Bellyful and Sodamint

THE BATTLE FOR ASIA--Edgar Snow--Random House ($3.75).

IN CHINA NOW--Winifred Galbraith--Morrow ($2.50).

Edgar Snow is a first-class journalist and his China is a grisly and exciting place. His Cook's tour of the Asian battlefield leaves no corpse unturned. It ranges from the insane theatricality of Shanghai's bombing to the way the Japanese hang Chinese buffaloes alive over fires, slicing and eating them as they bellow. The Battle for Asia brings Red Star Over China up to date. And as with his famed account of the Eighth Route Army Journalist Snow still finds his most exciting stones among China's Communists. He also shares some of their revolutionary fervor. Hence the Cook's tour is also one long left-wing editorial.

Snow's line on China is that the Kuomintang is inadequate to its task. In all Free China, in 1939, there were but three arsenals, some 20,000 trucks (with gasoline to move 10,000), a steel output of 60 tons per day (against Japan's 20,000) With such inferior fire power, China had only two strategic advantages: space and number. Her generals had not yet learned how to use space. As for her 400 millions so bitterly had the Kuomintang fought all organization for a decade, that at war's outbreak only one per cent of that horde was susceptible of mobilization.

But far from the shifting capital, along the North Border, the despised and feared Communist armies began to use numbers and space. Under the Marx-mouthed name of total-mass protracted resistance they developed guerrilla warfare into a new military tactic. And in what was left of Shanghai, labor-loving Rewi Alley, Snow and others, cooked up the grandiose pink dream of China's Industrial Co-operatives British Ambassador Sir Archibald John Kerr Clark Kerr did the liaison work that began their reality.

In July 1938 Indusco had no equipment and a one-man staff. By October 1940 it was "a living chain of small industry over 2,000 miles long." Its links were some 2,300 plants in 16 provinces, run by 300,000 Chinese. Entire overhead for one month is but $6,000, of which two-thirds comes from overseas. For the Kuomintang is reluctant to help. Chiang Kai-shek's shih-shih (yes-yes) men see in it "a new kind of democratic working-class mobilization outside their control."

To Snow, Indusco and the Red guerrillas prove that China's peasants are capable of self-government, that China's only hope lies in more democracy than the Kuomintang will grant.

A timely sodamint for this rumbling bellyful is In China Now. The gentle work of an Englishwoman who spent 15 years in China as a mission teacher, it proffers no resonant facts, no roars of scorn or praise no plans at all. Miss Galbraith writes mildly meditative "character sketches" of common Chinese people under war. Perhaps a few too many of the "characters" have some faintly whimsical object-of-love which ends up under a bomb; but several of the stories--such as that of a hunchbacked spinster who had shy hopes of, and lost, a one-armed soldier--are truly touching. There are also epigraphs--ancient Chinese poems, finely translated by Helen Waddell--which have the simple depth of starlight. In the long run, an earnest Christian calm is by no means the foggiest lens through which to examine chaos. Miss Galbraith is not a journalist; she is concerned with human hearts, not masses of humanity. But like the simple, earthy tales of Pearl Buck (of which Miss Galbraith's are a sort of distillate) her stories describe an aspect of Chinese life that has a way of surviving revolutions.

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