REPORT ON CHINA: The Time Has Come To Talk, Says New York Magazine

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 265, 21 July 1944, Page 6

REPORT ON CHINA:

The Time Has Come To Talk, Says New York Magazine

OT without anxiety, but with a strong conviction that the step is necessary, we reprint the following extract from a report.on China by the Chungking correspondent of "Life" (New York). If parts of it make depressing reading, that is largely because we have been kept so long in the dark. However, the picture is not unduly depressing when seen in proper focus. This is how "Life" presents it editorially: UPPOSE you were a Chinese who had a great faith in a country called America. Suppose your information about America was limited to a reading of the Atlantic Charter and Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech. Vague rumours had reached you, but you did not believe them. since they did not accord with these documents. Suddenly a well-infotmed traveller returns from America and tries to bring you up-io-date on everything that has happened there in the last two years. There has been a series, of strikes and race riots. Congressmen are in revolt against what some of them openly call the Roosevelt monarchy. An ambiguous character named Hopkins controls all access to the President. Manpower is a muddle, prices are Way up. There is a wave of juvenile delinquency. The Republicans killed off China’s friend Willkie, and there is a powerful Press campaign against Britain and Russia. "If you had to absorb all the bad news at one sitting, you would probably conclude that America is a hopeless, chaotic country, losing the war and falling apart. "The first-hand report on China by Theodore H. White wili shock a great many Americans. It will especially shock whose ideas of China were formed during Madame Chiang Kai-Shek’s visit here over a@ year ago, and who think of China solely in terms of her charm, eloquence and idealism. She spoke for China’s aspirations. White’s report presents the actuality. It is not a pretty picture. "But it is not just @ muck-raking job. It is a balanced attempt. by an able journalist who loves China, to give a true picture of China and its government to-day. The news in it is not all bad; but the bad things in it are news to most Americans. And the bad news seems worse than it is, because it has been kept too’long." * x * . OW is the time to talk about China. The popular American conception of China to-day is compounded of three powerful modern myths. The first is the Treaty Port legend. ‘This legend was born at the bars of Shanghai, Tientsin and Hong Kong, and stems directly from the traders who went tq the China coast to make a profit. The legend holds that all Chinese are sly, stealthy characters, untrustworthy, cowardly, dirty, They must be treated as an inferior race, beaten and cowed by gunboats and arms. According to this legend, East is East and West is West and thank God for it.

The second legend is the Madame Chiang Kai-Shek legend. Perhaps nothing attests more eloquently the genius of this brilliant woman than the skill with which she has clothed all China in the radiant glamour of her personality. According to this legend, all Chinese are noble in spirit, governed by courtly statesmen who like herself are inspired by a philosophical blend of Confucianism and Christianity which is altogether beautiful. There is no corruption, no.disunity. The Chinese armies, according to this legend, frustrate the Japanese in attack after attack upon the heart of China with nothing but skill, daring and superior moral courage. China bleeds, and there are none to bind her wounds. The third legend, more difficult to define, is tainted with the folklore of cynicism. It is shared alike by such widely-differing groups. as the Communist Party and disillusioned foreign officials. According to this legend, the Government "gang" in Chungking is out-and-out Fascist. Democracy is only a "gag." We are being played for suckers by the administration in power which seeks to accumulate stores and supplies against the day of inevitable civil war. The Nationalists in Chungking are rotten from skin to soul, beyond hope of redemption or reform, unwilling to fight even if they could, while only the Communists in the north keep the wicked Japanese at bay. ~ The Most Important Fact None of these legends is true. And by the time a correspondent comes to know China well enough to discard the legends, he realises that whatever he writes will be understood against the background of one or another of these myths. The most important fact about China is that it is a land of peasants — of hard-palmed, nut-brown men and women who work each day from dawn to dusk in the fields, who hunger for the land and need the land and love ‘the land. What binds all these people together is not only their common language and their cultural tradition, but also their common subjection to a poverty and ignorance that knows no counterpart in the Western world. It is out of this searing crucible of want that comes the desperate struggle of all Chinese to live. And out of this struggle of the miserable to be less miserable come the most pressing of China’s problemsfor when the miserable struggle against Nature, they usually struggle against each other. Until 30 years ago, this fabric was bound together by one of the most curious instruments of government ever created by man, the Imperial Civil Ser- . vice directed from Peking. Before this Civil Service vanished, however, it had produced and standardised a civilisation which, with several significant breaks, had hung together for almost 2000 years. It produced a code of manners and thought that reached from the coolie to the mandarin; a pattern of h n decency and tolerance that ‘the West has rarely approached. If you could take apart the tangled skein of Chinese history in the past 30 years and unwind it, you would find three continuing strands. First, in point of emergence, after the collapse of the Manchus was the rise of the warlordsthe brutal, wolfish soldiers who ravaged

the land, trailing pestilence and disaster in their wake. These warlords were queer, mad people, who in themselves personified the entire break with the past, Their weapons were shoddy, their leadership atrocious and _ their allegiance bought with silver dollars. They morselled China into a crazy patchwork of fiefs and sub-fiefs in each of which the warlord ruled as an absolute despot, Second in emergence were the Nationalists. The Nationalists were not only a unifying and historical force, but also a product of the general impact of Western culture. As schools grew, railways were laid, factories were built, scholars agitated and mighty cities arose where were bred large groups of men different from any that had appeared in China before. They were workers, clerks, compradores, bankers, intellectuals, teachers, social workers, and middle-class citizens. They not only wished to make

their country whole again, but they realised it had to be done with Western tools. Though they were Western in their thinking and technique, it would be a mistake to assume they had accepted the West whole-heartedly and without reservation. No one can _ understand China to-day nor the mentality of Chiang Kai-Shek, who does not understand the hatred and bitterness of the intelligent Chinese for the foreign businessmen who treated him like a coolie in his own land. In some cities this foreigner closed the public parks to Chinese; in some boats Chinese were not allowed to ride first-class, Much of this foreign sentiment focused in the great metropoles of Shanghai and Hong Kong, where Chinese were wealthiest and most advanced. I have seen my Chinese friends quiver with shame as they recalled foreign brutality toward the Chinese in China 15 or 20 years ago. This emotion is a healthy and normal reaction to an intolerable record of shame and humiliation. And it is this humiliation set against the whole background of disunion, bloodshed, decay and warlordism that explains why, in so many Chinese minds of the first order, unity takes precedence over all else. (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) The third great force in China was the Communist Party. It was the latest to arrive on the scene, and the extent of its influence is difficult to assess. Like the Nationalist Party, it analysed the situation and decided that China needed unification, modernisation and power. But it went further and, in effect, asked: Who will organise China and for whose benefit? The basic Communist answer is clear: China is to, be organised as Russia was, not by the rich, and well-born, and the educated, but by the peasantry and the working class. With these theses sharply etched into its programme, conflict with the Nationalists could not be resolved except by recourse to arms. On occasion the two parties could and did co-operate. They co-operated in 1925-27 in the first great counter-attack

against imperialism and warlord anarchy; their agents jointly marshalled the great mass movement that surged from the south and overwhelmed all central China and the bastions of foreign influence, Three Against Japan In China to-day, in 1944, we have a loose association of three forces against the Japanese invasion. Central Government, Communists, and warlords alike are all more or less committed to the war against the enemy, This war has gone on for seven years. But whereas it started in the closest and most inspiring alliance of all three groups against the invaders, to-day this association for a common end has sadly changed. The over-all picture of China to-day is compounded of three interwoven problems: blockade, inflation, political deadlock. No country in modern times has ever been blockaded as China is now. Since the Burma Road closed in the spring of 1942, the Chinese have lived almost on their own. When the road closed, it was estimated: that there were perhaps 15,000 trucks operating on China’s toads. Now, two years later, there are perhaps 5000 trucks that can operate regularly in the country. The others have worn out. The difference between these two figures spells tragedy. It means

that when there is a famine such as has taken place in Honan or Kwangtung, no trucks are available to move food in or people out, and people die on the roads and dogs eat them and villages are abandoned. It means that there is no facile way of getting raw materials to factories. It means that centralised control over the provinces dwindles from day to day, and the various génerals at the front conduct themselves more and more like independent satraps. It means that decisions and orders of the Central Government are denatured and vitiated with every mile and every hour’s distance from the capital. Armies on Foot The Chinese armies march on foot. They move divisions 1500 miles on foot, and only one who has seen the barefoot, under nourished and under clothed soldiers slog the rocky roads over the mountains and through the rice-paddies knows what misery means. There’ are no food supplies along some of the routes of march, and sometimes the soldiers,may not eat all day. In some cases, the soldiers sell their blankets to buy food from villagers, and at night in the. mountains they sleep rolled up all together, huddled to each other’s bodies against the cold. The transportation situation means that even if the Government could organise an efficient quartermaster corps in the rear, there would be no way of getting meats, fresh foods and beans to the front in quantity to feed the soldiers. The glory of the Chinese armies lies not in’ their battles, for they have fought few battles in the past three years, but in the fact that they exist at all. The soldiers of China are hungry. They get 24 ounces of rice a day, some salt, some oil, and some vegetables. They rarely eat meat. These soldiers suffer from malnutrition, disease and starvation, The Forges Are Hungry The breakdown of transportation is the first and primary incidence of blockade on Chinese life, but blockade has other effects more direct and just as pernicious. China lacks copper, lacks alloy steels, Jacks electro-generative equipment. All figures on production are rightfully secret, but it is impossible for any man who has not suffered under the naked impact of the figures themselves to conceive of the difficulty of fighting a war in China, The figures on small-arms ammunition productionbullets for rifles and machine-guns-are so pitifully small that no sane Western staff could conceive of sending troops into battle with so small a national reserve. The result of these shortages 1s seen in a desire, that has now become almost a habit, to; avoid battle under-any circumstances. Arms and ammunition are more important than territory, and each general stores up his’ bullets and shells behind his lines against the day of crisis. Under such circumstances, a Westerner might rightly ask how China stays in the war at all. China has been kept in this war as a united nation by the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek. Up to now, whatever its: other faults, this leadership has been unswervingly, unflinchingly, . and _ heroically _antiJapanese. It is Chiang Kai-Shek who, at. the darkest moments of China’s

loneliness, has held his Government and his people to their destined task. In this sense he, more than. any other man, represents the entire corps of unnumbered and nameless devoted men in every btanch of the national life subordinating all their personal future to victory and offering leadership, however limited, to the masses behind them. Food and Sons This leadership, however, would be a sterile and sickly thing were it not based on the enormous stability given Chinese society by her peasantry. The equations the budgeteers and statesmen make with paper figures are phantom equations. The real equation of Chinese resistance is simple enough. The peasant produces two things: he produces food and he produces sons. The Government takes food from him by its voracious grain tax, and with the food it feeds the civil servants, the factory workers, the army. The Government takes sons from him and keeps the weak cadres at the front replenished, The peasant is the great raw material of war in China. Even nitrates for the explosives that fill shells and bullets are sometimes processed from human excreta. If the rains fall and the sun shines, the peasants eat. No blockade can interpose itself between him and the land he cares for. Inflation, Corruption, Cynicism The second great problem of China is inflation. There are no real sources of revenue left in the country-no great taxable incomes, no industry to produce profit. China finances her war by the printing of paper currency. Last year approximately 40,000,000,000 dollars of Chinese currency were dumped into the circulatory stream of the nation, This year the figure will be greater, | This inflation is a serious menace to national resistance-not because of purely economic reasons, but because of its moral consequences. Corruption, official and private, monetary and moral, exists throughout the length and breadth of the land. Since money means so little, people come to have little respect for it, or the means by which it»may be accumulated, In the counties where the peasant meets the Government, there is corruption in the collection of his grain tax and corruption in the recruitment of his sons. If you know the right people, you, can buy your way out of the army. The weighing-in of the grain tax, the storing of the grain and its distribution, are all filthied with extortion. In one case, an American relief representative was attempting to transport a large quantity of grain over the Hunan-Kwangsi railroad for the relief of the famine sufferers in Kwantung. He found it impossible to get freight cars om the railway until he had found the right Official and paid the "tea money," which ran to thousands of Chinese dollars. Corruption stems directly from inflation. It is unavoidable. But the most terrible effect of inflation is the cyni‘cism engendered among the honest and decent elements of Chinese life, Civil servants who try to live on their salaries suffer more bitterly than white-collar workers of any other nation at war, Thousands upon thousands of Chinese civil’ servants are honest and decent, and refuse to cut the easy corners. They sell their clothes and valuables, live in unheated houses and work in unheated offices, borrow money from friends and try desperately to keep themselves (continued on next. page)

IN CHINA NOW (continued from previous page)

. abreast of the rising tide. The Government supplies them with official rice, with official cloth, salt, and oil. On this they must get along, hungrily envying the profiteers and their more practical friends. The war is responsible for blockade and inflation-with their mentally evil consequences. No change of Government, no legislation sleight of hand, can acquire for China more trucks, more copper, more electric power, more medicines, until the blockade is broken. Any Government in China would have to resort to inflation, because there is no real source of revenue in the country except grain; and more cannot be taken from the people without a social revolution of a cataclysmic nature. Deadlock in Chungking The war is not responsible, however, for the flat, black deadlock of politics in Chungking. There were alternate solutions facing the Chinese Government when the blockade forced a reorientation of its thinking; it could have appealed to the people and liberal intellectuals in dynamic and revolutionary terms demanding even greater sacrifices in return for greater freedom and hope. Instead, it chose to defend itself and the nation by regimenting conduct and freezing thought under the control of some of the hardest characters in national life. To understand the politics of China one must understand that the machinery of government is in the hands of a single party. According to the theory on which the Chinese Government is founded, the masses of people are insufficiently educated and experienced to handle their own destiny. Until education and modern life lift them nearer to the economic and literacy level of the Western democracies, their sovereignty is held in trust for them by the Nationalist Party. The period during which this party holds trust is known as the "period of political tutelage." You have to live in Chungking to feel the weight of this party in men’s personal lives. Censorship hangs over authors, playwrights, moviemakers, and all participants in public expression. The Press lives in a shadow world of gossip, hand-outs, and agency despatches, None of the great problems of China — famine, inflation, blockade, foreign relations or public personalities -can be honestly discussed in public. The greatest paper in China is the Ta Kung Pao — staffed with some of .the ablest and médst liberal journalists of the nation. In the early winter of 1943 the Ta Kung Pag published a powerful description of the Honan famine. It did not delve into the corruption, extortion, and inefficiency that accompanied it. The Ta Kung Pao was promptly suppressed for three days. If, by some historic necromancy, Japan were defeated to-morrow and the troops of Chiang Kai-Shek marched into Nanking victorious, it is quite possible that they might crush the Communist armies in a six-month campaign or so overawe them by show of force as. to exact submission. But the war in Asia is a long one, and throughout its course the Communists have been gaining in influence and power much as Marshal Tito has been gaining in the (continued from previous page)

° (continued on next page) Balkans, Concurrently within the Nationalist Party a progressive deterioration has set in which makes the ultimate test of strength difficult ,to determine. The shrewdest observers believe and hope that there will be no outbreak of civil war between Communists and Nationalists until the Japanese ate defeated. The leadership of both parties realises that if civil war breaks out, the enemy marches in. The Nationalists who control most of free China desire above all else to present to the world the aspect of United China. This makes their voice strong in international councils. Therefore, their censorship policy on all outgoing despatches has been to suppress any reference to the activities of the Communist armies in the north or any impression of serious internal opposition to their rule. As a matter of fact, however, the Chinese Communists rule independently over vast and populous territories in North China. Between themselves and the Government theré exists so complete and wide a cleavage that their representative in Chungking is almost an ambassador of a foreign power. Their armies, several hundred thousand strong, are fighting the Japanese all through the vital provinces of Shantung, Hopei, Shansi and ' North Kiangsu. Completely cut off from supplies by the Central Government of China, they have woven a net of popular resistance about the Japanese garrisons and railways. Their arms are seized from the Japanese or home-manufac-tured. They fight by night, move like formless wraiths through the hills, flicker about the Japanese garrisons and lines of communication like dancing tongues of flame. But underlining the existence and importance of these Communist armies at this point it is necessary to reemphasise the fact that the great burden of the war has been borne by the armies of the Central Government itself. These armies .were responsible for the great victories about Taierchwang and Changsha, for the heroic defences of Shanghai and Hankow, and in recent years of the gorges and the rice-bowl area. Blockade of "Red Area" Because tHe Nationalist Party has steadfastly refused for the last five years to permit any observers past their blockade of the Red Area, it is impossible to judge the veracity of the Com- ._ munist claims. According to the best information available, the Communist army numbers to-day between 200,000 and 300,000 men, and hold down about the same number of Japanese troops. In their rear, the Communists are sealed off from all aid by the Central: Government armies. Perhaps 10 divisions of the best troops which might be employed against the Japanese are employed on the border guard in midShensi. Through this blockade only the most daring smugglers can pass. Even medical supplies destined for the Communist armies have been seized by the Central Government cordon. Conditions of health are as bitter in the Eighth Route Army area as in Central Government areas, and there are far less supplies and tools to work with. At the central hospital of their army there was this winter only one set of surgical tools, and this incomplete. Amputations are done with butcher (continued on next page)

"The People of China Are Greater Than Any Man or Any Group"

(continued from previous page) knives and carpenters’ saws, surgical needles are adapted from those housewives use, scissors, knives, artery forceps are manufactured locally. When there is no anaesthetic, operations are performed raw. Point Counterpoint The case of the Nationalists against the Communists is explicit. They claim that unity comes before all else, that the. nation cannot be strong nor its army powerful if there are two Governments independent of each other, two armies under independent command, if the Communists make their own laws, print their own currency, and give no obedience to central authority. They claim further that the Communist Party of China, like Communist parties everywhere, is the agent of a third power, and that within any state no group can be tolerated whose policy is alien to its own flag. The Communists, on the other hand, claim that so long as they receive no supplies from the Central Government, they need give it no allegiance. They claim that they cannot yield up their independence of action for a share in

the Nationalist state unless it is a democratic state in which they have freedom of speech, assembly, and press. Were they to give up their armies and their indeperident areas and submit themselves to the present governing group, they would be wiped out as a political entity, and many would lose their lives. . The claims and counter-claims on both sides are so complex and detailed that this simplification distorts both sides, But both claims are overlaid with emotional invocations of "democracy." It is still unclear to what degree the Chinese Communist Party follows the pattern laid down in Moscow, and whether their conception of freedom of speech, press, and assembly is the same _ as that of the Soviet Union. It is equally unclear as to what the Kuomintang means by democracy, and whether the present closet-like atmosphere of Chungking is what they offer the Communists in return for surrender of their armies.

Over all the picture of China looms the brooding figure of Chiang Kai-Shek. Chiang-for all his tempers, moods and shortcomings — its the symbol of China: at war, the man whom even the Communists recognise as the only possible leader. Although he is surrounded by a sycophantic court- interested in poisoning his mind and feeding his prejudices, he isa man of great intelligence. In his understanding of China he is unsurpassed, Increasingly he feels that he is the only one he can trust in the entire nation, and his energy is more and more channellised into minor administrative matters. He feels, in a sense, that he is not only China’s leader but a great teacher of ethics; and that by ethical precepts.he can control his hard-bitten political underlings. Chiang’s decision in February to invite the Communists to Chungking was sound and realistic; but unless he follows through with an equally sound and _ realistic overhauling of all the

Test of tne political apparatus, there can come no real change in the present tensioncharged situation. Forces for Good Yet there are solid and profound forces working for good in China to-day, for the people of China are greater than any man or any government. I once spoke to a famous Chinese who, in the early days of the revolution, had sat at the bedside of Sun Yat-sen, the night he died. "It (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) was stormy and windy all that night," the teller said, "and we cried ourselves out. In the morning when we woke, the storm had passed, and it was a clear, blue Peking day in the spring. I remember how I walked in the streets and said to myself it does no good, for the sun to shine or the storm to gothe revolution is dead now, for Sun Yat-sen is gone and we ere lost. I felt we were all through. Then I went south to join the revolution again, and found it was still going on with new leaders and new people and’ stronger than ever; and we won, I suppose I learned ther that China is greater than any man or any group. It’s the country that is great, and nothing can stop it." Deep within China the great revolution of Asia is working itself up to a climax. Both within the Nationalist Party and out of it are distinguished Liberals, scholars and statesmen, who are still battling for the creation of a free and freedom-loving China. To keep the permanent friendship of this great nation almost any price is small. Americans have a real obligation, as allies in arms, to assist the Chinese with force at the present moment on a scale far greater than we have done for the past two years. And if this obligation is not too long denied, we shall find on reaching China vital forces eager to join us in pursuing the ends we consider the true ideals of America.