China and the West

China fights on after four years of War. Chiang Kai-shek's inspiring leadership. In : The Advertiser ; 5 July (1941).
This article by the Shanghai correspondent of "The Times" contains a tribute to General Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese leader, which, with the high praise of Ernest Hemingway in his article yesterday, and that of Dr. T. Z. Koo, who is now in Adelaide, shows the quality of the Chinese Generalissimo.
THE war in China, which on Monday will enter its fifth year, has exposed many fallacies about the Chinese. The most tenacious of these was the view that they were incapable of resisting a mechanised modern army like the Japanese. Judged by Western military standards, the training, staff work, and equipment of the Chinese forces are still for the most part woefully inadequate. Although they have given the Japanese some hard knocks, their "strategic" retreats, since the epic days of Shanghai, have often been strategic in a different sense. Yet their will-o'-the-wisp tactics, deliberate as well as enforced, have kept over 1,000,000 Japanese troops in the field for nearly four years. The Japanese continue to claim victories in the fighting up and down the country—and it must be admitted that, with notable exceptions, the weight of metal usually tells —but such claims are, in fact, a confession of their own frustration. The war which was to have lasted only four weeks has, indeed, lasted four bitter years, and still shows no signs of ending. NATIONAL UNITY ANOTHER delusion of the Japanese was the conviction that national unity could never be attained by the Chinese, a view often put forward in the assertion that China was not a nation but a geographical term. After their spurious success in sowing political discord among rival factions in the period of civil strife, the Japanese were disconcerted by the solidarity of the military leaders in the face of invasion. It is true that they have induced Mr. Wang Ching-wei to set up a "central" Government at Nanking, under the protection of their bayonets. But, in spite of all his efforts, Mr. Wang Ching-wei has still failed to attract a single adherent of national repute. Nor is there the slightest prospect of the new regime fulfilling the Japanese hope of serving as a bridge between themselves and General Chiang Kai-shek. The leaders in Chungking and the masses of the people alike despise the "puppet" Government. Every one knows that it will vanish like the Yangtze mists the moment the Japanese troops are withdrawn. The Communists in China have also been the subject of much confused thinking. Since their first exploits against the Japanese in Shansi, they have been steadily losing favor, especially among the youth of the country which has been irked by so much talk and so little action that it no longer looks to them for the future. Moscow has sedulously refrained from using the Communists in China as a token in its relations with Chungking, taking the realistic view that the war of resistance can be continued only by giving undivided support to the Generalissimo. Numerically also the Communists are of diminishing importance, and the Government, with its vast new armies, is confident of its ability to cope with the Red divisions as well as the Japanese if compelled. Moderates on both sides, however, recognise that the dispute is harmful to China's prestige, and most foreign observers believe that it will not be allowed to get out of hand.
BLOCKADE OF CHINA. THE Japanese are learning bitter lessons in their efforts to blockade China. In theory the Chinese coast has been blockaded from the Gulf of Chihli in the north to the Bay of Tonkin in the south. Yet in fact as fast as the Japanese close up one gap another appears, like holes in a leaky hosepipe. There is no doubt that the recent raids, such as the descent on Pakhoi. are severe blows to the Chinese, causing the interruption of routes and the destruction of valuable supplies. Nor can the Burma road, especially since the unresisted attacks on the Mekong River bridges, wholly compensate for the loss of the Indo-China route. Yet again supplies have a way of finding their way into the interior by all sorts of devious routes which the Japanese cannot hope to block. To make the blockade "total" under existing conditions would require one soldier for every half-dozen yards of the coast from the Manchurian border to Indo-China. And even this would be ineffective in places where the smuggling of Japanese goods fetches high profits. Japanese hopes that the Chungking Government, isolated in the interior, would become little more than a provincial regime have also been falsified. With the "closing" of the Burma road to the transit of certain classes of war materials Chungking reached its lowest ebb. The reopening of the road, the Anglo-American credits, Mr. Laughlin Currie's visit to China, and President Roosevelt's promise of assistance have had a tonic effect in the war capital. The Chinese, who have maintained from the outset that they have been fighting for the Western democracies as well as themselves in the common war against aggression, feel now that this has at last been recognised. They look forward to receiving an increasing measure of support which will not only enable them to turn the tables on the invader but ensure their place in the world settlement upon which their future peace and security depend. Among the changes that have been brought about in four years of war in China is the frankness with which Chinese leaders will now discuss their difficulties and dangers. Thus the officials in Chungking make no secret of the serious problem of spiralling prices in the interior provinces, the anxiety over this season's food crops, the growing shortage of commodities in "Free" China, and the Japanese attacks on the national currency. They are less willing, perhaps, to speak of the confusion which still hampers much of the traffic over the Burma road. The appointment of Dr. John Earl Baker, director of the American Red Cross in China, as head of a commission to lake charge of the road is a big step in the right direction. Many of the problems which still confront the Chungking authorities would be considered hopeless in other countries on account of their magnitude and complexity. But the Chinese have proved over and over again in the past four years that they know how to contrive, hang on, and survive—qualities of race and character derived from centuries of coping with Nature in all her moods.
GENEBAL CHIANG KAI-SHEK. WHATEVER the Japanese may have felt about General Chiang Kai-shek at different times—at the moment they would desperately like to make a deal with him if they could—they have never withheld respect for his courage and tenacity. More than once they have nursed wistful hopes that his health was failing, that his followers might melt away, that he might be induced to take a holiday in the United States. Never have they expressed any of these things in any disparaging sense. They have, in short, recognised his greatness. It is this greatness which is China's chief mainstay today and her main hope for the future. It is her good fortune that the Generalissimo, in spite of the unceasing strain of his terrific burdens, continues to enjoy his usual good health and spirits. Nothing seems to daunt him nor shake his belief in China's destiny, and it is not the least of his qualities that he has inspired the whole country with his own faith. Mr. Quo Tai-chi in a recent speech in London said—"We have our Chiang Kai-shek, as you have your Winston Churchill and the Americans have their Franklin D. Roosevelt." There is no doubt that the future of human freedom depends in the first instance on these three leaders. General Chiang Kai-shek's part, though less spectacular in the eyes of the world, is in some ways more important, for he has no obvious successor, and there is no one else at the moment to whom 430,000,000 of his countrymen can look for their future. Even the renegades know that the Generalissimo will never give up the struggle until the Japanese with-draw from China. Every Chinese feels of the Japanese what Mr. Churchill said of our own chief enemy. "It was for Hitler to say when the war would begin, but it is not for him or his successors to say when it will end." The Japanese are discovering, in discarding the greatest fallacy of all about the Chinese, that one nation may start a war but it takes two or more to make a peace.