FIVE CITIES IN CHINA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 64, 13 September 1940, Page 12

FIVE CITIES IN CHINA

Three Centres Where The Conqueror Rules And Two Where The Spirit Of Resistance Still Lives On

While Japan and the Wang "Government" talk of "treaties" and "settlements of the China question" in Nanking, from Chungking the Government of free China firmly maintains its stand against aggression. Thess two cities are among five discussed by James Bertram in his talks on China for the NBS. This talk was broadcast by 4YA last Monday (September 9). Although it was prepared and broadcast by 2YA earlier this year, recent events make it unusually topical. Mr. Bertram himself, is now back in China

EKING remains for me the most beautiful city in the world, though I suppose other travellers may challenge this opinion. Certainly it was a delightful place to live in, with its old palaces and gardens, and those beauti-fully-poised temples in the Western Hills, with their age-old white pines and gingko trees where foreign residents and the superior people from the Legation Quarter used to spend their week-ends. Peking under snow, as I first saw it, is

something one would cross continents just to look at. But already, in those autumnal days, the stage was set for tragedy; already the Mikado’s sacred tanks went rumbling down the long streets, past the pink walls and curving gold-tiled roofs of the Forbidden City.

I shared rooms in Peking with a young Chinese student whose passionate resentment at his country’s fate was typical of the outlook of a whole generation. He had been three times imprisoned for "anti-Japanese activity"; but he had consoled himself in gaol by writing a long poem on Chinese Freedom which was smuggled out and published secretly, and made him famous overnight. This former room-mate, as it happened, was one of the last people I saw before I left China-he is now an officer serving with the Chinese armies on the northern front. Peking was beautiful; but it had known too many conquerors. When the Japanese attack came at last, it folded up with only a parody of resistance. I went back once, after the Japanese had settled in properly, to find that they had turned the universities into barracks, and cheap little bars and geisha-houses were spreading like a rash along the fine old streets. Peking had had its day. Bluff in Nanking HERE was a good deal of bluff about pre-war Nanking and all that it stood for. China just wasn’t a modern demo-

cratic state, and it was no good pretending that it was. Nanking in those days was a secure haven for indolent bureaucrats, who drew up wonderful codes on paper (for example, the Chinese Factory Laws, which were the most enlightened in the world, or would have been if anyone had thought of putting them into effect!); and the same people painstakingly pigeonholed all the careful reports drawn up by League of Nations officials and expensive foreign advisers, and went to sleep on them. Red tape rather than barbed wire made up Nanking’s defences; and the end of it all was, in one sense, the final exposure of the bluff. General Tang Sheng-chih, a hero of the Civil War who had killed off a good many bright Chinese youngsters in his time, was put in supreme command of the defence of the capital. In public speeches he vowed that he and

his gallant staff would fall to the last man rather than yield: but when word came that the Japanese vanguard was approaching the walls, General Tang drove his staff-car headlong through the ranks of his own troops to make his escape through the West Gate. I’ve said a few unkind things about the Nanking Government and Chinese officialdom in the first war months; but if all that were true and more, the city had done nothing to deserve the reign of terror that descended upon it when General Matsui, the Mackensen of Japan, rode his charger into the doomed capital and gave the word for its sack. Iris Wilkinson’s Pilgrimage ANKOW has sometimes been called the Chicago of China: it is primarily an industrial and commercial city, and it did no harm to have the government for once located in a centre with a strong industrial working-class. A lot of the old "face," so dear to the Kuomintang, was sacrificed; and I for one thoroughly enjoyed looking up discon(continued on next page)

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solate vice-ministers who dwelt uneasily in temporary offices in tenements, and sighed for the parquet floors and cushioned splendours of Nanking. To Hankow, while it lasted, came the most representative group of international journalists who flattered the China War with their passing attention; and it was from Hankow that Robin Hyde, one of the most attractive of New Zealand writers, set out on that ill-starred pilgrimage through China which she described with spirit in her last book, " Dragon Rampant," published not long before her death last year. That journey didn’t deal too gently with her, in the matter of wear and tear; but Iris Wilkinson was happier in China than she had ever been anywhere else, and never forgot the consideration the Chinese had shown to a lonely writer. I think she was particularly grateful because they treated her simply as a human being, and not as a lame, neurotic female in search of adventure. Chungking Underground F course, Chungking was a bit of a comedown after Nanking and Hankow; but it has had a spectacular development over the last year, new buildings going up very much faster than the old ones were knocked down. The real heroes of Chungking are the stone-masons-they carry on day and night, building an underground city as well as the foundations of a new one above the ground. Civic-minded New Zealanders might be surprised to know that this remote Chinese capital on the upper reaches of the Yangtse, with no railway communications with the outer world, has banking and commercial. buildings larger -and in a few cases, very much better designed-than anything in Queen Street or Lambton Quay, Fortunately Chungking hasn’t gone in for the vulgar style of architecture that characterised republican Nanking. It’s a wartime capital with no nonsense about it, and the Chinese hope that it will see them through. Given an active government and the support even of the local people, Chungking and its only western province of Szechwan has something like the population and natural resources of Germany to organise and carry on China’s struggle.

The Second Free City

N the far north-west of China is the administrative centre of a "Special District " which once bore the ambitious title of the "Chinese Soviet Republic." Yenan, the Chinese Communist base in North Shensi, has been a special object of Japanese attentions since the latter pushed forward their air-bases in the north; and the town itself, in a little valley between the hills, is mostly rubble and sandbag-fodder, these days. But the government carries on in caves, hundreds of which have been dug in rows into the loess hillsides; and Yenan,.if only because of its fighting spirit and some of the people you'll meet there, is well worth a visit-though it may take you a couple of months to get there! Whether the Chinese Communists are real Communists or not is always a keen subject of debate among foreign journalists. But they have some of the toughest and most experienced leaders in China, and the support of many intelligent young Chinese. Yenan. has its own " Anti-Japanese" university, a military academy and a propaganda-school. It claims to have the only democratic government in China-there is universal suffrage throughout the "Special District"; and recently they started a new production campaign under which every citizen-including Chairman Mao Tsetung and his political colleagues — has has to put in two hours’ daily in the fields, helping to grow something. However you regard it, Yenan is a fascinating social experiment, and it is certainly refreshing, after all the Chinese insistence on "face" that I’ve said some hard things about, to meet people like Mao who could have cushy jobs anywhere in China, but prefer to carry on in the war zone, their only possessions a couple of cotton uniforms, their salaries / graded from five Chinese dollars a month (which is what Mao and the commander-in-chief of the army get) to a dollar a month for the regular soldier and political worker. It is the practical example of Yenan, far more than its political theories, that gives it such extraordinary influence; and makes it perhaps, after Chungking, the second city of Free China .. . certainly brings it in on this gallery of " five Chinese capitals."