I don't want to wreck the Formosan regime, but it must reform." His theme: to return to the mainland, the Formosa regime must have the "fullhearted support" not only of the Chinese in Formosa, on the mainland and overseas, but also of the free world. The Nationalist regime is endangering this support by its undemocratic practices. Wu listed them bluntly:

P: One-party rule: the Kuomintang is financed, not by party members, but from the government treasury. Its methods "are entirely devoted to the purpose of perpetuating its own power."

P: "The so-called political department is entirely modeled after the system of . . . the Communists . . . It has almost totally wrecked the morale of the troops."

P: Secret police: "During my three-year administration as governor of Formosa, hardly a day passed without some bitter struggle with the secret police . . . They made numberless illegal arrests. They tortured and they blackmailed . . . The people . . . only dare to resent but not to speak in the open . . ."

Wu dated the change in climate from the entry of Chinese Communists into the Korean war. "More American aid came for Formosa. The rulers began to feel more secure in their position, and old ideas which led us to our downfall on the mainland reared up their ugly heads again." Chief culprit, Wu thought, was the Generalissimo's son, Lieut. General Chiang Ching-Kuo, who heads the secret police, runs the political department in the armed forces. Wu charged that once "a dastardly attempt" was made on his life, said that Chiang refused to give a passport to his 1 5-year-old son now living with Wu's parents. "It is awful."

Wu, with a long career of service behind him (mayor of wartime Chungking, postwar mayor of Shanghai), still has hopes for the Nationalist cause. "But if the Gimo will press for these needed reforms . . ." said he, "the Chinese people will gladly back the Nationalist government. If he does not do so, not only our hope of ever recovering the mainland of China is lost, but he may find himself even unable to defend effectively Formosa in the not too distant future."

On Formosa, where he is now regarded as a renegade, there was bitter resentment among men who stayed on. Others charged that he was trying to forestall a supreme court probe of charges of irregularities in his conduct as governor. The Assembly's 85-man presidium snapped: "The presidium views with utter contempt K. C. Wu's action and utterances, which it considers as giving aid and comfort to the Communists, inasmuch as he is . . . in the sanctuary of a foreign country, smearing and attacking the government [with] malicious propaganda."

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