VERGE OF ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXI, Issue 13111, 1 April 1943, Page 3

VERGE OF ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

CHINA'S POSITION

WARNING BY MADAME KOO

Philadelphia. Pa., Feb. 2

China, beset by desperate scarcities of food and commodities and receiving only "pitiful" assistance from the United States, is on the brink of economic collapse, according to Mme. Wellington Koo, wife of the Chinese Ambassador to Britain, who addressed workers of the United War Chest here.

Terming President Roosevelt's estimate of help reaching China from America faulty, Mme. Koo said China's ability to resist the Japanese might soon reach the breaking point due to starvation among its peoples and lack of military and other supplies. Meanwhile, as dispatches from Chungking told of a Honan Province famine which had claimed thousands of victims and caused a mass exodus toward Shansi Province, the German Trans-Ocean News Agency reported from Nanking that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek and other high government and military officials had secretly left Chungking for Washington aboard four Flying Fortresses furnished by the United States Government:- The Generalissimo, it was said, would ask the United States to speed the supplies of war materials promised to China. Confirmation of the German report was not obtainable here.

In her Philadelphia warning yesterday, Madame Koo said the United States could not afford to wait much longer in dispatching equipment for the Chinese Army and in opening the way for food and other supplies which would stave off hunger and inflationary collapse.

"President Roosevelt has said that as much is being flown into China as ever went over the Burma Road," Madame Koo declared. "What he did not say was" that, of all the LendLease materials, China gets only 2 per cent, the rest going to England and Russia. What he did not say was that, of this pitiful 2 per cent, only half ever got to Burma, and that, of this, only half ever got into China.

"The President did not point out that, of what materials did go to China, 10p« per cent were made up of equipment of war and medical supplies. Not a pound of food ever went over the Burma Road or is going in now."

The "relentless pressure of war which makes itself felt in hunger and cold and worthless money, the grinding burden of increasing scarcity and rising prices", is more dangerous than all the Japanese armies are to China today, Madame Koo added.

The importing of American-credit is helpful, but it cannot prevent devaluation of the Chinese dollar when there remains a vast insufficiency of goods for the dollar to buy, she stressed.

Declaring that China was not worried about rationing because there was little to ration, the wife of the Chinese Ambassador to Britain said prices had advanced five, ten and 50 times over in the last year as inflation mounted higfc«r

"My stepdaughter is in the interior of China, working for the Red Cross," she continued. "She gets a salary of 50 dollars a month, which is above that of most salaried workers. However, a meal costs 3 dollars, a yard of cloth and a oneroom hut, made of mud and straw, costs 3500 dollars. A trip by sedan chair, which formerly cost 60 cents, now costs 6 dollars. People cannot afford to buy coal, as it costs 1000 Chinese dollars a ton, while in Chungking hotels are asking 50 Chinese dollars for a night."