JUST OUT OF CHINA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 253, 28 April 1944, Page 12

JUST OUT OF CHINA

We Interview A Quaker From Chungking

VERYWHERE in the world to-day the Relief Workfrom war or natural disaster -of the Quakers is_ well known and well appreciated. When, therefore, The Listener learned that Harry Silcock, Secretary of the Society of Friends’ Service Council in China, was in Wellington, having come from Chungking on-a Round-the-Pacific tour connected with plans for immediate post-war.reconstruction efforts in the East, we were quickly on his doorstep. Mr. Silcock was found to be a tall, quiet man whose erect spare frame belied his 63 years. First interest, of course, was to hear about conditions in Chungking from one who had ended two and a-half years’ residence only in December last. China’s new capital really deserved its title of "the world’s most bombed city" said Mr. Silcock. Once in 1941, for example, Japanese radio had announced that the sirens would be kept ringing for 100 hours on end, and in effect they were. Nevertheless, despite lack of defences, casualties were extremely few. Chungking occupies a bluff in the hairpin bend of a river and its rock has been honeycombed with dugouts. Turning a back-country town into the national capital had of course swamped accommodation. But when the Government insisted that only essential persons should remain, there was safety-room for all. Was. life uncomfortable as well as dangerous? Well, free China had enough food; if only barely enough, but the difficulty was to transport it to where it was needed. Plane-space from India and lorry-space from Russia-the only two means of ingress-were so precious that not even medical supplies or spare parts were allowed. Consequently machinery kept deteriorating, held together by wire and ingenuity. Then the value of money was decreasing-but steadily, about 10 per cent per month, not runaway as in Germany after the last war where each tram journey cost more than the last. Farmers whose mortgages were thus fading away, and who in any case

lived on the land, were not badly off. Nor were bottom workers or top administrators, who both could ask for more from time to time. But the rank and file of civil servants, teachers and so on, were badly hit. Politics From inflation to politics is not far. What could Mr. Silcock tell us about the tension between Communists and Government parties within the national alliance? } "Just this, that the practical top men pull together much better than the politicians lower down. I remember, for example, being told by a friend, a member of the People’s Political Council, how that body seemed about to freeze out the Communists altogether, when Chiang Kai Shek himself arrived and addressed them. After his speech they voted almost unanimously for continued co-operation." "And is a, new China really growing up in the West out of Japanese reach?" "Well, it is 36 years since I went to

Szechwan, which is the Province Chungking is situated in, to serve as Dean of Education and later Vice-Principal in the University which various religious bodies, including our own, had just launched at Chengtu. This great basin inside the mountains, with the area of Germany and much the same population, was then incredibly remote. After the first 1000 miles up the Yangtze you took a month at the end of a tow-rope plus several weeks to creep through the 400 miles of gorges. And there was no other way in. Our University was one of two catering to some 100,000,000 people. The other was 700 miles away. The local people looked on the rest of China as foreigners and the Government was independent in everything but name. Even in 1919, when I was asked in Shanghai to give a sort of travel-talk about Szechwan, I found that I, a European, was the only one among the audience of Chinese who had ever been there." _"And to-day?" "You have all heard how the Chinese have trekked out as the Japanese have come in. There may be up to 60 million such refugees in these new areas. Whole Universities, students and staff, have migrated with their libraries on their backs. And half China’s factories-not that there were ever more than a few thousand altogether--have been reassembled in caves and villages in the West. The missionaries who pioneered the back of beyond 20 years before my time with churches, hospitals, schools, printing-presses, and co-operatives did not know it-but they were laying foundations’ for a second start for the , Chinese Republic. _ Under the Japanese "Have you been inside J apanese-held areas; Mr. Silcock?" "Inside-yes; but in-no. I mean 1 was in Shanghai during the period when the International Settlement remained a Chinese-French-British-American island inside Japanese-occupied suburbs. Our ‘Friends’; Centre’ there was doing its (continued on next page) 5

(continued from previous page) ; usual work of encouraging our own members and of bringing persons of different nations and philosophies together for mutual interpretation when-as usual ~-we found other immediate jobs as well. During the ‘thirties, for example, thousands of European refugees had crowded into Shanghai in addition to all the White Russians of a previous period. We found so many sweating around in clothes suitable for snow conditionsand Shanghai is the same latitude as Cairo-that we had to cable abroad for summer cast-offs and finally got 70 tons of them!" "And do the sixty million refugees in the West need this kind of help?" "Not precisely. There is lots of land available, and, when machinery can be brought in to utilise it, lots of waterpower. But new villages frequently need a kick-off. Bailey’s Boys-which is what we call the young fellows whom a missionary named Bailey recruited from good jobs to do dirty and dangerous work under Rewi Alley in the Industrial Co-operatives-have done a lot. The Society of Friends is of course a religious

o body. We never have cut-and-dried relief schemes. They are just the particular response to some particular situation of need. This is why, being already established in West China for 60 years, we were able to put an Ambulance Unit on the Burma Road. With the Road closed, these men are either stretcherparties on the jungle front or else are transporting medical supplies inside Szechwan. Don’t think the second job is the easier. Free China is running on trucks, converted to charcoal, that would be on scrapheaps anywhere else." Personnel "Your men are local Chinese?" "Only partly so. The largest single group, some 70, are British conscientious objectors. And the other Friends’ Ambulance Units, in the Middle East and elsewhere, are mainly staffed by these volunteers, who are not all Quakers, of course. In the U.S.A., Pacifists are requited to spend the duration, plus six months, in Civilian Public Service Camps run by the Churches-not as punishment but as work of a sort they can readily give-but some have been allowed to come to China instead." Control "The object of a Friends’ Ambulance, Unit, we suppose, Mr. Silcock, is to help repair war damage without supporting the war itself? But do not your Units in > practice have to operate under military orders?" "Yes, indeed. But in practice again we have found the military authorities sufficiently understanding of our position not to ask us to do things which we would have to refuse. Of course Ambulance Work is not our only possibility. In Bengal as I came through I found that the Unit from Britain, which had come out on Quaker funds to teach A.R.P., had been diverted to fighting the worst enemy inside the frontier-I mean famine. They were, in fact, organising both the relief and the rationing measures for the Governor." "And what about future plans?" "Large-scale relief after this war, I am glad to say, will be a government and not a private undertaking. But there is always a need, we have found, both inside and alongside big schemes, for persons with a religious call to supply what it provides and what no government machinery pretends to be able to provide."