Chiang's War

Two years ago this week, on the night of July 7, a Japanese private went A. W. O. L. from the maneuvers of his regiment at the Marco Polo bridge, ten miles from China's old northern capital of Peking. Apparently he had slipped off to visit a brothel, but the Japanese accused the Chinese of abducting him and holding him in the city of Wanping. Next day, although the missing man had long since taken his place in line, Japanese troops opened fire outside the east gate of the city.

Thus began the second direct test-at-arms between Japanese and Chinese since 1894. The Japanese, who aspire to rule the Far East as Britain has ruled Europe since Elizabeth's day, by fragmentation of the neighboring continent, had grown frightened of China's growing political unity and economic strength. Under Strong Man Chiang Kaishek, who the previous December had formed a tacit anti-Japanese front with the powerful Chinese Red Army, China was close to being an integrated nation--closer than at any time since the 18th Century, when the Manchus had ruled an empire that stretched from southern Burma to beyond Vladivostok. Moreover, native Chinese businessmen had begun to give not only European and American foreign devils but the despised Japanese "dwarf monkeys" real business competition in the treaty ports and the international settlement.

Confusion. A half-century ago a Japanese samurai advised his Emperor: "Wait for the time of the confusion of Europe ... we may then become the chief nation of the Orient." Two years ago the Occident was certainly confused:

Russia, riddled by the purges of the Trotskyite dissenters, was in no mood to fight a Far Eastern war on behalf of the Chinese. Great Britain, strongest European power in the Far East, was hamstrung by fears lest the year-old Civil War in Spain leap its national boundaries and rage through the Mediterranean and along the Rhine. The French Popular Front Government, bedeviled by fiscal troubles, was in no position to take part of the White Man's Burden in Asia on its sagging shoulders. The U. S., although its Navy was growing, had only recently passed a neutrality law, had signaled its desire to grant independence to the Philippines, leading Japan to conjecture that the U. S. might be abdicating its role in the Far East forever.

The Japanese had a tingling sensation in their small, tidy bones. It said to them that the time had come to pulverize their great neighbor, to nip off the five wealthy Chinese northern provinces of Shantung, Hopei, Shansi, Suiyuan, Chahar.

But if confusion in Europe made for War in Asia, trouble in Asia did not compound the immediate chances for World War No. 2 in Europe. As Far Eastern member of the anti-Comintern alliance, Japan is most useful to her German and Italian partners when she feels free to challenge Soviet Russia along the Siberian-Manchukuoan border. She is most menacing to Britain and France when she is poised as a free-wheeling threat to Singapore, French Indo-China, The Netherlands Indies. From 1935 to 1937 Japan was useful to the blackmail schemes of the Rome-Berlin dictators. After the war began, with a claimed 1,000,000 of her soldiers soaked up by the immensity of the yellow-brown

Chinese terrain like so many drops of ink spilled on a tremendous blotter, Japan was far less able either to harass Russia or to challenge Britain and France in southeastern Asia. The great two-year-old undeclared war has thus acted as a wet blanket on the smoldering fires of the European continent.

Ability of the Japanese Army to push the undeclared war to a declared victory depends to a considerable extent on their ability to catch and kill one man. That man is the smoky-eyed Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, symbol of the belated unification of China. For two years this perambulating symbol who travels fearlessly by plane over the mountains and deserts of his country has evaded capture from in front and assassination and bribery (old-Asiatic tools) from behind. Chiang is the needle in the greatest haystack in history.

The Opportunist. When the Japanese Army leaders, who have the ear of their Imperial Majesty Hirohito, cast the die for war in 1937, they thought it would all be over in a few months. They could make out a good case for their belief.

Chiang was no mixture of revolutionary and saint like Dr. Sun Yatsen, who in 1911 had stirred the Chinese to overthrow the corrupt Manchu dynasty. He was just the son of a South China wine merchant, who had been trained in the Military Academy at Tokyo, and later became president of the Whampoa Military School in Canton. When Dr. Sun died in 1925, China was overrun by warlords. It took a hardheaded soldier like Chiang to command the loyalty of the Kuomintang. Hardheaded men in Chinese politics are not stubborn idealists --against odds they normally quit or sell out.

Chiang had the earmarks of such a man.

He had willingly accepted Communist help during his great campaign from revolutionary Canton up to Shanghai and the rich Yangtze valley in 1927. Once his objectives were in sight the Generalissimo turned on the Communists and machine-gunned many of their Shanghai supporters.

For ten years he pursued a policy of buying off and placating the Japanese. He failed to stand in their way in 1931, when they grabbed at Manchuria. He failed to back up the courageous Chinese Nineteenth Route Army when it fought against Japanese invaders of the Chapei district of Shanghai in 1932. He let the northern province of Jehol fall into Japanese hands in 1933.

Chiang nursed his hold over the Yangtze valley, but patriotic Chinese intellectuals distrusted him. His only "offensive" gestures were made against the Chinese "Reds" of the southeastern province of Kiangsi, inner lair of the famed and capable Chinese Soviet generals, Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh, whose "communism" amounts to little more than a Populistic desire to give land to the tax-gutted and landlord-ridden Chinese peasant. Counting on Chiang's willingness to let the great granary of North China go, the Japanese Minister of War, General Hajime Sugiyama gave his underlings the green light signal without first bothering to ascertain whether the Japanese economy could stand a long war.

Ready to Fight. But in 1937 Chiang Kai-shek failed to act in his old character. Chiang is a strange thing, a grey-eyed Chinese. Willowy, wiry and methodical, he is a combination of disinterested patriot and pietistic Y.M.C.A. secretary. Like his wife, the Wellesley-schooled Soong Meiling (sister of Sun Yat-sen's widow), who is his active political aide, tough soldier Chiang is a Methodist; and together the Chiangs have sponsored China's New Life Movement, which is a uniquely Chinese combination of Christian idealism and traditional ethical Confucianism.

Part of Chiang's temporary placation of Japan had consisted of "chasing" the Chinese Red Army from Kiangsi south of Shanghai back through the immensity of hither China on a vast circuitous sweep over mountain ranges, deserts and rivers to Shensi, in the great bend of the Yellow River--the birthplace of China's 4,000-year-old civilization. The Red Army marched 6,000 miles in their retreat, fighting 15 major battles and some 300 skirmishes. Nothing like this movement had been seen since the escaped Czech legionnaires, who had been prisoners in Russia, fought their way to freedom across Siberia to the Pacific in 1918.

As it turned out, the escape of the Chinese Communists was the precipitating factor in the chemistry of recent Chinese history. For the Chinese Reds, who kept saying "Japan is the enemy," eventually pushed the sharp-nosed, slack-lipped young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, son of Chang Tso-lin, the old warlord of Manchuria, to the supreme effrontery of kidnapping Chiang Kai-shek in northwestern Sian in 1936. Long conversations with the generalissimo convinced young Marshal Chang and the Communists of something that Chinese patriots now accept as fact: that Chiang was determined to resist the Japanese. All his placation was only to gain time to organize his nation, strengthen his army, build roads, prepare for the inevitable retreat into the interior once war was joined.

When the kidnappers became convinced of Chiang's patriotism, the kidnapping turned into a fantastic game of Face-saving and counter-Face-saving. Kidnapper Chang was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, reprieved and placed under "disciplinary observation." Kidnapped Chiang apologized to the Chinese people for the whole incident. But the practical upshot of the curious affair was Chiang's decision that the time had come for a United Front of all Chinese, Reds included, to resist Japanese pressure.

The Chinese currency has been stabilized, and two remarkable brothers-in-law (of each other and of Chiang*), the solid, wistful Yale-trained, Dr. H. H. Kung, and the glossy, competent Harvardian, T. V. Soong, had at last succeeded in teaching their countrymen the art of central banking.

Chiang was ready to fight because during the years between 1932, when Japan set up her stooge empire in Manchukuo and the kidnapping at Sian in 1936, China had matured politically and grown stronger economically. And for the same reason, fearing a United Front of all Chinese, the Japanese struck two years ago this week.

Whose War? One year later, General Seishiro Itagaki, arch extremist of the Japanese army, who had become Minister of War, could have claimed that the Japanese had for all practical purposes won their war: they had bitten off the five northern provinces as planned. But the Japanese had found that they were not fighting their war. They were fighting Chiang's war and they had still to win it.

Instead of suing for peace, Chiang retreated, drawing the Japanese Army farther and farther into China's mammoth interior, imitating after a fashion the strategy by which the Russians ruined Napoleon in 1812.

The Japanese still do not dare declare an end to the undeclared war, for such a declaration would mean great loss of Face.

They must first suppress the Man, Chiang, who has spoiled their plans. Even if they could get him they might not bring an end to Chinese resistance. Chinese national consciousness is becoming a hardy plant, and there are now other good Chinese generals, notably Li Tsung-jen and Pai Chung-hsi of the crack Kwangsi army, who might carry on. But the death of Chiang might mean a short period of struggle for power within China. With such a struggle for power going on, Japan could terminate hostilities without loss of Face.

Lopsided as were the military odds, the invasion of China has been no mediocre war like the conquest of Ethiopia. The number of men engaged was more than twice that of the late Civil War in Spain.

The casualties can only be guessed at, but they have been huge -- even among the Japanese, who have had to fight General Plague, General Flood, and General Attrition. The Japanese sack of Nanking will go down in history as the greatest mass sexual orgy of modern times -- thousands of women and girls were assaulted to top off the mass execution of thousands of civilians. The fall of Canton last October was equally extraordinary: fearful that the story of Nanking would be repeated, Canton's 860,000 residents virtually abandoned the city within a few hours of the Japanese arrival -- probably the greatest spontaneous civilian evacuation in history.

In battle, the Japanese, who have modern guns and a vastly superior air force, have won most of the direct engagements with ease. The most successful Chinese tactic is the "scorched earth" policy, which prevents the Japanese from living off the country through which they advance. But in spite of scorched earth and burned buildings, the Japanese have seized the cities and important railroads of North China, and have pushed their lines up the Yangtze valley to Hankow. Japan's conquest at its furthest limits extends 1,000 miles from north to south, 1,000 miles from east to west.

Behind the Front. But still unconquered are tens of thousands of square miles behind the Japanese lines, regions ruled by guerrilla bands of Chinese. Since they must keep an army of 475,000 in Manchukuo, as insurance against Russia, Japanese cannot afford the manpower necessary to garrison most Chinese villages in the occupied areas. So they have attempted to set up puppet Chinese governments. Where these governments are effective the Chinese are taxed to death; there is a tax on pigs, a tax on goods-in-stock, a tax on travel, and a, tax on the movement of all commodities. Farm animals have been seized, and the metal parts of tools confiscated. Finally, Japanese have at tempted to force their own currency and their own import prices on Chinese buyers and sellers in North China.

The Chinese, however, are by turns unbelievably bold and unbelievably ingenious in the ways of sabotaging the would be conqueror. They assassinate puppet officials. Throughout 150,000 square miles of territory in the rear of the Japanese Army they have organized "self-defense" governments. Some 75,000,000 people, almost as many as lived in pre-Munich Germany, help the Cooperative Committees and the Mobilization Committee of these governments. Boys between 14 and 16 years of age act as a special messenger service; farmers cooperate by cutting ditches and felling trees across roads to impede Japanese troop movements.

The Red Eighth Route Army harries the invader by guerrilla fighting throughout Shansi and Southern Hopei, and a "People's Self-Defense Army" of 50,000 mobile guerrilla units operates in central Hopei. By day a Chinese peasant, brown as the earth he tills, may placidly hoe his rows; by night he may be part of a guerrilla band that is chivying Japanese sentries; next day, when the Japanese start reprisals, he will be back on his acre, his gun and soldier's kit buried, a blank look on his face.

Peasants have other means of resistance. Unless it is tendered on the point of a bayonet, a Japanese yen-backed note from the new Japanese-dominated North China Federal Reserve Bank is not honored at face value. Last spring in the Japanese-occupied areas of North China, the Chinese mysteriously forgot to plant their usual cotton crop. Unless the Japanese can debauch the Chinese in captured sectors with opium, as they are trying to do, this sort of passive resistance might go on for decades.

The Money War. For years Chinese patriots denounced the "treaty ports" and the international settlement where foreign devils maintained their own "extraterritorial" courts and police power. But today were it not for these international areas the Chinese would not be able to carry on as well as they do against the Japanese. The political capital of Chiang's Government is now far-off Chungking but for Westerners its financial capital is in the foreign enclaves, particularly Hong Kong and Shanghai. The Japanese are bitterly aware of this. They have not yet dared seize the international settlement of Shang hai and other foreign areas of cities but they have tried gradual encroachment, and last week they tried something stronger, blockading the French and British concessions in Tientsin, thereby striking a blow where the U. S. has no direct territorial rights (see p. 21).

If they can permanently cut off Tientsin, the Japanese may be able to suppress one of the most troublesome of the black bourses where Japanese currency is bought and sold at a discount. This is not only an economic disadvantage but a loss of face. But even if the Japanese are able to clear the money-changers out of Tientsin, there remain Shanghai and the illegal black bourses in Tsingtao and other Chinese cities in which there are no foreign concessions or settlements. And if Shanghai were seized the legal black bourse could move to British-owned Hong Kong.

Some months ago the U. S. lent $25,000,000 to the Chinese Universal Trading Corp. to finance Chinese purchases in the U. S. Shortly afterward, Great Britain lent $25,000,000 to the Chinese to stabilize the Chinese dollar. With the Chinese treasury thus bolstered, the Japanese yen, whose value has been depreciated in the occupied areas for some time, actually sank below the value of the Chinese dollar. Moreover, the Japanese cannot get needed foreign exchange from China with which to buy planes, oil and scrap iron so long as deals on China's coastal soil are cleared through western treaty port banks.

Great Trek. With the fall last autumn of Hankow and Canton, the two ends of Chiang Kai-shek's railway supply line, the Chinese lost the route by which they were accustomed to receive munitions from British Hong Kong. This terrific blow caused western wiseacres to proclaim that Japan had won the war. But the capture of the Canton-Hankow railway terminals instituted a new period of Chinese resistance. With Chiang's capital removed to Chungking in interior Szechwan, a new motor road was completed across mountain ranges and torrid jungles to British Burma, which fronts on the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. Other routes have been kept open from Yunnan to French Indo-China, the old Imperial Highway rebuilt across the deserts of Sinkiang to the Soviet border.

The Interior provinces upon which Chiang's army must now rely are potentially wealthy. Szechwan, with an area of 155,000 square miles (approximately the area of California), is rich in gold and oil, and its 52,000,000 people produce four harvests a year. Rice, wheat, barley, millet, tobacco, sugar cane, corn, beans and cotton make up its harvests. Neighboring Yunnan has tin, copper, iron and coal, and its mulberry leaves are juicy enough to nourish a great silk industry. Kweichow is up-tilted country, good for cattle raising and orchards.

This wealth cannot make up for the loss of the industrialized China coast. Nor can enough war material reach China by difficult caravan routes across the great deserts from Soviet Asia. But under stress the newly nationalist Chinese have done what no other people have ever done: they have picked up their factories--as a Biblical character once picked up his bed--and walked. Industrial equipment valued at $100,000,000 Chinese (U. S. $3,448,275) was removed from Shanghai in the early days of the war. That was only a beginning of a great industrial and cultural migration.

Aside from war and politics, this movement--which at one stroke transplanted factories, colleges and Government to the heart of a primitive continent, may be a milestone in the history of Asiatic civilization. The migration was in the hands of the Minister of National Economy, Dr. Oong Wen-hao, a geologist and mining engineer who once studied at Louvain in Belgium. According to John Gunther, Dr. Oong had by the end of 1938 supervised the transportation of 64 machine shops, 18 electrical plants, 22 chemical plants, five glass factories, seven cotton mills, twelve printing plants, four dockyards (to build boats for use on the upper Yangtze). The weight of the machinery transported on coolie-back for hundreds of miles amounted to 25,000 tons. By U. S.

standards this amounted to a mere 500 freight car loads. By Asiatic standards it was an industrial revolution.

In Chungking, centre of the new industrial area, 140 factories -- a third from Hankow, the majority from Shanghai --have been set up. Chinese universities have also moved inland. The Government is now organizing the western peasantry into producer cooperatives for tanning leather, building small boats, weaving and spinning textiles, mining coal and iron, milling flour, making sulfuric acid.

Two Civilizations. A struggle between a people capable of such a Homeric resistance and the Japanese is lopsided in both directions. Japan is a compact island king dom with a crowded rice-and-fish-fed population of 70,000,000. Two generations ago the Japanese people accepted a "westernization" that was dictated from the top down by the Emperor and leading feudal families.

The Japanese willingly follow their near-Fascist leaders, for they regard their Emperor Hirohito -- always purblind and now rapidly growing pudgy -- as a blend of divinity and family patriarch. They are strong as a people can be living under a quasi-totalitarian state, semi-totalitarian economy.

But seizing Formosa (as Japan did in 1895) and the South Manchurian Railway (as in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904) and Korea (1910) and Manchuria (1931-32) were all child's play compared to the tremendous job of subjugating the Chinese, who outnumber the Japanese six to one, and seizing China, a country of 4,000,000 square miles, larger than the U. S.

The Chinese are an easygoing people who do not like to fight or to prepare for fighting. For years before the Sun Yat-sen revolution of 1911 they permitted the Manchu Dowager Empress, Tzu Hsi ("Old Tiger" to her people), to pit firecrackers against Enfield rifles and sailing junks against armored cruisers. Western civilization has come to them, is coming to them, not by fiat, but by hit or miss infiltration --from contact with Occidental trade, from missionary schools, from Communist propaganda, from their enemies the Japanese, from their new nationalist leaders. They are strong as only a disorganized, individualistic people can be, for they have not been much more disorganized by invasion.

Having been conquered, they go on fighting.

To wipe out their guerrilla bands alone can easily be a man-sized, two-year job for a big army. The Japanese may or may not be equal to the task.

Prize? If Soviet Russia were to attack Japan, the circumstances would, naturally, alter very much in Chinese favor. If Europe were to go to war, that would introduce further complicating elements. But the Chinese are not counting on either of these eventualities. They are prepared to fight on alone. And their continuing resistance makes for peace in Europe so long as they keep the Japanese end of the anti-Comintern alliance too occupied to abet Hitler and Mussolini in new aggressions.

There may be worthy candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize this year; but it would not be too waggish if that prize were to go to the Chinese coolie.

* T. V. Soong is the brother of 1) Mme Chiang, 2) Mme Kung, 3) Madame Sun Yatsen. fearing a United Front of all Chinese, the Japanese struck two years ago this week.

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