CONFIDENCE IN VICTORY

Southland Times, Issue 24338, 20 January 1941, Page 6

CONFIDENCE IN VICTORY

CHINESE ON CREST OF WAVE VIEWS OF ADVISER TO CHIANG KAI-SHEK (Special to The Times) AUCKLAND, January 18. Confidant and intimate adviser to the rulers of China from Dr Sun Yatsen to the Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, Mr W. H. Donald, formerly an Australian journalist, is visiting Auckland. After watching China from the inside ever since he went from The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, io join The China Daily Mail in Hong Kong early in 1903, he is about to fulfil a longcherished intention of writing his memoirs, which will in effect be a contemporary history of China since the beginning of the century. “I decided to get right away from China,” said Mr Donald in an interview. “I got a steamer going to the Solomons, and my objective is Tahiti, where I intend to do my writing. Documentation will halve to wait until I get back to China. No, I won't go to Australia,” he added. “I left there 38 years ago, and I have never been back. With Australian politics the way they are. I won’t go.” LIVING DANGEROUSLY “You must have taken your life in your hands to come away from Chungking,” it was suggested. “I take my life in my hands every day,” was the prompt reply. “We live dangerously all right. They are after us all the time,” he said, referring to the many Japanese attempts to bomb the generalissimo and his party. Mr Donald said it was perfectly true that he speaks not a word of Chinese. He added: “People say, ‘How did you manage to get where you are?’ I can never answer that, because I don’t know myself. I treat them like human beings and talk to them like fellow men. If I have anything to say I say it. They know they cannot buy me, and that nobody else can buy me. There is a rumour that they do not like straight talking, but they do like it. “I have no special qualifications,” Mr Donald added with a smile, “except that I can always smile when I say a nasty thing.” “The Chinese are on the crest of a wave and the Japanese are in a bog of despair,” said Mr Donald, touching on the Far Eastern situation. He spoke with the utmost confidence of an ultimate Chinese victory. The failure and defeats of the Italians had given a severe setback to the Japanese, and the return of President Roosevelt and his policy of support for Britain had further weakened their morale.

China had now been fighting the Japanese for three years and a-half, and had out-fought and out-manoeuvred them. It was the Japanese who were the inventors of the “blitzkrieg,” which they first used against Peking, and the Germans were merely their imitators. They had their initial successes, but after three years and a-half they had never been able to cross the Upper Yellow River, the western boundary of the Shansi province. The Japanese had blocked all the coast line, but this had merely destroyed foreign trade. Chinese peasant life went on as it had done for 1000 years. The Chinese had refused to quit as the invaders had expected them to do, and wherever there was a Japanese soldier there was a Chinpse soldier to oppose him. JAPAN’S PEACE OFFERS Recently the Chinese had recaptured the strong fortress of Ma Tang on the Yangtse River, to the great consternation of the invaders. If, as they claimed, the Japanese had 1,000,000 troops in the Yangtse Valley, then the greater part of them was now cut off. Japanese troops were being moved from the Canton area now, not southward I for Indo-China, which was wholly a I naval adventure, but northward in an attempt to recover Ma Tang. ; Since October 1938. when they took Hankow, the Japanese had not had even an apparent success, except when they got into Nanning, but they had already been turned out of that. “They have been defeated in all thrusts during the last couple of years,” said Mr Donald, “and now they are in such a state that to extricate themselves is almost an impossibility. They are to get no more reinforcements.” Mr Donald recalled that Japan had time and again offered peace terms, but Marshal Chiang Kai-shek had never even deigned to consider them. Three times the Japanese had sent peace terms through the Germans, three times through the Italians, several times through puppet governors, and once through the British Ambassador. Chiang Kai-shek stoutly told the British Ambassador, “There will be peace when every Japanese soldier is out of China—not before.” TRADING WITH JAPAN It was China, Mr Donald said, that had pricked the bubble of Japanese invincibility. The Japanese had defied international laws and behaved with inhumanity. From his collection of photographs, Mr Donald produced one of Japanese soldiers practising bayonet thrusts on live Chinese coolies whose hands were bound behind their backs, while a large crowd stood round watching. Yet the Australian and New Zealand Governments were trading with

Japan and sending her things to be used against China, he said. Although Japan had joined Britain’s enemies, Australia sent an Ambassador “to take hold of her blood-soaked hand.” But if it had not been for the stand China had made at such cost, Japan would even now have carried out her programme of southward expansion to these lands. “The Chinese feel very bitterly the attitude of the democracies,” said Mr Donald. “They have got nothing from us that they have not paid for. The Russians have supplied them freely and done 10 or 20 times as much for them as we have. Madame Chiang Kai-shek once said: ‘lf we can do without Britain in war we can do without her in peace.’ The Japanese army is demoralized, and another winter is on them. They must be suffering terribly.” As anothc. reason for confidence in Chinese victory, Mr Donald told of the wonderful development of the Chinese armament industry, which was now making machine-guns and other armaments on a vast scale. Chiang Kai-shek had estimated that, even if outside supplies were completely cut off, they had enough munitions to supply them for a year.