Triple Seven

China this week celebrated a memorable anniversary: San Ch'i, "Triple Seven," or the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of resistance to Japan.

It was a moment, as always, to look before and after. In Chungking, it was an occasion for parades, for orators declaiming from platforms draped with red-&-blue flags. Mme. Chiang Kai-shek had hurried home, after a seven-and-a-half-month absence and a return trip of 14,000 miles, to share in the day. For the nation the way to this vantage point had been long and bitter. Now, even more perhaps than on any previous anniversary, the prospect appeared hard. But it also held a new hope. China still fought almost alone on its far-reaching battlefields. Yet Japanese power appeared to be overextended; the Allies on distant flanks were striking blows; the Chinese strategy of selling space for time might soon be vindicated.

China's Balance Sheet. With characteristic courage, China has surmounted the past year's difficulties: two terrible famines that swept Honan and Kwangtung, a price level now 87 times the pre-war level, the throttling grip of the blockade, the hunger of vast armies for medicines and munitions, the creeping paralysis of transport. The only major Japanese military drive this year--the campaign in western Hupeh--has been smashed. The Chinese Air Force has taken the air for the first time in several years, shot down enemy planes, cooperated with the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force.

TIME Correspondent Theodore H. White, in a cable from Chungking, pointed out another significance:

"Above all, the past year marks the abrogation of the unequal treaties with foreign powers, ending what China calls 'a century of oppression.' This is the fact least grasped by Westerners and most important for understanding China. For the Chinese, in a sense, this is not only a war begun on July 7, 1937, but an incident in a greater struggle reaching back through the Nationalist Revolution of 1927 and the Republican Revolution of 1911 to the Opium War of 1840. In the chronicle of that struggle it will be recorded that only in the sixth year of the war against the Jap did the West finally accept China into the comity of the nations on a stage of equality."

China's Voice. In these six years of trial and endurance, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, more than any other man, has grown in stature as the symbol of a nation. Many a Chinese finds fault with the social and political views of this strong, indomitable leader who rose from China's minor gentry to direct 450,000,000 people. But none fails to see him as the chief artisan of resistance and final victory over Japan, of equality at the table of the nations.

Ten days after the incident at Marco Polo bridge, the Gissimo spoke: "There is only one thing to do when we reach the limit of endurance: we must throw every ounce of energy into the struggle for our national existence and independence."

Since then Chiang has spoken often, though his words have not always been heard abroad. On the Triple Seven anniversary the record of his words was spread before the English-speaking world in Resistance and Reconstruction (Harper; $3.50), a compilation of 60 of Chiang's most important messages. Through them China truly speaks:

> Oct. 25, 1938. "Our plan has been to establish the bases of our resistance, not along the coast or rivers, or at centers of communication, but in the vast interior. . . . [The] war . . . is beyond considerations of time or space."

>Feb. 21, 1939. "We cannot rely on military strength alone. We must mobilize the spirit of the whole nation. . . . We must transform the will of our people into a powerful weapon . . . a dynamic force."

> April 10, 1940. "Nothing will ever make [the Japanese] understand the measure of the spiritual strength of our people; their ignorance of the age is incurable, and of China still deeper."

> Dec. 9, 1941. "To our common battle we offer [to the U.S.] all we are and all we have, to stand with you until the Pacific and the world are freed from the curse of brute force and endless perfidy."

> Nov. 17, 1942. "We repudiate the idea of leadership of Asia, because the 'Fuehrer' principle has been synonymous with domination and exploitation. . . . China has no desire to replace Western imperialism in Asia with an Oriental imperialism or isolationism. . . . We hold that we must advance from the narrow idea of exclusive alliances and regional blocs, which in the end make for bigger and more terrible wars, to effective organization of world unity."

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