Another Year

The news of China had a somber, almost majestic sameness. Again the dispatches told of Jap advances, Chinese retreat, threatened disaster (see WORLD BATTLE-FRONTS). Again Chinese spokesmen pleaded for aid. Again the U.S. Government replied with a tribute. Vice President Wallace, leaving Chungking, left behind a message from President Roosevelt to Chiang Kaishek: "The stand which your people have made against the forces of aggression has set an example for all the friends of China. , . ."

Thus was ending the seventh year of China's war. It had not been a hopeless year. At its end, the Chinese no longer felt that they had been fobbed off with nothing but promises. U.S. and British forces on the Burma fringe, U.S. airmen in China had done what they could for China (and for the Allied cause). Millions of U.S. dollars had been poured into China to provision the Fourteenth Air Force, bolster China's strained finance. But Erh Ch'i--July 7, the Double Seventh, the seventh day of the seventh month--would not be a happy day for the Chinese. It had not been a happy day since 1937, when the Japanese chose the Double Seventh to seize the Marco Polo Bridge near Peiping, begin the long "incident."

State of a Nation. As Year VIII began, the burden on China's broad and patient back had never seemed so grievous, her strength to bear it never so taxed.

China choked within the Jap blockade. Her lack of supplies, particularly heavy weapons for an army of riflemen and grenade-throwers, had become so vast that a new Burma Road could not satisfy it. Perhaps nothing less than an Allied landing on the China coast and the winning of a major supply port would do. Now the Japs, astride the Hankow-Canton line, threatened to cut this desperate hope. Certainly, until the blockade was thoroughly broken, no one could expect the ill-fed, ill-munitioned Chinese armies to take the offensive.

China suffered from a creeping paralysis. The Jap invader had long ago gobbled up most of her railways. Now her unreplenished fleet of motor trucks, 15,000 strong two years ago, had worn down to a wheezy 5,000 machines, and many of these were idle for lack of spare parts. More than ever, China traveled and hauled by foot, mule and human carrier. More than ever, the lack of mobility hobbled her armies, sharpened the peril of famine, loosened the bonds of central government.

China was sick with inflation. Somehow a nation whose masses had always lived close to bare subsistence could endure the shortage of goods, the 360% rise in the cost of living. It could wear threadbare cotton garments more threadbare; it could do with a daily bowlful less of rice. But the enduring masses could not correct the evils that trailed inflation--profiteering, black markets, "squeeze," public cynicism, official corruption.

A Nationalist Government dedicated to democratic ends had left the chosen path. In Chungking a tight little group of Nationalist politicians had thrust aside the liberal men, gagged public opinion, imposed a rigid censorship, devised "Thought control," used secret police and concentration camps. Up in the northwest, along the border between the Nationalist and Communist parts of Free China, some of the best troops of each faction were watching one another, fearful of a break in an uneasy United Front, letting the war against Japan go hang.

Record of a Nation. These ills were immediate and pressing; they cried for remedy. But from the vantage point of the Double Seventh they fell into their true perspective. They weakened the nation, but they were also part of the stress & strain of China's primary task and great achievement: her resistance to Japan.

No Ally had given so much for so long.

Twenty million Chinese, civilians and sol diers, had died since 1937. Fifty million had fled before the invader into the free hinterland -- an uprooting and a mass migration without precedent. China had lost all of her great ports, all of her major cities, precious coal and iron mines, most of her communications and industries, her most fertile and populous provinces. She had been isolated as few nations have been isolated. But her will to resist had never faltered.

This was the chronicle of her achievement:

Year I. Near the ancient marble bridge outside Peiping, which Marco Polo crossed in 300 measured paces, the shots of Asia's Sarajevo were fired. The excuse was a Jap soldier missing after night maneuvers.

The Mikado's Army swarmed into northern and central China. A world grown used to the way of appeasement and newly respectful of sheer might gave the Japs three months to beat China into submission. But the weak, unwieldy victim did not fall apart. Instead, war lords and Communists joined a United Front under Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Government.

Shanghai fell. Nanking fell. Chiang Kai-shek moved his Government to Hankow, rallied his people, reformed their ranks.

Year II. In the year of Hitler's Munich, Mussolini's snatch of Albania and Franco's triumph in Spain, Canton and Hankow fell. Chiang Kai-shek moved his Government to interior Chungking, 1,000 miles up the Yangtze from its old seat in Nanking. He spoke for his people: "The enemy has failed in his major objective: the winning of a short decisive war. . . . Ours is a war for the very existence of our nation. ... It is beyond consideration of time or space. It cannot be blocked by factors of finance, economics, communications or by other external obstacles. Neither poison gas, nor high explosives, nor the disparity in armaments, nor the heavy sacrifices we are suffering can deter us from prosecuting the war."

Year III. Germany blitzed Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, France. The U.S. shipped more iron & steel to Japan. The French barred Indo-China as an avenue of supply to China. The British closed the Burma Road. China hung on.

Year IV. The Japs took over Indo-China. The British reopened the Burma Road. The U.S. embargoed iron & steel to Japan, lent the first $100,000,000 to China. From his Chungking capital Chiang Kai-shek voiced an old belief: that most of the world hated aggressors, wanted peace; that if China held on, powerful allies would come to her side. China held on.

Year V. In Pearl Harbor's wake, China briefly exulted, then despaired. Within six months the Japs took the Philippines, Singapore, the Indies, Burma. Their ring around China was complete. The U.S. was very busy elsewhere. General Claire Chennault's A.V.G., the feeble beginnings of the Fourteenth Air Force, were gallant mockeries of China's first hopes. But China hung on.

Year VI. China strangled, and hung on.

Year VII. In the person of Chiang Kaishek, China sat at Cairo as one of the world's big powers--a tribute to her resistance, a token of her coming place. Her armies and her people suffered, hoped, retreated, resisted, hung on.

Sinews of a Nation. Coolie means "bitter strength." The bitter strength of China's coolie masses, as much as any other factor, had brought the nation unbowed 'to 1944's Double Seventh. China's soldiers (5,000,000 in all) had withstood hunger, disease, a continuous inequality of arms, commanders' inanition, retreat after retreat. Yet they had won notable defensive battles (Taierhchwang, Chang-sha), and had never finally given in.

China's farmers had survived the invasion, migration, abuse by their own politicians, with their wives and children had hacked out such monumental works as the Burma Road, great runways for U.S. planes. Yet they had continued to feed China. China's guerrillas, Communist and Nationalist, had fought with old rifles, broadswords, grenades melted down from rice kettles, fled again & again, attacked again & again.

Yet they still held great enclaves of territory within the Jap lines, thwarted pup pet governments, spiked Japan's "co-prosperity" plans.

Others, in China's articulate minority of politicians, artists, students, artisans, gave the nation its brain and voice. But China's strength was the endurance of the people.

Symbol of a Nation. More than ever, the symbol of China's will on the eighth Double Seventh was the shaven-headed, tenacious Generalissimo. Even Chiang Kai-shek's bitterest political enemies, the veteran Communist chiefs Mao Tse-tung and Chou Enlai, acknowledged his undisputed leadership in resistance. In the 17 years since he set out to centralize and nationalize China, Chiang Kai-shek had concentrated tremendous power in his own hands. But he could never have held that power if he had not used it for China, and against Japan. In him a leader's will and a people's will had fused.

There were signs that Chiang had bent a shrewd ear to the warnings of his country's liberals and of China's true friends abroad. Chungking's strict censorship seemed to be relaxing. Allied correspondents, on a trip to the long forbidden Communist zone, were allowed to report warmly on the Communist village setup, land reforms, guerrilla tactics against the Japs. In Nationalist China, hitherto quiescent democratic groups issued a manifesto: "The formation of a democratic system should not be postponed any longer. We warn our fellow countrymen that if democracy is not realized in wartime, what we gain after the war will not be democracy but the disruption and annihilation of the nation, with sufferings a hundred times more painful than now."

The Generalissimo was well aware that China must first be preserved before the Chinese finally decide what democratic forms are suitable for China. He gave his critics their best answer by allowing them to publish the criticism. For himself, he said last week:

"The objective of victory in the Pacific is the establishment of a democratic peace based on political and social stability deriving from government devoted to the welfare of the people."

China's people could ask no more. They deserved no less.

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