K. C. Wu (Chinese: 吳國楨; pinyin: Wú Gúozhēn) (October 21, 1903 – June 6, 1984) was a Chinese political figure and historian.
二戰後，美蘇的兩大陣營『冷戰（1946-1991)』史，主要推動者，是美國國務卿艾奇遜．台灣因此才長期投入美國的懷抱，接受老大哥的援助與支配．我今天，原想下載他的『回憶錄』，臨時又用『冷戰史』的關鍵茲搜尋，卻出現共十幾種，超過一千萬字以上的驚人龐大叢書．大陸在華東師範大學成立一個『冷戰國際研究中心』，所以才會如此撲天蓋地的大量搜集與出版．台灣學者是落後了．無限感慨！
Man on the Dike"; Time, August 7, 1950. (
[2])
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._C._Wu
DANGER ZONES: Man On The Dike
Out of the skies over Formosa one day this week roared a U.S. C-54. It landed smoothly at Taipei's airfield. From the Bataan stepped General Douglas MacArthur. He was welcomed by Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, whose determined face had over the years become almost as familiar to history as Douglas MacArthur's lofty scowl. MacArthur, accompanied by Vice Admiral Arthur Struble, commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, had come to discuss the defenses of Formosa, which the U.S. is committed to guard against Red attack. Said MacArthur, shaking Chiang's hand: "How do you do, Generalissimo, it was nice of you to come down and meet me."
The two men, who for nearly 40 years had been fighting the various separate battles that history assigned them, had never met before. Last week, at long last, the two fighters stood side by side in the same battle. After months of snubbing the Nationalists on Formosa, Washington had begun to see the one fact that counted about Chiang. Formosa's Governor K.C. Wu had sharply stated that fact: "The only force in this part of the world with a sizable anti-Communist army, with a leadership that has a popular following and with the will to fight, is the Nationalist government."
It had taken the U.S. a long time to reach the same conclusion.
The Road to Decision. Last January, the President of the U.S. announced: "The United States Government will not provide military aid or advice to Chinese forces on Formosa . . . The resources on Formosa are adequate to enable them to obtain the items which they might consider necessary for the defense of the island."
Secretary of State
Dean Acheson had persuaded the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, against the advice of General MacArthur, that the U.S. should not intervene in Formosa. He advanced the remarkable argument that if Russia had its way in Asia, the Communists would eventually become highly unpopular among Asian people and the U.S. would gain popularity for its nice-mannered nonintervention.
knock into a cocked hat
The Red invasion of South Korea knocked such arguments into a cocked hat. The President reversed himself, announced what most military men—and plain common sense—would tell any American: Formosa in Red hands would be "a direct threat to the security of the Pacific area . . ."
Can Formosa Hold? In the six months that it took for the U.S. to make up its mind, the Reds had built up a sizable invasion fleet. The Red dragon began to spit fire; Communist leaders made belligerent statements about how.they would liberate Formosa and crush Chiang. Would Formosa be the dragon's next bite?
Last week, the Communists tried to take Taitan, a small Nationalist-held island off the mainland port of Amoy. The Nationalists drove off the attack. Later, the Nationalist air force—which had been idle for a month because of President Truman's request that the Nationalists cease operations against the Red mainland—strafed Communist forces on the Chinese coast, reported that it sank 150 Red invasion vessels. The Nationalists called this action a "self-defense measure," and Washington accepted that explanation.
U.S. military men believe that a Red invasion can be turned back by the U.S. Seventh Fleet, together with the Nationalist army of about 500,000 men who have been licked into top shape by V.M.I.-trained General Sun Li-jen. They concede, however, that the Red Chinese air force of about 300 fighter-bombers and 100 medium bombers might deal crippling blows to ports and industries of the island stronghold.
But the defense of Formosa, and the U.S. stake in it, is not purely a military matter. A large, vocal body of U.S. opinion has persistently suggested that the Nationalists are not fit allies for the U.S. The Chinese who are building a stronghold on Formosa today should tell Americans another story. One of the most important of these Chinese is Governor Wu.
The Measure of Maturity. Wu Kuo-cheng was born in 1903 in the mountains of Central China, grew up in Peking, where his peasant-born father was director of military training for the Imperial Chinese army. In Peking's yellow-roofed Forbidden City, Dowager Empress Tzu-hsi (also known as the "Venerable Buddha") still occupied the Dragon Throne, and China still lay in the heavy torpor of her past. While Wu was in school, Sun Yat-sen and his followers rudely yanked at the queue of Chinese tradition, dethroned the Manchus and established the Chinese Republic.
The din of these great events was only dimly heard in Wu's classroom. Wu was a bright pupil. Because he was the smallest boy in his class, he was invariably seated in the first row where he could get a better view of the blackboard. Next to him in the front row usually sat a mandarin's son named Chou Enlai.
Their generation of Chinese was discovering (almost simultaneously) the Bible and Karl Marx. Wu eventually turned to the Bible and became an Anglican; Chou turned to Marx, is now Premier and Foreign Minister of China's Communist government.
When he was 17, Wu weni to the U.S., enrolled at Grinnell College in Iowa. The only course in which Wu, later to be the mayor of three cities, did not get an A was municipal government. In 1923 Wu moved on to Princeton to take his doctorate in political science. He faced the formidable Dean Andrew Fleming West who personally interviewed all graduate students seeking admission. "Young man," said West after contemplating the round, boyish face of the applicant, "you are immature." "Sir," replied Wu, "to judge maturity by the criterion of age is an immature thought in itself." Dean West promptly admitted him to Princeton.
Technician of Order. When Wu returned to China in 1926, Sun Yat-sen was dead. Vast areas of the country were bitterly contested by warlords with their private armies and by Nationalist revolutionaries. The best of the Nationalists, Chiang Kaishek, Sun's disciple, set out from Canton at the head of a revolutionary army on his famous Northern Expedition to quell the warlords. Young Nationalist K. C. Wu tried to join Chiang's army. He was rejected with the explanation: "You are too educated."
Throughout the war, on orders from Moscow, the Reds had arrayed themselves in the "united front" with Chiang against the Japanese.* Liaison man between the Communists and the government was Wu's old schoolfriend, suave Chou Enlai. Chou was often heard to say at Chungking parties: "Wu and I used to go to school together. Now we fight together." Wu did not share this pally mood. Chou made him nervous. Said he once: "Chou En-lai puts me on the jitterbug."
K. C. Wu's jitters proved amply justified.
The Technicians of Chaos. For a time it seemed as if Chungking's—and all China's—heroic endurance had been rewarded. In 1945, after 14 years of fighting, the war was over: the Japanese surrendered. Men like K.C. Wu were sure then that they would get the time and the peace so desperately needed to build and organize a modern China. But, within sight of realization, their hopes came to nothing. While the technicians of order labored to build, the Red technicians of chaos labored to perpetuate disorder. Immediately after V-J day, the Communists and Nationalists were at war.
In 1946, Chiang Kai-shek assigned Wu to tend Asia's most desperate sore of disorder: Shanghai.
It was not a city; it was the double-distilled epitome of chaos. Sediments of every evil that Asia has seen in a century, and the residue of every Western movement for good in Asia, had been washed ashore on the Shanghai mudbanks. When Wu took over, Shanghai was a compound of patient, unlettered Chinese coolies, British traders, American, French and British missionaries, White Russian blondes who lived by their wits, refugees, adventurers, prostitutes, gangsters—and Communist agents. Nobody was astonished at hotel rooms that cost $150,000 (Chinese) a night, at small boys who peddled blackjacks in public, or at homeless children dying nightly in the streets.
Mayor Wu's first act in office concerned the 97,000 dead who, during the war, had accumulated in the city's morgues because relatives could not transport them inland to their ancestral burial grounds. Wu ruled that henceforth no corpse might stay unburied more than 30 days.
Wu proved an efficient, smart administrator against overwhelming odds. He managed to keep Shanghai's astronomical budget from soaring into outer space, did his best to fight black markets. As in Chungking, he dashed in person from crisis to crisis. On one occasion, he harangued nearly 3,000 rioting students for 18 hours, persuaded them to go home peacefully; another time, students beat him up. Once when workers in the city's big textile industry demanded pay raises, Mayor Wu gave a big tea party for the union bosses and their families. They were so pleased at being allowed to rub elbows with the mayor that they cut their demands by 75%.
But Wu's fight for order was in vain. The technicians of chaos carried the day. The Communists (and their obedient echoes in the U.S.) screamed about China's weakness and confusion while, swinging the torch of civil war, the Reds themselves desperately increased the weakness and the confusion. As the Reds approached Shanghai, Chiang ordered Wu, who was seriously ill, to go to Formosa.
Last Stand. On that island outpost, the men of order had another chance. For a time after V-J day, a carpetbagging Nationalist regime did great harm on Formosa. When Chiang's Nationalist government arrived, it carried with it from the mainland many of the weaknesses and the faults it had suffered before, but the realization—always bracing to strong men —of having to make a last-ditch stand had purged the Nationalists. Above all they were removed, if only 100 miles across the Straits of Formosa, from the Reds' corrosive power. Even Chiang Kai-shek's bitter foes concede that his government on Formosa is better than any Nationlist government of the past. Formosa (for 50 years brutally but efficiently ruled by the Japanese) is orderly, clean and prosperous looking. Over the neat towns and the green hills there seems to blow a breeze of determination and high spirit.
Wu lives quietly with his wife & four children in an unostentatious, comfortable house which they bought with the proceeds of watercolors painted by Mrs. Wu. One Chinese explained why the Wus collected only enough for a modest house: "Not so plenty money because paintings not so good." The picture that fetched the highest price ($500) shows a grey palm tree with red fruit. The caption, written by K. C. Wu, says: "This tree is very hard, like iron; beautiful birds perch on it, looking down on the clear springwater. This is a heavenly place, wthout the slightest noise to break the stillness."
Too Much Success. Since the Generalissimo appointed him governor last December, Wu has ably wielded the broom of reform. He has managed to halt inflation by curbs on the amount of money in circulation. Wu has also managed to repeat his feat of Hankow: he has balanced Formosa's budget—not without drastic forced loans and capital levies.
Wu has overhauled the administration of the provincial government, thrown out unnecessary officials by the carload, given government posts to large numbers of Formosans. He has also pressed for early local elections, against the advice of more conservative Nationalist leaders.
Perhaps the most important Nationalist measure on Formosa is land reform, begun by General Chen Cheng, Wu's able, shrewd predecessor as governor and now Prime Minister in the Nationalist government. Wu, good friend of General Chen, has vigorously enforced his land-reform program, which provides that farmers are to pay rents no higher than 37.5% of their crop (in the past, rents ran as high as 75%). The land reform has been partly financed by EGA and carried out with the help of a remarkable, little-known organization composed of U.S. and Chinese technicians called the Joint Commission for Rural Reconstruction, which has done important work teaching Formosans modern agricultural techniques.
The Nationalist regime on Formosa has not turned overnight into an American good-government league's dream of good government. Since the island contains both the exiled government of China and the provincial government of Formosa, the lines of responsibility are apt to get tangled. Wu, for example, is theoretically in charge of the island's internal security. But in addition to his own provincial police, Formosa is guarded by the Nationalist government's secret police and the army intelligence service. Governor Wu is thus in the somewhat cramped position of the captain of a ship when the admiral is aboard. U.S. observers fear that Wu may have been a little too successful for his own good, that he may arouse the jealousy of old-line officials (a good many of whom remain, despite Chiang's recent purge of the hidebound old inner Kuomintang clique).
Within a Year? Said one U.S. observer last week: "What we need is an act of imagination. We must imagine how it would be if the Communists had already invaded Formosa. The morning after that invasion, we would no longer debate whether or not Chiang's boys are worthy of our aid. We'd know that we must help Chiang for our own good."
With Douglas MacArthur in Formosa, imagination would not be lacking. K.C. Wu himself, who has an amazing capacity for believing the best of the U.S., has never doubted that the U.S. would help the Nationalists. He speaks with resounding confidence of a Nationalist return to the Chinese mainland within a year.
It will probably be a long time before K.C. Wu and his comrades again see ' their homeland. Meanwhile, what Wu and his friends have done on Formosa adds up to one significant message—the Chinese Nationalists are still fighting.
* Mao Tse-tung explained the alliance: "Our determined policy is 70% self-development, 20% compromise, and 10% fight the Japanese."
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信中闡述了以下觀點：一是明確指出“我們今日的新詩是中國詩的一種”，“白話詩不應該說是舊詩詞的一種進步，而是一種變化，是中國詩的一種體裁。今日的
新詩，并不能包羅萬象，舊詩詞所能表現的意境，沒有他的地位，而他確可以有他的特別領域，他可以表現舊詩詞所不能為力的東西。”二是在將舊詩詞與新詩作了
質的區分之后，繼而指出語言形式的文言與白話并非新舊詩的區分標準，“舊詩之不是新詩，不因其用的不是白話，就是有許多幾乎完全是白話句子的詞，我也以為
不能引為我們今日新詩的先例。新詩之不是舊詩，不因其用的是白話，而文言到底也還是漢語。”三是指出當下詩壇的困窘境地，“今日做新詩的人，一方面沒這個
體裁上的必然性的意識，一方面又缺乏新詩的生命，以為用白話做的詩就是新詩，結果是多此一舉。他們以為是打倒舊詩，其實自己反而站不住腳了。”四是對自己
的新詩充滿信心和對其晦澀的解釋，“我自己所做的一百多首詩，自以為合乎這個新詩的資格。我用了我的形式表達出了我的意思，他是站在舊詩的范圍以外，能夠
孑然而立了。若說他不好懂，那我覺得這本是人類一件沒有法子的事情。藝術原則上是可通于人，而事實并不一定是人盡可解；恐怕同戀愛差不多，我所見的女人我
未必都與之生愛情了。”以上四點還沒有明確說出廢名在“新詩問答”、《談新詩》中提出的根本觀點：新詩要有“散文的文字，詩的內容”。廢名又在信中大談溫
庭筠的詞、莎士比亞的戲劇、陶淵明的詩，來說明他們在藝術表現上的自由活潑，充盈著美麗的想象，似有引為今日新詩前例之意，但廢名又在《談新詩》中指出
“我的意思不是把李商隱的詩同溫庭筠的詞算做新詩的前例，我只是想推想這一派的詩詞存在的根據或者正有我們今日白話新詩發展的根據”。同時廢名自己作的新
詩也并非是要為其它詩人立一個做詩的榜樣，他只是說：“我用了我的形式表達出了我的意思。”他以他的詩實現了他的主張，而更希望別的詩人從他們自己的詩來
實現新詩的品質：要有“散文的文字，詩的內容”，因此極為推崇劉半農、卞之琳、林庚、朱英誕、沈啟無、馮至等人的詩歌，而很討厭新月派的格律詩，如“商籟
體”等。廢名平素對胡適的“談新詩”的觀點極為不滿，而這封信恰好是針對胡適的詩論的。１９３４年，廢名講教“新文藝試作·散文習作”，次年開講“現代文
藝”。據說廢名在講新詩以前曾問過胡適這門課怎么上，胡適叫他按照《新文學大系》上講，意若按照胡適的“談新詩”一文講即可，廢名卻在課堂上大說胡適的不
是，一口一個胡適之（馮健男：《廢名與胡適》）。
