STIRRING TIMES

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 129, 3 June 1935, Page 3

STIRRING TIMES

MANCHUKUO'S HISTORY

A BOOM AND A DECLINE

PROBLEM FOR INDUSTRY

"Is there any other part of the world of which it can be said that in one ye"ar it has had more railways built; the greatest boom in real estate and city construction; the largest number of churches built; the greatest number of Bibles sold; the greatest number of trains wrecked by political 'bandits, and the longest period of spiritual reviVal in its' history?" asks a writer in "World Dominion."

"In writing of Manchukuo one is continually tempted to use the superlative; its use would be quite in order regarding most things, good and evil, but the mind tires, and men become impatient when everything is described as the greatest, the longest, the highest, and the broadest. Yet all activities in this country must be evaluated against the background of an extraordinary stimulation.

"The secular Press from time to time reports chaos, yet speaks of the building of over '2000 miles of railway in difficult country in two years; it reports the blowing up of a passenger train and the abduction of dozens of its passengers; the wrecking of freight trains at the rate of three per week; yet when one takes up a religious newspaper reporting on Manchuria, and l-eads that a record of Bible selling has been made and a record in giving by the indigenous Church has been reached, the bewilderment is likely to increase rather than decrease. It may be difficult to reconcile these things, yet these are but the record of what is happening. "If the visitor who has read all this is still confused, and not quite sure about the veracity of reports, whether secular or religious, let'him investigate a little further. Let him take a trip down the railway line running from Kirin to Mukden, via Hailung, and he will be on the scene of the most spectacular contrast. Along that "railway line throughout the year there have been massed attacks by bandits on cities, and in these same cities there have been large and beautiful' churches in the process of building. CHURCH DEDICATION. "At the time of writing, a letter came inviting me to the dedication of a church built to the memory of Blind Chang, of Hailung, while a second letter informed me that the city of Shanchengtsze had been entered and looted by bandits. * • "This place' is only half an hour s rail journey from Hailung, the scene of the dedication of the memorial church, and three-quarters of an hour's journey from Tingfeng, where the Finnish Salem Mission one month later dedicated its large and beautiful church. Shanchengtsze itself was the scene of the dedication of a church. .. . These churches," the writer adds, 'are not edifices built up by optimistic mission boards in the West in the hope that some day they may be used; they are churches built largely at the expense of the local Christians themS In a lengthy contribution to the "Contemporary Review," Mr. Allington Kennard gives another side of the situation. He writes:— . "Even in a land of cheap living .the Japanese farmer's budget makes extraordinary'reading. At the last sitting of the Diet a group of angry farmers, who presented petitions requesting relief, revealed that the average income for the 6,000,000 farming families is y.120 a year. At par rates of exchange—the fairest computation, since the cost of living has not been affected by the fall of th! yen-that represents £12 a year for a family of five. THE AVERAGE WAGE. "For purposes of comparison it may be not>ed that the average wage paid in the cotton mills works out a a little over £26 a year. The Jtarmers £12 is net income, after meeting interest charges on the enormous mountain of debt which is slowly suffocating agriculture It is the fall in the price oi Ws product which is the primary-cause S the farmer's distress, but the burden of debt is a very close second, and by a cumulative process it would eventually have precipitated a crisis, even h Uad?he hG Vove Prnmenfs efforts to bolster prices been successful. For years the farmer has been getting^ slowly into the grip of the moneylender until today his total indebtedness is £S£hugefaUinthevalueof silk exports-and consequently in the Sir's eamings-which is creating so much perturbation. Not many years 2o*the P export of silk to America used to be reckoned the backbone of Japanese trade The extent of the fall may be seen in the figures for the past ten years:— Yen. ' . 622,223,121 \fA '.'.'.','.'.'.'.'.'■'■'■'■'•'•'•'• 840,486,448 lop (sii'monthvr:::::: liti'Ssis . "The possibilities of the situation are patent. No one has yet been, able to explain to the farmer why, the harder he works, the worse off he is. HIS RUIN. "There is a Japanese proverb to the effect-that three daughters are the ruin of any farmer—a reference to the costly wedding trousseau and feasting which every father,has to provide—but that stands in need of revision today, when the girls go to work in the cities and manage to send a little money "An appreciable number of farmers have even migrated to the cities with their families, and more will be tempted to do so as the silk crisis grows worse. Morris Clubs—so named in honour of William Morris, the craftsman Socialist—have provided work for others, but these handicraft industries offer only a precarious living, while a good farmer does not always make a capable factory operative. It is also a reasonable assumption that Japanese exports have reached their maximum, and that when the full effect of the quotas and restrictions enforced by many countries begins to be felt, it will coincide disastrously with break-ing-point in the .rural districts. "What would have happened naa Japan been faced with an unemployment problem in the past decade as a subject for interesting speculation. We may be supplied with the answer, however, in the next eighteen months, In the wors wt of the depression the total unemployment was not more than 450,000. The number today is less than half that. ■ THE SILK CRISIS. "The Government has never had to concern itself seriously with the workJess! and the few public works it sponsored were paid for wheri the Budg was more or less balanced. The defence estimates have since beea doubled, and the Government is now spending nearly twice its An^ interruption of foreign trade will Dp calamitous. Two million bankrupt, sericuCists, unabsorbable in alternative occupations, offer an equally dire proßPe'ofnless silk prices rise these two million are certainly heading for bankZT and the only hope of a pnqe rise rests on demand on the other side

of the Pacific. A very slender hope indeed. Yet much depends on it. "To show which way the wind is blowing, mention may be made of the recent deputation which visited the War Minister, General Hayashi. Pointing out that Army and Navy alone cannot guarantee national defence, these farmers bluntly told the general that failure to deal with the rural crisis will upset the higher command's conception of national security. They concluded with the request that 5 or 10 per cent, of the war budget be devoted to agricultural subsidies. The significance of the deputation lies in the fact that it represents the first threat of a break in the national front formed when the Japanese^ army marched into Mukden in 1931."