New Zealand and China

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 172, 9 October 1942, Page 3

New Zealand and China

space in this issue is devoted to China. That was not our plan to begin with, and when things take shape without a plan the fact is apt to be obvious. It is obvious in this case, and yet not inappropriate. Anything cut and dried about China, over-simplified, or over-emphasised, is a distortion. China is not simple, or orderly, or fully awake, or completely united. The Chinese are not, left to themselves, all smiles and kindness and peace-loving and philosophic. They are human beings, millions and millions of men and women, occupying half a continent and presenting every human type from the animal to the sage and the saint. It is never sensible, or helpful, to reduce human motives to a plus b, and human beings to standard types. China is so wide, so deep, so confused, and so confusing that the generalisations we can occasionally risk of smaller groups are reckless nonsense when applied to its four hundred millions. The most we can say is that something has been happening there since October 10, 1911, which will either shake the world or steady it for two or three generations. China will either beat off the Tap- | 1. is an accident that so much

anese and stabilise the East on a new level of civilisation, or it will be conquered and used to uproot the culture of half a hemispherethe half to which we ourselves belong. Its "Double Ten" is therefore a day of destiny for New Zealanders as well as for the Chinese themselves, and it is almost incredible that a New Zealander has done more than almost anyone else in the world-far more than any other non-Chinese-to ward off disaster so far. To convey what he has done is difficult if we are to avoid extravagance; but it would come near the truth to say that a man who started to cut down a kauri tree with a pocket-knife or to move a fair-sized hill with a teaspoon would be showing no more courage and no more faith than the man who set to work five years ago to rebuild the industries that the Japanese were systematically blasting out of existence.