Depression in Chungking

Chungking has never been a particularly happy city. It is at best a dark, damp, depressing place. But never before has there been such gloom as prevails this spring in China's capital.

Chungking is no longer a city of defiance, a place where men dream of their country's coming unity and progress, and act in the face of crisis. The inmates of Chungking--for many of them have come to feel like inmates rather than inhabitants--are gradually becoming spectators of the war rather than its combatants, and they are depressed by what they watch.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek is still a symbol and an inspiration. His prestige is still high. But his problems have never been greater.

After six years of war, blockaded China is weaker economically and militarily than at any stage of the conflict with Japan. The country is in the throes of the worst inflation since the Sung Dynasty--in the Twelfth Century, just before the invasion of Genghis Khan, when rocketing prices in Peking would change between morning and evening. Malnutrition and privation are slowly undermining the vitality not only of the Army, but of the many intellectuals and younger office holders on whom China's future leadership largely depends. Inadequate material help from America and continued delay in the only quick means of bringing that help -- the reconquest of the Burma Road -- have provoked a growing feeling of neglect and resentment among the Chinese people.

Although Chiang's bitterest enemies, the Communists, concede that he is the only possible wartime leader, his Army and theirs are still at odds.

Goods Cannot Move. Through no fault of its own, China is stagnant. Japan's very nearly total blockade has accomplished a kind of stillness inside China that looks to some Chinese like the stillness of death.

Until 1938 the main dependence of Free China for goods that gave her life --for trucks, tires, spare parts, lubricants, fuels, the things of mobility--was on the Hong Kong-Canton route of imports. Later, until 1940, it was on the roads and railway through Indo-China. Imports through Indo-China averaged 40,000 tons a month, and the Burma Road was an insignificant supplement--perhaps 3,000 tons a month. After the fall of France, the Burma Road was the only road into China, and imports over it were lifted to an unsatisfactory maximum of 14,000 tons in November 1941. Then it, too, was lost. Since then the air supply route "over the hump" from Assam has given China only a fraction of even the Burma Road's trickle.

The consequence has been that Free China has lost internal fluidity. There is almost no motion except on foot, on donkeyback, on carts with wooden wheels. In Chungking there is one dilapidated alcohol-burning bus line; otherwise rickshas and sedan chairs are the only means of transportation.

The freezing of movement has meant the freezing of things. Even if there are in one place and time plenty of blue coolie-cloth jackets, there is no easy way to move the jackets to those places where there are many bare backs.

The want of goods has resulted in a serious inflation, which China's allies cannot soon alleviate. Inflation has hit various commodities with differing impact; while a handful of rice may have increased 100% in price, a wrist watch will have increased 4,000%. This inflation is not the result of a lack of confidence in Chinese national currency; it is the result of the lack of things to buy with the currency.

People Cannot Move. Chungking is crowded with people from the coastlands of China--those who through patriotism or defiance or fear moved inland one step ahead of the conquering Jap. These people are still downriver people at heart. They have had enough. They want to go home.

An American recently walked through Chungking with a Chinese friend, asking people what they wanted to do. Sample replies:

> A repair mechanic called his wife and sat his visitors down to drink a cup of tea among the hammering apprentices. He said he had come from Shanghai with the war. He did not like being an independent mechanic as well as working in a factory, but he could not exist on factory wages during inflation. His mother and two sons were still in Shanghai. He wanted to go back to them.

> The boatmen on the Yangtze said that life was bearable now if you owned your own sampan; wages were impossible; it would be best if the war would end so that you could work on a river steamboat between Shanghai and Chungking.

> In a teahouse on top of Garrison Hill a well-dressed, thirtyish, loquacious man, celebrating with some pals, said that he liked the war fine. He was a smuggler. He was just back from Jap-occupied Hankow, where he had sold some country herbs, bought some printer's ink, brought it back, made 50% on the deal.

> Across the river in a hut on a hill, a peasant, his mother, his dead soldier brother's wife and children said that things were bad. Their little farm had been in the family for generations. Sparrows ate the grain crops on their hillside farm, and vegetables were all they could raise. Rice was so expensive they could buy only government rice, for which someone had to stand in line for hours. When the Americans asked the family what they would buy if they had a thousand dollars, the children screamed: "Buy meat, buy meat!" The grandmother, matriarch of the family, said: "I want to make some clothes."

Disease. The permanent undernourishment from which most of Chungking suffers, the eternal want of material things, the discouragement over the war, the homesickness, the weariness--these and other things have combined to infect China with an old disease. It is called squeeze. It is polite Oriental graft. In some of its smallest manifestations, Chinese squeeze is harmless, accepted. But under pressure of inflation, it has gone beyond the Chinese norm. Even Government officials, living on fixed salaries at a time when money is declining in value, have let themselves indulge in certain venal practices which surprise visitors to Chungking.

Cure. Free China is ill; but even this illness is not yet defeatism. China expects to be really free again. The only sparks of warmth and excitement which are struck in Chungking these days are during brief talks about the postwar China. After the war will come the day of construction, not just reconstruction: it will be China's long-hoped-for industrial revolution.

The hopelessness in China now arises from the knowledge that the only possible solution is a military one, and that that solution must wait for the defeat of Hitler.

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