China and the West

Hemingway, Ernest. Japan's position in China. In : PM ; June 16 (1941).
Rangoon.—Japan has temporarily lost her chance of making peace with China.
The second thing you can truly count on in the Far East is that Japan can never conquer China.
The simplest way to explain the present military stalemate is to point out that Japan has conquered all the flat country, where her superiority in planes, artillery and mechanized formations has given her a tremendous advantage, and she must now fight the Chinese in mountain country, much of it roadless, where the Chinese meet the Japanese on more equal terms.
The Chinese have an enormous army of 200 first-line divisions (over 2,000,000 men) who are exceedingly well armed for the type of war they are fighting now. They also have another million men in not so good divisions; they have three Communist divisions and, probably, 500,000 Communist irregulars who are trained in guerrilla warfare.
China has ample supplies of rifles, plenty of ammunition, excellent heavy and light machine guns and automatic rifles and ample supplies of ammunition manufactured in Chinese arsenals for all of these arms. Each Chinese battalion has a mortar company of six 81-millimeter mortars which are extremely accurate at 2000 yards and have an extreme range of 3000. This is not hearsay. I saw them used many times at the front and they were excellent weapons used with great skill.
This 81-millimeter mortar is the French Brandt. The Chinese can drop a shell with it on a set of diapers at 2000 yards, and in the mountains it makes up enormously for their lack of artillery.