CHINESE PEASANTS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25798, 20 March 1945, Page 8

CHINESE PEASANTS

BACKBONE OF RESISTANCE GREAT CONTRIBUTION TO WAR To the peasants of China we owe profound thanks, writes Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times. For more than seven years they have endured the enemy without submitting. With three-quarters of their vast country occupied they have retained their independence. Although their resistance is unspectacular and time and again their tired armies have broken before the invader, their contribution to the war is incalculable. Inside their country the enemy has never enjoyed the satisfactions of conquest. For more than seven troublesome years he has never dared let go. Like everything else in China, the nature of the resistance is tremendously complicated. Only a nation of primitive development could survive piecemeal, as China has done. The privations of war have borne most heavily on the white-collar class of teachers, Government employees and other salaried people whose incomes under the inflation have become tragically inadequate. But the war has been sustained chiefly by the peasants. who have supplied rice through taxation and soldiers through conscription.

Comprising about 85 per cent, of China's enormous population, they are the source of China’s resistance.