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During the crossing of the Yangtze River, there occurred an incident which pointed up the significance of the whole China war in a fashion more revealing than a dozen political dissertations. The Yangtze, one of the world's great rivers, which has its source in Tibet and its mouth three thousand miles away in the China Sea, is navigable for its last thousand miles by ocean-going steamers. On this stretch of the river, foreign warships have been maneuvering for nearly a hundred years, with no Chinese government able or willing to keep them out. As the battle over this great waterway began, British naval authorities, with a sublime indifference to the new realities in China, ordered the sloop Amethyst to move out of Shanghai with supplies for British embassy officials in Nanking. This action was definitely, though perhaps not purposely, provocative. Later both Kuomintang and British authorities were to declare that the ship had a perfect right on the Yangtze because of treaties concluded with the Chiang government. But it was just these treaties which the Communists were fighting to destroy. As might have been expected, Communist soldiers in the midst of a battle with the Kuomintang fleet and Kuomintang soldiers on the opposite shore opened up with their American-made batteries on the Amethyst. She was severely damaged and ran aground fifty miles from Nanking. From that city another British warship, the destroyer Consort, headed downstream but was beaten off by Communist guns. Adding folly to arrogance, two other British warships moved upstream from Shanghai; they too were heavily shelled and turned tail and fled. In all, the British suffered forty-four seamen killed, eighty injured.
The significance of this event is tremendous. Thirty years earlier, the mere presence of the British warships on the Yangtze would have been enough to turn the tide of any civil war. Twenty years ago, such an incident would have sent every foreign warship on the China station scurrying up the river to silence the insolent Chinese; diplomats would have sternly demanded apologies; the foreign press would have thundered for revenge and editors would have written philosophic dissertations on the need for "law and order." But 1949 was not 1929.
The crossing of the Yangtze - like the crossing of so many other river barriers in history, from the Rubicon to the Rappahannock or the Rhine - may stand as a decisive date in world history.
It is likely to stand [remarked the New York Heraid Tribune] as the day on which Chinese Communist gunners, learning how to use American equipment, brushed the Royal Navy contemptuously aside. It is likely to stand as the day when a bankrupt old regime in China was forced finally to confess itself impotent, and when the Western policies, founded upon hopes of its survival, were compelled to admit they could not save that regime and that new and different forces had assumed dominant power over the Chinese millions. It is proof certainly the old order is done, that neither the Chinese monied classes, British imperialism nor the American "open door doctrine" have sufficed to open a pathway through the tangled problems of the times which the Chinese people could follow.