CHINA SETS THE STAGE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 335, 23 November 1945, Page 12

CHINA SETS THE STAGE

This is the second of a series of | articles written for "The Listener’ by JAMES BERTRAM. HUNGKING in 1941 was the focus of immense and exciting political forces; but this was pretty well concealed. I shall always remember Hankow in 1938 as a war capital worthy of China’s struggle. In the desperate months after the fall of Nanking a new spirit had been born, and the salutary shake-up of military disaster had spurred the Government to a genuine effort at popular leadership. When the first People’s Political Council was held that summer, blue cotton uniforms jostled the silk gowns and silkier beards of Kuomintang veterans. Chou En-lai, subtle and eloquent Communist spokesman, was a Vice-Min-ister; Yeh Chien-ying, Chief of Staff of the 8th Route Army, was slated to head a National training school for guerrilla forces. Debates were fiery and unprompted, rude things were said about the heads of Government departments, and it was all very stimulating and extremely good for the country. Hankow in that period provided China’s first-and last-taste of wartime democracy on a national scale. Twilight in Chungking Three years later, Chungking presented a very different picture. With the fall of Hankow and Canton, the fronts had "frozen" and the war had passed into the stage of stalemate. The Kuomintang had got over its scare and its liberalism, and there were no longer any Communist officials in the Government. Chou En-lai was still about, but now he lived furtively down a dark alley, closely watched by the agents of the new power behind the throne, the sinister General Tai Li, head of the Secret Police. The air of Chungking was not merely damp: it was oppressive. In the newly-built National Assembly Hall I attended sessions of the People’s

rolitical Council, where the Generalissimo discussed national resistance and the War Minister (now Commander-in-Chief of the Chinese Armies) reported remotely on immobile strategy and heatedly on _ political recalcitrance. It was more like a puppet . show than a Parliament, An accurate index of the temper of the administration at this time was the exodus of the intellectuals, Writers, artists, and academic liberals whose first enthusiasm had taken them to the war capital were drifting ‘silently out of Chungking and seeking sanctuary elsewhere. Provincial capitals in the south proved. hardly more hospitable, and many of these Chinese progressives finally ended up in Hong Kong, where a British colonial government which none of them especially liked did at least guarantee protection against secret arrest and the oubliettes, My own work in Chungking kept me in close contact with journalists and writers, though as I have suggested they were fast becoming a vanishing race.

There were days when the Hsin Hua Jih Pao appeared with the whole of its front page blank (though the favourite trick of writers under censorship in China from time immemorial has been to write poems, in which gecondite allusions to situations in ancient history make the points as neatly as any Paris feuilleton). It was a strange unreal atmosphere, in which one gave and attended picturesque parties in decrepit or half-bombed restaurants, pouring wine with elaborate Chinese courtesy while one tried to assure excessively polite editors that the whole of British policy in the Far East was not summed up in the recent temporary closing of the Burma Road, or in the humiliating experiences of our nationals in the British Concession in Tientsin, where the Japanese literally as well as figuratively were taking our pants down. Diplomats on Parade The diplomatic front at Chungking was pleasantly varied. Nelson Johnson, genial U.S. Ambassador who is now Secretary of the Far East Advisory Commission in Washington, and who was at his best wise-cracking in beautiful Pekinese at Chinese banquets, was transferred to Canberra early in 1941. His successor was tight-lipped Clarence E. Gauss from Shanghai, who spoke a language more convincing if less soothing in Chinese official ears. The French were mixed Vichy vintage, and there was a bewildered Italian whom many liked and nobody trusted. The Germans had a curious representative in the smooth, Oxford-trained Graf von Plessen, who had filtered in mysteriously through Indo-China from Ceylon and whom many of us had known when he was Councillor in Peking and _professedly anti-Nazi. (Now the men who had once played polo with him on the old Legation glacis looked through him stonily on rare encounters at Chinese functions. The Soviet Ambassador, Paniushkin, was in poor health; but the Russians

generally maintained a sumptuous establishment in a mansion some old Chinese warlord had built on the’ heights of Chungking, and gave much the grandest parties. TASS, the Soviet News Agency, was also strongly represented; and I got along particularly well with them because my book on the North China guerrillas had just come out in avery handsome Russian edition, with the blessing of Goslitisdat, It was a convention of all Soviet citizens in China never to take a rickshaw, for this humble conveyance was considered an insult to human dignity. Instead of being drawn by their fellow men, the Russians drove everywhere in large black cars, and whether by accident or design undoubtedly gave the impression of belonging to the prepotent foreign delegation. We British imperialists, on the contrary, were very meanly housed in the old Chungking Consulate, which was always being knocked down in the bombing season and rebuilt in lath-and-plas-ter. But the tenacity which kept the Union Jack flying on the north bank of the river through all Chungking’s vicissitudes (when everyone else except the Soviets had moved to country villas. in the comparative immunity of the south bank) gave us considerable "face," and was a good reflection of the personality of the British envoy, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr. ; Portrait of an Ambassador Kuibushev and Moscow, to say nothing of Berlin, have since won further laurels for this brilliant diplomat. But’ it was Chungking that first made him a world figure, and the reasons were plain to anyone who saw him at work. References to Sir Archibald in many of the current China books (possibly because most of the authors are American) reveal a certain puzzled scepticism: writers and newspapermen accustomed to the usual chilling formality of British officials in the Far East clearly did not know what to make of this lean. brown.

extremely unconventional Séot who liked journalists, generally received them in his shirt« sleeves, and called himself a Socialist. There was nothing of pose here: it was all of a piece with the whole career of a man who had fought in World War I. in the ranks, who alone of mortals went swimming in the yellow and turbulent Yangtse, and whose very diplomatic passion for painting was only matched by his equally undiplomatic Passion for sun-bathing. When the Ambassador had serious matters to discuss with the Generalissimo, the pair bf them went hiking over the steamy and precipitous Chungking landscape, shedding clothes as they went and often outdistancing their guards. It was a néw type of diplomacy in China, and for a while it certainly got results. The Americans hitherto had been accustomed to regard themselves as the young and virile Westerners in the Far East; but Clark Kerr's (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) comment after meeting Ernest Hemingway in Chungking was typical: "Tough? Why, J2’m tougher than he is!" At long last, the British Government seemed to be realising how near we were to disaster in the Far East, and something was being done about it at the China end. Chungking’s new Military Attaché was a general from the Indian Army with both brains and imagination a rare bird in that territory), and the Air Attaché’s office expanded weekly, with new assistants departing as soon as they arrived on reconnaissance missions about South China and the Burma frontier. But how late we had left it all I only realised when I made a trip down to Rangoon. Burma Interlude I had with me a young Chinese film agent, whose irreverent comments on the first. British war films were refreshing and salutary. We flew first to Kunming, then over the spectacular gorges of the Mekong and the Salween (which were to mark the furthest limits of the tide of Japanese invasion a few months later) and across the green rice-fields to Rangoon. It did not take long to sum up the state of Burma’s defences in 1941. There were Indian tfoops at Mandalay, and a thin screen to cover the vulnerable frontier near Moulmein. In Rangoon itself we watched a ceremonial parade of the balance of the forces (not a very long march-past!) while six Wellington bombers of the R.A.F. roared overhead again and again like stage soldiers. The whole show was so pathetic that I did not marvel the Burmans seemed unimpressed; and they had still the liveliest apprehensions regarding any sudden irruption of Chinese troops from the north, which was the only obvious source of reinforcements. The internal situation was interesting. Part of my job was to help establish friendly relations and break down the old suspi¢ion of Chinese designs on Burma. Thanks to F. W. W. Rhodes, a New Zealander who had been for some years Professor of English at Rangoon University, I made contact with a number of politically-minded young Burmans, one of whom was a leading Thakin and friend of the revolutionary leader Ba Maw, who later headed the

"Free Burma Government" set up by the Japanese. The high spot of our gatherings was a Chinese dinner party featuring a roast pig and the captivating singing of a charming Burmese film-star; but beneath these festivities it was not difficult to see how a_ short-sighted British policy had completely alienated those progressive elements in, Burma which should-as in India-have proved our most active allies in combating fascism and Japanese militarism. It is easy to see now how much was lost by this forfeit of sympathies in the campaigns that followed, when young Burmans looked to Thailand and even to the advancing Japanese for the redress of grievances we should have been the first to recognise. Nor is the present administration in Rangoon the most hopeful of auguries. It remains for a Labour Government in Britain to prove that the lessons of the last four years in India and Burma have not been entirely lost. The Gathering Storm With a new car and a couple of heavily laden trucks we made the long trek back to Chungking overland: But that is an old story now; and just as the famdéus American air transport service across the "Hump" and then the new Ledo Road superseded the Lashio route during the war years, so the next phase of Burma-China communications will undoubtedly be the much-discussed railway first surveyed fifty years ago. Back in Chungking, the Ambassador had just returned from Singapore; and to us there was a world of warning in the emphasis with which he declared, in an interview, that Singapore "should be impregnable." ("Never believe anything until it is officially denied" is an old maxim that has its corollary.) But there was some backbone in British policy at last, however inadequate the means at hand to enforce it. The last picture I like to remember of those months in Chungking was of a garden-party we arranged for Chinese and foreign journalists, on the lawn in front of the bomb-scarred British Embassy. We were able to offer our guests Johnny Walker and Bristol Cream (thanks to the foraging expedition in Rangoon), which was about the strongest challenge that had been made so far to the vodka and cherry brandy and Caucasion wines the hospitable Russians used to fly in across Sinkiang. And in the middie of it all, the Ambassador got up and quietly read a statement to the effect that there had been a good many rumours lately about another weakening of British policy in the Far ‘East, and a possible closing of the Burma Road again to Chinese war supplies. "The Burma Road," said Sir Archibald, with a nice brittle quality in his voice as though he were making a most satisfactory retort to Sir Robert Craigie in distant Tokyo, "will remain open." ; The Chinese were the first to clap, and then~a wave of polite applause rippled out over the sun-drowsed Yangtse. Our colours were up at last. in China, and it was a relief to know it. But the next chapter, for me, was to see those colours come ignominiously down in some of the darkest months of our history, when Japan struck like the lash of a typhoon at Pearl Harbour and Hong Kong. (To be continued)