Ifs Over China

INSIDE RED CHINA--Nym Wales--Doubleday, Doran ($3).

UNCONQUERED--James Bertram--John Day ($3).

THE DRAGON WAKES--Edgar Ansel Mowrer--Morrow ($2).

In the year and a half since the "incident" at Marco Polo Bridge, Peiping, Japan's armies have marched through half of China's 18 provinces, captured all the major Chinese cities. China has won one major victory, at Taierhchwang. The score looks overwhelmingly one-sided. But in spite of that score, the three latest books on China all predict a Chinese victory.

Inside Red China, by the good-looking wife of Edgar Snow (Red Star Over China), describes four months spent in Yenan, former headquarters of the Chinese Soviet Republic (now the "Frontier Districts of Shensi, Kansu and Ningsia") and the Red Army (now the Eighth Route Army). Written a year after her husband brought out his sensational account of the Chinese Soviets, her book duplicates much of the material in his, but is more personalized, has more to say about the women leaders who survived the epochal 6,000-mile "Long March" (when the Communists retreated in 1934 from South China to the Northwest).

Unconquered is by the correspondent who was the first to get the full story of Chiang Kai-shek's kidnapping at Sian (First Act in China). He saw the debacle of the 29th Route Army at Peiping, spent nearly a year in Soviet territory. His book gives detailed descriptions of guerrilla fighting and of the Red Army's famed "short attack." Best testimony to the guerrillists' deadly effectiveness are Author Bertram's quotations from the gloomy diaries of the Japanese soldiers who fought them.

Edgar Ansel Mowrer is former head of the Foreign Press Association in Berlin, winner of a 1933 Pulitzer Prize for his despatches on the rise of Hitler, and author of Germany Puts the Clock Back--the book that got him kicked out of Germany. Last year he spent several months in Central and North China, interviewed foreigners, Chinese, the "Amazing Soong Family," watched a Japanese bombing massacre with U. S.-made planes, saw the guerrillas in action behind the Japanese lines.

All three observers give almost identical reasons for predicting a Chinese victory: the unprecedented national unity of the Chinese since the "remarriage" of the Kuomintang and the Communists, their unexpected bravery when properly led in battle, the success of the Communist-inspired, guerrilla tactics. They particularly make the point that Japan cannot hold more than the cities and lines of communication. She has occupied China, declares Mowrer, "about as effectively as a few swimmers can be said to 'occupy' a swimming pool."

China, they add, will win IF: 1) the Central Government arms the whole peasantry, whose Communist leanings it mistrusts; 2) the Kuomintang-Communist pact holds; 3) Russia continues to send substantial aid to the Chinese; 4) the U. S. puts an embargo on iron, oil and planes to Japan; 5) England and France do not make a deal to dismember China, as a means of blocking both Japanese imperialism and a possible victory for the Chinese Communists; 6) China does not become another Czecho-Slovakia or Loyalist Spain.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.