CHINA

Hokitika Guardian, 26 April 1932, Page 8

CHINA

ASLEEP FOE 5000 YEAR'S China is the tragedy of four hundred million individuals who have tailed to become a nation. Her history, /stretching back to the immemorial beginning of things, and illustrious with the achievement of art and science, is scarred and defaced by conquest, rebellion, and the cataclysms of Nature.

For years now she lias endured the miseries of civil war, and to that scourge have been added famine, drought, and unparalleled hoods. Today she is at the mercy of economic forces beyond her power to control, and menaced by a Communist activity that has added a further and a growing peril to her stability. And in such a situation she is at war with a powerful i*nd well-organised nation—. j apan.

JAPAN’S NEED. What are the causes of this chaos of lighting and politics? Primarily in the case of the war, economies. Japan is faced with the problem of a population increasing at the rate of 800,000 annually, a population that she cannot feed from her internal resources. She ha/5 concentrated on industry to meet her need for foreign loocrstuffs, but she lacks two basic essentials—coal and iron.

Those essentials, she can obtain from China—especially from Manchuria—and she can obtain them cheaply and rapidly. * There is just one other thing that Japan can obtain from China, and that is a market for the goods that she cannot sell elsewhere because of the tariff walls that shut her out from the trade of tile world.

China can supply Japan’s most important raw materials, China can a'l>tecrb Japan’s manufactures. And in China there exists an anti-Japanese boycott. War is the result.

ft is true that Japan maintains that China: i<s not an organised State, and is therefore not entitled to he treated as though she were. It is truo that China’s reply is that she has never been given time in which to stabilise herself. Behind all political pleas and arguments there lie the stony realities of the hunger for rawmaterials and the hunger of a growing people.

CHAOS OF SOULS. Those are the views of eminent authorites on the Far East whom I have consulted As to the future of this vast chaos of souls that we call China, expert opinion is unanimous that it will be impossible for the Chines© to prolong their present armed resistance. Apart altogether from the lack of unity there is a desperate shortage of munitions—munitions which the Chinese have been urgently seeking to buy abroad, but which are not being supplied to them owing to their lack of credit.

At the same time, it must he remembered that it is not Japan’s aim to three a victory that would leave a ruined and crippled enemy. It is essential to Japanese policy that China shall he in a position to act as a good customer, for the reasons outlined above, and this would obviously be impossible were China to be shattered. Japan’s object is simply to force vJiina te the point of surrender, and then to grant easy l terms in return for her trade demands, and the rights which she claims to have won in Manchuria after the Russo-Japanese war—rights later ratified by treaty with the Chinese Government of the time, but now repudiated. So the deadlock rests at present; for China the future is obscure and even perilous. Her people, 90 per cent, of whom are peasants, are being ►stimulated to discontent by Communist propaganda, directed to the abolition of land taxes and the accomplishment of land redistribution.

COMMUNIST THREAT. Though they are by temperament and tradition docile and ea-sily governed. their individualist tendency, by a kind of paradox, has proved fertile soil in which to plant Communist ideas. Further the student class and the intelligentsia, infuriated at being allowed no part in the country’s affairs by the Kim Min Tang (the National Government, whose methods roughly correspond to Fascism), are adopting Communism as their political creed. And, in addition, there arc the peculiarities* of the Chinese temperament, manifesting itself strangely in high places— an almost' complete indifference to honour among politicians, a superficial and cynical practice of the worst methods of finance among some of the industrialists. For though the Cbine.se have an extremely high sense ol honour, they are not well grounded in true business methods—they are. unable to gratsp the importance of subordinating themselves to an aim. “THE YELLOW PERIL.” “Even if China were to organise, it would take her more than a century in which to consolidate bersell”— that was said to me by a man entitled to rank as of the very first, authority on the qunstiou of Far Eastern peoples. China was great when she was ■dominated by the Mongols—-left to herself, she fell to pieces like one of her own intricate puzzles—and tln-ro is no leader risen as yet. who can fit the piece,s together once more.

She is not a world force, and she may never become one. The old nightmare of the “Yellow Peril” is, so far as China is concerned, a nightmare and nothing more—a nightmare that is to-day only a pathetic jest. That is' the truth about a people whose recorded history goes hack 2,852 yearfei before Christ, whose language has remained unchanged for five thousand years, whose culture lias stamped its beauty on the mind of the world throughout centuries of time. With such traditions and such glories, it is the more gloomily astonishing to note> the terrible array of forces that militate against the wellbeing of this ancient people.

PLUNDERERS. The vast majority of her population are illiterate; her soldiery is unpaid, and plunders the countryside for its subsistence; while in the recent scrimmage of power the leaders raised enormous armies, eaoh of which were regarded as the sworn adherents of their respective generals, without a thought for the devastation and misery caused to the country. ft is estimated that to-day there are two' million men under arms in China —two million men of whom a large section, at tile word of Japan, abandoned Macnhuria with hardly a shot fired.

It is true that this disgrace was compensated by the magnificent stand made hy the Chinese at 'Shanghai, hut tlms© two opposite events only enforce the lesson that China’s fundamental need is for organisation—tor the adoption of methods,that shall give her people the consciousness of nationality, the vision of unity. THE FUTURE. She needs good and strong government —and the facts: are indisputable that the people at large, despite their unrest, are ready to receive it. Her 4,300,000 square miles of territory are 'sufficiently rich in natural resources to provide not only for her own needs, hut to leave a surplus for foreign trade. The profoundotst students of the subject are convinced that if sound politics were introduced, China could become a fruitful and stable country, with a high place among the nations of the world.

The future lies before her—a future that can mould to peace and fulness. But her past is about her like a garment —handsome and fine-woven, and splendid with many jewels; the works of her artists and her craftsmen, the dreams of her philosophers, the songs of her poets. But it is a garment that may suffocate her. ” “China must change her mind.” But China; Us. the East, and she has not changed her mind for five thousand year's. Can she do it now in five?