Monday, Sep. 13, 1943

A Time for Plans

The Chinese high official weighed his words. His guest, New York Timesman Brooks Atkinson, took them down exactly as the official gave them: "Unless China can take back some of the occupied territory within a year, the difficulties of the Government will be greatly increased." The rest of the talk was off the record.

The difficulty is economic and getting worse, wrote ex-Drama Critic Atkinson afterward. The blockade stifles, equipment wears out, prices constantly climb, "Two buildings in uptown Chungking, one a temporary one-story mud-&-bamboo structure now being built . . . the other a three-story brick-&-cut-stone modern broadcasting studio built in 1939 . . . cost identical [sums]."

Atkinson's host last week may have been one of the somber, undernourished men who sit in Chungking's bleak mud-&-bamboo offices performing the routines of the day--and planning, in between, for a Chinese future with a boldness not seen since Russia's first Five-Year Plan.

The Plans. In 1941 the Chinese Society of Engineers recalled the monumental plans and dreams of Sun Yat-sen and set up a committee to reduce the 1919 sketches to exact technological data. Eminent Chinese engineers gave their spare time for 18 months, handed their findings to Chiang Kai-shek last spring. Chiang put them in a book he called China's Destiny and forbade translation or quotation abroad. The book sets forth reconstruction objectives for the next ten and 20 years--in rolling stock (25,000 locomotives, 30,000 passenger cars, 300,000 freight cars), automobiles (500,000 a year to maintain 3,000,000 on 1,000,000 miles of highway), technicians (1,000,000), sanitation and public health specialists (1,000,000), education (more millions).

Other reconstruction objectives are listed in moral, political and social terms--to lead China's 400 to 500 millions from Sun Yat-sen's stage of military unification, through his stage of political tutelage to constitutional democracy.

The Price. All plans for industrialization assume the participation of foreign capital. Last month, in London, Foreign Minister T. V. Soong welcomed foreign capital and technicians, "but not on the old basis of concessions or privileges" (TIME, Aug. 16). In Chungking Finance Minister H. H. Rung proposed that the Executive Yuan prepare new regulations providing due protection of law so that foreign capital need 'not hesitate to enter the Chinese market. But when foreign capital has been fully repaid, China will expect the properties to become Chinese.

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