War of Nerves in Chungking

Lasting peace in the Pacific can be made only with the full consent of three nations: China, Japan and the U.S. Last week one of the three, China, waited with a growing fear of betrayal while the other two whispered in a corner.

For weeks Chungking has been worried by the Hull-Nomura conversations. Last month Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek summoned U.S. Ambassador Clarence E. Gauss to his mountain cottage behind the Yangtze bluffs, asked for information. Ambassador Gauss, having none, could say nothing. Later, when President Roosevelt told the world that the U.S. Navy would sink any Nazi raider molesting shipping in the western Atlantic, Chinese radio operators strained at their earphones to hear one word about China or the Pacific. They heard none. Chungking censors sup pressed Washington dispatches reporting that the U.S. was considering Japanese claims to north and central China in return for peace in the Pacific (TIME, Sept. 13).

The Chinese had no concrete cause for worry. The U.S., they might have known, would not negotiate with Japan on the lopsided basis that the Japanese are pleased to call equitable. An agreement was as remote as the moon. But people in the position of the Chinese needed more than logic to sustain them. For four years they had cowered in dugouts, trekked thousands of miles, hungered, frozen, fought, died. What they had fought for, they told themselves bitterly, not even a friendly power could give away. And now, while Japanese troops hammered at Changsha (see p. 28), Washington's diplomacy hammered on China's nerves.

This war of nerves was especially displeasing to friends of the U.S. in Chinese councils. But there is a strong minority of Government officials which for years has urged Chinese rapprochement with Germany. For years Chiang Kai-shek has insisted that China's lot lies with the democracies. Yet if all of Russia falls, Germany and China will be neighbors. Chiang Kai-shek would strike a bargain with the devil in order to save China from the Japanese.

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