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The divergence of policy between Britain and the United States over the recognition of Communist China is now twelve years old. In the spring of 1950 nobody could have anticipated that it would go so deep or last so long. When the British Government transferred de jure recognition as the Government of China from the Kuomintang régime still holding out in Formosa to the new Communist authority which by victory in the civil war had gained control of the whole Chinese mainland, it was not considered in London to be an act contrary to American policy because it was understood that the American Government would do the same after a short interval of time. The policy of the Truman Administration, after the failure of the ill-conceived Marshall Mission, had been one of disengagement from the Chinese civil war; it was in accordance with this line that the War Department obstructed the delivery to the National Government of the arms voted by Congress in the China Aid Bill of 1948. When the Kuomintang régime collapsed on the mainland, the American Government made it clear that it would take no action to preserve its remnant in Formosa; the Secretary of State declared that America's "defence perimeter" lay in Japan, Okinawa and the Philippines, excluding Formosa and South Korea. No objection was raised in Washington to the British Government's intention to give de jure recognition at an early date, but it was hinted that because of the domestic political situation the United States would have to wait until the mid-term Congressional elections of 1950 were safely over.

Among the most obvious and durable monuments to the colonial age in Asia are the great engineering projects which have permanently transformed the physical and economic geography of the continent. Many of these have an interesting history of their own, both in the political and commercial history of the country building them and on the level of international politics. This is true not only for such successfully completed projects as the Suez Canal or the Trans-Siberian Railway, but also for great schemes which were never realized. In Southeast Asia the long-discussed Kra Canal is the most famous instance of the latter, but it is not unique. Throughout most of the second half of the Nineteenth Century the British Government and especially the British business community dallied with the idea of a rail link between the Bay of Bengal and the interior provinces of China. Those familiar with the building of the Burma Road will understand the enormous engineering problems involved in such a plan. But for most of the Nineteenth Century geographic knowledge of Southeast Asia was extremely vague and the lure of a several thousand mile shortcut to the perennially fascinating markets of China exerted a strong pull on the imagination of a commercial nation. Ultimately, international political complications and sound economic logic killed ven the idea of such a railway. But the light it throws on government — business relations within the British Empire and on imperial rivalries in Southeast Asia makes the story of the first Burma Road, the one that was never built, well worth the telling.

In 1899 a little-known, now long-forgotten, Polish revolutionist named Waclaw Machajski published a small book, The Evolution of Social Democracy, which provoked consternation in the nascent Marxist movement in Russia. Its thesis was that the new messianism of socialism masked an ideology of discontented intellectuals, and that the new socialist society would simply replace one ruling class with another, so that the workers would still remain exploited, albeit this time by a new class of professional leaders.