HUMILIATION OF A CONQUERED PEOPLE

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 16, 20 January 1937, Page 16 (Supplement)

HUMILIATION OF A CONQUERED PEOPLE

Japan No Longer Needs Guns to Vanquish China, the Blood of Whose People is Slowly but Surely Being Poisoned by Servility.

A MAN threw away a cigarette-end in a Shanghai street. Immediately two Chinese rickshaw coolies pounced upon it and started a fight for its possession. Of course, it was just coincidence that the man Who had thrown away the coveted object was a Japanese, but the fact gave this undignified scene a symbolic meaning, •rites Agnes Smedley. On that same day, a young rickshaw coolie stumbled and fell in another Shanghai street. Maybe it was the heat or weakness. As he lay there a street car ran into his, rickshaw and smashed it. This displeased the Japanese, policeman. He lent a hand in pulling the pieces of WQod out from under the street car. When he finished ho turned to the coolie: he seized him by a leg, pulled him off the track and pushed him into the gutter, without bothering to make sure whether the Chinaman was alive or dead. What does the life of a Chinaman mean to a Japanese policeman anyway? The fellow was probably only a poor peasant, who had been in Shanghai but a short time. There are thousands of poor Chinese peasants in the city: rickshaws, porters, beggars, etc., driven out of their native villages by looting soldiers and the devastations of the civil war.

This too happened in Shanghai on the same day: two motor vehicles were proceeding in the same direction. The first was a Japanese truck. Two Japanese marines stood on the platform in the rear. The second was a taxi with a white passenger and a Chinese driver. The truck was driving slowly and holding up the traffic. The foreigner in the taxi was in a hurry and ordered the chauffeur to get ahead. But the man explained that he could not think of getting ahead of a Japanese. When the passenger insisted, he steered toward the curb, stopped, got out, sat on the ground and wept like a child. For nothing in the world would a Chinese chauffeur get ahead of a Japanese car, or a police car. Generations of Chinese were enslaved and ill-treated and grew up to be servile and humble. An official, a policeman and especially a soldier is sacred to them.

The servility and submission of the Chinese in their dealings with the Japanese defy description. It is not so much the common people who are responsible for it, however, as the Nanking Government. Ever since Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931, Nanking has been preaching that China was too weak to fight and must submit. During tho past five years the Nanking Press, the schools and other official institutions have

been preaching a demoralising defeatism. Big Chinese armies have rotreated before a handful of Japanese soldiers. {Slowly but surely the poison of servility is corroding Chinese blood. Japan, no longer needs guns to conquer China. She sends ahead an unarmed woman or a child, or, if it comes to tho worst, a Japanese or Korean gangster, and she gets what she wants. The Japanese have no respect for anybody in China, except the Communists and the Chinese Red Army, for all the others creep in the dust before them. Only the fear of the Communist influence keeps them from occupying all of China.

Tho following incident reported by a newspaper is characteristic. Two Japanese boarded a train in Honan, in the heart of China. The Chinese conductor asked them for their tickets. They had none, they said, shrugging their shoulders, and proceeded to look out of the window. The conductor repeated his request with the same negative result. Soon afterwards, a patrol of Chinese railway militia ■walked through the train. The same scene was enacted. The militiament walked out of the door like beaten dogs.

It is a principle with the Japanese not to purchase tickets for a Chinese train. The conductor or the militiamen would have beaten a poor Chinaman to death if he had found him without a ticket. The Japanese £ot away with it. When I mentioned it to my Chinese friends they said: “And what would you like the conductor to do? Should be disobey orders from Nanking and fight the Japanese, when even the army is forbidden to do it?” I said that the Japanese- might have been made to get off the train. So they might, but this would have meant that the provincial governor would receive a peremptory order from Nanking to apologise officially to the Japanese consul and to pay damages in cash. I passed by the Japanese Embassy in Peiping. A Japanese infantry soldier with fixed bayonet stood at the gate. Suddenly it opened and out walked about twenty Chinese, probably servants or employees of the Embassy. As they passed before tho sentry, they took off their hats and bowed almost to the ground, but the. soldier stared into the air without taking the slightest notice of these people. It was terrible to see this humiliation of a people that was onco strong and courageous.

I have been told innumerable times that these poor Chinese have to think of their families. If they, are disrespectful the Japanese sentry might transfix them with his bayonet—and get away with it, of

course. I have been asked what kind of an opinion I had formed of the Chinese of the poorer class. Generations of their forefathers had been humiliated and ill-treated by their own superiors, as the present generation is by the Japanese. For centuries they have been robbed, beaten, tortured, killed, beasts of burden toiling for tlieir masters. Could I expect them to become heroes all of a sudden and rise against the foreign intruder? And yet the Chinese are not a people of slaves. The fighting spirit is still alive in them. Otherwise why would Nanking decree exceptional measures against the revolutionaries, why would it fight the Red Army and sign secret pacts with Japan against it? The Japanese get anything out of Nanking. Every time the Japanese Ambassador, or a minor official of the Embassy, calls on the Nanking foreign minister, this honourable gentleman has to change his underwear in a hurry. For a change, the Japanese have again murdered one of their own people in

China. Strangely enough, it is always a small man who is the victim. Japan invariably accuses the Chinese of these misdeeds, but never have they been able to apprehend a Chinese murderer. Everybody knows that these murders are committed to order, by the Japanese themselves, when they wish to blackmail the , Nanking Government. Maybe they want Nanking to sign a new secret treaty or to withdraw its troops from Hopei, or the right to keep a garrison in Shantung and annex this province. Maybe they want new economic concessions in Shanghai or the city itself. At any rate these murders are a good excuse for keeping Japanese police at.the international settlement. Japanese marines, armed to the teeth, patrol the streets in which there is not one Japanese to protect. The British authorities iu Shanghai support the Japanese when they can, and so do the Germans and the other foreigners must submit and resign themselves. Fatalistically they prophesy that the administration of the settlement will soon pass into Japanese hands or that Japan will take it altogether. This would give her the key to the rich Yangtse valley and the financial resources of the Nanking Government. Anyway, the latter was never anything but the hangman of Far-Eastern colonial reaction.

China is declining—physically, morally and spiritually. Nanking and its followers tremble before the Japanese and kiss the hand which chastises them. Only the left elements are embittered and fulTof hatred at the humiliations Nanking and Japan are inflicting upon their country.