On Their Own

No banquet under heaven is endless.

--Chinese proverb

Its name means "beautiful," but its history has been hard and ugly. The mountainous island of Formosa was devastated by 50 years of Japanese occupation, and it fared little better under the Chinese after they regained control in 1945. Its nadir came in 1950 when Chiang Kai-shek landed on the island with 500,000 beaten soldiers and 2,000,000 refugees from the Communist mainland, straining the unhappy country to the breaking point.

After bloody rioting, the newcomers and the 5,000,000 natives settled down together in an uneasy truce while the Red Chinese juggernaut massed across the 115-mile-wide strip of water. It was then that President Truman warned that the U.S. would do nothing to stop the Communists or to aid Chiang Kaishek.

The Red invasion of South Korea that year forced an abrupt about-face in U.S. policy. Aid and arms were poured into the beleaguered island so that it might withstand invasion, rebuild and modernize its economy, develop foreign trade. The U.S. has since funneled $2.7 billion in military aid to Chiang's government in Taipei, plus some $1.5 billion in economic assistance. A land-reform program has more than doubled farm productivity, while more and more of the nation's resources have been harnessed to industry. Formosa today boasts the Orient's second highest standard of living (after Japan), though three-fourths of its national budget goes for defense. Since 1960, more than $42 million in foreign investment has been pumped into the island, whose skilled, low-wage labor force has attracted several dozen U.S. companies from Westinghouse to Winchester. In 1963, for the first time, Formosa had a balance-of-payments surplus.

So well in fact have the Nationalist

Chinese used their U.S. dollars that Washington last week announced the end of the banquet. The cut-off of economic assistance to Formosa will mark the first time that any U.S. aid program in any underdeveloped nation has accomplished its ultimate aim--which is, after all, to put itself out of business.

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