Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
"We do not believe that the Chinese Communist regime represents the will of the people it controls. First capitalizing on the natural desire of the Chinese people to enjoy full recognition and respect for their importance in the world community, the regime then proceeded by its 'lean-to-one-side' policy to betray the powerful Chinese longings to stand up straight. It has followed slavishly the leadership of the Soviet Union and attempted to emulate it in all its ways. With the aid of thousands of Soviet advisers it has set about methodically to change the entire fabric of traditional Chinese culture, substituting communism's materialistic, atheistic doctrines wherein the state is the be-all and end-all and the individual its pawn.
"The regime at first attracted considerable support, principally through its sponsorship of a land redistribution program, but is now, after establishment of the prerequisite police-state controls, taking the land away from the owners in the same collectivization process which is familiar in other Communist countries and which invariably has brought suffering in its wake. China's much advertised 'New Democracy' is of course in reality 'old communism.'
"From its inception the regime has proclaimed a 'lean-to-one-side' policy in foreign affairs, and has left no doubt about its dedication to the proposition of world Communist revolution under the leadership of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. While its 'leaning-to-one-side' has not brought it to the position of complete 'prostration-to-one-side' characteristic of the Eastern European Soviet satellites, there is not the slightest evidence that this indicates any separatist tendencies. The difference in status of Peiping in its relationship with Moscow (as distinguished from that of the Eastern European satellites) is rather due chiefly to its having come to power without benefit, except in Manchuria, of Soviet Army occupation; to the prestige of Mao Tse-tung, arising from his long history of leadership of Chinese communism and his literary contributions to theoretical communism; to China's assumption of the role of leadership. . . ."
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- President Eisenhower's News Conference, April 7, 1954. Public Papers of the Presidents, 1954, p. 382:
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"Q. Robert Richards, Copley Press: Mr. President, would you mind commenting on the strategic importance of Indochina to the free world? I think there has been, across the country, some lack of understanding on just what it means to us.
"THE PRESIDENT. You have, of course, both the specific and the general when you talk about such things.
"First of all, you have the specific value of a locality in its production of materials that the world needs.
