CHINA

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 4953, 9 February 1937, Page 3

CHINA

THE PROBLEM OF THE PACIFIC. (By J. G. H. in Brisbane Mail.) Had China in the last 50 years applied herself with Japan’s energy, thoroughness, courage and perseverance to mastering Western technique in war and peace she would have been supreme in the Eastern Hemisphere. Had she developed her agricultural x-esources as Japan has done, had she trained her teeming millions to manufacturing industry, had she built a navy and recruited and equipped an army commensurate with her resources when measured by Japan’s achievement she would have been a world Power able to match the might of any Occidental combination. One has only to travel through a small fragment of China, through no more than the three provinces which are traversed by the Panking—Peiping railway, to realise the vast resources of the Chinese nation and their pitiful waste.

From the railway train between Shanghai and Nanking, and between Nanking and Peiping, the traveller, it is true, continually sees laboriously cultivated land. But far or near he also sees the gaunt lines of hills or mountains long ago denuded of every scrap of timber. Deprived of the protection of trees the soil has been washed away by rains or blown away by winds, leaving only barren rock where cultivation of tree or crop is now virtually impossible.

The visible yellow plains of the Shangtung province would soon become desert but for their periodic flooding. These floods destroy human life by the tens of thousands, but they spread over the land fertile loess and hundreds of thousands of poverty stricken peasants return to the enriched land and cultivate it anew. The lot of the Japanese farmer may be hard, but it is opulence compared with that of the Chinese. The Chinese must build his house of mud and straw because of the scarcity of timber and the preciousness of stone. His children, boys and girls, run naked in the fields.

Over large tracts of China the exactions of the soldiery and of the money lenders, to whom the farmer has had to pledge his land and his crops, have left him no means to buy fertiliser or good seed. The agricultural productivity of China could be doubled had the Chinese farmer the security of the Japanese. Yet the Chinese people breed prolifically. Life is pathetically cheap. The jinrilcisha man survives in Japan to give entertainment to the tourist. But in the great cities he has become little more than a museum piece. His “man power carriage” has been supplanted by the taxicab. The taxicab driver makes a very thin living. He obtains his car from a hiring company, and in Tokyo he is able to take out a car only every other day, because there are so many more taxi drivers than cars. But he is adequately clothed, gives cheerful service, and keeps to his bargain when hired. In the cities of China the jinrikisha man is still an indispensable utility. He is half naked. By his Chinese customers he is beaten down for his fare to a few cash. His night’s shelter is often his jinrikisha under the cover of some archway. He is little more than a beast of burden. His hope in life is some tourist whom he may grossly overcharge. The Occidental, who has become habituated, in the comfort of a club and the security of a concession, to the poverty of China sometimes resents the independence which he has to respect in the Japanese. But he cannot deny that Japan is fortunate in having no foreign concessions, and in owning every square inch of her island homeland, and he must acknowledge that his life and property are more secure in Japan, where he must live as a guest, than in China, where he lives behind a barricade of extraterritorial rights and privileges. He can move about Japan and penetrate into the poorest quarters of its cities without incurring any more risk of molestation than he would in Australia or any Western Euorpean country. But even in Shanghai he is

warned not to enter the Chinese city without a guide. In any case he would be pestered by beggars and harassed by importunate jinrikisha men. For all its outward show Shanghai is a monument to China’s decrepitude. It proclaims old China’s dependence on foreign enterprise. It speaks nothing of new China. But some 250 miles inland from Changhai is the hope of new China—Nanking. Nanking is an astonishing place. Here Chinese Nationalism is doing what Russian Communism is doing in Moscow and Japanese Imperialism is doing in Hsinking —constructing a new metropolis on a grandiose scale and apparently regardless of cost. Many splendid cities have occupied the site of Nanking during the course of more than two thousand years. The mighty walls which still enclose a large part of its area were built in the fourteenth century, but they were then raised on the foundations of much older fortifications.

Nanking was still a magnificent city, though no longer the capital of China, when the Haiping rebels seized it in the last century and were besieged in it for ten years. Little was left of Nanking after that calamity, except its walls and ruined temples and palaces, sacked of all their treasures. Its population dwindled from more than 1,000,000 to fewer than 200,000. What had once been crowded streets, markets and pleasure gardens became fields where water buffalo grazed and peasants cultivated small plots. The waters of neglected canals flowed into swamps, and Nanking became a shrunken provincial town, mocked in its squalor by its monumental walls, though retaining commercial importance as the chief inland port on the lower Yangtze. This was the place chosen to be the capital of the Chinese Republic when the fidelity of Peiping to the Republic regime seemed too dubious to trust, and when Canton had called in Russian aid to maintain its own interpretation of Dr Sun Yat Sen s testament. Since then Nanking has undergone a wonderful transformation. A broad, asphalted and tree planted boulevard has been driven as straight as an arrow from the northern to the southern gate of the city. Whatever stood in its way, shops and houses and even hills, were levelled. Another boulevard crosses it.

Along these main thoroughfares palatial Government buildings have risen or are in process of construction. The roads carry a heavy traffic of motor buses, lorries, motor cars and bicycles. But along the side paths still plod slow caravans of donkeys and large areas of grass grown waste land, grazed by water buffaloes, extend behind the new buildings and building sites. Every other Chinese appears to wear a military or police uniform. Incidentally, the Chinese Government, unlike the Japanese, has to recruit its military officers from the cities because of the almost universal illiteracy of the rural classes. On the outskirts of Nanking are newly equipped aviation fields, and also a vast park containing the resplendent mausoleum raised in honour of Dr Sun Yat Sen. A steepbroad flight of many hundred marble steps lead to the richly adorned hall of memory and the traditional cupola that is the actual tomb of Sun Yat Sen. Most obviously it was intended to vie with the former splendour and the proved durability of the tombs of the early Ming Emperors within the same park. These have survived neglect and even deliberate attempts at destruction after 500 years. One wonders at whose cost is being found the enormous expenditure for the making of new Nanking and what

small fraction of the Chinese peasantry will ever see it. Yet it is an inspiring witness to the faith, courage and energy of new China. This is a modern capital which the Chinese are trying to build for themselves. Though they have had to make large use of foreign technical advice, they are reluctant to grant to foreigners any property rights that might be enlarged into permanent territorial concessions. From Nanking, where all is new and hopeful, to Peiping, the new name of degraded Peking, where all is old and regretful, is a sharp transition. Peiping feels only anxiety for its future. It is now on the political fringe of China. A few score miles away is the frontier of a new State which Japanese troops garrison. A strong Japanese force is within a few hours’ march at Tientsin. A Chinese army pitifully equipped is quartered in the environs of the city, but no one knows when it may receive orders to remove itself. But if Peiping is dying, it is dying gracefully and slowly. It is still a gi’eat city, for it has institutions and treasures which cannot be easily removed elsewhere. It is still the cultural and educational capital of China.

The city itself calls to mind one of those ingenious Chinese ivory carv-. ings which contains casket within casket. There is the Forbidden City, itself a congeries of palaces and courts. To look down upon it is to gaze on a field of gold of ornate yellow tiled roofs which are a continuing memorial to the opulence of the life which they once sheltered. To enter it is to tread on alabaster, and to be shown treasure house after treasure house. Around it is the Manchu city, where once resided those of the privileged ruling race of China who had duty in the capital. Around that again is the Tartar city, and beyond that the Chinese city. Peiping contains yet another “city,” the Legation Quarter. Here, to be reached only by sentry guarded gates, are quiet, clean and pleasant streets, and handsome residences set among ’gardens and trees. It is little wonder that the embassies of the foreign Powers are loth to leave Peiping for the rawness of Nanking. Peiping contrives to govern itself efficiently, and an urbane life flows through it. Its citizens stroll on a summer’s evening through spacious pleasure parks, which once were the sacred preserves of the Imperial Court. The lavishness with which the Ranking Government has laid out parks in its new capital is perhaps an attempt to prove that a republic can provide as well for the populace as an Imperial regime once provided for its court and nobility. In the midst of alarms and excursioijgj Peiping enjoys the fleeting hour, "jfeimour from time to time whispers that the Forbidden City is to be closed again, and to become the residence once more of an Emperor of China, who now, under Japanese protection, is merely Emperor of Manchukuo.

It is difficult for the Occidental mind to measure the depth of the gulf which now sunders China and Japan. Perhaps a political coalition of the Japanese and Chinese people is as remote as Franco-German amity and cooperation, but if it were effected it would shake the world.