The Dragon Wakes A Report From China

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MAY '4?

THE DRAGON WAKES

In Mr. Mowrer's considered opinion based
on first-hand observation in the field, Japan
can't win. He gives as his reasons : 1 ) the in-
ability of the Japanese to "occupy" more of
China than the ground their troops stand on;
,2) the steadily awakening national conscious-
ness of the whole Chinese people.

To write this book, the distinguished Amer-
ican foreign correspondent long with the
Chicago Daily News interviewed hundreds of
native Chinese as well as scores of foreign
observers. He talked with business men, man-
darins, military authorities, women, workmen,
refugees. His book is the most penetrating
study yet made of an ancient civilization caught
in the turmoil of a bitter war.

$&pks by Mr. Mowrer

IMMORTAL ITALY

THIS AMERICAN WORLD

GERMANY PUTS THE CLOCK BACK

THE:

m a j* ^ *
t a *,- *

DRAGON

A Report from China

BY
EDGAR ANSEL MOWRER

WILLIAM MORROW AND COMPANY

NEW YORK

1939

A& INTERIM COPYRIGHT

SECURED 1938 :*AM&RI<5Arf EDITION PUBLISHED
1939 : COP^BIGs^T 1939 BY EDGAR ANSEL MOWRER

*"*

i England with the title Mowrer in
China. Maps appearing in the text were drawn by
Marthe Rajchman. Quotations from The Tinder
Box of Asia by George Sokolsky, Doubleday,
Doran, New York, 1932 are by permission of
the author and publisher.

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,

must not be reproduced in any form without

permission of the publisher.

PUBLISHED, FEBRUARY, 1939
SECOND PRINTING, MARCH, 1939

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN, INC.

CONTENTS

EXPLANATION BY WAY OF A PREFACE 3

I. THE JELLYFISH TURNS 6

II. BRITAIN'S FRONT DOOR TO CHINA 20

III. BLEEDING CANTON 34

IV. FOUR FANTASTIC CITIES 47
V. THE AMAZING FAMILY OF SOONG 76

VI. ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 91

VII. CHINA IN UNIFORM 125

VIII. JAPAN MODIFIES ITS WAR AIMS 144

IX. MORALE 166

X. E PLURIBUS UNUM 187

XI. THE IMPREGNABLE SOUTHWEST 199

XII. MEDITATION WHILE FLYING TO CHENGTU 211

XIII. DIALOGUE WITH MY CONSCIENCE 221

INDEX 238

MAPS

ACCESS FROM OUTSIDE 40

COMMUNICATIONS IN THE INTERIOR 50, 51

ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 95

THE JAPANESE ADVANCE (1, 2) 149

THE JAPANESE ADVANCE (3, 4) 152

THE JAPANESE ADVANCE (4, 5, 6, 7) 157

THE DRAGON WAKES

AN EXPLANATION BY WAY OF A
PREFACE

THIS talk of China wearing out Japan is all
very well," said the Experienced Diplomat,
"but just how much do you know about China?"

"Practically nothing," I admitted. "This is my
first visit."

"Precisely," he grunted. "And you can't learn
much about China by mere reading. . . . Have an-
other drink?"

The night was stifling, hot and moist like a Turk-
ish bath. I accepted the offer.

"Boy," shouted my host, "boy, bring Master
here another gin and tonic water and put plenty
of ice in it." He turned to me:

"The trouble with most of this talk of China
winning is that it comes from people who are either
ignorant or emotionally prejudiced. It comes from
the missionaries or the other foreigners who have
lived a long time in China, or from radicals who
naturally hate Japan. In both cases it is wishful
thinking.

"The missionaries know a lot about China and
nothing about the rest of the world. How can they
judge? They got so used to seeing the Chinese run
away from a shadow or sell out their country or

3

4 THE DRAGON WAKES

their party to the first bidder that, when a few
Chinese who had been trained by German experts,
actually fought back, when the Chinese rulers for
once didn't sell out, these foreigners went crazy
and pronounced China invincible. Rubbish!

"The radicals are idealists, therefore incapable
of seeing anything as it really is,

"Now, I know China and Japan and a good deal
of the rest of the world. I don't tell you the Japs
are irresistible: any good Occidental army could
teach them their place, as General Alexander von
Falkenhausen was saying the other day. But the
Chinese aren't Occidentals. They have never had
much of an army and are not a fighting people.
They are individualists; each of them thinks only
of himself and his family. Patriotism, as we know
it, is remote to them. The Kwangtung crowd around
Canton are just merchants and laundrymen: they
talk big but they haven't any guts. The Kwangsi
crowd and the Northerners can fight for a minute,
but sooner or later they will begin quarreling and
then one of them will make his peace with the Japs,
and China will collapse like a circus tent when the
props are taken away. Just as it always has. Maybe
a people can change in the course of a thousand
years, though if you read your Tacitus you will see
that the Germans haven't changed much since Ro-
man days. But who believes you can transform over
four hundred million human beings in a generation
or two? China will remain the jellyfish it always has

AN EXPLANATION BY WAY OF PREFACE 5

been, at least for a very long time. This talk of
New China is hardly better than nonsense."

For a while the Experienced Diplomat pulled at
his Manila cigar. Then he continued:

"Now you are an old newspaper man without
any prejudices "

"Not so/ 5 I felt obliged to interrupt "I am op-
posed to aggression."

"Well, anyway, you aren't a communist or a
radical and you've been about enough not to let
your sympathies interfere with your judgment.
How many armies did you say you had been with?
Six? Well, go into China; go to Hankow to see the
Chinese leaders; get to the front and see the Chi-
nese army; get out into the backwoods and meet
the older type of cultured Chinese as well as the
smart returned students from abroad; then come
back and tell me how you feel about China's chances
of resisting a great modern country like Japan. I
am willing to trust your common sense."

I did all he told me to do. I interviewed scores
and scores of foreigners, as well as hundreds of
Chinese. I went to Hankow; I saw the Chinese army
on the Northern Front; and after a final swing
through the remote interior of China, I flew back to
Paris. There was no opportunity of giving a verbal
report to my friend, the E. D. This little book is my
substitute. This is my judgment

CHAPTER I
THE JELLYFISH TURNS

AN HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION WHICH MAY BE
OMITTED BY THE LEARNED

[ Japan have fought intermittently for

close on to thirteen hundred years. It was in

the year A.D. 661 that the first Japanese attack on
China occurred. The emperor Saimei sent his Gen-
eral Kotzuke with twenty-seven thousand men to
attack Korea, which was then a Chinese protecto-
rate. The invaders were met by the Chinese Em-
peror Kao Chung of the Tang Dynasty who, in a
combined land and naval battle at Chemulpo, com-
pletely routed them. For more than six hundred
years there was peace between the two countries.
In the next war, China, under Kublai Khan, was
the aggressor. But Kublai's invincible armada that
was to conquer Japan was destroyed, much like that
of Philip of Spain, by a typhoon. Thus encouraged,
Japan repeatedly attempted to pillage or attack
China. This process continued to the complete Japa-
nese victory of 1895, when the corrupt Manchu-
ruled Chinese Empire virtually collapsed and was
compelled to cede outright to Japan all of Korea
and the Island of Formosa as well.

Chiefly notable in this long duel was the almost
6

THE JELLYFISH TURNS 7

invincible Chinese preference for being let alone
(broken only when China was ruled by the anything
but peaceful Mongol emperors), and the incurable
Japanese penchant for war. Each Chinese success
brought about a prolonged period of tranquillity,
each Japanese victory paved the way for a new
aggression. In other words, the most pacific great
country known to history, a fountain of art and
science, was almost continually upon the defensive
against one of the most bellicose, rooster-like peo-
ples on the globe, and able to defend itself chiefly
by its bulk, its riches, and its brain power.

The Japanese invasion of China in 1937 was,
therefore, anything but a novelty. To the Japanese
ruling class, a group of people who saw nothing
amiss in the sale of Japanese children as factory
workers and prostitutes by their parents, there was
also nothing morally wrong in an endeavor to en-
slave and to stupefy and thus immobilize over four
hundred million human beings by forcing the use
of narcotics upon them. After all, had not Great
Britain exploited whole generations of English chil-
dren in factories? Had not Great Britain compelled
China to open its doors to Indian opium less than a
century before? Morality aside, however, the date
chosen for the new aggression offered evidence of
a certain time-lag in the calculation of the Japanese
military leaders, whose wits were never of the sharp-
est. For this last aggression marked an attempt to
transform China's semi-colonial position into that

8 THE DRAGON WAKES

of an undeclared but completely vassalized depend-
ency of Japan, and this at a moment when not only
China, but other Asiatic countries like Mesopo-
tamia, Persia, Siam, and even India, had begun to
emerge from their previous inferiority toward the
conquering Occident. The tide of history was run-
ning strongly against imperialism.

At a time when China was positively thrilling in
the throes of a national rebirth, the Japanese con-
tinued to consider it something less than a nation,
to mistake its intensely patriotic leaders for corrupt
condottieri and its heroic bamboo-hatted, umbrella-
carrying, barefoot soldiers for mere passive con-
scripts or avid hirelings. The visual error was clear
to the disinterested, but the Japanese eyes were
closed by the immensity of the national conceit.
They were all the more determined that China
should, before it was too late, be reduced to com-
plete colonial servitude; it should, that is, develop
little or no industry of its own, but instead provide
an inexhaustible source of raw materials and per-
manently servile customers to Imperial Nippon*

Now, it was not Japan's fault that China had, in
the Nineteenth Century, fallen victim to Occidental
colonial imperialism and it was to Japan's honor
that its military temperament saved it from a simi-
lar fate. Nor was it the Westerners who debased the
Chinese, or taught them the use of opium, or the
financial corruption, the organic disunity and in-
efficient administration which marked them out to

THE JELLYFISH TURNS 9

be the economic and often the military prey of ex-
pansive nations. Provocative weakness does invite
mistreatment, and the Chinese were both provoca-
tive and incredibly weak. As George Sokolsky wrote
in his controversial book, The Tinder Box of Asia
(1932):

The history of the foreign relations of China is a suc-
cession of outrages committed against foreign lives and
property, and all foreigners gaining thereby a wholly
unrelated and disproportionate reward.

At any event, by the outbreak of the Great War
in 1914, foreign countries had not only chipped off
numerous bits of China, like Hong Kong, as colo-
nies, but had obtained as trading centers any num-
ber of so-called "concessions," meaning virtually
real possessions, in the midst of the most important
Chinese towns. Foreign citizens possessed extrater-
ritorial rights, controlled the customs and the postal
services, impounded the principal revenues, col-
lected permanent tribute, owned more than half of
Chinese industry, had financial liens on all sorts of
things offered as collateral on the loans for which
the corrupt Chinese were forever pleading. Great
Britain, France, Russia, Germany, even Portugal,
dominated China, with Japanese influence growing
from year to year.

As fellow Asiatics themselves narrowly escaping
a fate like China's, the Japanese might properly
have put themselves at the head of an anti-imperi-
alist movement for Asiatic liberation. Instead, they

10 THE DRAGON WAKES

chose rather to join the Occidental exploiters and
eventually to go them one better.

In 1900 Japan was proud to participate with
the Western countries on equal terms in "punish-
ing" the Chinese for the Boxer outrages. In 1904
Japan fought and worsted Russia over the right to
dominate Manchuria. When the entire European
world went to war, Japan seized the German pos-
sessions. Then, in 1915, it forced upon China the
incredible "Twenty-one Demands" the result of
which would have been to turn China into an almost
exclusive fishing ground for Japanese financiers,
industrialists, and military men.

Of the five groups into which the "Demands"
were divided, China was bullied into accepting
four. All seemed set for the permanent enslavement
of the effete Chinese by Japan. Japanese troops oc-
cupied large sections of Shantung Province. When,
after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the West-
ern democracies intervened against their one-time
ally, the Japanese made a very serious though
clumsy attempt to set up Jap-controlled "White"
Russian states in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria.

An unexpected obstacle to Japanese designs
turned out to be the United States, whose Open
Door policy had long been a thorn in the flesh of
the other imperialists. By virtually deciding the
war in Europe, and by bringing China into it, the
United States did not prevent Japan from inheriting
the German Pacific Islands it had occupied, but it

THE JELLYFISH TURNS 11

did compel Nippon to disgorge what it had swal-
lowed of Shantung Province. A couple of years
later American naval preponderance, plus the
threat of still greater preponderance, enabled the
Americans at Washington to secure British and
Japanese acceptance of the Naval Limitations
Treaty and the Nine-Power Treaty that pledged its
signatories unconditionally to respect Chinese ter-
ritorial integrity and independence.

China was saved, but China was on the verge of
anarchy. The Republic of 1911 and of Sun Yat-sen
had broken up into a number of warring provinces,
each dominated by a local "war lord/ 9 The nominal
Central Government at Pekin had no authority, A
Russian-sponsored attempt at communist revolu-
tion added to the confusion. Though this was the
period (the early 'twenties) when "liberal" Japa-
nese governments claimed to be friendly to China,
their friendship continued to take the form of fi-
nancing, encouraging and using the "war lords" in
order to further the spread of anarchy, just as they
had used and then broken the first President of
the Chinese Republic, Yuan Shi-kai, during the
World War.

When, between 1925 and 1927, a half-com-
munist Kuomintang government rose to the top
and instigated a vast and disgraceful outbreak
against Westerners in China, Japan, that later
champion of anti-communism, never moved a fin-
ger, for such outbreaks obviously promoted the dis-

12 THE DRAGON WAKES

order necessary to the furtherance of Japanese
ambitions. Subsequently, Chiang Kai-shek broke
with his Soviet backers, when the Japanese en-
couraged him to waste the national energy and sub-
stance in fighting the communists. But when his
armies began to move northward in an obviously
successful attempt to unite China, the Japanese
prevented them by force from entering Manchuria,
already marked out for seizure.

In vain! The forces behind Chiang Kai-shek were
those of national revival. Renascent China found
assistance abroad. In 1931 Chiang's brother-in-law,
the gifted T. V. Soong, worked out with the League
of Nations a vast plan for the regeneration and
modernization of the entire country. From the view-
point of the Japanese, something had to be done or
China might be permanently consolidated. The Jap-
anese quickly picked a quarrel with the Chinese
authorities in Manchuria and seized the country,
setting up as a puppet Emperor the last descendant
of the Manchus, Pu-yi. And when the indignant
Chinese countered by a boycott of Japanese goods,
the Japanese provoked an "incident" and, after
much more severe fighting than was anticipated,
eventually overcame the resistance of the Nine-
teenth Chinese Route Army at Shanghai.

In violating their pledges to the League of Na-
tions, the Nine-Power Treaty, and the Kellogg Pact,
the Japanese were cynically defying the civilized
world. Italy alone seemed possessed by a philoso-

THE JELLYFISH TURNS 13

phy similar to theirs. And unquestionably they went
ahead with some trepidation, though their fears
were groundless. The British Conservatives had
long been aware of the obstacle that an effective
i League offered to imperialism, including their own.
Furthermore, they were all hot and trembling with
that "bolshevitis" from which they seemed destined
never to recover. Under British leadership the
League limited its reaction to academic disap-
proval of Japan's action, and while Japan simply
walked out of the League the latter sent a scholarly
committee of investigation to China which dis-
covered there just what it had known before leav-
ing. The American Secretary of State, Stimson, was
unable to arouse any European enthusiasm for op-
posing Japan, even morally and economically. The
League, in its first crisis with what was then con-
sidered to be a major power, failed. Its member
governments were unredeemed cynics, who mouthed
a mealy altruism while secretly condoning the op-
pression of the strong by the weak. The peoples,
insufficiently educated and all unaware that readi-
ness to stop aggression anywhere by force was the
kernel of the League and deliberately intended by
the League's founders, shrank from anything s6
"romantic" or "quixotic" as an effort to save rot-
ten old China. And thereby the door was opened
.upon a return to the naked law of the jungje'dear
to militarist hearts, and the great aim of a*wqrld
ruled, if necessary, sternly by law, went glimifter-

14 THE DRAGON WAKES

ing. The American-fathered so-called Stimson Doc-
trine of the non-recognition of territories acquired
by force, though generally followed in regard to
Manchuria, was later broken even by the United
States when Nazi Germany simply jumped upon
and annexed Austria.

Japan's seizure of Manchuria began an era of
systematic aggression, much of which was connived
at by the government of Great Britain. In 1933
Japan seized the Province of Jehol, contiguous to
stolen Manchuria and declared to be essential to
the latter's defense, and set up semi-controlled
governments in Hopei and Shahar Provinces. Adolf
Hitler slaughtered German democracy and started
upon a remarkable career of broken pledges, in
one of which naval rearmament Great Britain
became his open confederate.

In 1936 a Japanese expedition into Suiyuan
Province in Inner Mongolia was withdrawn only
when it met quite unexpected resistance. Italy,
resolved upon violence since the advent of Benito
Mussolini in 1922, finally attacked black Ethiopia
in 1935, encouraged by Pierre Laval of France.
League action, though tardily undertaken, was so
half-hearted and feeble, that though it served to
dupe the British people into supporting the Con-
servatives at the general election, it did not deter
the Italians. Whereupon, the following summer,
those two strong-arm dynamists, Mussolini and
Hitler, joined their forces in assisting a group of

THE JELLYFISH TURNS 15

rebel Spanish generals in an insurrection against a
perfectly legal but faintly "pink" Spanish Repub-
lican government. The pretext was, naturally, de-
fense against "bolshevism." Sly financiers and
ignorant old gentlemen and fascists everywhere
applauded mightily. Thanks to the cowardice of
the French and the now almost open pro-fascist
leanings of the British Conservative Cabinet, Ger-
many and Italy were allowed to go ahead with a
full-fledged invasion of Spain, whose ultimate vic-
tims could only be France and the British Empire.
The spectacle was so edifying Britain and France
frantically preventing the League of Nations from
taking any decisions against two bare-faced thieves
that the "third robber," Japan, decided that here
was a game worth playing and proceeded to form,
with the two assailants of Spain, an "anti-com-
munist" pact that virtually made Japan a part of
the "Rome-Berlin Axis" which was claiming to
dominate Europe.

The moment seemed well chosen for once more
rescuing the world from "bolshevism." Just at this
time (Christmas, 1936) something extraordinary-
happened in China: Chiang Kai-shek, as the result
of a temporary kidnaping and a number of impor-
tant discussions with his Chinese patriot captors,
made his peace with the Chinese communists and
secured their allegiance. In ten years, from 1927,
Chiang had extended the rule of the Central Gov-
ernment he represented from five of the eighteen

16 THE DRAGON WAKES

provinces to all of them save those directly or
indirectly under the Japanese boot. And even the
northern rulers, whom the Japanese considered
their puppets, began to feel the wave of patriotism
that was sweeping the country and to gravitate
toward Chiang Kai-shek. For example, General
Sung, of the so-called Hopei-Shahar Government,
became so busy in his native village sweeping the
tombs of his dead ancestors, that he sometimes for-
got to obey the orders from Tokyo.

Thanks in part to Chiang's wise measures and
his efforts at national moral regeneration, thanks
to British assistance in stabilizing the Chinese cur-
rency in 1935, China in 1937 was actually able to
borrow in foreign markets for the first time in its
history without collateral and at a low rate of inter-
est. In both the military and economic fields the
country was making enormous progress. Anti-
Japanese feeling was growing along with self-confi-
dence. Having had to choose between unity or
absorption, the Chinese had chosen unity.

What more outrageous "bolshevism" than this
could be imagined! Tokyo considered the northern
Five Provinces of China as already belonging to
Japan. Was not Japan pushing smuggled goods
into them with impunity and thus defrauding the
Nanking Government of fifty million dollars a
year? Had not Japan set up an entire semi-ofpeial
machine for the debasing of the Chinese and the
enriching of the Japanese by the unhampered

THE JELLYFISH TURNS 17

facture and enforced sale of narcotics to Chinamen?
The Five Provinces were rich: they contained iron
and coal. China, in Japanese eyes, was to become
another Korea, a sort of second British India con-
ceivably independent in name, but practically sub-
ject to Japan, with hired Chinese officials and cor-
rupt "war lords" playing the role of the Indian
maharajahs. Japanese industry demanded new milk
pots to skim, Japanese military new and easy
laurels. And so, following the tried and time-
honored technique of first provoking "incidents,"
and then punishing the Chinese for allowing them
to occur, the Japanese struck at the Marco Polo
Bridge near Peiping, July 7, 1937. Again, with the
blessing of Britain and conceivably of Germany,
Japanese troops invaded the coveted provinces
while warning the Chinese not to defend them.

Now, of course, this was not the way the Japanese
saw the situation. When, therefore, Chiang Kai-
shek, against British advice, defied the invaders and
sent his soldiers north of the Yellow River to de-
fend Chinese territory, the Japanese determined to
teach him a lesson. To them, Japan was fighting in
"self-def ense" ; in defense, that is, of its right to
treat the Chinese as it treated the Koreans and the
natives of Formosa. Japan had extended the "hand
of friendship" to China. What did these Chinese
meto by their "insincere" conduct in refusing "to
be toads"? The lords of the Far East would show
them. ... A new "incident" perhaps deliber-

18 THE DRAGON WAKES

ately provoked by the navy against the wishes of
the army conveniently occurred on Hungjao Road
in Shanghai, and Japan launched a second attack
against that international town. What had the
world's most terrible soldiers to fear? The League
would eventually meet and register China's pro-
test, powers like the United States would frown,
but none would go to war to save China* Had not
Britain's Foreign Minister, Anthony Eden, told the
House of Commons ten days after the original "in-
cident" that he "sympathized with Japan's difficul-
ties"? Soviet Russia had accepted a minor humilia-
tion in June on the Amur River: the country was
weakened by Stalin's too frequent "purges" and
was caught off its guard by the suddenness of
Japan's action. Besides, what had mighty Japan to
fear from American pacifists, pro-fascist British
Conservatives, timid French provincials, or bearded
Bolsheviks? Let them look out. And so, blithely
and full of beans, the Japanese militarists set about
teaching China a lesson.

The historian may note with surprise how the
Japanese leaders, remote physically and psycho-
logically from the Western world, and neighbors
of China, guessed to a T what the Occidentals
would or rather would not do, while utterly
failing to foresee the all but unanimous reaction
of the Chinese.

By September, 1937, two months after the out-
break of the undeclared war, the Oriental Econo*

THE JELLYFISH TURNS 19

mist, organ of the Japanese financial interests, could
write that "Japan faces the most critical situation
since the Empire's foundation." For the Chinese
jellyfish had turned and its sting was biting deep
into the pride and the body of Nippon.

CHAPTER II
BRITAIN'S FRONT DOOR TO CHINA

NOW that you have talked with the Governor
of the colony,, Sir Geoffrey Northcote, you
ought really to see the King," my German friend
told me. "Unfortunately he is now in England."

"The King?"

"That's what we call him Sir Vandeleur Gray-
burn, boss of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank
and uncrowned King of this outpost of British
interests in China. He could tell you a lot about the
foreign attitude toward the Japanese invasion of
China and the undeclared war if he would. 7 *

"Is he so well informed?"

"A mine of information. All about China just
as it used to be. Of course, he has the foreign
banker's slant: he has been in the Far East for
years, and is reported only twice to have set foot
on Chinese soil, at Canton, ninety miles from here.
But he has plenty of sources and strong opinions.
After all, this war will modify the future of all
Western interests in China. That is why most of
the foreign businessmen out here and the Hong
Kong group has recently been reinforced by new-
comers from Shanghai are inwardly cursing the
Japanese invasion and hoping that the war can

20

BRITAIN'S FRONT DOOR TO CHINA 21

either be brought to a standstill fairly soon by what
they call here 'an honest compromise/ or else that
Japanese and Chinese will fight each other to a
draw. In either case the foreign bankers would
have a decisive word to say. For if the Japanese
continue to prove unable to deal a mortal blow to
China, and the Chinese cannot learn how to stand
up in decisive battle against the better trained,
better armed Japs, then the fight may boil down to
a sort of economic and financial tug-of-war to see
which side can hold out the longer. Japan is far
better industrially equipped, far more modern and
efficient; China has greater sources of wealth,
tapped or potential, and conceivably more staying
power. On the other hand, a Japanese victory, or a
real Chinese success, cannot but diminish the power
of the foreigner in China. Meanwhile, those who
control the world's credit resources could do a great
deal to tip the balance one way or the other, if
only they could make up their minds which side
they prefer to see win, if victory there must be. As
I said before, it is a pity you cannot have a talk
with Sir Vandeleur Grayburn."

As one who had but set foot in the Far East I
would have welcomed a talk with Hong Kong's
"King," but it is doubtful if I should have been
much wiser for it, for I had met the "imperialistic"
or colonial attitude before. Here in this tiny colony,
set on the rim of China like a sort of green cloud-
wrapped Naples on a tropical sea, it was imme-

22 THE DRAGON WAKES

diately plain how loath the many foreigners were
to admit that they might be compelled to accept
either a victory of national China or the virtual
subjugation of China by Japan. Mediation, so
plausible to many in Europe and America, already
seemed infinitely remote. Neither China nor Japan
was in the mood for it. Most of the foreign business-
men one met, either of the old-fashioned red-faced
type, or the younger less cocksure sort, were unable,
after ten months of warfare, to make up their minds
just which side they would like to see win. Senti-
mentally, of course, most foreigners, including the
Germans, naturally sympathized with China as the
victim of a brutal and unprovoked aggression.
They had not forgotten the Japanese conduct at
Shanghai, the machine-gunning of the British Am-
bassador, the sinking of the Panay. They were
writhing under each new set of "orders" received
from the Japanese naval forces lying off the mouth
of the Pearl River that flows down from Canton,
the deliberate firing on an Imperial Airways plane
off the Ladrones Islands in February, 1938; they
waxed sarcastic over the boasts of Toyoishi Naka-
mura, Japanese Consul General in Hong Kong, for-
merly in Canton, that Japan would take Hankow
and the Chinese would collapse "within three
months."

For Japanese military prestige had fallen to a
low ebb. Few of the foreign businessmen had for-
gotten how they were virtually squeezed out of

BRITAIN'S FRONT DOOR TO CHINA 23

Jap-ruled Manchuria in defiance of promises and
the "principle of the open door." There was a
vast amount of ill-feeling concerning a, reported
Japanese attempt to freeze British merchants out
of the wool, fur and skins trade in North China,
with the formation of a Japanese wool export asso-
ciation to monopolize commerce. And the Japanese
Consul General in Sydney, Australia, defined the
Australian embargo on iron ore as something which
"strained relations" between Australia and Japan.
A Japanese subjugation of China, the setting up
of a new Mongol puppet state, Mongokuo, in Inner
Mongolia, might mean an even worse blow to for-
eign interests in China and particularly to Hong
Kong, which was enjoying a magnificent trade
boom, due exclusively to the war.

At the beginning of the aggression there is no
doubt but that the majority of foreign business
interests rather favored a Japanese victory. In the
first .place, they anticipated it, and businessmen
easily follow the philosopher Hegel in believing
that "the real is the only rational." Furthermore,
they felt themselves more akin in spirit to the pre-
sumed "conquerors" modernized, efficient, and
out for gain than to the sloppy, hard-working but
essentially incompetent, corrupt, individualistic
and xenophobe Chinese. (This, at least, was the
picture that had been handed down by the "old
China hands," who, like Sir Vandeleur Grayburn,
had been on the ground for ever so long and ought

24 THE DRAGON WAKES

to know.) These people decided long ago that Japan
represented a "principle of order and discipline/'
while, since the reconciliation with the communists
in 1936, they had watched Chiang Kai-shek with a
disapproval which Chiang's non-aggression pact
with the Soviets had turned into definite suspicion
that China was aiding in the "spread of bolshe-
vism." (In Hong Kong, one learned, Bolshevism
meant less a system of collectivized economy, for
which few believed China to be ripe, than the
growth of Soviet Russian influence and the curtail-
ing of the amazing privileges of Westerners.) Japan
began the invasion of China with a relatively large
backing among important foreigners. But pro-
Japanese feeling waned rapidly with the progress
of the war, which revealed, at the same time, the
unsuspected arrogance, the surprising incapacity,
and the insatiate greed of the Japanese.

It began at Shanghai. Few foreigners who under-
went an experience with Japanese officers or sol-
diery there managed to continue hoping for a
Japanese victory. Japanese behavior toward the
Chinese at Nanking and in the north went beyond
what even hardened colonials, with memories that
went back to Boxer times, could stomach. The
Japanese bombardments of open cities, their posi-
tive rage to obliterate Chinese universities and edu-
cational institutions, their frightful treatment of
Chinese women and girls under the eyes of their
superior officers these sickened the foreign col-

BRITAIN'S FRONT DOOR TO CHINA 25

onies in the Concessions. The Chinese could be
incredibly heartless and brutal according to Occi-
dental standards. The Japanese were unquestion-
ably worse.

Still, the Japs seemed bound to win. The taking
of Nanking convinced most Occidentals on the
spot, as well as the Japanese generals, that Japan
had already won. And then something happened:
the vast ineptitude of the Japanese General Staif
and the utter lack of discipline and unity within
the army began to be clear. Foreigners, looking on
with passionate interest, saw how the Japanese
"columns," superior in every sort of equipment,
dared not quit the railways and main roads and
navigable rivers, and often proved unable to keep
the bold Chinese guerrilla bands from cutting com-
munications along them. They saw the so-called
Japanese occupation boil down to long thin strings
stretched across vast areas, in most of which Chinese
civil administration continued to function under
orders from the Chinese in Hankow. They saw how
the Chinese "puppet regimes" failed to win the
adherence of any real portion of the population,
who, at every opportunity, turned upon and mur-
dered the "Chinese traitors" who served on them.
Such regimes, the only hope of making Japanese
occupation effective, simply could not restore order.
The Japanese-controlled "Provisional Government"
at Peiping was unable to extend its authority be-
yond the city walls. The Chinese "Heads" of the

26 THE DRAGON WAKES

"Reformed Government,' 9 set up by the Japanese
armies at Nanking, found it healthier to settle down
under Japanese protection in the New Asia Hotel
at Shanghai.

On the other hand, guerrilla fighting went on all
around the edges of Shanghai itself; Chinese mobile
units came and went at night virtually as they
pleased with the assistance of the entire population.
They ambushed Japanese trucks on the highways,
derailed Japanese troop trains; they killed quanti-
ties of Japanese soldiers in isolated detachments
or remote outposts.

The foreign business and banking houses in the
Far East are not primarily there for the realization
of any special political ideals. In 1937 a Chinese
victory, aside from opening the door on what was
called bolshevism, might conceivably, in the minds
of the businessmen, have meant the ejection of the
foreigner from China under conditions of appalling
anarchy and financial loss. The victorious Chinese
might have refused to pay their honest debts or
recognize foreign privilege. But a Japanese occupa-
tion of China gradually began to look even less
delightful for foreigners. China's unexpected mili-
tary prowess and staying power obviously doomed
the Japs to ten or twenty years of "pacification"
during which trade and farming would be at an
extremely low ebb. In the occupied regions there
was a currency chaos with five kinds of money, a
situation that was obviously going to get worse.

BRITAIN'S FRONT BOOR TO CHINA 27

Until the Japs advanced much further into China,
Shanghai and most of the Treaty Ports would re-
main cut off from their supply and distribution
markets. One had but to compare their situation
with that of Hong Kong, prosperous as the war
port of entry for the Chinese Republic, to realize
the danger. As a temporary condition, this might
be tolerated if there was any certainty that it would
eventually be followed by a return to the Open
Door policy. But it was exactly this certainty that
the Japanese attitude in the first months of the war
destroyed. A nation with such a government, with
such vast economic and political appetites, seemed
bound, in any case, to seize and hold such Chinese
economic districts as would make it independent
of foreign imports. A notable instance was the
cotton-growing region of North China. Before the
war it produced about as much cotton as Japan
normally imported; efficient Japanese directors
could double the output and make Japan entirely
independent of American and other cotton growers.
The Japanese, unable as they were to make their
occupation militarily effective, nonetheless initiated
an elaborate plan for destroying Chinese factories
outside the occupied zone, and for ousting Occi-
dental interests and monopolizing Chinese markets
and industry within it. At Shanghai complaints
multiplied in the foreign consulates of all sorts of
interference, from petty annoyance to downright
robbery, at the hands of Japanese military and civil

28 THE DRAGON WAKES

authorities, who behaved as though the International
Concession were their personal property. And al-
most immediately they set about making it so by
the formation of huge official companies to monop-
olize mining, power transportation, and most of
trade. Tariffs were speedily revised in favor of
Japan, at least on paper. Everything pointed to
the establishment of an air-tight Japan-Manchuria-
China economic bloc on the basis of nearly complete
monopoly, if the Japs could complete the occupa-
tion by the acquisition of Central China as far west
as Hankow. The Japanese military authorities be-
gan to exact "fees" and other forms of "squeeze"
from the foreign owners of businesses and mills as
the price of continued operation. The attitude of the
foreign governments was so spineless that in many
cases foreign victims, sure of receiving no eff ective
backing from their several governments, preferred
not to complain to their consuls, lest they be subject
to reprisals. Redress for foreign interests was more
or less rendered impossible, despite manifold
threats, because the Japanese hid behind the screen
of "puppet" Chinese governments, for whose ac-
tions they disclaimed any responsibility. By a sys-
tem of export licenses Japanese exporters were
deliberately favored, while against this plot to
delude and ease out the Occidental, individual
Occidental firms were helpless.

Obviously none of this escaped the foreigner.
How judge it if not as part of a vast movement of

BRITAIN'S FRONT DOOR TO CHINA 29

"Asia for the Japanese"? What wonder if foreign
opinion in places like Hong Kong underwent rapid
change? A Japanese triumph would clearly be
disastrous for the Westerners. So long as they con-
tinued to fear a Chinese victory, the best they
might hope for was the continuance of just enough
Chinese resistance to baffle the invaders, but not
enough to enable the Chinese to expel them. While
the war was going on, Japan could not clinch its
hold on China. Without a strangle-hold, Japanese
monopolistic exploitation under a totalitarian eco-
nomic system could not really get under way.
Could the war be prolonged to the exhaustion of
both sides, outside influence might have the final
word. This was the hope still prevalent when I
reached Hong Kong.

But already many of the younger businessmen
had felt compelled to relinquish it. Many of them
believed that China stood the better chance to win.
This belief was based on observation of something
called New China. To the older fellows, or many
of them, New China was just a bunch of Canton
fire-crackers, going off with a loud noise and much
smoke, leaving everything just as it was. To them
the Chinaman, though perhaps no longer a creature
to be "kicked off the dock" by the Occidental "mas-
ter," was still essentially the feeble, corrupt being
he had always been. The younger men doubted
this. One of them explained to me the change in
China in terms of growing and effective Chinese

30 THE DRAGON WAKES

resentment of just such boisterous manifestations
of Occidental superiority. "The Chink had been
insolent as hell," he concluded, "and I longed to
knock him down. But what was the use? If I had I
knew he would have shot me dead. Believe me,
your average Chinese is no longer taking anything
from anybody."

For, as I said before, businessmen are realists,
or try to be.

Hong Kong was enjoying a very real though pre-
carious prosperity. Wandering along the docks
beside the railroad terminal at Kowloon, it was
easy to see why. Half a dozen freighters were tied
up, while a horde of bare-footed coolies, the smile
upon their faces even more inscrutable than usual,
unloaded packing cases of various sizes and shapes.
Most of these contained ammunition or high explo-
sive, but there were boxes of rifles and machine-
guns. Some cases, I afterwards learned, held air-
plane motors from the United States. Most of the
munitions I saw being unloaded came from Ger-
many, but the British port authorities said that
little more was expected from that quarter. The
quota from America was, they thought, distinctly
smaller than was being sent to Japan. The Soviets
were becoming the greatest source of Chinese sup-
plies.

Anyone could stand by and check up the quan-
tities; anyone, that is, except the Japanese. Not
even Toyoishi Nakamura cared to send Japanese

BRITAIN'S FRONT DOOR TO CHINA 31

agents, notebook in hand, to watch the docks. To
do so might have been to condemn them to sudden
death, not to speak of the scandal of "international
incidents." For whatever the color of their pass-
ports, the Chinese in Hong Kong were just about
as Chinese as those in Hankow or Shanghai, and
as little disposed to stand for spying by Japanese.
Little the Japs needed to worry: had they not
friends among the foreigners, and notably in the
Italian Consulate? Among the foreigners in China
only the Italians were giving whole-hearted sup-
port to Tokyo. The Germans, despite the change in
the wind at Berlin and the threatened recall of the
German military advisers under General von
Falkenhausen, remained fixed in their preference
for China. There were numerous Germans in Hong
Kong, and they made no bones of their disapproval
of Berlin's love for the Japanese. In the meantime,
they, too, were contributing to Hong Kong's pros-
perity, and had helped make it the chief port of
entry for China. Numerous wealthy Chinese, ever
quick to take advantage of business opportunities,
and perhaps aware of the charm of a city immune
to the bombings that were making a purgatory of
nearby Canton, had chosen Hong Kong as their
temporary residence, and their wives and daughters,
with the incomparable elegance of the well-dressed
Chinese woman, gave its streets and ferry-boats
added attractiveness.

Why worry so long as the boom lasted, though

32 THE DRAGON WAKES

from the golf course to the north of the city one
could sometimes hear the machine-guns as the
Chinese fired on the Japanese naval planes that
bombed the precious railroad to Canton and Han-
kow just outside the frontiers of the Colony?

But it is difficult being nonchalant on a volcano.
Britishers in Hong Kong had formed a Volunteer
Corps and were drilling frequently. British war-
ships (though not nearly enough to tackle the
Japanese fleet) were constantly at anchor or com-
ing and going across the incomparable harbor.
Really, all Hong Kong was fascinated by the
strange deadly struggle going on "in China 'cross
the bay/' How would the cat jump?

Two attitudes seemed possible. In view of Lon-
don's anything but heroic attitude, the first was
easier: try to be on the best possible terms with
both sides, while hoping for a compromise or a
draw.

The second attitude was less flaccid. Why not
help to determine the outcome? By extending
financial help to one or the other side, the foreign
business interests, through their backers at home,
might, indeed, say the decisive word my German
friend expected. If mediation seemed impossible,
and compromise a dream, somebody's victory ought
perhaps to be hastened. Under the circumstances
this somebody could only be China.

Facing the busy docks, talking with the business-

BRITAIN'S FRONT DOOR TO CHINA 33

men beside beautiful Repulse Bay, I reached the
following conclusion:

So long as Hong Kong remained prosperous, the
foreigners would be content to let nature take its
course. But once let the Japanese cut Hong Kong
off from China, and Colony neutrality could quickly
give way to definite partisanship. At that moment
(provided Japan still gave the same impression
of weakness), how could foreign interests better
serve international law and morality than by ex-
tending generous help to China, the innocent victim
of aggression?

(Provided, of course, that China would then be
certain to win.)

CHAPTER III

BLEEDING CANTON

NEW CHINA began at Canton, the "city of
rams," the city of revolutions, the birth-
place of Sun Yat-sen and Chinese nationalism, the
chief window of China on the great wide world.
The "rams" are largely forgotten, along with the
legend that explained them. But pride in "revolu-
tions," meaning primarily the great national revo-
lution whereof the late Sun Yat-sen was the clearest
voice, is strong with the modern Cantonese. And
the city's role of gateway to the world, and chiefly
to the Occidental world, is as marked as ever.
First Chinese town with which foreigners came in
contact the Arabs came here a thousand years
ago, the Portuguese in 1511, the American and
British tea clippers early in the Nineteenth Cen-
tury Canton, or rather, Canton's citizens, have
continually gone out to meet the foreigner at home.
It is in Canton that most of the Chinese abroad
originate and it is to Canton that they return later,
laden with wealth acquired by their ceaseless labor
and their nimble minds. Most important of all, it
was to Canton that, in the Twentieth Century, most
of the foreign-trained Chinese students returned
bearing the ideas that were later to blossom as the

34

BLEEDING CANTON 35

Chinese national renascence. Little wonder that the
revolution that overthrew the Manchus started here,
to be completed later in the battles around the three
Wu-han cities, of which Hankow is the best known.
"Everything new originates in Canton," say the
Chinese, who should know. To understand what
was going on in China, one could hardly do better
than start with a visit to Canton.

Forget Shameen, one of those hygienic but tire-
some "Concessions" the foreigners succeeded in
wringing from the Chinese in the latter's decades
of weakness, and where the foreigners still live a
ghetto-like existence modeled on the dullest of
Occidental models. Canton proper, Chinese Canton,
the city of over a million patriots, is a fascinating
paradox. From a window on the tenth floor of the
modernly built and managed Oi Kwan Hotel, you
could look over the incredible boat-dwelling popu-
lation over a hundred thousand! that lives and
dies in houseboats anchored twenty deep along the
Pearl River banks. The river itself is like a giant
pond heavy with silt across whose surface hun-
dreds and hundreds of insect craft come and go,
rowed, skulled, pushed, pulled, naphtha- and steam-
propelled, with the huge junks and river boats and
an occasional steamer rising high in their midst.
This seems ancient China at its most picturesque
and fearful. Leave the hotel and you are surrounded
by a howling crowd of beggars in rags and sores,
shrieking rickshaw boys, peddlers and idle citizens.

36 THE DRAGON WAKES

Many of the streets are still as narrow, dirty and
fascinating as those for which this tropical city
was once famous. But look a little closer, talk
with the leading citizens,, investigate the growing
civic institutions, and what do you find? A modern
up-to-date well-trained elite gradually raising and
improving a population that, despite its poverty
and dirt, is eager for change.

Ex-students dominate, the majority returned
from the United States, bringing American ways,
an American accent, an American enthusiasm for
efficient action. Educated men from Columbia,
Chicago, Wisconsin Universities, cooperate with
others from Cambridge and Leipzig, the Paris
Sorbonne and the schools of Japan. A snappy young
man from the artillery officers' school turned out
to have spent nine years at the military academy
at Turin and to have commanded Italian batteries
in military maneuvers. The Provincial Governor,
Wu Te-chen, had been one of those mayors of
Shanghai whose enlightened administration made
that city famous. The Mayor, Tseng Yang-fu, an
ex-mining engineer from the University of Pitts-
burgh, and a true native of the home province, had
served his country in a dozen important positions
with all the energy of an American go-getter. In
addition to being Mayor of the third largest city
in China, he was a member of the all powerful
Executive Committee of the Kuomintang, Vice

BLEEDING CANTON 37

Minister of Railways, and Acting Commissioner
of Finance for the Province of, Kwangtung.

Modern minded professors from the Lingnan
American Missions University, and from the Chi-
nese Sun Yat-sen National University outside the
town, discuss the latest sociological theories of
Pareto and the intricacies of currency management
in a machine civilization, amid streets where sit in
their shops perhaps the most ancient and skilled
artisans of the world. The furniture makers, ivory-
carvers, inlayers of silver and feathers and mother-
of pearl, cutters of jade, artistic potters and grass
weavers still go on as ever. But meanwhile, I felt a
mentality directing their destinies, a mentality that
was thinking of speedily industrializing China and
completing the process of economic emancipation
from Japan and, to a lesser extent, from the West.

Plenty of old temples and several superb pagodas
had survived the aerial bombardments; but the
modern leaders would rather show you the Sun
Yat-sen University, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall
and Memorial Tower, all dedicated to the man
whose three-fold program of nationalism, democ-
racy, and popular livelihood (which can, but need
not necessarily, be understood as something ap-
proaching socialism), became the Bible of the
ruling Kuomintang party, and through it, of mod-
ern China. None could visit Canton without feeling
that the seeds of a new national state had taken
firm root, and that war or no war, the hard-headed

38 THE DRAGON WAKES

veteran foreigners of Hong Kong cafes and the
Japanese military would never again see the an-
cient, decadent., corrupt, disunited and submissive
China whose profitable exploitation was their ideal.
This was the fond hope of the Japanese, and it
turned out to be an illusion. The wheel of history
turned; mistreatment galvanized a once proud
nation; the missionaries began the process; for-
eigners demonstrated the new machine technique;
Sun Yat-sen put through the political revolution;
thousands of returning Chinese students provided
competent native technicians and the emotional
power; Chiang Kai-shek became the spearhead.
Back in the 'twenties, the Western powers began to
retreat from their imperial positions. Only Japan
persisted with the result that New China, nour-
ished on hatred of Japanese bullies, grew up al-
most overnight. In my travels in China, I met few
foreigners who thought the Chinese clock could be
put back.

The process of national renascence would have
gone on under any circumstances; the Japanese
invasion marvelously hastened the process. Here
again Canton was in the van. Long before the
occurrence of 1937's little "incident" at the Marco
Polo Bridge near Peiping, the cry to defy Japan was
loud in Canton. By 1938 hatred of the northern
upstart invader had become universal in the city
and in Kwangtung Province. There may have been
some exceptions: the Japanese Consul General in

BLEEDING CANTON 39

Hong Kong boasted that he had "sweetened" Can-
ton palms In the course of a few months to the
tune of a million yen. But I suspect that this money
might equally well have been lost by him at the
fan-tan tables of nearby (Portuguese) Macao. For
those who accepted the bribes could not have ful-
filled a promise of defeatism and betrayal. They
tried once and were themselves tricked and sup-
pressed. Merchants, the Cantonese were and per-
haps always will be. So were the citizens of ancient
Venice. But lack of patriotism was hardly a Vene-
tian weakness.

Seat of the Fourth Route Army, located at the
apex of the Pearl River Delta at the junction of
the railway to Hankow and the railway to Hong
Kong, Canton's military importance grew as the
war progressed. With the entire Chinese coast as
far south as Amoy virtually in Japanese hands,
with Japanese warships and airplane carriers lying
off the delta and occupying the old "pirate islands"
called the Ladrones, with Hong Kong as the chief
port of entry for the imported war material for
China's hit-and-run defense action against inva-
sion, Canton became chiefly responsible for the
maritime defense of the entire south. At the time of
my visit, few believed that the Japanese would defy
Britain and the world by attempting to seize Hong
Kong. But they knew that the occupation of Canton
and the cutting of communications between this
city and the north would force the Chinese to fall

ACCESS FROM OUTSIDE

BLEEDING CANTON 41

back upon the French railway from Indo-China to
Kunming, in the southwest, and the long interior
communications with Burma and Soviet Russia.

That the Japanese early realized this, is clear.
Hence their virtual blockade of the entire Chinese
coast with the Pearl River mouth; hence their con-
tinual talk of occupying Canton; hence the con-
tinuous series of murderous air raids upon the city
itself, with the factories and universities as the
specially preferred targets. Japanese naval fliers
came over once, twice, four times a day and dropped
their high explosives upon the defenseless city. The
casualties soon ran into thousands. A single bomb
would often kill nearly a hundred people and wipe
out half a dozen of the flimsy houses built for a
tropical climate. Once a squadron of Chinese air-
men, reputed Russians, went over and wiped out
the Japanese air bases on the Ladrones, but the
Japanese soon reestablished them and the murder-
ous bombardment continued day after day. Mayor
Tseng Yang-fu made a moving appeal to mayors
of all free cities throughout the world, asking for
their moral solidarity, lest by their immobility they
might be hastening the day when their own cities
would be treated in the same way. There were pro-
test meetings in Paris and London, and finally the
American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, said
he intended to discourage the further sale of Amer-
ican military airplanes to Tokyo. It was indeed sad
for an American to realize that this daily slaughter

42 THE DRAGON WAKES

of innocent non-combatants with the single purpose
of terrorism was largely being accomplished with
materials furnished by American companies for a
price. Far better have let the Japanese obtain their
murder machines from their totalitarian fellow
aggressors, Germany and Italy, and at least have
kept American hands clean. For despite the Secre-
tary's indignation, despite the all but universal
condemnation, the attacks continued. The Sun Yat-
sen University, outside the city, the pride of New
China, had to be brought within the city where at
least its students and professors could not be singled
out for special punishment but merely took their
chances with the other Cantonese. The American
Lingnan Missions University was struck. For the
purpose was terrorism, pure and simple. And
though life in Canton became as much a hell as
anything the natives of Madrid had to put up with,
the Cantonese, so far from being terrorized, simply
stiffened in their determination to rid China once
and forever from molestation by the contemptible
Japanese. Under this inhuman "strafing" the brave
became fanatics, and the tepid determined.

Strange to say, though the railroad from Hong
Kong and to Hankow was repeatedly bombed, it
was as steadily repaired and the steady trickle of
war material continued to enter China. Stations
destroyed were rebuilt, trains hit were replaced.
And traffic went on about as usual, despite informa-
tion allegedly furnished the Japanese by Italian

BLEEDING CANTON 43

officials In Hong Kong. The trains were, if possible,
more crowded than in normal times and there was
much good-humored joking among the passengers
during the endless delays caused by air alarms. Both
as means of sowing terror and as air blockade, the
raids on Canton were a failure.

Had I not seen the same sort of wild courage in
Spain, I should not have believed that a population
could remain so calm under such provocation.
Within Canton, Dr. K. T. Chu, graduate of Indiana
Medical School, organized a high-class system of
first aid in case of air attacks. While the bombs
were still exploding and before anyone had left the
few real shelters, bold young people of both sexes
were on the spot, digging out the victims and doing
what they could until the flying ambulance squads
appeared. Often, within an hour, all the movable
results of a murderous and wanton attack had
disappeared. Meanwhile, Canton's excellent hos-
pitals had been put on a war footing and steps were
being taken to prevent the occurrence and spread
of any real epidemics. Among other measures,
anti-cholera injections were being made at the
rate of three thousand a day with serum prepared
in Canton according to League of Nations stand-
ards.

The Cantonese were never reputed a martial race,
but hatred of the Japanese was transforming them.
Cantonese infantry and aviators did excellent work
at Shanghai. The Province of Kwangtung was

44 THE DRAGON WAKES

maintaining sixty or eighty thousand soldiers at
the front (there were suggestions from outside that
this number ought to be materially increased), and
literally hundreds of thousands of new recruits
were being trained and equipped. In addition,
there were provincial militia (called "Able-Bodied
Youth Units") of both sexes available for local
emergencies. General Yu Han-mo, the Military
Governor, was moving heaven and earth to prepare
to repel a conceivable invasion. His chief-of-staff,
General Chow, a German-trained soldier with great
experience (he had been at Shanghai in 1931-32
with the famous Nineteenth Route Army), seemed
completely unworried. Certain of the younger offi-
cers were spoiling for a fight. The watery terrain
of the delta offered innumerable obstacles while a
march around the delta was long and arduous. The
Japs had landed with impunity at Amoy a few
weeks before, for Amoy is an island at the mercy
of a powerful fleet. But Swatow or Bias Bay near
Hong Kong would be another story, General Chow
thought. The Chinese were confident that they could
repulse any Japanese offensive unless carried out
with a vast expeditionary force of eighty to a hun-
dred and twenty thousand men, with fifty or sixty
transports, and a vast financial expenditure. With-
out relinquishing their campaign against Hankow,
the Japanese presumably lacked the troops for an-
other offensive, while the Chinese, with their limit-
less man power, looked forward to the creation of

BLEEDING CANTON 45

a "southern front/ 9 an added opportunity of ex-
hausting their adversary.

For this reason, Chinese and foreign experts
were slow to believe in the imminence of a Japanese
attack in Southern China. At least, not until the
issue of the Hankow campaign had been deter-
mined. In the previous winter, in November, or
immediately after the fall of Nanking, it could
have been different. Conceivably, the Japanese
"missed the boat."

But the Japanese are a cocky lot, and militarists
with an omnipotence complex do not always fol-
low the rules of reason. Therefore an offensive in
the south was not excluded from Chinese calcula-
tions. The Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Geoffrey
Northcote, warned the members of the Hong Kong
Volunteer Defense Corps that should an attack oc-
cur, Hong Kong would be lucky if it had six days
in which to prepare its defenses. The French, whose
Indo-China army had previously numbered only
twenty thousand, of which five thousand were
Frenchmen, appropriated a couple of hundred
million francs for increasing the force. A British
passenger airplane was fired on by the Japs in
February, 1938; French protests against Japanese
interference with French shipping were becoming
ever more energetic, though little was said of them
publicly.

In the streets of Canton were vividly defiant
posters; lectures on civic duties in war time were

46 THE DRAGON WAKES

being given by men of foreign experience; Every-
where one met an atmosphere of self-confidence and
easy defiance of Japan, Everywhere were men (and
girls) in uniform, giving an impression of readiness
to meet the enemy. To believe them, you needed
only to hear them sing the new war songs charac-
teristic of China's first great effort at military de-
fense. Strange, atonal melodies carrying the unmis-
takable message that China had "come back/*

Note: Japanese forces occupied Canton on Oct. 21, 1958. Ed.

CHAPTER IV

FOUR FANTASTIC CITIES

1. HANKOW

HANKOW, chief of the Wuhan triplet of cities,
built about the junction of the Han River
with the vast Yangtse, is the southern end of a rail-
road from Peiping. It is essentially a creation of
the foreigners, and formerly housed five large Con-
cessions or trading stations. Germany forfeited its
Concession as a result of the World War; Soviet
Russia voluntarily renounced its extraterritorial
privileges throughout China as a matter of doctrine;
Great Britain sacrificed its Concession (with cer-
tain reservations) in 1926, and France seemed
about to do likewise. But the French changed their
mind and held on to their "sovereign rights" over
a few acres of a city which they had, after all, done
not a little to build up. The Japanese Concession
was abandoned by its owners and taken over by
the Chinese early in the war. These five Concessions,
four of which had reverted to China, lie contiguous
to one another along the Yangtse River. With the
exception of the Japanese, they form essentially an
Occidental town, built in the Occidental style, in
the midst of a vast Chinese city that was until the
outbreak of the war the center of the Chinese tea-
growing industry.

48 THE DRAGON WAKES

In the center of Hankow the French Concession
was, when I reached the city and found lodgings
in the Hotel Wagons-Lits et Terminus, guarded by
French soldiers, with barbed wire ready to be
installed at the slightest need. The French had an-
nounced their intention of protecting their rights
and property as inflexibly against the Japanese at
Hankow as they had at Shanghai and Tientsin. On
account of this inflexibility, while British prestige
was abysmal and American prestige rather low,
French prestige was high throughout China. For-
eigners, whose property happened to lie within
the French Concession, were thanking their stars
for the relative protection it afforded against
Japanese air raids or Japanese seizure. Other for-
eign interests and most of the business at Han-
kow was foreign were looking forward hopefully
to the French to protect their property outside, in
case of Japanese occupation of the town. And the
French, to back their verbal resolution, were or-
ganizing and equipping a foreign (mostly French)
volunteer corps to assist the bold but numerically
weak body of regular troops in defending the Con-
cession. For obvious reasons, all civilians, foreign
or Chinese, who could find a place to live within
the French Concession, preferred to do so.

Along the bank of the Yangtse lay the warships
of several powers. Gunboats mostly mere "token
ships" so far as real resistance to the Japanese fleet
was concerned, but invaluable as a last refuge for

FOUR FANTASTIC CITIES 49

foreign residents in danger and as a symbol that
the proprietary powers had not by any means re-
nounced their rights.

Further up the Yangtse and across the Han
River, Hanyang city offered little of interest, save
swarming Chinese life and an ancient arsenaL

Not so Wuchang, ancient Chinese agglomeration,
built around Serpent Hill and surrounded by a
wall seven miles long. Once the capital of the
Kingdom of Chu, later that of the Kingdom of
Wu, famous throughout the country for its "street
of a thousand shops," Wuchang reached its highest
interest as the northern point of the railway to
Canton and Hong Kong (the prolongation south
of the bridgeless Yangtse of the Peiping-Hartkow
railway) and the residence of Generalissimo Chiang
Kai-shek. For although after the fall of Nanking
the capital had theoretically been moved to Chung-
king far to the west, China was being not only
defended but governed from Wuchang.

But when the foreigners say Hankow they mean
all three Wu-han cities taken together. Here, after
the fall of Nanking, one might meet nearly every-
thing that counted in China. The ancient tea
center had become the residence of most of the
personalities of the country. Generalissimo Chiang
Kai-shek and his wife came and went quickly,
secretly, effectively, somehow contriving always to
dodge the Japanese airmen who seemed only too
well informed of their movements but who always

Railways
Surfaced roads
Ndvigdble rivers

100 200 300M.

COMMUNICATIONS IN THE INTERIOR

52 THE DRAGON WAKES

arrived just one jump behind. Here, until July,
1938, were all the Cabinet and the various Minis-
tries, with their many bureaucrats. Here were the
other politicians the big shots of the Kuornintang
with their families, the members of the three Yuans
that claimed to govern, and of the Military Council
that seemed actually to share the power with Chiang
himself. Here were all sorts of subsidiary organiza-
tions. To Hankow came the foreign businessmen
with matters of personal profit to attend to. Around
the Headquarters, grumbling but reasonably well
cared for, collected the foreign newspaper men,
who, perhaps properly, could not see why their
obvious sympathy for China did not constitute more
of a pass into Chinese confidence. To Hankow came
those startlingly pretty Chinese women from Shang-
hai and Peiping, who had fortunately not waited
for Japanese occupation before clearing out, their
very presence turning the clean but inconceivably
dull streets of the Foreign Concessions into some-
thing gay and exciting. And to Hankow, more or
less unwillingly, came finally the members of the
Diplomatic Corps, whose governments insisted on
their remaining in contact with the rulers of the
country to which they were accredited.

A few of them found the war atmosphere exciting
and the Chinese conflict the most fascinating thing
in the world. More were frankly peevish. Hankow
was, they said, a "hole." They loudly resented the
inadequate housing, the difficulties of obtaining this

FOUR FANTASTIC CITIES 53

or that "indispensable" article. Personally, I found
the food on their tables more than adequate, their
wines of reasonably good quality, their service far
better than one could expect. But I had not known
the ease of pre-war China to the foreign "masters 9 *
who came and went from one Concession to an-
other, as though all China were but an adjunct of
these Occidental oases. How those in Hankow en-
vied the other diplomats, who, like the British and
the French Ambassadors, preferred the ease and
relative security of civilized cosmopolitan Shang-
hai, or the delights of medieval Peiping, to this
rather austere provincial atmosphere created by a
people in whose vital struggle most of the diplo-
mats took surprisingly little part. With the foreign
diplomats, considerations of China's war for en-
franchisement were mixed with considerations of
what outlandish place they might next be asked to
live in, if and when the Japanese took Hankow.
Some of their political temperatures went up and
down sometimes twice in a day, according to the
military news or to the efficiency of their own
digestive apparatus. China could hold. China might
hold, of course. China was at the end of its rope.
Finished. Virtually, of course. Not yet beaten. Not
quite beaten. Not necessarily, only probably. Still
capable of long resistance. In fact, sure to resist.
Formidable. Magnificent. Invincible. And to the
novice in China it was just a little bewildering.
Who said Man is a reasonable animal?

54 THE DRAGON WAKES

For this confusion the Chinese themselves were
partly responsible. Partly just because they re-
mained Chinese, with ways- that were not Occidental.
But also because they always claimed too much.
They announced the recapture of cities when their
troops were still on the outskirts; they refused to
admit losses days after all the world knew; they
stubbornly clung to the notion that unless the
Chinese told them, the advancing Japanese would
not really know the names of the places where they
were. All of which undermined Chinese credit with
the foreigners of the usual type.

Not, however, with the foreign military attaches.
Officers of several countries German military
advisers, Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, were
sure of two facts: first, that the Chinese had showed
far more military prowess, far more national
morale and unity and staying power than anyone
had given them credit for; second, that the Japanese
armed forces were a greatly over-estimated quan-
tity, their strategy deficient, their tactics antiquated,
their efficiency so low that it was very doubtful if
Japan really had any serious claim to being con-
sidered a Great Power. And on the basis of these
two facts, several very important political adjust-
ments were likely to take place, the most important
of which was the recognition by Great Britain,
France and Russia that Japan was, so long as its
hands were tied in China, far too weak to threaten
foreign interests in the Far East.

FOUR FANTASTIC CITIES 55

_ 2. CHUNGKING

The none too modern hydroplane takes off from
the airport on the Hankow side of the Yangtse, and,
leaving the great stream well to the south, flies
westward across a giant bend. Below is the water-
bespeckled surface of Central China paddy fields
of tender green rice, streams, pools, canals, ditches,
lakes innumerable all alive with boats and gleam-
ing against the red earth. For the feature that most
distinguishes Central and Southern China from the
Western world (excepting certain spots like Devon-
shire and parts of Alabama) is that the soil is not
black or brown or buff or yellow or dust color, but
red all shades of red, from a tawny near-orange
to the deep purply-plum of the hills of middle
Szechwan.

In the plane are mostly Chinese officials, already
busy preparing to get under full swing at Chung-
king if the change has to be made. Many of them
have studied abroad ; nearly all speak some foreign
language, with English predominating. A year be-
fore most of them were probably wearing Occiden-
tal clothes. But with the war and the rise of national-
ism has come a return to the specifically Chinese.
To-day a large number, perhaps the majority, of
these somewhat westernized bureaucrats bear the
ancient gray or blue robes of the traditional Chinese
gentleman. The native pilot, smart in uniform and
white cap, speaks twangy American, and (for which

56 THE DRAGON WAKES

I am grateful) American, too, is the way in which
he lifts his "bus" from the water and places it
again with a splash on the cocoa-colored reaches of
the Yangtse at Kiangling and Ichang. Five minutes
above Ichang the gorges begin. Under a low cloud
ceiling, the hydro seems to be flying straight at a
rock wall. As it approaches, a door becomes visible
and the plane swings back and forth between
fantastic cliffs, some sheer and smooth, other carved
into pylons and stalagmites, with rocky walls be-
hind them, in the crevices of which the patient
Chinese have scraped out little terraces of earth
and one sees new wheat rising within protecting
walls. The plane flies level with the top of the
cliffs ; fifteen hundred feet below a sampan toils up-
stream, drawn painfully along one wall by two
figures staggering forward on a crazy tow-path.
The gorges widen only to narrow again. They con-
tinue for a couple of hundred miles. Then the
rocks subside, cultivated fields appear everywhere,
and after half an hour or so a large town appears,
perched well above the river at the end of a long
bluff. Ichang means "Can Be Prosperous" and I
sincerely hope it is. But when the plane alights
again it is beside a city that bears the prophetic
name of "Happy Again," a name probably given
thousands of years ago by river travelers grateful
at having finally surmounted those dreadful river
gorges and being able to relax again at Chungking.
Situated on the Yangtse and divided into two

FOUR FANTASTIC CITIES 57

parts by the Kialing River, the ancient walled city
of Chungking is a unique mixture of old and new.
From the river level I was carried up nearly three
hundred steps in a sedan chair on long bamboo
poles by two ninety-pound coolies. I might have
walked; but this was the first opportunity in my life
to ride into a city in a sedan chair and I did not
intend to miss it. Entering the gate, one is struck
by the long row of water carriers, the numerous
monks, the vivid exotic crowd that swarms through
the streets, shouting strange cries, chanting various
sorts of wares, keeping time in those strange yet
rnarvelously rhythmic coolie barks, thanks to which
the greatest burdens can be carried along without a
hitch by slim bodies moving in unison. A few wide
streets cut motorways through a maze of narrow
lanes.

Chungking was, before the war, the trading out-
let for all Szechwan, and its stores are full of
native drugs, thick plain-color silks of excellent
quality, offices for the exporters of wood oil and
products of Tibet. Several countries maintain con-
sulates: there is an international club. It had eighty
foreign members, but no ice even on a suffocating
June day, when a sort of moist dust clutched at the
throat and the sweat stood unevaporated on the
forehead.

Old and new are combined most discontentedly.
The setting is the traditional Chinese; the wares in
the shops are, except for the vast piles of Chinese

58 THE DRAGON WAKES

medicines in the native pharmacies, mostly products
not of the old handicrafts but of the new machine,
Chinese or foreign. Somehow the city was symbol-
ized in my eyes by the place where I slept. It was
in the top floor of the Mei Feng Bank, a modern
steel and concrete construction, with an electric
elevator; on the floor of the bedroom was linoleum.
But scattered throughout the vast chamber were no
less than five spittoons, and the bed was Chinese in
type, with the upper sheet sewn to a silken coverlet.
Yet the conflict between old and new in Chung-
king was definitely decided by three new factors.
The first was the war. Chungking became properly
patriotic. Its streets began to ring night and day to
the tramping of countless soldiers and recruits.
There were the famous wall propaganda pictures
copied from the Russians; there were the cloth
posters, with inspiring mottoes stretched above the
streets; there were the myriad pictures of Chiang
Kai-shek and the few portraits of Sun Yat-sen;
there were numerous organizations of all sorts help-
ing to prepare, conduct or bear the war strain.
There were ten or twenty thousand refugees, each
with a tale to tell that made Chinese blood boil.
And there was General Ho Kwo-kwang, the repre-
sentative of what was called the National Govern-
ment, to distinguish it from the Provincial Govern-
ment at Chengtu, still farther to the west. General
Ho seemed an army in himself: a loyal, quiet-

FOUR FANTASTIC CITIES 59

voiced, Intelligent soldier, striving patiently to in-
crease the war effort wherever he could, and at the
same time to prepare a gigantic economic develop-
ment of rich Szechwan.

General Ho's principal task was, however, to re-
ceive and house several government offices and
departments and of preparing to receive the rest
in case of the abandonment of Hankow.

Already the presence of these government officials
had overcome the traditional in Chungking. This
was the second factor. Trained young economists
from Oxford and Columbia, snappy bureaucrats
used to the atmosphere of cosmopolitan Shanghai,
were making a deep, if sometimes unwelcome, im-
pact upon sleepy Szechwan.

Their efforts were seconded by the professors
and students in exile. Chungking had its univer-
sity a small but impressive center, specializing
in science and engineering, directed by a German-
trained Chinese engineer, ten miles outside the
town on a bluff above the Han River. Then its
campus was asked to shelter the faculty and twelve
hundred students of the crack Central University
of Nanking, bombed out of existence by the Japa-
nese last November. Seven other educational insti-
tutions were grouped around Chungking: obviously
a factor of this type in a town of half a million must
become irresistible, despite the grumblings of the
old timers.

60 THE DRAGON WAKES

3. CHENGTU

Chengtu, fantastic Chengtu, to one Foreign Devil
you will remain unforgettable, though he stayed
but a few days within your nine miles of forty-foot
walls ! For you alone are the fabled China of Marco
Polo. Where else do the inhabitants use their
ancient defenses for a public promenade on warm
summer nights? From where else in China but your
citadel can one occasionally see the snow-clad
giants of the Tibetan Himalaya, fifty or a hundred
miles distant across the "Red Plain"?

Here is a province, the biggest in China proper,
almost completely separated from the rest of the
country by a mountain barrier a province which
looks as much west to Tibet and north to Mongolia
as eastward to the sea. Here around this ancient
capital of the one-time Kingdom of Shoo, lies a
land unique in China that, despite its approxi-
mately sixty million population (some claim
seventy) on a territory smaller than France, has
never really known famine. For the fertile Red
Plain produces two crops of cereals or four of
vegetables every year, thanks to a marvelous sys-
tem of irrigation that was set up by China's greatest
hydraulic engineer, Li Ping, who lived, well, some-
thing over two thousand years ago. Outside the
Red Plain, in the triangle between the "Three
Cities," are the salt domes, famous in a country
where salt is still an article to be taxed, which may

FOUK FANTASTIC CITIES 61

become an oil Golconda In some fairly near future.
The mountains elsewhere are loaded with mineral
wealth, including gold, awaiting the day when com-
munications will make exploitation feasible. The
forests toward the Himalaya foothills swarm with
marvelous birds and almost equally marvelous
animals tigers and the lonely panda, that bamboo-
eating pied brown and white sub-bear, one of
which I saw in captivity muzzling into a hole it had
dug for itself. Here in Szechwan the villages are
often larger than well-known towns in other parts
of the country. On its way from Chungking to
Chengtu, the "paved" highway, whose two hun-
dred and sixty miles can be driven by a bold chauf-
feur in not over two days, crosses the "Four Rivers"
(the words Sze Chwan mean "Four Rivers"), and
touches eight walled cities the one more medieval
than the other.

As for Chengtu itself, it is a great city of six or
seven hundred thousand people, with giant gates.
Here, in famous Great Eastern Street, are shops
selling superb silks and satins legendary through-
out China, and marvelously gay embroideries made
in shop fronts open to the world by weak-eyed little
boys of ten; coppersmiths galore; curio dealers
dispensing old jade carvings, ancient bronze mir-
rors and rare Tibetan jewelry for a song, since, as I
was told, "nobody wants such old trash." Here are
tiny Taoist temples right on the streets like shops,
before one of which I saw a fine yellow paper

62 THE DRAGON WAKES

dragon, ten feet long, newly put together for a
coming celebration; here is a series of beautiful
ancient constructions of varying style that now lead
into Szechwan University; here the city gates must
be closed at night to keep out bandits, and houses
hide behind venerable walls; here nearly every-
body drinks incredibly heady wine distilled from
orange juice and any number of people poison
themselves with 'opium. Yet, good or bad, Chengtu
seems Old China and the machine age is still felt
remotely as a knock on his door to an opium
broker a call to reality, perhaps ultimately ir-
resistible but which he can still ignore. Chengtu!

Yet I must not give a false impression. Exter-
nally this city is anything but an isolated center of
obscurantism. My hotel, the Sa Li Wen, not far
from the park, had been built comfortably only
twenty or thirty years ago; it possessed a couple of
bathrooms, though no real toilets, with running
water; there was a mosquito net over my bed and
the Number One Boy spoke considerable English
and served tomato soup out of a can opened less
than three weeks before.

The city housed eleven foreign missions and two
Bible societies. The Y.M.C.A. building seemed
admirably administered and full of modern-appear-
ing young men. There were many returned students
from abroad. The Missionary West Union Uni-
versity had an art museum with Tibetan objects
rivaling those in the British Museum or the Louvre.

FOUR FANTASTIC CITIES 63

The National Chinese University was captained by
two scholars who were almost contemporaries of
the writer at the University of Michigan. There
were new hospitals: I watched a soccer football
match that drew several hundred spectators, and
membership in the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides
was said to be obligatory for school children.
There were at least ten daily newspapers and a
feminist weekly published by pretty Chu Zho-hwa,
a most intelligent girl, trained in Japan. A modern
brewery provided a very fair imitation Pilsner beer
as an alternative to orange wine.

What was more, those rambling palaces, with
their dozens of courtyards opening one out of the
other, housed two very modern "Marshals," Yang
Chi-yi, the Civil Governor, and Ten Chi-ho, the
head of military affairs, who headed a thing called
the Pacification Commission of Szechwan and
Sikiang Provinces. In addition to captaining
Szechwan's efforts in keeping eight divisions in the
field against the Japanese, this administration had
drawn a very impressive program for the eco-
nomic development of the province, on a scale that
is absolutely astounding. There were a couple of
agricultural and livestock-breeding experimental
stations of a really surprising efficiency. Who could
insinuate that Chengtu was anything but modern?
Even opium culture, the curse of Western China,
had been severely restricted, one was told, and
smoking was going out of fashion.

64 THE DRAGON WAKES

Yet how square all this modernity with the per-
manence of certain ancient institutions and abuses?

Opium culture might have been greatly re-
stricted, but the traveler could see the poppy fields
along the road but a few miles outside the city
gates. Why was it that so many of the city shops
were closed in the morning and only open after
lunch? Could it be that their owners, having smoked
until very late, only at lunch time revived enough
to smoke those other few pipes, thanks to which
they recovered sufficient lucidity to transact the
day's business? Why was it that the rickshaw boys
sometimes stood dazed before a squawking motor-
car, without moving, or, upon hearing an address,
darted off in exactly the opposite direction? For-
eigners resident in Szechwan declared that al-
though there was some improvement among the
young, opium smoking was the chief occupation of
about half the town's adults over thirty years of
age and that a very large share of the provincial
revenues came from the opium tax.

In other ways, too, what these foreigners re-
ported was very interesting. What was the good of
modern hospitals if contagious cases were hardly
ever isolated, typhoid and influenza were endemic
and there prevailed an epidemic of scarlet fever,
"brought to the province by these beastly modern
airplanes," as one Chinese physician, trained
abroad, somewhat unscientifically remarked?

The streets of Chengtu are wide, paved and rea-

FOUR FANTASTIC CITIES 65

sonably clean. But at ten o'clock each evening the
gates to the great forty-foot wall were firmly shut
and none could have them opened by the guards
without a special pass. The reasons? Just bandits.
Who were the bandits? Either peasants, with a long-
ing for higher things, or soldiers garrisoned nearby
who might be tempted to profit by the darkness to
enter and pillage a few insufficiently protected
houses. A foreign diplomat living in a compound
outside the north gate turned loose in his garden
every evening some fifteen savage police dogs to
frighten robbers. Visitors awaited within closed
cars until the "dog coolies" chained them up. Be-
sides, it was explained, if the city gates were not
closed at night, part of the garrison within the walls
might decide to desert. Foreigners and Chinese
with money traveling around Chengtu found it
convenient to go with an armed escort (just as they
did in the neighboring province of Yunnan), and
a friendly Russian chauffeur proudly showed me
his fully loaded Colt automatic, without which, he
said, he never dared to go abroad after dark. Some
time before my arrival, it was said in town, there
had been an attempt upon the life of a missionary
bishop by a Chinese fanatic, who wanted to kill
him with a knife "because he was a foreigner."
A curious result of all the popular education and
enlightenment, but natural if one accepted the
thesis that Szechwan was fundamentally medieval.
Szechwan was maintaining those eight divisions

66 THE DRAGON WAKES

at the front all right, but many more than eight were
garrisoned throughout the province. What were
they doing here so many hundreds of miles from
the fighting line? Could it be that without them the
present administration could not maintain itself?

After the collapse of the Manchu Empire in
1911, this province became the bone of contention
of three cliques: the Siuting, the Chengtu and the
Chungking. Chungking won, and its leader,
"Marshal" Liu Wan-hwei, remained boss until he
was beaten by the communists and then ousted with
violence by his own nephew, "Marshal 9 * Liu Siang,
who exploited his conquest until the Japanese inva-
sion. Marshal Liu had snapped his fingers at fara-
way Chiang Kai-shek in Nanking, but he knew the
handwriting on the wall and immediately threw
in his lot with the Chinese national armies. In the
autumn of 1917 he obligingly died. The National
Government, with the consent of the province, sent
the Pacification Commission of Szechwan and
Sikiang Provinces with the two modern-minded
marshals. But the administration in Chengtu re-
mained in the hands of the henchmen of dead
Marshal Liu and some said that the National Gov-
ernment governed here on condition of abstention
from ruling.

Many foreigners believed that the real Szechwan
rulers were at heart autonomists, if not separatists;
that they were far more Szechwanese than Chinese
in feeling, and determined to continue the age-old

FOUR FANTASTIC CITIES 67

exploitation of the poor farmers by usury and taxa-
tion. For dear Old China can teach the most liberal
modern spenders a trick or two; in Szechwan the
taxes had already been collected for perhaps fifty
years in advance, men said. New China might mod-
ify all this. . . .

The elements of New China were here, all right
the missionaries, the returned students, the
Kuomintang, the reformers and mass education
movement and Y.M.C.A. But one must perhaps
come to Chengtu to realize just how deep is the
dislike of traditional China for all these new-
fangled innovations. One can understand the anger
of the opium fiends under the threat of being de-
prived of their reason for existence. One can com-
prehend the resentment of any local political
machine against efforts at reform or transfer of
authority to a national leader so competent and
vigorous as Chiang Kai-shek. Even the dislike of
the traditionally educated Chinese for the mission-
aries becomes clear if you imagine the reaction of
Occidental intelligentsia to Chinese missionaries
that came to teach such outlandish habits as the
binding of girls' feet and the multiplication of the
spittoon. But why do the old scholars so dislike the
returned students? Clearly for much the same rea-
son as the nationalist everywhere dislikes the ex-
patriate. The traditionally educated Chinese is a
conceited fellow. Without having much understand-
ing of patriotism as we know it, he is, nonetheless,

68 THE DRAGON WAKES

amazingly sure of himself, proud of his people's
and of his personal culture. He hates the returned
students from abroad because they are to him un-
educated and traitors to Chinese traditions. He be-
lieves them uneducated because they have not mas-
tered the language which remains the pride of the
Mandarin; they know only a few thousand char-
acters; they do not sing their speech in the proper
manner of the ancestors, but bark it out almost like
foreigners. And, above all, they have repudiated
all that was ancient China: its science, medicine,
engineering, architecture, manufacturing processes,
art, in favor of crudely efficient foreign innovations.
Left to the returned students, China, as the tradi-
tionalists understand and love it, would cease to
be China, and Chengtu would no longer be Cathay.

4. KUNMING

Yunnan is the remotest province of China proper
and borders on Burma, Tibet and French Indo-
China. It is mountainous, relatively scarcely inhab-
ited, and, in spite of its perfect climate, in parts
almost unexplored even by the Chinese. In the time
of the great Ming Dynasty, China courtiers consid-
ered banishment to the frontiers of Yunnan almost
the worst thing that could befall them. A fairly
large section of the population are Mohammedan in
faith and an even larger section are not true Chi-
nese at all, but older races who bear the quaint
names of Lolos, Miaos, Shans, Wahs, as well as

FOUR FANTASTIC CITIES 69

other "shy peoples" one has to go a long way off
the beaten track to hear of. From China, Yunnan
Province was until recently almost as inaccessible
as Szechwan and it is small wonder that among the
twelve million inhabitants local feeling was stronger
than national.

Recent history turned Yunnan into one of the
most important sections of the country, destined
perhaps to play an absolutely decisive role in com-
ing events. It was through Yunnan that the ancient
trail along which the Chinese have from forgotten
times kept in touch with India climbed over moun-
tains and across rivers. It was from Hanoi, in Indo-
China, that the French, a few decades ago, pushed
a narrow-gauge, single-track railway and a highway
right across their territory and then three thousand
miles farther through most difficult country to
Kunming, the capital of the province. Yunnan thus
became a sort of back double-door to China. Then
with all the front doors, except Hong Kong, block-
aded by the Japanese navy, with the possibility of
Hong Kong being severed from China proper even
more threatening, with the Chinese army retiring
even farther into the west, the facts of the "French
Railway" (possibly extended north into Szechwan),
and the Burma road (rapidly being modernized for
motor traffic), made of Yunnan one of the vital
factors of the present Far Eastern political situa-
tion.

Still another thing contributed to push Yunnan

70 THE DRAGON WAKES

to the front: the fact that the province contains one
of the very few tin fields of the world, and the only
one which escaped control by the monopolistic
International Tin Committee. The tin production of
Yunnan could be quadrupled. The French Railway
cuts the tin district and the outlet for the tin mines
seems assured under all circumstances. Yunnan,
therefore, became the scene of a very pretty little
economic intrigue of the true imperialistic type.
The center, naturally, was the capital, Kunming.

Beautiful, well-favored city, six thousand five
hundred feet above sea level, with a climate that out-
does California, close enough to its lake to enjoy the
beauty, far away enough to avoid most of the mos-
quitoes, with its lovely West Mountain and its
temples out in front, Kunming is as charming a
place to forget the world in as one could well im-
agine. Many of the foreign colony found it too
much for them: they imitated the easy-going popu-
lation in addiction to opium. A person who takes
up opium smoking in New York or Paris or London
is playing with fire in a literal sense, for opium
smoking destroys not so much the body as the char-
acter. But a foreigner who smokes in China, thereby
adding foreign prestige to the vice that is responsi-
ble for at least half of the degradation of China, is
committing an historical crime. He is like a man
who consents to drink with a dipsomaniac.

The fascination of the city, as of Chungking, lies
in a curious combination of opposites. From the

FOUR FANTASTIC CITIES 71

Chinese side Kunming represents an ancient and
distinctly backward sort of Chinese life. But, on the
other hand, this backward sort of Chinese can, if he
wishes, be in daily contact with modern French
civilization. The French Government supports a
school and a hospital almost gratuitously here.
There are a modern power plant, electric lights, a
mint and an arsenal. There are numerous predomi-
nantly French businessmen, including the agents of
armament firms; French is the predominant foreign
language of the province.

This strange marriage of the ancient Chinese and
the modern Gallic is evident in the Government
Building a luxurious palace, with rooms ceiled
with real gold leaf, with European furniture and
European style. It was nowhere better shown than
at a dinner given by the Governor of the Province,
General Long-yun. Now, the writer attended many
dinners as the guest of important Chinese officials :
at Canton, at Hankow, at Chungking, at Chengtu.
At practically none was there the slightest attempt
at the Occidental. Those present wore Chinese robes
or informal European clothes, as they saw fit, sat
about round tables and served themselves from com-
mon dishes. The food was served in Chinese fashion,
several dishes at a time constituting a course, each
course being marked by the presentation of hot
moist towels to wipe the lips and take the place of
napkins. On January 24, 1938, there were, per-
haps for the first time in several thousand years, no

72 THE DRAGON WAKES

incense sticks or candy offered in Chinese homes to
the Kitchen God, so that he should bring a favor-
able tale to the God of Heaven concerning his wor-
shipers on earth. Now worshipers of good food
the Chinese were and remain, but the all-dominant
fact of war penury left them nothing to waste.
Thanks to wartime restrictions, the number of
dishes was generally kept down to thirty or forty.
The only drink was rice wine, consumed hot in
small cups (or in Szechwan, orange juice wine),
the number of which could and sometimes did rise
to forty, fifty and even more, for the Chinese pos-
sess a number of fascinating table games to encour-
age competition in drinking. At the end of the meal
appeared the only dish of rice, followed by tea.

In Governor Long-yun's gay palace at Kunming
everything was dijfferent. The guests sat at a long
table, Occidental fashion. They had napkins from
the beginning. The drink was water and French wine
of good quality. The menu was restricted to a
scanty ten items, served one after the other, which
I reproduce as they were scribbled in English for
me on the back of a menu card by a Chinese friend :

Bird's Nest and Egg Soup

Fried Rolled Fish

Roast Gitsong (a kind of delicious mushrooms)

Chicken Coined (cut into small pieces)

Pigeon Without Bones

Roast Second (Suckling?) Pig

Peace (In Pieces?) Cake

French Fruits

FOUR FANTASTIC CITIES 73

Ice Cream
Coffee or Tea.

It was into this relatively happy marriage of
Paris (or Hanoi) and Yunnan that the Japanese in-
vasion of China came like a tempest with absolutely
unpredictable consequences.

Yunnan Province cooperated militarily with
Chiang Kai-shek in his wars against the Kwangsi
generals who became the Generalissimo's closest
helpers. But Yunnan had been essentially self-
governing. Although it had heeded Chiang's request
to cut down the opium production and to raise the
price of opium by government monopoly, it had
also maintained its own Foreign Office and cur-
rency. Suddenly it was asked to cooperate in the
defense of China. Yunnan accepted as a matter of
course.

The army it first sent to "China/* meaning the
front, the Sixtieth, under General Lu Han, was not
very large: three divisions only with nine supple-
mentary regiments. Preparations were, however,
made for training two hundred thousand men and
sending out a "New Army" of three more divisions.
The first army was equipped by the Central Gov-
ernment. The reinforcements, if I understood cor-
rectly, were being entirely equipped in Yunnan it-
self by the French, who suddenly decided that it
was to their advantage to see that the province con-
tiguous to French Indo-China should not fall into

74 THE DRAGON WAKES

the hands of the Japanese* The Yunnan troops
fought well.

After the fall of Nanking, as the Japanese came
closer to Hankow, numerous government institu-
tions, factories, offices, universities, academies, and
military departments began to be transferred to
Yunnan by order of the Generalissimo.

Kunming was making no pretense at social or
political modernity, but its inhabitants were pa-
triotic, particularly the younger ones and the
Kuomintang group. Nowhere could one hear more
fiery speeches, more winged words of defiance di-
rected against the Japanese; nowhere were the pro-
fessions of loyalty to Chiang Kai-shek louder. But
the Yunnan people were patriotic not in an Occi-
dental but in a Chinese way. At bottom China re-
mains a nation of Mandarins, whose greatest re-
spect is for the word and whose approach to life is
literary. To such a people the most convincing argu-
ments are found not in the insignificant realm of
deeds but in the immortal wisdom preserved in
ancient words. As a clinching argument that China
was bound to win the present war, an educated gen-
tleman in Kunming offered for my consideration
the following proverbs which he asked me to submit
to the world as a convincing argument in favor of
China's ultimate victory. According to my promise
I give them just as he copied them out for me in
English in his own excellent hand:

"He is pointed at by thousands of people because

FOUR FANTASTIC CITIES 75

of the fault he committed and he will die without
illness." Note: This shows Japan is hated by the
world because of her cruel invasion of China.

"One who does more \many?~\ unrighteous
things will kill himself." Note: This also shows the
example of Japan.

"One who has got morality will get more help
and one who has lost morality will get less help.* 9
Note: This shows why China has got help from the
peoples of friendly nations.

"One word of righteousness is heavier than nine
incense pots." (The incense pot in the Chinese tem-
ple is made of brass or stone which is very heavy
and serves as a measurement of the weight a man
can carry.) Note: This shows propaganda by writ-
ing and speaking to the world is very important and
powerful.

Really, Mr. Mowrer, could anything be further
removed from hard facts as exemplified in the
successes of the realistic nations like Germany,
Italy and Japan? A most unmodern, fantastic, truly
pitiful example of the clinging to an outward belief
in a moral basis for the world!

Quite so, dear reader. The Chinese show a most
deplorable unwillingness to yield to their ancient
habits of thought, even though it is being proven
each day that what succeeds on this earth is the
ethics of the jungle. Or doesn't it succeed?

CHAPTER V

THE AMAZING FAMILY OF SOONG

HISTORICAL movements sometimes produce
leaders, but leaders have it in their power
to make or mar the finest movements. History is
thus neither the account of the sociological and
economic development of masses, nor of the achieve-
ments of heroes. For it is both. A military genius
like Hannibal fails without the support of a great
people, while the Celtic tribes succumbed to Rome
for lack of adequate leadership. China, in the early
Twentieth Century, brought forth several quite ex-
traordinary leaders. The amazing thing is that they
were all members of one family. Three of them mar-
ried into it, the other four were born there. Fifty
or a hundred years after their deaths it may be pos-
sible to rank the members according to ability. To
contemporaries, they all seemed able, though in
different ways.

Sun Yat-sen, the Mazzini or the Jefferson of
Modern China, founded the Chinese Republic in
1911, and gave it a doctrine, the "Three Princi-
ples," whose realization was to be the task of a
single governing party, the Tungmenhui, which
turned into the Kuomintang. Sun was a democrat
with collectivist leanings. But incidentally, he in-

76

THE AMAZING FAMILY OF SOONG 77

spired the one-party, totalitarian State of a type
which was first installed by the Russian Bolsheviks
and after them by those fascist plagiarists, Musso-
lini and Hitler. Sun Yat-sen married Miss Soong
Ching-ling, the second daughter of a hammock
peddler who drifted to the United States from
Hainan Island in the extreme south of China, and
there joined the Fifth Street Methodist Episcopal
Church South, of Wilmington, North Carolina,
adding at baptism the names of a benefactor,
Charles Jones, to his own family name of Soong.
Later, he returned to China, married a Miss Ni,
and helped found the Chinese Y.M.C.A.

One of Sun's disciples, a young officer who be-
came his private secretary and remained with him
until he died in 1923, was called Chiang Kai-shek
and became the George Washington of modern
China. Active in the Chinese revolutions of 1911
and 1913; with, and then against, the communists;
associate of the Russian, Borodin, and later of the
worst "Tammany" elements who controlled the
decadent Kuomintang of the late 'twenties; official
founder of the Puritan New Life Movement in-
tended to regenerate China; convert, like Charles
Jones Soong, to the Methodist Episcopal Church:
the soldier who knew no foreign countries but Ja-
pan and Soviet Russia proceeded to take charge of
China from about 1927 on, and ultimately to lead
the country in its great war of liberation and de-
fense against Japanese aggression. On December

78 THE DRAGON WAKES

1, 1927, he married Soong Mei-ling, youngest
daughter of the hammock peddler of Wilmington,
North Carolina, and during all the eventful years
that followed she remained his closest and perhaps
most inspiring helper.

Up in Shansi there lived a merchant banker called
H. H. Kung. He owned a string of tiny banks stretch-
ing right across Northern China from Manchuria
to Mongolia, and some medicine shops in South
China as well. From this, he branched out into all
sorts of other business. Though a staunch Christian
speaking beautiful English, as a reputed lineal
descendant of Confucius ("Master Kung" in Chi-
nese) it was, perhaps, only natural that he should
represent the more traditionally Chinese tendency
in the nation struggling for rehabilitation. Oddly
enough, his wife was Soong Ai-ling, eldest daughter
of incredible Mr. Charles Jones Soong. Thanks to
his wife's relations, Dr. Kung became Finance Min-
ister and Prime Minister of China.

There were not only marriageable daughters in
the Soong family. There were three sons. Like their
father and their sisters, they studied in the United
States and remained true to Methodism, the religion
their father embraced in Wilmington, North Caro-
lina. The two younger boys, T. A. and T. L., were
intelligent. The oldest son, T. V., was remarkable.
For he became one of China's richest bankers, a
sound economist and competent financial adminis-
trator on Western lines, the personal friend of an

THE AMAZING FAMILY OF SOONG 79

entire group of notable people abroad, the cham-
pion of Occidentalism, a leader of Chinese youth
in opposition to the Japanese, the strongest sup-
porter and occasional opponent of Generalissimo
Chiang Kai-shek. T. V., as every one called him,
became legendary; his mysterious comings and
goings, his houses in several cities, his Bank of
Canton, his missions, the many attempts upon his
life, these were all whispered and commented upon,
praised or attacked from one end of the country to
another. He was not revered; he was admired or
hated. Was he not the author of the 1931 plan for
the revival of China through a corps of League of
Nations experts? Did not the foreign businessmen
trust him beyond his Chinese fellows? Had he not
at the same time excellent relations with Soviet
Russia, along with his sister Madame Sun Yat-sen,
and was he not China's link with such foreign bodies
as the International Peace Campaign of Lord Rob-
ert Cecil? But loved or hated, criticized or admired,
T. V. remained a huge figure and, after the Gener-
alissimo, the most powerful personality in China.

Such then were the members of the amazing fam-
ily of Soong, called upon by destiny to provide in
its greatest crisis a nation of over four hundred
millions with the leadership that could either make
or break the country. Except dead Sun Yat-sen, I
met them all.

It was at the Central Army headquarters at
Wuchang, across the Yangtse River from Hankow,

80 THE DRAGON WAKES

that I saw Chiang Kai-shek. The Generalissimo was
kind enough to send a launch to take me the mile
and a half across the turgid yellow water, and a
waiting car whisked me in a few minutes into the
courtyard of a great building. There were sentries
about but no wealth of soldiery. Chiang Kai-shek
dispensed with ceremony despite his semi-dictato-
rial position in a country in which the tradition of
ceremony is deeply rooted. Alone among the mem-
bers of what critics call sarcastically the "Soong
Dynasty/' the Generalissimo used an interpreter,
in this case Hollington Tong, Vice-Minister of Pub-
licity, faithful follower of the Soong family and
author of the official biography of Chiang Kai-shek.

There was little conversation. I explained my
visit to China and posed my questions. The Gener-
alissimo accompanied the translation of my re-
marks with a series of understanding grunts and
answered in half a dozen words. During the trans-
lation, I studied that face and figure.

Most Chinese are quiet in manner and eschew
facial expression. Chiang Kai-shek was inscrutable,
a habit doubtless acquired in the labyrinth of plot
and counterplot that used to constitute Chinese
politics. No poker player ever kept a closer mask.
His head was closely shaved on the Russian or
German model, accentuating his hollow temples.
His thin lips barely moved as he uttered his polite
grunts. As a conversation, the interview was not a
great success. He was obviously used to receiving

THE AMAZING FAMILY OF SOONG 81

foreign newspaper men; used and resigned and
anything but communicative.

Yet I could not imagine that face trusting too
much to any human being, although it obviously
welcomed approval. A paradoxical character, so I
judged. Limitlessly ambitious, yet not precisely
self-seeking. Really caring for principles, really be-
lieving that he was leading China through the "pe-
riod of tutelage" prescribed by Sun Yat-sen toward
"democracy," while at the same time furthering
and organizing private and secret societies that
foreigners were bound to call fascist in character.
Watching him, I understood the subtle politician
who stood by and watched the heroic Nineteenth
Route Army massacred by the Japanese at Shang-
hai in 1932 rather than engage prematurely in a
death struggle with Japan, yet who, less than two
years later, was giving secret lectures to the Officers'
Training Corps at Kuling, on the urgency and man-
ner of preparing for the coming war with arrogant
Nippon. Endlessly proud, willing to die rather than
submit to the conditions of his 1936 kidnapers,
yet voluntarily fulfilling their demands when re-
leased and scrupulously observing the unwritten
pact with his former communist enemies. Doubtless
as "boundlessly vindictive" as his opponents said,
perhaps cruel, yet capable of the greatest gener-
osity and kindness. Utterly patriotic, self sacrific-
ing, immediately ready to die for China, yet some-
how unable to divorce China's cause from his own

82 THE DRAGON WAKES

eminence. Insensitive to popular suffering, socially
obtuse, despite the New Life Movement with its
emphasis on toothbrushes for which he accepted the
responsibility. Above all, a leader, simple in intel-
lect, subtle in intuition, swift in action beyond his
fellow Chinese, therefore their proper choice and
their idol at a time of crisis. However devious and
ultra-Oriental, however oblivious to foreign ex-
perts' advice, this man seemed to follow an instinct
of his own that might, in last analysis, prove more
effective in dealing with the human material at his
disposal than any amount of "military science." I
left Wuchang with confidence in Chiang Kai-shek's
ability.

What a contrast with Soong Mei-ling, known to
foreigners in Hankow simply as "Madame"!

The wife of the Generalissimo received me in the
reception rooms of the Central Bank of China at
Hankow. She had just come from Wuchang; she
was going to address a meeting of feminist leaders
on the new tasks of Chinese womanhood during the
war. Like many Chinese women, though to an even
higher degree, she had, in her simple Chinese gown,
the gift of permanent elegance slim in appear-
ance, brisk in manner and speech. Sex appeal. Quick
feminine intelligence a little eclipsed at moments
by the feeling she must live up to her role as the
wife of the hero.

She told me of China's struggle in a simple and
moving way. She could not, she explained, accept

THE AMAZING FAMILY OF SOONG 83

any of the numerous invitations to return to the
United States where she had studied, for the calls
upon her would prove too much for her health.
Besides, she had far more than she could do within
China. Just think, in another year, thanks to the
war and the Japanese naval blockade, the Chinese
women would have nothing fit to put on their backs!
Shantung, the great silk-producing province, prac-
tically all of the cotton-growing and textile-manu-
facturing regions, were overrun by the enemy.
Therefore, she was obtaining hand looms for refu-
gee women on which to weave cotton stuffs of the
simplest kind. Imagine a whole society of Chinese
women clad in homespun!

Japan, she said, was anxious to prevent the de-
velopment of Chinese industry, for Chinese labor
was even cheaper than Japanese. Already cheap
articles manufactured for Japanese in China had
been sold abroad under the label, Made in Japan.
She and her friends were trying to substitute China-
made cheap toys on the world markets for those
Japan used to export. Perhaps something of the
same kind could be done with the remaining silk.

Her eyes flashed as she referred to the Japanese
treatment of Chinese civilians, especially the
women, and the Japanese manufacture and sale of
narcotics to the Chinese and even to Americans.

Then the usual question: since Americans were
friendly to China, why did they persist in selling to
Japan airplanes, bombs and war material for mur-

84 THE DRAGON WAKES

dering the Chinese population? a question doubly
embarrassing coming from so attractive a woman. I
did not know the answer, unless it was that Ameri-
can isolationists utterly lacked imagination while
some American pacifists were quite incalculably
pro-Japanese and pro-German. The Administra-
tion. . . .

But she knew all about that and expressed her
deep appreciation of what President Roosevelt was
"saying" in defense of China. If only he would
"do" something. China lacked credit even to pur-
chase food for civilians.

Sometimes she lapsed for a phrase or two into
stereotyped propaganda: China was fighting the
battle of democracy everywhere; if China were
beaten, the rest of the world, even America, would
pay a bloody price; and the like. I agreed with her
fully but was sorry she did not give me credit for
understanding as much. Yet for the most part, she
spoke as an intelligent, even witty woman. But her
time was fearfully taken up and there was that
speech to be made. . . .

While we were talking, her eldest sister, Madame
Kung, the wife of the Prime Minister, came into the
room.

Less strikingly pretty than her youngest sister,
Soong Ai-ling was equally impressive. There was
about her anything but tall figure something so
authoritative, so personally powerful, so penetrat-
ingly keen, that one would have been struck with

THE AMAZING FAMILY OF SOONG 85

her anywhere. Here was authority, conscious of it-
self, conscious of power, but withal wonderfully
good-natured, resourceful, helpful in need. Madame
Kung avoided any attempts at questioning: she
spoke of her very agreeable trip to Europe a few
years before, of our mutual acquaintances to whom
she sent her regards, and of whom she seemed to
preserve memories of unusual intensity. I suspected
a mind that forgot nothing and forgave little, but
that knew how to repay affection richly. I should
have liked to see more of her.

With her husband, the Prime Minister, I was
more fortunate. Dr. Kung received me in those
same rooms of the Central Bank of China, gave me
an interview, served tea with delicious persimmon
cakes, and talked long and fluently in English about
Chinese finances. He was optimistic: he did not
announce or predict the new drop in the value of
the Chinese dollar that occurred a few weeks later.
... I did not ask him if it was true that he did not
see eye to eye in financial matters with his brother-
in-law, T. V. Soong, whom he apparently consid-
ered something of a radical. He ate nothing, but his
conversation and his manner were vigorous and
he personally revised the text of the interview I
later submitted. As I wrote at the time, in the rather
plump elegance of his gray silken robe, he looked
the merchant prince he was or some ancient Chi-
nese philosopher, and I found it easy to accept the
story that the man before me descended directlj

86 THE DRAGON WAKES

from the great Confucius, a generally accepted be-
lief that added greatly to his prestige among the
Chinese. But I could not accept the story reported
to me by several persons that his more important
thinking was done for him by Madame Kung. Dr.
Kung's ideas were far too incisive to be the product
of anyone's brain but his own; not even of his
wife, the gifted Ai4ing. As an assistant, I could
imagine her, perhaps as an instigator and coun-
selor. What women elsewhere would not try to assist
and influence their husbands in such a position at a
moment of such national crisis? A well-known
China expert wrote of the three Soong girls that
they were of a "retiring disposition" in the sense
that they "preferred to act through their husbands
when they could." For whatever the future of the
country, the China of Chiang Kai-shek and the
Soongs was undergoing its trial by fire and the
fortunes of the entire family were at stake*

Madame Chiang Kai-shek had as permanent as-
sistant and adviser W. H. Donald, the well-known
Australian expert on China, in whose company I
was privileged to spend one of the most intellectu-
ally profitable and agreeable days of my life.

Madame Sun Yat-sen habitually mixed up in all
sorts of movements and continually turned out
political writings. Her I met in Hong Kong, in a
flat high up on the Peak overlooking the harbor.
After a brief argument with a servant at the door
who apparently had not been informed of my com-

THE AMAZING FAMILY OF SOONG 87

ing and who was suspicious of visitors, I was shown
into a bare room furnished in the Occidental fash-
ion with a small desk, a small table and a couple
of chairs. A little surprised, for I had been an-
nounced by her famous brother, T. V. Soong him-
self, I waited.

Soong Ching-ling, the widow of China's great
founder, combined the charm of her sister Mei-ling
and the determination of her other sister Ai-ling. In
addition, on that day she showed signs of political
fanaticism.

She served me something to drink but took noth-
ing herself, with the air of one who had no time for
frivolities. She talked with quiet passion of the
principles of her late husband, dead fifteen years
but as alive in her breast as ever. She told me of her
numerous activities. Alone among the three Soong
sisters she seemed more European than American.
She snorted at mention of the New Life Movement.
Knowing of her dissension with Chiang Kai-shek, I
asked no further questions on that subject. For hers
was a passionately intolerant faith. I did not then
know that she was a prominent member of the
China Defense League, which was providing as-
sistance to the former communist Eighth Route
Army in Northern Shensi. She asked me questions
concerning Soviet Russia, and my inability to ap-
prove of the massacres of Old Bolsheviks reputed
traitors was obviously not to her way of thinking.
She herself spoke so sympathetically of the Soviets

88 THE DRAGON WAKES

that I asked her point-blank if she were a com-
munist, a question she did not deign to answer. All
in all, not a very harmonious meeting, but of the
highest interest to me. For here was a soul of crystal
transparence burning literally with the "hard gem-
like flame" Walter Pater so recommended. When
I left she relented a little and presented me with a
pamphlet wherein she had transcribed her belief
that China could not be conquered, though just how
or why she did not explain. After all, argument was
not her role. . . .

To meet T. V. Soong was either easy or quite
impossible, for he came and went like the wind in
the night and none but his most intimate retainers
and relations and associates were ever informed in
advance. After all, he had been the object of any
number of unsuccessful attacks and I could not be
surprised that he once failed to tell me in advance
that we would be traveling on the same train from
Hong Kong to Canton although I had seen him but
a few hours previously. The trains on this line were
bombed often enough without the Japanese naval
fliers realizing that this particular train was carry-
ing their arch-enemy* T. V. ; for, after the Generalis-
simo, there was none, I imagine, whom the invaders
so hated.

My first meeting with him was in the Hong Kong
office of the Bank of Canton. After I had, with
difficulty, made my way through a roomful of per-
sons that even my foreign eye recognized as a Chi-

THE AMAZING FAMILY OF SOONG 89

nese bodyguard, and had waited for a moment In a
very plain office, I was ushered into the sanctum of
a man reputed to be the richest in China. Behind a
desk, in his shirt sleeves, a revolver in a holster on
his left hip, was a heavy figure, six feet tall, whose
manner was at the same time boyish, diffident and
rude. Making all allowances for the terrible war
strain, the importance of his work and his distinc-
tion, though I saw him several times, I never be-
came used to his rudeness. At Hankow he invited
me to dinner, and when, out of courtesy to him, I
broke a previous engagement with an American
friend who had asked other people to meet me,
and went, he abruptly dismissed me as soon as the
meal was over. But I became more and more con-
scious of T. V.'s qualities. His very bulk was in-
spiring.

"How do you keep so slim?" he once asked me
with a touch of envy; "Now I eat almost nothing
and look at me!"

To China in distress, burly T. V. was a rock. At
bottom as Chinese as Chiang Kai-shek himself, T. V.
nonetheless managed to achieve a unique reputation
among foreigners as a man of immense capacity,
absolute reliability and complete honesty. If any-
one could secure foreign help for China, it was this
burly son of the hammock peddler. It was precisely
the qualities that endeared him to Westerners with
ideas of efficiency that made him so obnoxious to
many of his elder countrymen, who accused him

90 THE DRAGON WAKES

virtually of trying to sell out China to "foreign
devils." With his brother-in-law Chiang he had
differed, rumor said, over questions of a balanced
budget and orderly finances. But I suspected a
deeper ground and wondered if there were place
even in China for two such ambitions.

T. V.'s strength was with the returned students,
the social-minded leaders, the pro-Russians and the
youth. Though older men in China suspected while
respecting him, young Chinese everywhere posi-
tively thrilled when they heard that I knew and liked
T. V. For the old fellows seemed to be dreaming of
a China freed from the Japanese menace that would
nonetheless preserve the ancient financial tyrannies
(which were of a type that no free Occidental coun-
try would have tolerated for twenty-four hours).
Young China was consciously striving for the inte-
gral application of all three of Sun Yat-sen's prin-
ciples, number three, the livelihood (prosperity) of
the people being as important as nationalism and de-
mocracy. In this particular it was looking for lead-
ership less to the Generalissimo than to millionaire
T. V. Soong. But Young China was still a minority,
and during the war against the Japanese all lesser
differences were in abeyance.

CHAPTER VI

ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER

1. I DID NOT GET TO LANFENG

BEFORE trying to estimate China's chance of
successful resistance I wanted to see for
myself how China was fighting. The Ministry of
Publicity was obliging and suggested that the "East
Front" over beyond Kuling would be a nice quiet
object of excursion as nothing much was at the
time going on there. Perversely I insisted on going
to the "Northern Front" along the Yellow River,
where a Japanese advance was in full progress.
A pass signed by the Generalissimo himself was
forthcoming, along with an interpreter who had
spent some time at the University of California.
But the Chinese are close-mouthed with foreigners,
however well disposed, and they failed to inform
me that the High Command had determined to
avoid further battle on the flat country by effecting
what Madame Chiang Kai-shek preferred to call
"another strategic withdrawal" and that the firing
line was moving rapidly toward the west.

Another foreign newspaper man completed the
party and, with a fair supply of provisions and
bedding for sleeping out, we left Hankow early one

91

92 THE DRAGON WAKES

hot June day on the Number One express train of
the Pinghan Railway, bound for Chengchow, the
important junction where the north-south railway
cuts the east-west or Lunghai line.

A hundred miles or so north of Hankow the
Chinese "devastated regions" began. Hardly a vil-
lage or a town but had been smashed from the air.
Some of the places were half in ruins. Air attacks
were occurring almost daily, less, as we came to see
from studying the targets chosen by the airmen, in
view of inflicting military damage on China than as
part of a general attempt to terrorize the Chinese.
And precisely as in ravaged Spain, the effort was
producing the contrary effect.

Civil life can of course be completely disrupted
by frequent air attacks. But a fairly large section
of the population simply leaves the place. This is
rather an alleviation to the defenders than other-
wise. In open country an intelligent person can by
strict observation of approaching airplanes escape
injury by bombs unless the attackers are too low or
too numerous. Since the airmen never can be quite
sure of the absence of anti-aircraft or machine-
guns, they generally keep several thousand feet
above the ground. Their terrific speed forces them
to drop their bombs several hundred yards ahead
of the target. This leaves the intended victims
several seconds in which to seek safety. By plotting
the course of the airplane in advance (and the pilot
cannot veer quickly at such high speeds) the man

ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 93

on the ground can gain time to run twenty or thirty
steps to the safer side and, by throwing himself face
downward on the ground, almost surely escape
death or serious injury. Naturally the quick-witted
Chinese learned this at an early stage.

When a train was attacked, the scene was different.
I twice witnessed the following: at the alarm signal
the train stopped where it was, the valuable loco-
motive was uncoupled and run a quarter of a mile
up the track where, standing alone, it provided a
very small target, while passengers and train crew
left the cars and rushed into the nearby fields. There
half hidden in the growing crops or flat on their
bellies in the narrow runways between the wet
paddy fields of rice, or crouched invisible under a
hedge or tree, they completely escaped destruction,
for the aviators aimed their bombs at the standing
cars. To escape this, trains actually within the war
zone practically traveled only at night. The Japa-
nese airmen showed small inclination for night
flying.

In the towns close to the fighting, where air raids
were incessant, the people were even cannier. Each
day at sunrise the bulk of the population left the
built-over area for the safety of the fields. While
the sun remained above the horizon shops and
houses were closed and empty. But at dusk the
people crept back to their homes and did the neces-
sary buying and selling by the light of faint tapers
and dingy lanterns flickering through the darkness.

94 THE DRAGON WAKES

For the same reason Chinese headquarters, even
the highest, were usually located in tiny villages
outside the larger places, and raids by suspicious
airmen would be answered by complete silence even
though the surroundings were bristling with anti-
aircraft guns and the low-flying Japanese could per-
haps have been brought down with a machine-gun.

The trip to Chengchow took the scheduled eight-
een hours for about three hundred miles, the train
arriving on time. Chengchow itself, though perhaps
the oldest and most historic town in all China and
the first big center of the "Sons of Han" when
they descended on to the Chinese lowlands from
Turkestan or Mongolia, is a dull sordid place with
few monuments of any particular interest. It was
being heavily bombed and a large part of the
population had left. All the foreign missions in
town had been more or less damaged by bombing,
some of which was clearly intentional. The Italian
Catholics and the American Methodists came off
worst, their churches being completely shattered.
Twelve bombs had also fallen into the American
Baptist Hospital compound. But although it had
been necessary to transfer the sick to the open
country, the buildings had thus far escaped.

Our goal was the town of Lanf eng, some seventy
miles to the east of Chengchow, where fighting had
been heavy. A rash division of Japanese, com-
manded by the famous General Doihara, had actu-
ally come beyond the Chinese in Lanf eng, only to

96 THE DRAGON WAKES

be attacked by other troops and pushed northward
until they came to bay with the Yellow River behind
them and the Chinese yapping about them on three
sides. An attempt to open a line behind them by a
bridge of boats was thwarted by the Chinese avia-
tion which destroyed the bridge. The question was
whether or not the Chinese could deliver the punch
that would annihilate the weak forces of Doihara
before they could be relieved by two Japanese
relief columns advancing westward along the rail-
way beyond Lanfeng, just south of the Yellow
River, the one astride the Lunghai Railway, the
other a few miles to the south. They were weak
columns, presumably some five regiments in all, or
twelve thousand bayonets. Opposing them were
six or perhaps nine weak Chinese divisions, or well
over fifty thousand men. But whereas the Japs were
all steel, and motor or horse mounted, with the
latest equipment, armored trucks, artillery to spare
and great superiority in the air, the Chinese had
relatively little of all these things. Moreover,
memories of the early days of the war, when
poorly armed Chinese charged entrenched well-
protected enemies only to be massacred, had pro-
duced a sometimes excessive caution in the Chinese
leaders that was causing them to recoil before forces
weak enough to be annihilated by Chinese numbers.
Strong in my mind was the impression, based on
vivid memories of the World War, that somewhere
or other there must be a fighting "front" and that

ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 97

it was my business to get there. At the very least I
ought to reach Lanfeng and witness the action
against the "encircled" Doihara Division. Kweiteh,
the next big town beyond Lanfeng, had fallen to the
Japanese with twenty precious Chinese locomotives
as booty. In addition to the eighty lost at Hsuchow a
couple of weeks previously, that meant a loss of at
least a hundred. There still seemed to be no cause
for real worry, since the Chinese claimed to be
holding Minchuan well beyond Lanfeng and to
have a whole "army" (an indefinite word meaning
anything from two to a dozen divisions) at Pochow
to the southeast. But if we did not move quickly we
thought we might miss the next fight.

Railroad stations along the Lunghai Railway,
China's great east-to-west highway, had been badly
damaged and the officials were living in bomb-proof
cellars dug in the yellow loess or clay-like "dust of
ages" that from time immemorial has been blowing
eastward from the great arid plains of Central Asia,
filling the water courses and driving the great
Yellow River from one bed to another like a home-
less outcast. To keep it in its latest course, the
inhabitants have built high above the plain dykes,
thanks to which the river, scarce of water save after
heavy rain or in August when the melting flood from
the mighty snows of the Himalayas reaches the
plain, meanders along above the cultivated plains
on either side. On these dark yellow flats grows a
pale-green pastel-like vegetation, trees, bushes and

98 THE DRAGON WAKES

crops. The soil is fertile. In dry weather the strong
winds whip it up into choking, blinding dust storms.
Caught in one such, in Chengchow, we were hardly
able to breathe or speak, while for hours our eyes
stung with the swift-driven filth. On the other hand,
when it rains, the worn hard tracks called roads
(there is no real pavement) become slippery glue
upon which walking is a trial.

The loss of the locomotives had made the Chinese
cautious. There was no guarantee of getting to
Lanf eng by rail. The best we could do was to entrain
for Kaifeng, the capital of Honan Province, two-
thirds of the distance to our goal. We arrived late
one night and found shelter about three in the
morning with two shocked women missionaries In
charge of the American Baptist Mission outside the
walls. They were accustomed to scorn shelter and
witness air raids from the totally unprotected roof
of their main building. But they shrank from the
scandal of sheltering three strange men under the
same roof. To relieve their sense of outraged de-
cency, after breakfast we transferred to the main
Baptist Center within the walls and in charge of a
man. He had sent his family away; his furniture
was crowded into one locked room for protection
against pillaging Japanese. But like all the foreign
missionaries he had decided to risk his life and stay
behind to be faithful to his life work. As one of our
two women hosts said:

100 THE DRAGON WAKES

While the murderers roared away Into the east, we
hurried to the stricken area near the East Gate.
The bombs had fallen into the poorest quarter
where the coolies were nearly all absent or at work.
The number of women and children killed and
maimed was nearly a hundred. I counted several
bodiless heads of babies. From piles of rubble
came faint groans. A woman sat speechless beside
the prostrate figure of her dead husband, in her
arms a baby missing from the waist down. The
Japanese airplanes that did the killing were manu-
factured in the United States.

The operations on the "Northern Front" were in
charge of the famous "Kwangsi General," Li Tsyng-
jen. Under him, in charge of our area, was General
Cheng Sheng, the Yellow River Defense Com-
mander. We had a letter to General Cheng but
missed him. At Chengchow they declared him to
be in Kaifeng. At Kaifeng a sourfaced transport
officer announced that the General had returned to
Chengchow, apparently crossing us on the way.
More than that he refused to say. In fact, he refused
all information, declared solemnly there was no
real military authority about, and categorically re-
fused to help us reach Lanfeng. A new divisional
general, who blew in to disprove the former state-
ment, was equally unresponsive and, for China,
downright impolite. This went on for three-quarters
of an hour. Finally I announced that as newspaper
correspondent I had flown some ten thousand miles

ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 101

at fabulous cost to see China at war; and having
come so near the f ront, I was not going back before
making at least one attempt, with or without per-
mission. Whereupon the transport officer melted.
He had, he admitted, intended to make matters
difficult for us simply because the news was so
unpleasant: China was again on the retreat. But
we could, if we insisted and could find some means
of getting there, go to the headquarters of General
Hsueh-yo, three miles out in the country.

He named the spot. We walked. General Hsueh
and a young officer on his staff who had studied in
the American Staff College at Fort Leavenworth
were courtesy itself, but they advised against our
going to Lanfeng. In reply to queries they refused
to give any explanations. Yet at the same time, the
General said, though he would take no responsibility
for our going, our passes with the signature of the
Generalissimo were good for the area in question
and none would stop us if we insisted.

I did insist. I had been warned by my newspaper
colleagues at Hankow about the reluctance of the
Chinese to allow foreign journalists actually to
witness any fighting, which it was my aim to do. I
would therefore consent, I said, to wait until the
next morning to see how matters developed; then,
without some better reason for desisting, I would
insist on setting out for Lanfeng.

Here the interpreter revolted. I knew nothing of
Chinese ways, he said. The reluctance of General

102 THE DRAGON WAKES

Hsueh-yo could only mean, in his eyes, that the
Chinese were falling back. There were rumors of
the precipitate evacuation of the entire area. So
much the more reason for advancing, I urged. We
should not need to go so far in order to see some-
thing, at least a glimpse of the Chinese operations
against the Doihara Division. How go? he coun-
tered. There were probably no trains. He for his
part urged a return to Chengchow and a talk with
the Yellow River Defense Commander before we
decided on anything rash. But at this point two
indignant newspaper men refused to give way. After
all there must be some means of getting for-
ward. . . .

The next morning, after witnessing a massacre of
Chinese women and children by Japanese bombers,
we learned at the railway station that trains were no
longer running to Lanfeng. It looked pretty hope-
less. Twenty-five miles seemed too far to walk in the
rain that had set in the night before. The interpreter
took heart. Would we not consent to return to
Chengchow?

And then Chen appeared. Straight, slight, dressed
in a neat khaki officer's uniform without insignia,
an immense steel helmet above his smiling face,
Chen Chen-sze introduced himself as a Chinese
newspaper man on his way to Lanfeng. He himself
had reason to believe motor transport could be
found. Would we perhaps go with him?

Would we not? From the first minute I liked

ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 103

Chen. Chen had a coolie along to carry his baggage.
We piled into the rickety motor trucks and toward
five in the afternoon set out for the east, where all
through the day we had heard the rumble of distant
guns. The "surrounded" Doihara Division were
catching it hot.

As we bumped along over the worst road I have
ever known, bouncing high off our seats and lurch-
ing against the sides, we met what seemed to be the
entire population of the neighboring villages pour-
ing westward. In rickshaws, heavy ox-carts with
solid wooden wheels, wheel-barrows; walking,
riding occasionally on donkeys or mules, the people
were moving out of the way of the coming Japa-
nese. The sight was not reassuring. But once we
reached Lanfeng we would be with the garrison
and enjoy the relative protection afforded by a
large body of troops.

At Chingling, a station nearly half way, we
picked up the sacks of rice that were to be our
cargo and then the next disappointment occurred:
the captain of the motor column announced he had
received orders to return at once to Kaifeng: he
could not go on to Lanfeng, the bridges had all
been blown up that afternoon. We could either
return with him or take a train that stood puffing
at the platform pointing in the direction from which
we had just come. We demurred. We raised our
voices.

104 THE DRAGON WAKES

Whereupon Chen in his soft voice and negligible
English :

"You go Lanf eng walk?"

"Yes/ 5 we almost shouted.

"I go Lanfeng," Then, in Chinese, he explained
that there was a division headquarters a couple of
miles away where we could spend the night, with
only a fifteen-mile walk to Lanf eng the following
day. This was made clear to us and we accepted.
But here the interpreter rebelled. He did not, he
explained, much mind being killed by Japanese air-
men* But there were constant infiltrations of Japa-
nese cavalry and he refused to fall into the hands
of Japanese raiders and be tortured to death. He
would therefore return to Hankow. Before we could
even answer, he swung himself on the now moving
train and left us standing in the darkness with Chen
and his coolie, a friendly soul but with whom we
could exchange none but the most primitive of
thoughts. It was a new sensation.

Six persons, and not four, set out from Chingling.
From somewhere, perhaps from the disappearing
train, had appeared two more Chinese, a blue-clad
student propagandist going out to strew demoraliz-
ing handbills in the path of the advancing Japa-
nese, and the propagandist's coolie. The two coolies
obligingly added our food and bedding to the large
bundles already hanging from their long bamboo
poles. Under Chen's guidance, for he possessed a
hand-drawn chart of the region which he frequently

ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 105

consulted, we walked southward, headed toward a
military headquarters at which to pass the night
before going on to Lanfeng the following day. The
presumed location was a village called Kotien. But
as any real conversation between foreigners and
Chinese proved impossible owing to absence of a
common language, there was nothing for the two
newspaper men to do but walk and see.

Ten miles away, up by the Yellow River, sleepy
Chinese cannon growled about the Japanese Doihara
Division.

For hours we trudged across the dark muddy
plain, we in heavy leather, the educated Chinese in
tiny cloth slippers, the two coolies barefoot. The
warm drizzle increased to a steady rain. The loess
ruts, slippery as snow tracks, became unseen pud-
dles in and out of which our wet feet went with a
noisy splash. Chen's map seemed to have been
drawn by someone careless of exact scale. There
was some difficulty in finding the place, though
obviously the name Kotien awakened something
familiar in the ever scarcer villagers who responded
at great length with what we could only suppose
were new and extremely complicated instructions
how to get there.

Suddenly, with a sharp hiss that petrified the
Chinese and caused even us to stop dead in our
tracks, Chen froze and pointed to something.
Approaching from the east, and diagonal to our
path along what seemed to be a road, a tiny light

106 THE DRAGON WAKES

no bigger than an oil lamp was moving. It came
closer, three hundred, a hundred and fifty yards
away. Then it turned to a pale beam and died away
to nothing.

Softly Chen approached me. "Motorcar? 59 he
queried.

"Of course, motorcar," I answered and nodded.

"You hear?" he persisted.

"Hear what?"

"Hear motorcar?"

"No hear," I answered, suddenly wondering that
I had not before noticed how that now invisible
something had moved along without a sound.

"No hear motorcar?" Chen whispered persist-
ently.

I shook my head.

"Then Japanese," Chen announced with finality.
"Japanese motorcar."

We stood paralyzed. What would happen next,
I caught myself wondering, while I softly wiped
the rain and sweat from my bare head. The answer
came at once. Out of the darkness a luminous beam
suddenly blazed like a lighthouse straight at us.
Automatically we dropped on our bellies into the
wet road behind a thin curtain of bushes and sure
we had been seen, awaited the expected rattle of
machine-guns. My nose nuzzled the wet earth.

Nothing happened. Apparently the man behind
the light had overlooked six figures in a field, for

ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 107

the beam shifted again, raking the low bushes as
though suspecting our presence but unable to find us.

The minute the light was off us Chen had me by
the hand and, bent double, dashing from bush to
bush, we ran from that light like scared rabbits.
Three hundred yards ahead we pulled up and drew
breath.

"Japanese motorcar," Chen said with a Chinese
laugh and again began discussing directions with
the student propagandist.

But this was Chinese territory. How could the
Japanese simply have come along a main highway
through the lines even at night without meeting any
resistance?

"He's right," my colleague suddenly volunteered.
"I remember now at Shanghai the Jap armored
trucks moved about silently. The sooner we get
somewhere away from here the happier I shall be.
Forgetting what they would do to the Chinese, what
a fine place this field would be for an international
'accident' on a nice dark night like this!"

"But if they just come through the front like that
there can't be any Chinese army."

"There's an army somewhere all right but you
might as well understand here and now, there isn't
any front. Chinese and Japanese just go where
they please. This is a free war." It was my turn to
laugh.

For half an hour more Chen led us forward on
his little cloth shoes through the muck, the student

108 THE DRAGON WAKES

and the barefooted coolies at his heels. More noisily
we followed. Then a shape appeared out of the
darkness and rapidly turned into a huge gate in an
ancient wall.

"Kotien."

A funny sort of headquarters; inside it was as
black as without; where was the Chinese army?
Abruptly there was a faint noise near us. Chen's
flashlight picked up a man, and he called out
reassuringly. With a scream, the figure fled; run-
ning in a zigzag it reached the dark gate behind us
and disappeared. A funny sort of headquarters,
indeed. For a good quarter of an hour we stood
behind a bush and waited while the barefooted
coolies, having laid down their heavy loads, crept
forward to scout. Finally they reappeared with an
aged Chinese peasant. More endless conversation.
So far as I could gather, he explained that the
Chinese had all gone and the villagers with them
leaving behind only him and the screaming coolie
who had taken us for the expected Japanese.

There was no time to be lost: quickly we sneaked
out through the gate and again suddenly stopped.
This time I felt my heart thumping. Over to the
east the searchlight was still fingering the landscape
in our direction. But straight ahead, between us
and Chingling station, other new lights were gradu-
ally moving westward. In that direction, too, we
were cut off. So, as fast as we could, we made off
in the direction that seemed open, namely toward

ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 109

the southwest. After a long time slipping and splash-
ing through the rain, we reached another tiny
village. A timid Chinese in a hut responded to a
gentle call and then guided us to a large walled
farm. Two figures moved swiftly toward us. Chen
flashed his light full on himself, on the military
button serving instead of regular insignia, and spoke
to them. After a moment they seemed satisfied as
to his identity and let him in alone, while we
waited. When he returned, we saw by his flashlight
that the two figures were soldiers holding hand
grenades. Reluctantly they drew aside and let us
into the abandoned farmhouse.

We spent the night there. The runaway owner
must have been prosperous, for there was a big
inner courtyard, with a principal dwelling behind
and side-houses for extra women and servants. We
took possession of one of these side-houses; silk
things lay on a table, there was a family altar, and
we slept on a matting-covered bed, too tired to
mind the fleas, after a glorious supper of cold
corned beef, canned fruit and noodles hastily boiled
by the coolies over a wet outdoor oven.

By five o'clock the next morning we were up, but
it was seven before we had had our tea, finished ofi
the evening's scraps for breakfast and once more
started toward Lanfeng. The Japanese armored
truck had gone, but at every village we made
inquiries, for safety lay in reaching a good-sized
body of Chinese troops. An hour's walk to the east,

110 THE DRAGON WAKES

and we were suddenly in the midst of hundreds of
soldiers. There, in the middle of a village called
Taipinkong, was the man we had vainly sought the
evening before Chen's friend. General Kwei
Yung-chun, commander of the Twenty-seventh Army
Corps, wearing no visible insignia, like many Chi-
nese commanders. He had, it appeared, been quar-
tered just south of Lanfeng and failed to reach
Kotien the night before. As the General had studied
military science in Germany, I was able to converse
with him and received confirmation that the entire
Chinese army was retiring, leaving behind only a
rearguard to cover the retreat.

Were those Japanese we had missed the night
before?

Very likely. There were no Chinese armored cars
in the neighborhood.

But could we reach Lanfeng and join the rear-
guard?

"I really cannot say," the General answered.
"The Japanese are filtering in from the southeast.
They were all around us last night, as you noticed.
Go on as far as Chenliu and inquire and after that
keep well to the north, close to the railway."

Chen took two hand grenades from a soldier's
belt and put them in his own. ("Capture? yes?
. . . torture, no," he explained.) For another hour
we pushed eastward, meeting the General's troops
coming back, slight fellows, many of them South-
erners with bare feet and broad straw-and-bamboo

ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 111

hats, but carrying their often heavy burdens with
the patient ease of the coolie. Then, when only four
li (something over a mile) from Chenliu, a soldier
jabbered fiercely at us as we passed. Chen stopped
our caravan and talked. Then he turned to us and,
with his finger, began drawing lines on the ground
in the mud.

"Here Kaifeng, here Lanfeng, here Chenliu,"
he said. "No Chinese Chenliu. Japanese two li
here" (he pointed to the south) . "You go Lanfeng?"

We stopped and debated : getting to Lanfeng had
become almost an obsession. Maybe the soldier was
misinformed and we could still slip through? I
knew that if we decided to try it, Chen and his
party would stay with us through anything.

Once again the decisive argument was furnished
by the Japanese.

Just at this moment, less than half a mile to the
south, one of their machine guns began to rattle
monotonously and was almost immediately an-
swered by another to the east. There was no Chinese
answering fire. Leaves cut from a nearby tree by
bullets began slowly floating to earth.

"Japanese Chenliu," announced Chen, grinning
below his helmet and thick glasses as though it was
the best joke in the world. "You go Lanfeng?"

We groaned. All morning I had had visions of
being ridden down by Japanese cavalry after a
wild scamper across those muddy fields, and then
trying to explain to troopers with drawn sabers

112 THE DRAGON WAKES

that we were, after all, foreign newspaper men and
as much worthy of consideration ... as the
Panay. With the Japs less than a mile away what
chance would we six have getting through in broad
daylight? And if seen, what could we do with Chen's
two hand grenades? By evening, according to Gen-
eral Kwei, it would be too late. We were beaten.
The presence of those machine guns settled it.

But before we turned back, the student suddenly
drew from a wallet slung about his neck a handful
of tiny illustrated bills in Japanese and let the
wind blow them across the fields just where the
Japanese would find them. The aim was to incite
the Japanese soldiery to revolt. One picture showed
a Japanese general whipping a chained Japanese
soldier; a second, the same Japanese soldier, now
freed, shaking hands with a Chinese soldier; a third,
the two together happily sticking a bayonet into the
shackled Japanese general. . . .

We faced about and started back. "In all proba-
bility," I thought with some bitterness, "I shall die
without ever having seen the city of Lanf eng."

2. THE RETREAT

Our goal was Kaifeng where we had left our
baggage. Within a short time, for we made speed,
we had again caught the laggards among General
Kwefs troops and walked along with them. Hardly
had we gone a mile before a concealed Japanese
light battery off to the south let loose. The marks-

ALONG THE YELLOW EIVER 113

manship was good, the fourth shell found the road
neatly. But Chen was equal to anything. Hardly had
the first shell burst before he had us off the road
and once more we were running across the fields
away from the column of soldiers that offered the
bigger target. When another shell came feeling
after us, Chen made us tear large branches from
the bushes and hold them high in the air over our
heads. Thus camouflaged, he conveyed to us by
gestures, we would become invisible to the gunners.
Once more he proved to be right. Within another
half -hour we had not only ceased to be a target, but
were well out of range.

"Nothing to do but take the train back to Cheng-
chow," muttered my companion gloomily. "Imagine
not getting to Lanfeng after all this walking. My
feet are something awful." So were my own. Since
leaving the truck at Chingling station the night
before, we had walked seven hours. It was two
hours more before we reached the high crenelated
walls of Kaif eng, and still another hour before we
entered the Baptist Mission in the center of the
town, where we had left our luggage, for all the
gates but one were already closed and the ap-
proaches mined. Protecting Kaif eng to the east was
a broad anti-tank ditch and several lines of trenches,
but the latter were unmanned.

Leaving the Chinese waiting at the still open
gate, we hurried through the now almost deserted
town. We had hoped to find rickshaws. None were

114 THE DRAGON WAKES

to be had. There were hardly any troops inside the
walls; clearly, the Chinese intended to put up no
very decisive resistance here.

"Hurry, or we shall miss the last train/'

We strode through the wet, empty streets on
burning feet. The Mission was empty but we found
a letter from our runaway interpreter that caused
us to smile through our misery. He had, he ex-
plained, gone through the most awful experience
of his life, for he had sought shelter by leaving us,
only to run into the most terrible air raid he had
ever known.

Back from the Mission, that merciless mile over
rough pavement to the Southern Gate. It was almost
completely blocked with bricks and sandbags. A
group of soldiers motioned us back but we grinned
and pushed between them, hurrying in the direction
of the station. And there outside was Chen.

"No train," he announced with the graciousness
of a man offering a birthday gift. "Japanese four li.
Hear machine guns. Cannons. Walk now Chung-
mow, see General Kwei." And, with a broad sweep
of his arm, he trotted forward on his heelless cloth
slippers. His tireless coolie added my typewriter to
the heavy load on the bamboo pole and followed. I
looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes to two.
The alternatives were clear: stay, trust to the Japa-
nese when the town fell, or get out at once. With a
groan, I started limping westward after Chen, along
the twenty-mile road to Chungmow.

ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 115

A few minutes later, the Southern Gate was defi-
nitely closed to traffic. Some time that afternoon,
the Japanese onslaught on Kaifeng began. It was
forty-eight hours before the town fell.

Guns were already thundering away to the
south; what was that rattle of machine guns? Shut-
ting my eyes and whistling to forget my feet, I
hurried after my companions. Within half an hour
we had caught up with another and more fantastic
parade.

The weather had changed again. Old women,
children, all sorts of soldiers, carts, wheel-barrows,
rickshaws simply filled the streaming wet highway
where the morning's heat had given place to a cold
northeast wind that chilled the rain-soaked skin.

Dainty Chinese girls in silken semi-modern dress
and slippers, older women hobbling along surpris-
ingly quickly on their bound feet with the aid of
long poles on which they balanced ; occasional old
men; rich wives of merchants in rickshaws; peasant
girls plodding stolidly; tiny children wet to the skin
but impassive in the long-suffering Chinese way;
whole families on heavy ox-carts with solid wooden
wheels, drawn by inconceivable combinations of
domestic animals, their small household goods all
mixed up with the equipment of the soldiers trot-
ting beside them; babies in boxes on tiny wheels or
strapped to the back of tottering older children;
occasional sturdy farmers lifting the handles of
gigantic loaded wheel barrows, their remaining

116 THE DRAGON WAKES

donkey or wife or children pulling in front: these
were inextricably mixed with the retreating Chinese
army. There were almost no motor vehicles, and the
few were piled to the sky with women and goods
and attempts to purchase transportation were sternly
refused. There seemed eternally no proper trans-
port and, after the loss of rolling stock at Hsuchow
and Kweiteh, the authorities were careful to keep
what remained out of the reach of the Japanese.

An occasional horseman trotted by; a few officers
and officials pedaled along on bicycles. But except
for occasional groups on the ox-carts, most of the
soldiers, like most of the refugees, simply walked,
although many, like the writer and his colleague,
had come from places well to the east of Kaifeng.
Soldiers in every shade of khaki, from dust yellow
to pale green and blue, peasants in everything
under the sun, all were mingled in one endless
procession. Occasionally, an ox-cart would have to
stop, as a starved horse collapsed under the strain
and died.

Sometimes a man did the same. Never had I seen
such wounded. They were few enough, the bulk
having simply been left behind, somewhere. But
those who could walked. Helped by comrades or
limping alone, Chinese soldiers with bandaged
arm, shoulder or leg, staggered forward along that
endless rain-swept highway. Many were able to
keep erect only thanks to long poles like those of
the deformed old women. Their faces pale almost

ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 117

to Occidental pallor, or drawn into knots with the
pain, they stubbornly went on. A bareheaded boy
staggered forward, his steel helmet pressed to his
belly and in his helmet a section of intestines. Not
an ambulance in sight, not" a doctor. Only very
occasionally a wounded man seemed to have found
temporary rest on top of a piled ox-cart or within
the semi-waterproof curtains of a rickshaw.

It was interesting to compare this retreat with the
Italian defeat at Caporetto in 1917, in which I
participated. The same inextricable mixture of
soldiers and refugees, the same pitilessly streaming
rain over the flat plain. But there the resemblance
ended. Caporetto was part rout, part military strike.
The well-armed, well-clothed, well-fed Italian sol-
diers simply abandoned vast quantities of material
in wild disorder and, in a frame of mind varying
from panic to elation, started for home.

This army had next to no equipment, the southern
soldiers never had had shoes; there was hardly a
coat in the long defile, steel helmets were the
exception. Bayonets were anything but universal.
On the other hand, umbrellas were plentiful. I saw
a few machine guns, one small thing that looked
like a trench mortar, one anti-aircraft gun. In the
course of two days on the road with troops, I noticed
hardly more than half a dozen batteries of field
guns. During a week, not a single Chinese airplane
flew over us while Jap planes were everywhere. Of
kitchens there was none: a few iron kettles on

118 THE DRAGON WAKES

bamboo poles were about all. For the rest, each
soldier seemed to carry his own food, and there
was a lively trade in and pilfering of chickens and
ducks along the way. One saw soldiers and refugees
eating together from common pots. But what war
material the Chinese had, they kept. I doubt if the
entire retreat from Lanf eng westward to Chengchow
cost them more than eight or nine guns, lost by
carelessness. As for marching, there is no force in
the world equal to these thinly clad, barefoot sol-
diers. The rare officers smiled and once or twice
joked with us in English. I expected a demoraliza-
tion. There was none. Retreat meant nothing to this
army: after all, was not one place as good as
another? A few soldiers scowled at a pair of limp-
ing newspaper men, but most smiled at the unusual
sight of two foreign "masters" hoofing it out of
reach of the Japs. Some offered portions of their
scanty food and questionable drink. I received the
loan of a bicycle for an hour, a boon to blistered
feet, rested a precious half -hour on a cart drawn by
one cow, one pregnant donkey and two mules, and
finally, toward night, when the rain was falling in
torrents, climbed aboard a passing telephone truck
and rode the last few miles to Chungmow packed
tight among coolie soldiers. Not once did I see signs
of anger or depression.

Chungmow is an ancient walled city of the worst
sort. The houses are small and dingy, the unpaved
streets had become quagmires under the drenching

ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 119

rain, and only by haughtily producing passes, signed
by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek himself, were
two correspondents allowed to hobble up its main
street, asking vainly for the headquarters of our
acquaintance General Kwei Yung-chun, who had
told us at Taipinkong, early the same morning,
that he expected to spend the night at Chungmow.
None seemed to have heard of him, and finally an
officer, whom we pestered with questions in lan-
guages he did not speak, shoved us through an open
door into a dingy room lined with benches. It might
have been an opium den: it turned out to be a bath
house with benches whereon the Chinese like to lie
and repose after the fatiguing process of the bath.
Barely able to move, we collapsed upon two benches
and began removing layer after layer of well-soaked
clothing.

A boy approached and obviously wanted to know
our business. We were able to order tea and ex-
plain by motions that we had come a long way on
foot from the front. The boy was sympathetic. But
how make clear that we wanted our outer garments
dried, if possible, before the kitchen fire? When we
got to this point, "Can I help you, gentlemen?" said
a pleasant voice behind us. We almost collapsed
with astonishment. It was an employee of the
admirable Chinese postal service. And from that
moment everything went swimmingly. Food could
no longer be bought in the rapidly emptying city.
But what the post office official had, he shared with

120 THE DRAGON WAKES

us, and we dined sumptuously (we had had no
lunch) on a Chinese roll and a handful of peanuts,
washed down by innumerable cups of tea and a
little Chinese brandy that caused our teeth to stop
chattering, donated by the proprietor. We had no
bedding and the bench in the bath house was any-
thing but soft, but I slept soundly. The next morn-
ing, Saturday, we learned that General Kwei had,
indeed, come, but also gone the night before, further
west, to distant Loyang.

Our chafed and blistered feet were festering. But
somehow or other we had to get back to Chengchow
before the Japanese could cut the railway line south
of the town and prevent our return to Hankow.
Something came steaming into Chungmow station
from the west. We almost shouted: maybe it would
soon be returning. But it turned out to be an
armored train sent up to the last bit of track west
of the blown-up bridges to help cover the retreat of
the few divisions that were still holding out in
Kaifeng and points east. Meanwhile friend Chen,
who had spent the night at a farm, appeared with
the student propagandist, the two coolies and our
baggage. Together, around noon, we set out along
the railroad ties on the last twenty-two mile section
of our trek to the west.

The rain had ceased falling, the sun came out,
the heat was intense. Soon we decided to leave our
baggage with the friendly Chinese comrades and

ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 121

their worn but faithful coolies and to push ahead
as fast as we could.

We did. In the next three hours we covered ten
hitter miles, finding ourselves in the very midst of
a retreating Chinese division. Some soldiers led
along three captured Japanese by ropes thin as
string. More men with barely dressed wounds hob-
bled along at a surprisingly fast pace, showing no
signs of pain. The Chinese claimed to have over
two hundred military hospitals, but in the absence
of ambulances it was up to these men to get them-
selves out of immediate danger, if they wished for
real treatment, and most of them were doing it.

But as the heat grew greater and our feet ever
more painful, we were soon thinking principally of
ourselves. At the eleven-mile mark, there was a
station. Here we paused for a drink. The water
they offered came from an open well in which a
dead frog was floating. With sporadic cholera all
over the place, with typhoid endemic and dysentery
as common as cold in the head, one would hardly
have taken a greater risk in drinking arsenic. But
there was no other liquid available except the slimy
green pools from which some of the soldiers had
been drinking. The temptation was torture. Choking
back tears, I put it behind me. Just then a soldier
caught my sleeve and led me indoors. In a great
iron caldron rice was boiling. I dipped up a cupful
of the scalding water and gulped it down.

Once again luck came. We abandoned the pitiless

122 THE DRAGON WAKES

railway ties and were walking across a field toward
the highroad when we were hailed in English. It was
a somewhat portly Chinese officer who had been
surprised by the presence of two Westerners amid
this crowd of Chinese. He cross-questioned us and
we explained our adventures, our exhaustion and
our desire to reach Chengchow as quickly as pos-
sible in order to reach Hankow before the Linghan
Railway should be cut.

"We/' he said, "are a medical unit of which I
am the general. We are going over here to wait at a
farmhouse until a motor truck arrives to take us to
Chengchow. My son studied in the United States.
He lived with people who treated him like one of
the family. I should like to be good to an American.
For his sake I shall take you both along in the motor
truck with us.* 5 It was a voice from Heaven.

For an hour we lay on the ground in the farm
courtyard and drank cup after cup of sterile water
fresh from the boiling kettle. Nightfall found us
back at the American Baptist Hospital in Cheng-
chow, our feet dressed, eating American food.

Anxiously we inquired if the railway to Hankow
had as yet been cut.

"No trains came in yesterday," the doctors told
us, "but to-night there may be one. Eat quickly and
go straight to the station and wait/'

The station was crammed to suffocation with
soldiers and refugees. I had seen similar places in
Soviet Russia bursting with prospective travelers

ALONG THE YELLOW RIVER 123

patiently waiting for a conveyance; I had stood up
all night with refugees from the invaded regions in
war-time Italy; never did I see anything quite so
crowded as the station at Chengchow. Hours passed.
There was no train for Hankow.

Instead, two or three tracks away, another train
stood quietly under full steam. It consisted of two
parlor sleeping cars in which a dozen officers sat at
quiet tables before the windows and drank; two
freightcars loaded with unseen merchandise, and
four flatcars. Soldiers were loading the flatcars with
motor trucks and passenger automobiles, obviously
at the disposal of the occupants of the parlor cars.

"Where is that train going?" I asked.

"Westward to Sian."

"Why don't the soldiers get on it instead of wait-
ing here for something that may never come?"

"Because it is a generals' train."

"But the generals could double up a little and
take less space. And they could send the motor
vehicles by road to Sian and fill up those flatcars
with tired soldiers."

"Not Chinese generals."

Wlien the last of the flatcars was loaded, the
generals* train pulled out, making way for the
passenger train which had been waiting to enter the
station. It was one in the morning. Thanks to a
friendly station master, we secured two spots on the
floor of a baggage car, and slept. When we awoke^
the train had passed the danger point. Transferring

124 THE DRAGON WAKES

to Number One Express, itself crowded to the roof,
with a crowd of soldiers who howled vainly for
admittance to the compartment, after one air raid
and two hot boxes, we reached Hankow only sixteen
hours late.

In the train we had met a foreign railway em-
ployee. "Watch out in the next few days," he had
said. "That armored train you met at Chungmow
was not so much sent there to cover the retreat as to
protect the Chinese working on the Yellow River
dykes north of the town."

"Funny moment to be building up the dykes. . . ."

He winked. "Who said anything about building
them up. You know the river is higher than the
plain."

"Yes."

"Well, the Chinese are planting dynamite in the
dykes in two .places not far from Chungmow." And
again he winked.

A few days later the Chinese High Command
issued a statement to the effect that Japanese air-
men, dropping bombs near the Yellow River, had
burst the dykes and the water was pouring south-
ward across the plain just between the Pinghan
Railway and the advancing Japanese columns.

"Very providential of the Japanese," remarked
my companion.

That was the day when Chen Chen-tse appeared
in Hankow with our abandoned baggage. There are
not many like Chen.

CHAPTER VII

CHINA IN UNIFORM

". . . Der Soldat, der Soldat,
1st der feinste Mann im ganzen Stoat"

German Marching Song.

CHINA must always have had armies for the
country was frequently at war. But nowhere
was military prestige so low as among the "Sons of
Han." Great generals were celebrated in verse and
on the stage and some of the poets themselves were
soldiers. But they never seem to have felt much but
contempt for the profession. Anything further from
the romantic feudalism of medieval Europe or mod-
ern Japan could hardly be imagined.

Almost inevitably, one would think, the quality
of the army suffered. In these early contacts with
western enemies Chinese soldiers were something
of a joke. They were in the habit of firing once or
twice and then going somewhere else, leaving the
enemy in possession of the field. This was quite in
accordance with the classical treatises on strategy
which always urged allowing the foe to escape by
one way or another. The struggles between the rival
"war lords" all seemed to be governed by the strict-
est conventionality. It was rather like beer-gang
rivalries in the United States. Look as you might, it
was impossible to discover the germ of an idea.

125

126 THE DRAGON WAKES

This first began to change during the campaigns
of unification waged by Chiang Kai-shek against all
rivals in the late 'twenties and early 'thirties. But
the fact that Chiang's troops, representing at least
nominally Chinese unity and nationalism, could
still sometimes be successfully opposed by the pro-
vincial armies under half -independent governors,
by private mercenaries under war lords or, in the
case of the communists, by a disciplined but miser-
ably equipped party army, proves how difficult it
was to make willing and efficient soldiers out of
Chinese.

Evidence of definite transformation was first
given not by Chiang's forces but by the Nineteenth
Route Army at Shanghai in 1932. In their heroic
resistance to the far better armed Japanese, while
Chiang's two million men stood by idly and watched,
these soldiers gave promise of the even more stub-
born Chinese resistance against greater Japanese
forces five years later. To all who wished to see, it
was clear first that the "Sons of Han" were ap-
proaching a stage where their emotions could be
aroused by a patriotic appeal, and second, that once
so aroused, the Chinese "human material" was
capable of being made into a first-class military
machine.

The final signal for Chinese military awakening
was the second Japanese aggression of 1937.
Chiang's crack divisions immediately gave a good
account of themselves. There was a surge of patri-

CHINA IN UNIFORM 127

otism that surprised nearly everyone, residents as
well as outsiders. Remarkable was the fact, not so
much that Chiang's few German-trained divisions
fought and fought well but that after their final
defeat and the virtual rout at Nanking, China as a
whole stood the shock and became more determined
than ever. Circles that had hitherto remained in-
different, if not to China's fate, at least to the
military effort which alone could ultimately trans-
form the Japanese invasion into something favor-
able to China, suddenly became patriotic.

From one end to the other of this pathetically
pacifist country where the soldier had been some-
thing below a servant and hardly distinguishable
from a common criminal, the bugles began to blow
no wailing Chinese laments but short, stirring,
martial calls. New songs of battle, sprung from
nowhere, were suddenly sung from one end of the
country to the other. One heard them from soldiers,
from students, from Chinese newspaper men. They
were introduced into the schools, popularized among
refugee children, introduced into austere centers of
highly academic scholarship.

China had revered sages. It paid homage to the
political theorist and revolutionary, Sun Yat-sen,
But it certainly had never accepted as its most
popular and representative figure a soldier. Yet
within a few months after the outbreak of hostilities
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had become the
patriot-hero, the universally acknowledged leader

128 THE DRAGON WAKES

and the symbol of a renascent nation in which
nationalism was fairly bubbling. This process was
of course consciously encouraged by the authorities;
not only by the Chiang group who had the most to
gain from it, but by former opponents of the
Generalissimo, by all those who, determined to
oppose the Japanese to the bitter end, recognized in
the silent soldier the only living Chinese who could
mobilize all energies, rally all factions, focus the
entire national feeling on New China's first armed
struggle. With the elevation of Chiang Kai-shek
inevitably went a reversal of ancient values: from
being the lowest of the low, the soldier abruptly
became the highest figure in the country.

The results were immediate. Not only the young
people poured upon soldiers departing for the front
a vast store of emotion. Not only everything be-
came a hymn to war and struggle theater, litera-
ture, books, art, posters and public placards. But
getting into some sort of uniform became almost a
necessity. And from Hong Kong to Burma, from
the Wuhan cities to the stony wastes of Gobi and
the steppes of Outer Mongolia, everyone adopted
military dress. There were soldiers, soldiers, sol-
diers everywhere, literally millions of them, in all
sorts of colors from dark cream or dust-colored
khaki through the yellows and the browns to a vivid
light green and overall blue. An immense crop of
new-made officers accompanied this mass, their uni-
forms more sober in color. Generals wore small

CHINA IN UNIFORM 129

Insignia on their collars while most of the junior
officers showed their rank by round pinned buttons
like an American political badge, above which was
often another button with the features of Generalis-
simo Chiang. Military police, or soldiers on police
duty, could be distinguished by badges big as play-
ing cards covered by a sheet of mica against the
rain, while common soldiers' units were sometimes
apparent on their sleeves.

Not only the soldiers affected uniforms. The six
sorts of police (whose power to arrest was often
keenly resented), the students and school children,
postmen, boy scouts, sanitary men from the famous
Buddhist good-will brotherhood who had discovered
the swastika two or three thousand years before
Adolf Hitler, the mass of government employees,
all got out of their graceful ancient robes or sloppy
Occidental dress and into some sort of uniform. So
strong was the contagion that even persons with no
official quality whatever found it proper to turn up
in that half -military, half -overall costume with high
collar and without visible shirt, first adopted by
the Russian Bolsheviks.

Thousands and thousands of women followed the
men's example. Robes and baggy trousers were the
time-honored common property of both sexes. Put-
ting the girls into pants, though a great aesthetic
loss, was no novelty for them. New was the volun-
tary merging of the elegant, half westernized youth
of both sexes into the drab and anonymous mass

130 THE DRAGON WAKES

of the nation. It became fashionable to be merely
militant Chinese. On the outside, capitalist and
communist, mandarin and coolie, became indistin-
guishable.

This did not mean that all the Chinese who should
have been were actually fighting or seeking employ-
ment at the front. From an Occidental viewpoint the
country was simply full of "embusques" who used
birth, position, education, influence or power as a
reason for avoiding danger zones. The moral duty
of the best actually to lead the rank and file for the
sake of example was not always followed or under-
stood. Noblesse oblige was something new to un-
romantic China. One could still meet a physician or
a scholar who referred disdainfully to China's strug-
gle as a "coolies' war." Any number of the super-
fluous officials could obviously be spared for the
front. Yet so long as there was no lack of other
recruits, just what, the Chinese asked, was the use
of "wasting the educated minority"?

However little enthusiasm the privileged showed
in volunteering for the front, there could be no
thought of their actually disobeying a summons to
do so at least, not anywhere but in the remote
districts of Szechwan and Yunnan. The new disci-
pline was rigorously enforced, reaching in certain
corps and training schools and barracks a truly
Prussian precision. Schoolboys and refugee chil-
dren snapped to attention on command. Recruits
but three weeks under the celestial flag (white sun

CHINA IN UNIFORM 131

against blue sky on red ground) moved like ma-
chines at the sharp treble bark of the drill sergeant.
Was this the people of individualists considered too
uncompromising to govern themselves, reputed
without national pride or civic feeling? Where was
the traditional Chinese anarchy?

Now in the strict sense it was literally true that
they were not governing themselves. They were
being ruled by a semi-military government based
on Chiang Kai-shek and the Soongs, on the army
and on the Kuomintang Party organization. For-
eigners thought to detect a gradual decrease of
Kuomintang influence in favor of the Generalis-
simo's personal military machine. In certain prov-
inces, Kwangtung, Kwangsi, Yunnan, Szechwan,
Shensi, the central military authority had to come
to terms with and govern through the local author-
ities. Governors of provinces, most of them "gen-
erals" (in China an honorary title rather than a
precise military rank), sometimes overlooked the
orders of the shaven-headed Generalissimo at Han-
kow at whom they had formerly snapped their
fingers. They were no longer snapping them. That
might easily bring them before a firing squad. For
as the war progressed, and Chiang's incredibly
Chinese tactics began to justify themselves, the
authority of the Central Government grew. For it
was based not so much on fear and military disci-
pline as on the backing of virtually the entire group
of educated Chinese, China or foreign trained,

132 THE DRAGON WAKES

capitalist, communist, modern technician or an-
cient literary scholar, united in a common loathing
of the Japanese invaders. This group controlled
the bureaucracy, occupied the positions of technical
leadership, directed popular education. Their im-
mediate influence, plus the redoubtable facts that
Chiang alone possessed the quality of leadership,
an army and plenty of money, made him vastly out-
shine any other conceivable luminary. Strength-
ened by the flame of popular indignation, Chiang's
influence spread even to large sections of the once
so indifferent, still too passive, long-suffering, all-
enduring, all-surviving mass of coolies, probably
the toughest population in the world.

Once the reborn Chinese nation began giving its
best energies to the war, everything, or nearly, had
to be improvised. Modern China was after all con-
fined to a few towns on the coast. In the interior,
one still saw little girls, their feet bound to make
them tiny; the women themselves lived in actual
subjection to the men whatever their formal status.
A vast amount of opium smoking went on and so-
called leaders lived upon the profits from it. Filth
and excrement and disease existed on an indescrib-
able scale. The few modern physicians had hardly
begun to tackle the ancient fermentations, purify
the water, give a first faint semblance of sanitation
to the houses, root out deeply anchored supersti-
tions that made for over-population, mental and
physical deficiency, suffering and degradation. II-

CHINA IN UNIFORM 133

literacy was still the rule. Statistically the picture
of China even in wartime remained appalling. But
statistics are dead. China was very much alive and
each day more consciously so. During the war the
transformation from ancient to modern was fan-
tastically speeded up. It could not prevail in a year
nor even in a decade. The hour for a new synthesis
between all that was finest in old China's culture,
its science, art and philosophy, and the borrowed
Occidental civilization that was slowly transforming
the country a graft which could again make the
Chinese the highly creative people they once were
had not yet struck. But something brand new was
making steady headway, particularly among the
youth.

Why then the need for conscription? Surely the
inexhaustible well of Chinese man-power should
have furnished enough real volunteers to make
obligatory service unnecessary. Several explana-
tions were available. Some people said that the
peasants, the bulk of any conceivable Chinese army,
would not volunteer in sufficient numbers. Others
pointed to the need for social justice and particu-
larly for unifying the hitherto centrifugally tending
provinces under a common flag and a common dis-
cipline. Perhaps the truth lay somewhere between
the two. By conscription the Generalissimo was
unquestionably mixing and binding together in a
common task and a common feeling men who had
never before felt much in common. But also, with-

134 THE DRAGON WAKES

out the shadow of a doubt he was making sure that
the overwhelming superiority in numbers that was,
with the vast distance, China's greatest asset, should
be under all circumstances maintained without dis-
cussion. Introduction of conscription into China no
more meant a failing morale than introduction of
conscription in highly educated Great Britain dur-
ing the World War testified to failing national reso-
lution. The important thing after the Nanking dis-
aster was the reconstitution of a powerful National
Army, in contrast to the numerous strong provincial
armies that in the past had done the country so
much mischief.

This reconstituted National Army, comprising
men from all parts of the country, including white-
turbaned, bearded Moslems from Turkestan and
"directors" of Mongolian fighting "Banners," com-
pletely changed the scene. After a year of warfare,
it had grown to somewhere around two hundred
divisions of so-called "regular" soldiers. Many
were poorly equipped, ill-trained, badly officered.
But as the war progressed, Chinese morale pro-
gressed with it. Considering that the number of
really trained Chinese soldiers was very low in-
deed, there was nothing surprising in the fact that
it took an immense number of Chinese to oppose or
"contain" the hundreds of thousands of Japanese
troops engaged in invading China.

A complete picture of the organization of China's
fighting forces was difficult to obtain if only because

CHINA IN UNIFORM 135

of the infinite variety of origin, and the transforma-
tion of provincial to National. In communist Shensi
it was not the same as in militarist Kwangsi, for
example. It did not seem to be identical in Hopei.
But in a general way, the situation seemed some-
what as follows:

Reserves were being drawn from two sources, the
National Army training units established right
throughout the country and the remains of the
former provincial armies which were being not so
much abolished as emptied of their contents. In
some provinces this emptying process was almost
complete, in others, Szechwan and Yunnan for
example, it had hardly begun. But each province
was regularly sending to the battle zone slightly
more men than were being lost as casualties. Had
China possessed the requisite war material or un-
limited credit with which to obtain it, the army
strength could at any time have been doubled and
its quality perhaps increased four-fold. Lacking
such credit, lacking perhaps the possibility of pur-
chase on so large a scale in a war-mad world, trans-
port, equipment, medical services and supplies,
everything must remain sketchy. China was making
efforts in the way of producing its own arms. Small-
arm production was pronounced "nearly adequate."
Hand grenades could apparently be supplied in
profusion by a people adept in the making of can-
non crackers. Trench mortars seemed to be well
within Chinese capacity to produce and one heard

136 THE DRAGON WAKES

of the manufacture of some artillery, though the
more usual type of field gun was captured from the
Japanese and badly served. Airplanes (but not
motors) were being produced on a small scale.
But at best this production was hopelessly inade-
quate and until conditions changed China must
continue on an endless defensive that tried the
native morale horribly, while at the same time put-
ting a heavy strain upon the arrogant but worried
Japanese.

Aside from furnishing recruits to the National
Army, the provincial armies did garrison service at
home. One heard complaints that in many districts
these provincial armies were too numerous. But
that was an ancient problem in China. So long as
the local regime failed to win the confidence of
the masses, the local rulers leaned for their support
on provincial forces they obstinately but logically
refused to sacrifice.

Behind the provincial armies, often supplying
them as they supplied the National forces, were
"Able-bodied Youth" units, a sort of local militia
dividing their time between public training service
and everyday tasks. Militarily they were used only
locally. Their presence nonetheless constituted a
sort of guarantee that China's war strength would
be indefinitely maintained so long as the arms sup-
ply held out. There were a considerable number of
women within their ranks.

A final source of military strength, destined per-

CHINA IN UNIFORM 137

haps to become the most important of all as the war
wore on, were the irregular or guerrilla bands. The
Eighth Route Army, formerly communist, took the
lead in organizing these, as in many other innova-
tions and reforms. Realizing the latent possibilities
of a patriotic peasantry, they everywhere appealed
for cooperation to the population. Seeing their suc-
cess, the National military authorities also organ-
ized special schools for training guerrilla leaders,
to which officers from every division were sent.
When ready for action, these officers managed to
take a small amount of military material and a
handful of absolutely truthworthy men through the
lines to the region assigned for their activity. Once
on the spot they enlisted the inhabitants, often
within the very cities or villages which the Japanese
claimed to be holding. Indistinguishable by day
from the bulk of the population, the bandsmen,
assisted by old men, women and little children
doing intelligence service, by night turned into
ferocious raiders, murdering sentries, overwhelm-
ing small posts, cutting telephone and telegraph
wires, dynamiting railways tracks and bridges,
worrying the Japanese in a hundred ways. When
caught they were summarily executed or tortured
and the villages that gave them shelter or assistance
were cruelly punished. But so far from terrorizing,
this brutality merely enraged and stimulated the
guerrillas. It was amazing with what ease they
passed from one side to the other of the fighting

138 THE DRAGON WAKES

zone, preferably concentrating their activities on
regions well behind the lines, right up to the houses
of Peiping and Shanghai. As the lines lengthened
and the guerrilla forces increased, the toll in dead
taken from the Japanese rose steadily until it was
estimated in June, 1938, by the Chinese Chief-of-
Staff, General Pai (Pei) Hsung-chi, at over five
hundred a day with no tendency to diminish. Prob-
ably many more Japanese were killed behind the
lines than in open battle. No wonder that there was
a distinct decrease in morale on the part of the
Japanese soldiery. Lured into the war by the prom-
ise of a quick and easy victory, with plenty of
plunder, they found themselves not only surrounded
by a very numerous, lightly armed mobile enemy
they could never somehow seem to draw into deci-
sive battle, like terriers around a leopard, but by
millions of hostile civilians strengthened by the
guerrillas, who at the least opportunity turned into
savage killers that gave the invaders neither peace
nor rest nor quarter.

Yet clearly the bulk of the resistance had to be
made by the National Army under or cooperating
with Chiang Kai-shek, and more or less trained by
German military advisers who were more valuable
in this field than in that of strategy, where their
European conceptions were often unheeded by the
Chinese. What was the military temper and value
of this army?

Strictly speaking it was not an army at all, and

CHINA IN UNIFORM 139

its successes were something of a surprise. In 1917
the Americans, an active aggressive people trained
in sport of all kinds, familiar with mechanics from
babyhood and capable of spontaneous discipline,
found that to turn a civilian into a mediocre soldier
took six months; into a competent officer, at least a
full year. In pacific China, without much mechan-
ical experience and with no tradition of physical
sport or combat, officers and men often received no
more than three months' training. They remained,
that is, merely armed civilians whose real military
training was later obtained on the field of battle
where incredibly heavy losses kept the number of
veterans reduced to a nucleus. Add to this an insuffi-
ciency in all equipment larger than hand grenades,
but absolutely crushing in artillery, aviation and
transport, and it was rather a wonder that the
Chinese so-called armies could keep the field at all.
Yet improperly clothed and cared for as they were,
trotting on bare feet while the Japanese rode in
trucks, the Chinese soldiers despite terrific losses
not only stood fast but actually gained every day
in military quality.

Somehow the average Chinese soldier quickly
acquired the impression that he was, despite his
lack of mechanical support, man to man, quite a
match for his adversary. He despised the Japanese
anyway and looked forward to fighting him at close
quarters with the ancient Chinese two-handed sword.
Above all, he was never worn out, never impatient

140 THE DRAGON WAKES

or bad humored, never downcast by insufficient
food and shelter, and almost never afraid, though
he soon learned a healthy respect for enemy air-
planes, artillery and machineguns. Judged as
human "material," the Chinese soldiers, despite
susceptibility to sudden panic, were rated by all
foreign experts as first class.

Up to the rank of sergeant only: the general
officers were quite another matter. The Generalis-
simo demoted, cashiered and even shot them relent-
lessly. Not that they often went over to the Japanese.
But they frequently disobeyed or failed to execute
orders, failed to cooperate with or deliberately
deceived their Chinese colleagues, wasted their
men in futile attacks when they should have retired
or, more often, beat hasty retreats before quite
insufficient enemy forces; not uncommonly they
practiced self-protection at the expense of China
and filled up their staffs rather with faithful retain-
ers than with capable assistants. What could one
expect? Some of them had been "war lords" or
even bandit chiefs; others, semi-independent gov-
ernors of provinces with a dislike of Chiang Kai-
shek. Their primary aim was frequently to keep
their own forces intact while using up those of their
colleagues in order to hold trump cards for a pos-
sible final show-down. This led to a "masterly
inactivity" which, however successful in former
military competitions (called wars) between rival
Chinese military parasites, played into the hands

CHINA IN UNIFORM 141

of the Japanese. Even those generals who had re-
ceived military training abroad or in the National
War Colleges had never had the slightest oppor-
tunity of witnessing real warfare; and hook knowl-
edge was of little use in the complicated art of
adapting one's tactics to getting the better of a more
highly armed and trained adversary. Therefore the
many failures, some of them tragic. Gradually,
however, as in Spain, there arose in nearly every
unit a small number of really competent leaders
who gradually came to the places of responsibility.
The officer corps was somewhat better than the
generals, being for the most part younger and with
a larger trained nucleus. Their weaknesses as field
officers were: conceit that led them into over-esti-
mating themselves and under-estimating the enemy;
slap-dash bravery that led to ineffective slaughter
of their men; inexperience that made for failure to
deliver a decisive blow when it could be delivered ;
or, sometimes, what has been called an over-devel-
oped sense of self-preservation. All in all, unworthy
of their men and deserving the rough treatment
received at the hands of Chiang. Things being as
they were, the Chinese were compelled to pit
courage, numbers, knowledge of the ground and
the cooperation of the population against the far
higher cohesion and military technique of their
enemy. These factors were more often than not
ineffective against education, military tradition,
technical education and above all vastly superior

142 THE DRAGON WAKES

engines of war. On this account small mechanized
columns of Japanese went practically wherever
they liked, walking through the masses of cou-
rageously struggling Chinese with relatively small
losses, leaving the latter no alternative but hit-and-
run tactics and long retreats.

Fortunately for China, the Japanese army did
not come up to expectations. The China campaign
definitely cost it its place among ranking military
machines. The men, well trained and brave, come
of an ancient military race. But the generals en-
gaged in costly rivalries; field officers thought more
of keeping their swords polished to a mirror and
boasting of the number of Chinese personally killed
than of developing some new tactic adequate to the
realities of the unexpected Chinese resistance. Fear-
ful of becoming too heavily engaged in China,
already aware of the danger of long-run economic
struggle with the ultimately richer Chinese, Japan
endeavored to break China's resistance with mani-
festly inadequate forces. Japanese troops held the
ground wherever they stood; they occupied the chief
Chinese towns; they more or less maintained pre-
cariously long communications along road and rail
and river against constant and effective molestation.
Their soldiers had been duped by promise of a
pleasant military promenade with plenty of Chinese
to plunder and abuse. Plunder and abuse them they
did, but at a fearful risk of life. Had the million
Chinese front-line fighters possessed the training

CHINA IN UNIFORM 143

and equipment of the Japanese or even of Chiang's
original German-trained divisions, the Japanese,
lacking heavy reinforcements, would have been
swept back into the sea. As it was, holding the sea
routes, with a virtual blockade of the Chinese coast,
they were able to carry on an offensive that became
each day more bloody, in the ever diminishing
hope that some day they would succeed in dealing
the blow that would "break China." Short of which
decisive stroke, with the Chinese armies hardening
under experience, with the war zone ever broaden-
ing and the lines of communication getting ever
longer, the best the Japanese could hope for was
to "occupy" China in view of future economic ex-
ploitation. "Occupy" a great section of it they did
on the map. But they "occupied" it about as effec-
tively as a few swimmers can be said to "occupy"
a swimming pool: they went, that is, virtually where
they pleased on condition of making the requisite
effort. But even when they were going ahead fast-
est, the waters were closing in behind, relentlessly
obliterating all but a foamy track in the wake of
the advance.

CHAPTER VIII
JAPAN MODIFIES ITS WAR AIMS

JIU-JITSU is a form of wrestling, the essential
of which is to yield to the adversary's muscular
effort in order that he may overreach himself and
bring about his own undoing. The Japanese are said
to have invented it. But one could not long watch
the Japanese invasion of China without coming to
the conclusion that here again the Japanese were
mere imitators. For the entire Chinese defense was
primarily an application of military jiu-jitsu. Lack-
ing a proper army of sufficient size, the Chinese had
to reckon with the frequently demonstrated fact that
a heavily armed Japanese column could, within a
certain radius, go anywhere it chose, provided the
general was ready to pay the price in human lives.
Thanks to the adoption of jiu-jitsu tactics, in spite
of an almost uninterrupted series of Japanese vic :
tories, the Chinese in a certain negative way man-
aged to impose their type of warfare upon the in-
vaders.

Russia has several times been saved from con-
quest and ultimate defeat less by the Russian mili-
tary forces than by their allies, Admiral Frost and
General Distance. China never had much of a navy;
and it is on the whole a warm country with severe

144

JAPAN MODIFIES ITS WAR AIMS 145

cold only in the north. But even without Tibet, Mon-
golia, Turkestan and other areas claimed but not
really in possession of the Chinese, China is a large
country. If superimposed in its own latitude upon
the United States, it would extend roughly from the
State of Maine to Mexico City and from the Atlantic
to the Rocky Mountains. This extension must be
kept well in mind in judging any claims of the Japa-
nese to have "occupied 9 * China. In the first year of
the war, the Japanese, at the greatest estimates,
never had more than seven or eight hundred thou-
sand men at any one time in China south of Man-
churia. Could one imagine a foreign army, however
well equipped with transport, occupying the United
States with a million men? They would be driven
out by the population with golf sticks and shotguns.
The Chinese are less combative than the Americans
but there are well over four hundred million of
them.

The inside story or history of this war could
not be ascertained or written while it was in prog-
ress. But the outlines were at all times apparent. In
the first place, the entire military initiative was and
remained with the Japanese. It was the latter who,
from stolen Manchuria, Jehol and Chahar, launched
the initial attack upon China after creating the
incident at the Marco Polo Bridge in July, 1937. It
was the Japanese who almost immediately extended
the zone of operations to Shanghai and the Yangtse
Valley. It was the Japanese fleet that blockaded the

146 THE DRAGON WAKES

entire Chinese coast and whose airmen scattered
murder among the towns of Southern China. There-
fore, it is perhaps most convenient to analyze the
campaign in terms of successive Japanese political
aims, never forgetting that the motives of the Japa-
nese Government and of the army and navy oper-
ating in China need not and did not necessarily
coincide at all times.

The first aim was simply to take over the five
northernmost Chinese provinces, join them economi-
cally to stolen Manchuria and conceivably use them
subsequently as a base for an attack upon Soviet
Russia, considered by Japanese imperialists and
military men as an inevitable step in the fulfillment
of Japan's manifest destiny. Here no serious diffi-
culties were expected. The provinces are, with the
exception of rocky Shansi and part of Shantung,
entirely flat. They contain more railway lines than
any other portion of the country. Why should the
Chinese try to defend them any more than they had
defended Manchuria? At most the Japanese needed
only to overcome the local Chinese, whose leaders
were hardly to be considered loyal to Chiang Kai-
shek at Nanking. Then it only remained necessary
to find the requisite number of corrupt or traitorous
Chinese, constitute them into Jap-dominated "pup-
pet" governments propped on Japanese bayonets
and mercenary forces, as in Manchuria, and set
about profitable economic exploitation. To avoid the
least possibility of unpleasant surprise, it was con-

JAPAN MODIFIES ITS WAR AIMS 147

sidered prudent to seize the communications be-
tween Northern China and the Soviets across Inner
Mongolia.

The Chinese Central Government's decision to
defend the provinces was a political bombshell be-
cause none in Tokyo had expected Chiang to fight.
Yet to many it was a welcome bombshell for it gave
the Japanese Army the awaited opportunity of set-
tling China's affairs, not gradually, as had been
foreseen, but all pt once. Militarily, Chiang's deci-
sion did not immediately change the situation. The
Japanese forces seized Peiping and occupied the
road and the railway to Russia; they advanced
southward through Shantung and poured southwest-
ward into rich Shansi, the site of most of the coveted
mineral wealth, as far as the Yellow River, almost
succeeding in crossing and cutting the Lunghai, the
only east-west Chinese railway, just south of it.
The Lunghai Railway was the near end of the only
remaining connection between China and Soviet
Turkestan. The northern Chinese railways were
like the points of a trident of which the Lunghai was
the base and the extension of the Pinghan (or mid-
dle point) southward to Hankow and Canton, the
handle. The Japanese Army was if anything over-
mechanized for the territory on which it operated;
the invaders found it inexpedient to go far from
the railways and good roads. Occupying China took
the form of stretching a few clotheslines across a
yard. But though the stretching was easy, the pro-

148 THE DRAGON WAKES

tecting was a problem, while between the lines the
Chinese never ceased to come and go almost at will.

A Provisional Government was set up in Peking,
renamed Peiping, or Northern Capital, to give it
prestige; and within a short while the enforced traf-
fic in narcotics, in which the Japanese had for a
long time been specialized, was flourishing. The
hitch came in finding proper puppets: the moral
quality of the Chinese who consented to serve the
invaders was so low that their influence in inducing
the Chinese masses to accept Japanese rule was
negligible. Nonetheless, some persons were found.
Nominally, at least, the primary Japanese aim was
realized with relative facility and had the Japanese
stopped there and dug in, the Chinese could prob-
ably no more have thrown them out than they could
from Manchuria beyond. Sooner or later such an
occupation behind barbed wire was almost bound to
become effective and even profitable.

Stopping, however, entailed a serious risk. Low
as the Japanese leaders estimated the Chinese, they
could not but realize that Chinese unity was virtu-
ally accomplished, that Chinese industrialization
was going ahead apace and that the improvement in
quality of the Chinese National Army under Ger-
man tutelage was disquietingly rapid. Were China
given a few more years for increasing its industrial
equipment, enlarging and modernizing its army,
educating and f anaticizing its population, the result
could be very unpleasant for Japan. After all, why

JAPAN MODIFIES ITS WAR AIMS

149

be satisfied with the mere seizure of the provinces?
South of the Yellow River lay the Yangtse Valley,
the richest part of China, with the capital, Nanking,
and rich cosmopolitan Shanghai. Why be satisfied
with less than the best?

THE JAPANESE ADVANCE (1, 2)

In the absence of precise information, one need
only note that the requisite second "incident" al-
most immediately occurred at Shanghai, and Japan
launched a campaign of further conquest.

150 THE DRAGON WAKES

A large Japanese army landed at Shanghai*
Tokyo emitted a declaration to the effect that Japan
refused to have any more dealings with scoundrels
like Chiang Kai-shek who "refused Japan's prof-
fered hand of friendship/ 9 and the Japanese navy
initiated a series of outrages against foreigners des-
tined to convince the Chinese that they had nothing
to hope from the Westerners. This meant adding a
second aim to the first The war entered another
phase. The new purpose was called "bringing China
to its knees." Japanese rulers considered they had
every right to expect immediate Chinese capitula-
tion, since Japanese troops had long proclaimed
their own invincibility.

Then came surprise number two. Chiang Kai-
shek and his colleagues not only "refused to be
toads"; but the crack troops of the Chinese Na-
tional Army for three months stood up against a
magnificently equipped, though smaller, attacking
force and in the end were driven from their posi-
tions only by a flanking movement which any trained
lieutenant might have forestalled. Militarily this
defense of Shanghai to the bitter end was conceiva-
bly an error on the part of the Generalissimo, who
might have done better to keep his best divisions
relatively intact. For it was demonstrated that in
the absence of competent officers, not even the best
Chinese were yet able to stand up and win in
pitched battle against a modern army. When the
Shanghai defenses finally collapsed, China was

JAPAN MODIFIES ITS WAR AIMS 151

groggy and total defeat seemed not far away. Yet
the effect of the Shanghai defense upon the Chinese
soldiers was psychologically magnificent. While
foreigners left Shanghai at the turn of the year with
the impression that China was finished, inside the
country men remembered only that the Japanese
were anything but invincible and that in all cir-
cumstances, where superior equipment did not have
the decisive word, the Chinese could be a match for
them.

Meanwhile Nanking fell almost without defense
despite the years of care lavished upon its mili-
tary preparations. Chiang Kai-shek, thoroughly
alarmed, thought of creating a complete void be-
fore his adversaries and of retiring far into the
hilly west. It was fortunate for China that his Ger-
man military advisers dissuaded him. For the Chi-
nese people were not yet as thoroughly aroused and
steeled for combat as they later became. The im-
mediate evacuation of the middle Yangtse Valley
might have broken their faith in Chiang altogether.

Over-confident or over-nervous, the Japanese
failed to follow up their advantage. Then, if ever,
was the time for taking Hankow by a swift blow and
really "bringing China to its knees. 5 ' The invaders
stopped to plunder and dally. Grinning sardonically
over this error of Japanese generalship, the German
advisers under General Alexander von Falken-
hausen were able to persuade Chiang not to go too
fast or too far, and to reestablish his headquarters

152

THE DRAGON WAKES

provisionally in the important Wuhan trio of cities,
on the railway from Peiping to Canton, at the
junction of the River Han with the Yangtse and
astride the latter.

* Japanese ocdupafion
Jaf troop movement
inese trvqpconverttrj*
*" nn

THE JAPANESE ADVANCE (3, 4)

Falkenhausen went further: he persuaded Chiang
to try a diversion. Instead of retiring with his beaten
forces on the Hankow defense line, the Generalis-
simo sent them due north along the Tsinpu Railway,

JAPAN MODIFIES ITS WAR AIMS 153

the easternmost of the points of the trident, to
where it met the Lunghai crossbar at Suchow. The
Japanese forces were divided into two parts oper-
ating independently with no real communication
between them. So long as the Chinese were at
Suchow, none could be established between the
army in the five provinces and the Shanghai Expe-
ditionary Force. Conceivably none was necessary,
for each force was strong enough in itself. Had the
Shanghai army marched straight on Hankow it
might have taken it in short order and divided the
Chinese forces. Instead, while the navy was estab-
lishing the semblance of a blockade along the
Chinese coast, and seizing the useless island of
Amoy, the Japanese army followed the Chinese to
Suchow. This meant withdrawing forces from
Shansi and moving the Shanghai army, not west-
ward, but northward. It took time. While the Japa-
nese were concentrating these forces, the Chinese
gained the morally important minor victory of
Taierhchwang. When Suchow finally fell, the Japa-
nese captured some valuable rolling stock but the
main Chinese army, under the Kwangsi General Li
Tsung-yin, escaped on foot eastward from the mo-
torized Japanese and then boldly recrossed the
Japanese lines to join the rest of the Chinese forces
in a retreat westward along and to the south of the
Lunghai Railway.

As though hypnotized by their adversary, the
exasperated Japanese followed them up closely. The

154 THE DRAGON WAKES

Chinese evacuated Kweiteh, Lanfeng and Kaifeng
almost without fighting; but when the now trium-
phant Japanese reached the strategic spot near
Chungmow, the Chinese stopped them by dyna-
miting the Yellow River dykes and releasing its
flood waters over a vast area.

Meanwhile they had successfully organized guer-
rilla warfare throughout the entire country, espe-
cially behind the Japanese armies and along their
lines of communication. Japanese losses were ac-
cordingly rising. As estimated by the Chinese, in
the first year of warfare they amounted to just over
a hundred thousand killed and three hundred thou-
sand wounded, without counting deaths from illness,
which were beginning to count. The Chinese had of
course lost many times these numbers but consid-
ered that they had them to spare. More important
to them was the fact that the proportion was slowly
improving in their favor. "Whereas at the beginning
the Chinese lost four and five men to Japan's one,
by the second summer the proportion had descended
to five to two. Japanese losses in killed alone had
reached a rate that, if continued, would amount to
a quarter of a million a year.

During this period of the war Chinese tactics
underwent partial modification. The generals still
clung to some conception of modern warfare with
trench defense of strategic points and an attempt to
overcome and wipe out weak Japanese garrisons by
quick concentrations. But they began to rely more

JAPAN MODIFIES ITS WAR AIMS 155

and more on hit-and-run methods reenforced by
intensified guerrilla raids. This was described to
the writer (June, 1938) by the Chinese Chief-of-
Staff, General Pai (Pei) Hsung-chi as follows:

"Diametrically opposed to Japan's strategy of
quick and decisive battles is our supreme strategy
of prolonged and enduring warfare, while in point
of war tactics we emphasize mainly mobile fighting
and guerrilla activities. So the capture or fall of a
Chinese city, or the victory or defeat in a battle or
two, does not have much influence on the war situa-
tion. Besides, except for the few points and lines
captured, the enemy troops are entirely enveloped
by our militiamen and troops who still hold the
greater part of the invaded territory. Thus we are
engaged in a long-drawn-out war of attrition* We
are, so to speak, engaged in buying time by yielding
space, meaning our territory, and the accumulation
of many small victories can amount to one great
triumph. We are calmly waiting the opportunity
to deal our enemy a decisive and final blow, and
what is more, from now on, the chief theater of
war will be shifted from the plains to hilly and
swampy places where the efficiency of the Japanese
mechanized forces will be much reduced. . . ."

This I took to mean as follows: though the
Chinese might have put up a better fight along the
Lunghai Railway, they had decided to withdraw
from the major communications as well as from
the plains and, after lengthening the war fronts and

156 THE DRAGON WAKES

the lines of Japanese communications, settle down
to a test of military., economic and financial endur-
ance while always hoping for a "diplomatic break,"
as T. V. Soong put it.

Thwarted in the north by the Yellow River
August flood-water, the Japanese still persisted in
the idea of breaking the Chinese morale by taking
Hankow, and then speedily terminating the war.
Once more they assembled their forces and struck.
The main advance was along the Yangtse River
itself, an obstacle but a precious artery to the army
backed by ships.

The northeast fif th or sixth of China, as far south
as the Yangtse River, is low. Hankow lies near the
southwest corner of the plain. But it is defended
against an enemy coming from the north or east by
a range of hills beginning at the spur called Lung
Shan, 'a hundred and fifty miles east of Hankow
and not far from Anking on the Yangtse, and
stretching vaguely northwestward along the border
of Hupei Province, crossing the Pinghan Railway
at Kikungshan, following over Fu-niu Shan hills
in Honan and thence northwest to the Lunghai Rail-
way and rough Shansi. Except for the area north-
east of Kikungshan, which is full of rice fields
devilishly hard to navigate at any time, and for
the narrow gap between Lung Shan Hills and the
Yangtse, and for the lake district south of the
Yangtse, this is all hilly country. To attack Hankow
on such a front, the Japanese needed not less than

JAPAN MODIFIES ITS WAR AIMS

157

fifteen divisions. At the same time they pushed a
secondary offensive from Shansi southward, hop-
ing to cross the Yellow River at the hend near

THE JAPANESE ADVANCE (4, 5, 6, 7)

Puchow, and cut the Lunghai Railway somewhere
around Sian. For Sian lies on the way to Lanchow
and it was through Lanchow that the bulk of Rus-
sian war material was reaching China along the

158 THE DRAGON WAKES

tremendous caravan route from Turkestan. The
seizure of Sian would virtually cut off the main
body of Chinese soldiers around Hankow from the
communist and other armies in the northwest, since
roads through the western hills are few and far
between. If the Japanese could advance far enough
westward, as far as or beyond the end of the
Lunghai Railway, they might even cut off the Rus-
sians from the almost isolated province of Szech-
wan, one of Chiang Kai-shek's ultimate and pre-
sumably impregnable strongholds.

The taking of Hankow was announced by the
Japanese in May as "a matter of weeks." The as-
sailants advanced astride the Yangtse. This was not
without its inconveniences for the river is a formid-
able barrier, unspanned by a single bridge along
its course. At Hankow, six hundred miles from its
mouth, it is well over a mile wide with an average
volume of water of a million cubic feet per second
(the volume of the Thames at its mouth is twenty-
five hundred feet per second). But its very size
made it a main traffic artery to the nation possessing
the fleet. Despite the loss of many smaller warships
and transports, the Japanese took Anking and
slowly moved up the river, though impeded by the
usual August floods which overflowed the banks
for several miles on each side. In the course of the
campaign the summer wore away and September
found the assailants still a hundred miles from
Hankow. Yet with the end of summer the floods

JAPAN MODIFIES ITS WAR AIMS 159

subsided. If the Japanese continued their efforts,
the ultimate capture of Hankow was, barring sur-
prises, a foregone conclusion. 1 In July the Chinese
Foreign Office followed the Supreme Court and
other non-military bodies to Chungking, far up the
river, taking most of the Diplomatic Corps with it.
Chiang Kai-shek had long since discounted the fall
of Hankow and made his preparations accordingly.
But what had he to look forward to afterwards?

There was really no choice. Hankow lost, the
Generalissimo simply must, unless cut off, retreat
with the bulk of his army southward along the rail-
way in the direction of Hong Kong, the only re-
maining port of entry for his war supplies.

In rocky Kwangtung and Kwangsi and Kweichow
Chiang's same guerrilla tactics could be terribly
effective. A twelve or fifteen hundred mile front
stretching north from Hong Kong to the Desert of
Gobi would severely try the resources of even the
mightiest army; and Kwangtung, Kwangsi, Kwei-
chow and Shensi provinces were difficult, Yunnan
to the extreme southwest and Szechwan to the west
were really impregnable, if defended.

Bring out a physical map of Asia. In the very
middle, the gigantic Himalaya lies like a monstrous
beetle. Its head is toward the east and within a pair
of rugged pincers it embraces a chunk of the
Chinese plain Szechwan Province, fertile, abound-

1 Japanese forces occupied Canton on Oct. 21, 1938 and
Hankow on Oct. 25, 1938. Ed.

160 THE DRAGON WAKES

Ing in mineral wealth and with its sixty or seventy
million inhabitants capable of becoming a whole
country in itself, if properly exploited. Until fairly
recent years nothing pierced those pincer-like ranges
of mountains that protect, indeed, but at the cost
of isolating, this remote section. Nothing, that is,
but the irresistible pressure of the Yangtse. Pulling
itself tightly together into a torrent only a few hun-
dred yards wide, the great stream literally forces
a passage between the pincer tips, dropping over
five hundred feet in three hundred and fifty miles,
and digging a channel in some places fifteen hun-
dred feet deep and not unlike the Grand Canyon
of the Colorado the Yangtse gorges. Seemingly
almost impassable, these gorges nonetheless con-
stitute the gate, and until recently, the only gate to
Szechwan and the eastern marches of Tibet. From
time immemorial, Chinese boatmen have managed
to scrape out a crazy tow-path in the cliffs and, in
the course of a few weeks, to drag their sampans
up through the wild rapids. Modern steamers make
the trip upstream from Hankow, some seven hun-
dred and fifty miles, in about a week, depending
on the season, for within the gorges a rise of a
hundred feet in the river level is not unusual after
heavy rains or when in late summer the melting
Himalaya snow pours down to the plain. Fifty
miles above the pincers, at the eastern tip of Szech-
wan, lies Chungking, the "great city" of Western
China, a commercial center open to foreign trade

JAPAN MODIFIES ITS WAR AIMS 161

since 1891, which Chiang had elected as his new
capital. A more impregnable stronghold could
hardly be conceived.

What would Japan do after the capture of
Hankow? The pursuit of Chiang southward through
the southern hills might be a long affair, lasting
perhaps all through the mild winter and costing
another fifty thousand men. To fit out a new Expedi-
tionary Force, land it somewhere on the coast of
South China, advance inward and take rich Hong
Kong with the aid of the navy, thus cutting the
Chinese army off from Hong Kong and its base of
foreign supplies, might be even more difficult and
involve political complications, besides, with the
British and conceivably with the French as well,
neither of whom wished to see Japan installed so
close to their own possessions further south. To
stop with the possession of Hankow, proclaiming
that China was defeated, might for a time deceive
the Japanese masses. But substantially it would be
an acceptance of the Chinese insistence on a "war
of attrition." From the beginning, the thought of
such a war, granted the growing power and hostility
of the Soviets, had been a nightmare to the Japanese
leaders. In the silent struggle with the Russians for
Chungfeng, on the Manchurian frontier, the Japa-
nese had finally given in simply because they were
up to their ears in China. But they began to realize
they might have to settle down to a long straggle.
To prepare the Japanese people, they began cau-

162 THE DRAGON WAKES

tiously to mention a new and third war aim. Since
after the fall of Hankow or that of Canton, "war of
attrition" there would be, they decided to call it
"ruining China." This was plausible enough, since
most of the developed Chinese resources lay to the
east of the Canton-Hankow Railway more or less
at the mercy of Japan. This entirely suited the
Japanese industrialists, who were in a sweat over
the recent emergence of Chinese export industries
that could cut under the Japanese industries just
as the latter were underselling the Western world,
namely thanks to cheaper labor. Already the war
had cost Japan dear in the shape of lost commercial
outlets. From the beginning, the wholesale destruc-
tion of Chinese factories had gone along with the
systematic bombing of Chinese schools and uni-
versities and an intensification of the narcotic cam-
paign. For China was to be reduced economically
and intellectually to the status of a full colony.

But could China so easily be ruined? If left in
possession of Canton and the southlands, probably
not. For in that case, thanks to ever fresh supplies
of arms, the Chinese would be constantly on the
offensive. The very existence, or at least the profit-
able functioning, of puppet governments in the
occupied provinces, thanks to which alone the Japa-
nese could hold and exploit China, would be made
virtually impossible. Without traitorous Chinese
as auxiliaries, the Japanese simply could not con-
trol so much territory. But the number of traitors

JAPAN MODIFIES ITS WAR AIMS 163

available would depend upon the general feeling.
If the Chinese began to believe Chiang's situation
hopeless, they might well rally, for a consideration
to the Japanese. If, to the contrary, Chiang remained
active, his troops well armed and full of ardor,
then popular patriotism would continue high and
the number of traitors be correspondingly low.

Even without the seaboard province, even after
the loss of Canton, the Chinese armies would remain
undestroyed. What could they do, operating from
the hills in the more backward part of the country?
This was a question that could best be answered in
Europe. It depended upon France and England,
the democratic powers whose territories and pre-
dominant influence in the Far East the Japanese
were determined to inherit. It depended upon Ger-
many and Italy, Japan's partners in the anti-com-
munist front whose title had been chosen to hide
its real nature as "Highwaymen's Alliance." For
as the months passed, the original British and
French fear of the Japanese diminished rapidly.
The British had flatly refused to close Hong Kong
to the passage of war material for China. They had
cooperated with the Chinese in making the old
Burma track from Kunming into a paved highway.
The French, originally intimidated by Japan's big
talk, were beginning to recover and open their nar-
row gauge but invaluable Indo-China Railway to
the passage of arms of French origin for China.
Deprived of Hong Kong, Chiang, once his reserves

164 THE DRAGON WAKES

were exhausted, would be dependent upon what he
could receive via Indo-China, via Burma and via
the caravan trail from Soviet Turkestan. How far
would Britain and France go in seeing that he got
all he needed? They did not want the Japanese in
the southwest: could not that be made the subject
for a little bargain between Tokyo on one side,
London and Paris on the other? The Japanese could
promise not to advance westward of Canton and
Hankow if the Western democracies would promise
not to feed Chiang with enough arms to allow him
to take the offensive or continue his murderous guer-
rilla warfare throughout the "occupied" territories.
Would London and Paris accept? If they aided
Chiang, he could carry on to the exhaustion of
Japan. Would they aid him? It might depend upon
Germany and Italy. And upon Germany too de-
volved the role of preventing the self-confident
Russians from gradually increasing their assistance
to China to the point where it would amount to an
undeclared war. Without the German threat to the
Bolsheviks, Tokyo well knew, the Russians would
before long have thrown their gigantic weight into
the Chinese balance in an effort to finish with Japan
once and for all.

And the United States, chief source of Japan's
indispensable imports of iron and petroleum and
other things like airplanes? How long would an
indignant American public permit its manufac-
turers and merchants to permit an hostile power to

JAPAN MODIFIES ITS WAR AIMS 165

destroy a friend? Would popular outcry eventually
compel President Roosevelt to take definite steps in
favor of China? A real boycott of Japanese products
in the United States, an embargo on certain Amer-
ican products to Japan, could perhaps let China
win. It was endlessly difficult trying to dominate
and conquer the world from a couple of two-by-four
islands. And it was all very complicated. . . .

It took a brave man to hazard a bet on the out-
come of the struggle so lightly engaged upon by
the blithe Japanese generals. But in the Far East
most bettors were offering even money on China.
For Japan, they said, was in danger of having to
modify its aim for the third time. Aim number four
might, in the opinion of experienced foreigners, be
the saving of the Japanese army's prestige and
supremacy already lost abroad within Japan
itself. Unless this proved possible, social transfor-
mation might easily result and the China war have
served not to enslave but to liberate a people.

CHAPTER IX

MORALE

THE square at Chengtu was buzzing. Perhaps
five hundred men, with a sprinkling of women
and children, had crowded around a wooden plat-
form facing the square with the green park behind
it. Rain had fallen, and the naked ground was oozy
with mud puddles, but the crowd sloshed in and out
of them with indifference, so attentive they were to
what was proceeding on the platform. Voices rose
high.

My friend Victor Hu, educated in Paris, attached
to the Civil Government of the Province of Szeeh-
wan, took my arm and urged me forward. But be-
fore we got close enough to see or hear much, the
proceedings stopped and instead there went up
from the crowd a roar of approval: "Hao, hao!
(good, good) ," which one may hear in any popular
Chinese theater.

"Too late," said Victor Hu. "We missed the
show."

"What was it?"

"It is called The Death of General Wang Sze-
chung at Tientsin, a well known educational play."

"And who are the players?"

"High-school student propagandists. They travel
166

MORALE 167

all over the country and by their rather simple
spectacles arouse the patriotism of the people and
their indignation against the Japanese. There are a
good many of these little theatrical troupes."
"What a pity we missed it."
"Wait. We shall see something else."
Foreigners in Chengtu are moderately uncom-
mon: the crowd obligingly parted to allow us places
near the platform. A student in his ordinary clothes,
the "intensely visible property man" of classical
Chinese drama, placed two chairs and a small
lateral screen on the platform before a plain cur-
tain. And the play began.

Old John Chinaman, with more whiskers than
most of his countrymen can boast of, cloth slippers
on his feet, metal water-pipe in his mouth, was
seated in his armchair, peacefully enjoying domes-
tic life as his ancestors had done for four thousand
years before him. Around him was his family:
Young John, a sturdy but timid-looking youth in
Occidental dress, and three daughters, all pretty
girls wearing ordinary modernized Chinese street
clothes. But each of the girls wore on her back a
label. The first said "Jehol," meaning the northern
province; the second read "Peiping," and the third,
"the rest of China."

From behind the screen came unpleasant laugh-
ter, at which the happy family was only momen-
tarily disturbed. Then a face followed the laughter,
a swarthy face with an un-Chinese, Charlie Chaplin-

168 THE DRAGON WAKES

Adolf Hitler mustache. More laughter, self-satis-
fied, diabolic. And out stepped a sort of Mephis-
topheles in a kimono: Japan! Japan seized daughter
Jehol and dragged her screaming behind the screen
while the old man and his remaining children
looked on as if paralyzed.

He returned in a moment and repeated the same
scene with daughter Peiping, save that there was
some active resistance from Young John. When,
however, Japan finally laid hands on "the rest of
China," Sonny rolled up his sleeves and, with the
assistance of his father and sister, they downed
insolent Nippon and proceeded to kick him sense-
less.

Which ended the play. And the crowd bellowed
with delight. The actors, none of whom was over
nineteen, began packing their entire kit into a
tiny suitcase, ready to move on. For this was a
fraction of the Theatrical Troupe for the Promotion
of Resistance, organized by the famous Mass Edu-
cation Movement which was founded as far back
as 1923 for the purpose of transforming China. All
over China, such student players were coming and
going. Their aim was well described in a propa-
ganda pamphlet issued by the China Information
Committee in Hankow:

"National defence has its invisible as well as its visible
aspects. . . . The willingness and ability on the part of
the general public to participate in the national defence

MORALE 169

programme, whenever such participation is called for,
constitute the invisible aspect."

The "invisible aspect" soon became the most
visible thing in warring China. From Canton to the
Yellow River, from Kiu-kiang and Yenan to Lan-
chowfu and distant Kunming, everywhere travel-
ers reported unceasing propaganda, most of it
visual. A nation that still cherishes handwriting as
one of the highest arts easily takes to slogans
stretched on banners across whole streets. But in
addition, there were hundreds and hundreds of
wall pictures imparting patriotism and the brutal-
ity of the Japanese (some of them so crudely real-
istic that they made me start). Every flat surface
bore some kind of poster. Furthermore, portraits
of national symbols like Dr. Sun Yat-sen and Gen-
eralissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who had become the
incarnation of Chinese resistance to Japan, peered
at one from thousands and thousands of copies.
There was not an office, hardly a public place where
one was not confronted with something. The artistic
quality was generally pretty high: why should it
not be, when the finest painters, cartoonists, callig-
raphers, wood engravers and photographers had
dropped their usual tasks and turned to boosting
the national morale?

Patriotic movies were being shown in every city:
I saw only one of them and did not feel tempted to
see any more. But the effectiveness of the insistence
on atrocity toward men, women and children was

170 THE DRAGON WAKES

undoubted. The plays were distinctly better: mostly
classical revivals of drama from the heroic period,
with Chinese emperors and heroes chasing wicked
Koreans and Mongols and Manchus half across the
map, or getting beaten and being saved by heroic
women who were ready at the drop of the hat to
take command of the national armies or to drive a
knife into the bowels of a tyrant.

Then for the ears there was the constant appeal
of song: nowhere did I ever hear so much patriotic
singing as in the various Chinese organizations.
The soldiers sang, the women sang, putting into the
new war tunes a fervor that their unfamiliarity
with the increasingly popular Occidental harmonies
distinctly sharpened.

Pamphlets, newspapers, war books, lectures be-
fore gigantic audiences, dinned into the people the
great lesson: in the fight for national existence, only
the cooperation of all could save China from the
unspeakable Japanese whose treatment of Chinese
soldiers and women was so uncompromisingly
portrayed. To an extent almost incredible to skep-
tical foreigners, this cooperation was being given.

Obviously the greatest propagandists were the
Japanese themselves. Whatever tendency there
might have been at the beginning on the part of
rich or corrupt Chinese to pact with the invaders,
was rapidly dissipated by the crude brutality of
the Japanese soldiery and the complacent tolerance
of murder, plundering and rape by Japanese offi-

MORALE 171

cers of presumed culture. Instead of remaining to
serve the new masters, large sections of the Chinese
population, after a few such object lessons as the
scenes that followed the Japanese capture of Nan-
king, simply moved out with family, bag and bag-
gage. These refugees, uncounted but millions
strong, were gradually eased along into the south
and west. Each runaway individual became a viru-
lent center of anti-Japanese feeling.

But an immense amount was being accomplished
by deliberate effort* Delicate mandarins, hitherto
scornful of the masses, possessed of a philosophic
calm that made them superior to mundane events,
suddenly felt something new stirring within their
silken-clad breasts, something that resembled
strange but incontrovertible! patriotism of the
vulgar. In speaking of the Japanese, their cultivated
singsong voices tended to quaver or rise to an
unseemly pitch.

One after another, all the existing organizations
threw themselves deliberately into propaganda
work. The best prepared was the Mass Education
Movement of Dr. Y. C. James Yen, whom experi-
ence as a Y.M.C.A. man with the Chinese coolies
in France during the World War had made an
everlasting friend of the common man. For many
years, Yen and his friends centered their efforts
on educating the farmers, who comprise at least
eighty per cent of China's vast population. They
believed that New China could only perpetuate

172 THE DRAGON WAKES

itself and triumph, if it became the faith and out-
look of the swarming masses. But China was the
center of world inertia : many of the educated and
upper-class leaders wanted nothing so little as
mass education, fearing that it might create pres-
sure for social and economic reform. Progress was
slow until July 7, 1937, date of the "incident" at
the Marco Polo Bridge. After that, the Mass Educa-
tion Movement went ahead by leaps, for if China
was to resist invasion successfully, it was necessary
for the government to levy huge armies from the
masses and to impose suffering upon the entire
population. For these armies to fight and these
masses to suffer willingly, they had to feel them-
selves a people. To feel themselves a people, they
had to be educated and ultimately to be given a
stake in the community.

Dr. Yen organized a Campaign of Farmers' Edu-
cation for National Defense, and quickly grouped
fifty young people of both sexes into six educational
teams. Theatrical troupes followed; the publication
of a War Series of People's Literature in simple
language that any Chinese can understand; and
finally, the ambitious plan to recruit a hundred
thousand educators to train a million men. By this
time, the Mass Education Movement was but one of
several organizations specializing on keeping up
the national morale in time of war.

A second, perhaps even more important element
in magnetizing the Chinese people and turning their

MORALE 173

passions against the Japanese, were the communists.
Readers of the books of Edgar Snow and Agnes
Smedley are familiar with the details. Whatever
their responsibility for the anti-foreign outbreaks
of 1925-27, whatever their ultimate political aims
and ambitions, there is not the slightest doubt but
that communist leaders like Chou En-lai and his
friends not only saved the life of the Generalissimo
when he was kidnaped in 1936, but led all other
groups in making China nation-conscious. Foreign-
ers who visited the communist stronghold in North-
ern Shensi were unanimous in praising their na-
tional, social and educational influence. After James
Yen, but before the New Life leaders or the "rejuve-
nated 9 * Kuomintang group, they taught personal
honesty and austerity, cleanliness, decency, patriot-
ism. They annulled ancient debt burdens and di-
vided the lands among the peasants; they saw to it
that interest rates of sixty to a hundred-and-twenty
per cent vanished. They became an increasing center
of attraction to idealists in Chinese youth. When
the war with Japan, which they had long believed
inevitable, finally came in their relatively small
territory bordering on the Desert of Gobi, they
became a dynamic center of resistance to aggres-
sion. Dropping their practices of class war and
confiscation of land, pulling the communist em-
blems from their uniforms, their famous "Red
Army" transformed into the Eighth Route Army,
accepting faithfully the leadership of Chiang Kai-

174 THE DRAGON WAKES

shek, the only human being who could hold China
together, they threw themselves into the struggle
with almost complete tolerance. A foreign news-
paper correspondent at Yenan, the capital of "Red
China,' 9 was amazed when, at a dinner with a group
of Red Army commanders, he was suddenly asked :

"Would you care to say grace?"

As rulers, the communists favored the common
people; as soldiers, they were among the best,
largely owing to the complete trust of the popula-
tion which supplied them with military informa-
tion beyond the capacity of less social-minded
Chinese leaders to extract; as propagandists, they
became acknowledged models. Their "Anti- Japa-
nese University," whose dormitories, like the
dwellings of about a third of Yenan's population,
were dug in the hillside immune to bombardment,
drew no less than twenty-five hundred students,
many of whom came on foot from the most remote
parts of China. For Yenan is two hundred and thirty
miles north of Sianfu, the capital of Shensi Prov-
ince, and the journey even by motor truck over the
wretched roads took from three to six days. But no
such obstacles could dampen the enthusiasm of New
China, whatever its political leanings. Yenan, that
part cave, part walled medieval city, became an
educational center of first importance and its value
in arousing the Chinese masses against aggression
can hardly be exaggerated.

MORALE 175

Few in numbers as they were, the communists
unquestionably became national pace-makers.

Last on the scene, but far more extensive and
powerful in their scope, came the governmental
authorities. Once they realized the need for war
propaganda, they threw themselves into it with a
will, spurred on by the calm determination of the
Generalissimo and the burning energy of his wife.
They speedily enlisted the cooperation of the pro-
vincial authorities and set about in a big way
making China patriotic. Perhaps the most effective
instruments were the army, the Kuomintang or rul-
ing Party organization, and the New Life Move-
ment.

In a country virtually under military law, where
nearly every provincial governor was, or was called,
a "general," the army could sway the minds not
only of the recruits but of the entire population,
especially when working hand in hand with the
Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Pub-
licity.

The working of the ruling Party organization was
less visible. But through its numerous ramifications,
its somewhat devious affiliations, its ability to steer
the secret organizations of which little is said, the
Kuomintang unquestionably inspired a large sec-
tion of the youth that was inaccessible to communist
or to New Life Movement influences.

How important was the New Life Movement in
galvanizing Chinese resistance to aggressive Nip-

176 THE DRAGON WAKES

pon? The Chinese themselves do not agree; foreign
residents differ widely. To some of the latter, the
entire New Life Movement, that peculiar mixture
of Chinese traditionalism and Y.M.C.A. Christian-
ity was a kind of hoax invented to offset communist
influence and take the young people's minds off
economic reform. To others, it was the most vital
factor in modern China. Certainly, in so far as it
received the personal backing of the Generalissimo
and his family and the family supporters, it accom-
plished a good deal. It was a New Life champion,
Major-General J. L. Huang, onetime worker in
Henry Ford's Detroit plants, who took charge of
the distribution of cash bonuses to all the wounded
soldiers in China. As director of what he called the
War Area Service Corps, he also organized fac-
tories for employing refugees, and began teaching
patriotic songs to the unlettered by means of simple
pictures. The cash bonus system unquestionably
contributed to maintaining army morale. The Chi-
nese lacked the means to care properly for their
wounded. Transport simply could not be spared
and gasoline was far too scarce to move many
trucks and ambulances had they been available.
But by giving a cash bonus of from ten to one
hundred Chinese dollars to each wounded soldier,
the Generalissimo and his helpers took the sufferer's
mind off his personal woes and removed some of
the sting from military conscription, a new and not
always popular innovation in pacifist China.

MORALE 177

As for Madame Chiang Kai-shek, by her initia-
tive in looking after refugees, by her activities in
a dozen fields, by her incredible vitality and op-
timism, she proved what an enormous influence in
time of crisis a resolute individual can exert on
the public mind. For, in traveling through the
remoter parts of China, I was almost always asked
three questions: Had I been in Hankow? Had I
seen the Generalissimo? Had I talked with Madame
Chiang?

It is difficult to estimate, but foolish to ignore,
the importance of women in New China. They are
certainly its most fascinating feature. Fascinating
in the first instance by their appearance for, without
a doubt, they are among the most graceful figures
in the world. But beyond this, fascinating by their
simple dignity and directness, and a sort of energy
that seems to transcend that of the Chinese male.
This superior energy was recognized, it seems, by
the authors of much of the Chinese classical drama,
which is full of amazingly independent ladies who
as warriors, statesmen, mothers and wives, often
came successfully to the rescue of their less efficient
males.

Yet, unquestionably, Chinese society remains
preponderantly masculine. A foreigner can live for
years among friendly male Chinese without ever
meeting the female members of their families, and
his feminine acquaintance, if he have any, may
easily be confined to a few insipid sing-song girls.

178 THE DEACON WAKES

How much more delightful those pleasant, gas-
tronomically overwhelming Chinese dinners could
be made by the presence of a few seductive edu-
cated women! But in traditional China, the very
idea reeks of the immoral Occident.

To Occidentals (and to many Chinese women as
well) the Chinese woman seems traditionally to be
the object of a veritable oppression. Though not
exactly the victim of a harem system, she is almost
as dependent as though she were. She goes about
unveiled, visits her female friends and relatives,
shops in the markets. But as a baby, her feet may
have been deformed to the point of permanent
lameness; she is supposed to give blind obedience,
first to her parents, and then to her often polyga-
mous husband; and had her parents been very
poor, she might have been exposed as a suckling
and never grown up at all. The position of the faith-
ful wife-servant in The Good Earth may be inspir-
ing, but it is doubtless better to read about than to
fill. "Chinese women," one of them wrote me,
"were, until recently, oppressed, especially in the
more remote provinces."

Some intelligent Chinese and a few foreigners
emphatically deny this charge. "The mothers," they
say, "are chiefly responsible for the continuation
of the ancient system which they would do away
with if they found it oppressive. It was not the men
but the mothers who bound their baby daughters*
feet and threw out excess female children to starve,

MORALE 179

or later sold them. In no country are the women as
powerful as in China, This is a country literally
ruled by old ladies."

How explain the contradiction? Modem France
demonstrates how important women can be without
briefed rights. Can it be that under the old system,
when China was virtually without any sort of
respectable public life, when the family was the
end and measure of all things, that the women were
content to rule the country from within doors and
through the men; whereas under later circum-
stances, with private life reduced to an unimportant
incident, they were forced more and more into the
open in order to see to it that matters proceed to
their liking?

In any case the missionaries undoubtedly started
a process of change. The students returning from
abroad, both male and female, brought home new
ideas of female dignity and duty. In many such
student families, particularly in centers like Hong
Kong and Shanghai, the social life was, by 1937,
not unlike that in Western countries, notably in the
United States. Foreign families were received at
meals, unmarried girls were going to moving pic-
tures and to parties, sometimes with young men;
they dressed like Occidental girls, and their facial
make-up and habits and social outlook were very
similar. (In fact, a study in the relativity of aesthetic
standards could be based on the following contrast:
while Negro girls were going to any expense to have

180 THE DRAGON WAKES

the kink taken out of their hair, graceful Chinese
women with absolutely straight hair affected a sort
of permanent wave that made it distinctly kinky. In
both cases, the model was apparently the interna-
tional movie star.) When married, they continued
to claim an emancipation that was still a rare thing
in the interior of China. The fact that most Chinese
schools and universities were co-educational un-
questionably encouraged change, although the num-
ber of women students was much lower than that of
the men. But the fact remains that until very re-
cently the actual status of women remained far be-
hind the theoretical equality they enjoyed in all
situations.

It remained for the Japanese invasion to cause a
very real and rapid change. Then suddenly a large
number of Chinese women awoke to the national
needs, and despite opposition from authorities,
parents and relatives, set about fulfilling them.

The Chinese were used to feminine influence in
high places. At the outbreak of hostilities the
country was dominated, some claimed, actually
ruled, by the three Soong girls. As early as August
1, 1937, Madame Chiang founded an Association
of Chinese Women to Support the National Defense,
which ramified into many sections throughout China
and abroad. Its members collected money, clothes
and medicine, looked after orphan children and
refugees and needy families. In May, 1938, Ma-
dame Chiang summoned a great meeting of im-

MORALE 181

portant women from all over China at Ruling, near
Kiukiang (later occupied by the Japanese), and
extended their activity to the organization of weav-
ing and the stimulation of home industries to in-
crease exports.

In every large town, notably in Canton, girls of
good family enrolled in first-aid groups whose
members, in addition to helping air raid victims,
read to the soldiers and wrote their letters for them.
An entire battalion of five hundred Kwangsi girls
was actually at the front, fighting under the com-
mand of twenty-two year old Miss Tieh-sua, who
successfully won her grades in action. I was struck
by the numbers of girls visiting the front and sing-
ing to the soldiers, the housewives who sewed and
mended for them far from the battlefields; I met
highly gifted women newspaper reporters in Han-
kow and Chengtu, visited a training school for
refugee student girls just outside Wuchang. Many
of the latter had come long distances on foot from
their ruined and captured universities or devastated
homes, and were living without news of their fami-
lies. In their plain uniforms and Spartan quarters,
they looked the picture of a new determination.

At Hankow, a number of prominent women had
the kindness to receive me at tea, at which each of
them outlined her particular work. Most of them
were foreign educated, all were experienced and
capable. One had been active in the Mass Education
Movement, another was in charge of a large school,

182 THE DRAGON WAKES

a third worked close to Madame Chiang in her
many undertakings, a fourth in the Y.W.C.A. But
the one with the most to tell was a communist from
Northern Shensi. For to the Chinese communists,,
opposition to Japanese aggression and the equality
of women were two parts of a single dogma held
and practiced like a religion.

They began by giving the right to own property
and economic protection to unmarried women.
They made the father economically responsible for
the children of his divorced wife or wives. Each
failure to assume such responsibility was made a
public scandal and utilized for educational pur-
poses. The communists went in for mass education
on an unprecedented scale with as many girls as
boys, women as men. Miss Ting-ling, best known
of China's women writers, organized the first war
service corps for duty at the front. By the end of
May, 1938, it had grown to over eight thousand
members. There were laundry corps with nearly
five thousand laundresses, sewing corps with six
thousand seamstresses, a Red Cross corps with eight
thousand five hundred nurses, special schools for
adults, over ten thousand women in uniformed po-
lice work, twenty-five hundred leaders of Girl
Guides under eighteen, thirty-six thousand women
organized to till uncultivated fields, reading classes
in every village to teach the illiterate the indis-
pensable few hundred characters. In the communist
district, the women were actually working under

MORALE 183

fire, with and beside the men. The woman who told
this story had never been outside of China and
spoke no foreign language, whereas her companions
were women of the world and returned students
mostly of conservative political leanings. But they
listened to her with the profound respect paid by
the aspiring athlete to the champion. For outside
Northern Shensi and the coast cities, feminism, it
seemed to the writer, had barely more than touched
the cheek of Chinese society.

How shallow a movement women's emancipation
yet represented became clear to me at Chengtu, the
capital of isolated Szechwan Province, and at
Kunming, the capital of remote Yunnan. At
Chengtu, as soon as the war started, the "women of
advanced ideas" organized an Association for War
Support Against the Enemy, with numerous sec-
tions: for direct aid to soldiers, for propaganda,
for nursing, for patriotic singing, and the like. Nine
months later, the Association managed to send to
the front eleven young girls. "To awaken women
still lost in their family dream" it began publish-
ing a monthly review, the Women 9 s Voice, and tried
to organize other associations for common work.
But although new organizations sprang up in num-
bers, the results were small. In other words, much
talk and promises and flurry, small results, if one
excepted the girl students' military training club.
As one remarkably intelligent and politically

184 THE DRAGON WAKES

awakened young woman described the situation for
the writer:

"Although there are so many women's associa-
tions at Chengtu the results have not developed. The
mass of the feminine population is backward and
does not yet understand the war or participate in it.
This is due to the lack of leaders and to the force
of inertia in these women still under the influence
of feudal ideas. But this situation cannot last. The
feminist movement is developing from day to day
following the extension and duration of the war. In
face of the inhuman and barbarous acts of the Jap-
anese (massacres, rapes, burnings), the women of
Chengtu have arisen, like those in the rest of China.
There are not only women's service corps, but young
girls and women who are taking part in guerrilla
warfare. Who can still say that Chinese women are
backward? To defend their country and world
peace, they are already active in the front line and,
brave as the women of Spain, are struggling against
aggressors."

Pretty Chu Zho-hwa must have known, for she
was born and was living with her parents in
Chengtu, and had studied abroad in Japan. New
China was transforming Old China, even in Szech-
wan, but the process had only begun to get under
way.

In Yunnan Province this action was moving even
more slowly. Yunnan represented all that was tra-
ditional in China, and deplored modern ideas.

MORALE 185

Yunnan protested against the "immoral modern
habits" of the girl students who migrated to the
province from the universities of the Chinese sea-
board. The Governor of Yunnan, while I was in
Kunming, forbade any more modern dancing (quite
like a reactionary Western dictator) and actually
prevented Madame King, the wife of one of China's
most brilliant technical engineers, from attending
the great meeting at Kuling at the invitation of
Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Considering that this
meeting was called to promote further women's
assistance in winning the war, the governor's action
showed a degree of conservatism rarely displayed
even in the remote provinces.

Yet even in Yunnan, feminism and nationalism
proceeded hand in hand. And since the wave of
nationalism was obviously irresistible, since New
China was determined to resist the Japanese and
transform and modernize the country regardless of
expense and suffering, feminism seemed bound to
triumph with it. After all, no less than seven thou-
sand strapping young women of Yunnan volun-
teered for service at the front, and after a long se-
lective process, fifty-five of them actually got there,
after a walk of several hundred miles and the mili-
tant opposition of their parents. For their motto was :
"War is no time to think of our families, sisters!
Join the corps and serve the Army."

Talking with young women like Chu Zho-hwa,
reading of women infantry commanders at the front,

186 THE DRAGON WAKES

I had the feeling that once the women were thor-
oughly aroused, though China might be martyred,
occupied and even exploited by the Japanese, it
would take a very brave or a very foolish leader to
suggest capitulation.

CHAPTER X
E PLURIBUS UNUM

IN 1932 George Sokolsky, advertised by his
publishers as "the writer best qualified to know
what is happening in China," expressed himself as
follows:

The tale of China's struggle has not been pleasant
writing, for the Chinese are individually a lovable peo-
ple, yet collectively, in the present stage, they produce
only the appearance of anarchy. 1

It must be regarded as axiomatic that for many years
to come China will be in a state of revolution and civil
war. This civil war has become the normal process by
which China is altering her political, economic and social
system. 2

The constant civil wars in China invite invasion and
partition. But the civil wars will continue. 3

Clearly Mr. Sokolsky expected the coming inva-
sion and attempted partition of China by Japan.
China's civil wars did indeed go on for another
four years, until the end of 1936, when they
abruptly stopped. The first half of the year 1937
was a banner year for China. In the words of the
American Commercial Attache, Julian Arnold:

1 The Tinder Box of Asia, p. 52.

2 Ibid., p. 293.

3 Ibid., p. 317.

187

188 THE DRAGON WAKES

China's financial stability was maintained, unification
of the currency system advanced; China's credit strength-
ened by the augmentation of gold reserves abroad. . . .
Rice crop products, cotton and tung[wood] oil were
excellent; up to the middle of July the general outlook
for trade throughout the country was far more encourag-
ing than at any time for some years past.

What is more important, for the first time in Its
history, China was able to borrow from the Western
world without pledging its shirt

In 1931 China's chances had also seemed bright,
with everything ready for a vast plan of assistance
in many fields by the League of Nations. Japan
chose this moment to take Manchuria.

In 1936 the last of the warring factions, the com-
munists, made peace with Chiang Kai-shek. Six
months later, Japan struck again. Was it because of
civil wars and to bring "order," or for fear lest
there be no more "disorder" as pretext for inter-
ference, that Japan hastened an attack which, owing
to the unexpected resistance of China, soon evolved
into a full-fledged attempt to conquer the Celestial
Republic?

In any case, the Japanese invasion began by pro-
ducing exactly the effect it was intended to fore-
stall; namely, it united China as the country had
not been united for God knows how long. With one
exception Han Fu-chu, the Governor of Shantung,
who was hanged by the Chinese not a single im-
portant leader went over to the enemy or rebelled

E PLURIBUS UNUM 189

against the absolute leadership of Chiang Kai-shek.
The few Chinese who consented to serve the Japa-
nese by acting as members of "provisional" (pup-
pet) governments or as agents for the diffusion of
narcotics, the income from which the Japanese used
to help finance the aggression, were of such small
reputation that they carried no popular following in
their wake. Some of them were assassinated by
loyal Chinese with almost breathless speed; others
sought the protection, not only of the Japanese con-
querors, but of the foreign police in the concessions
at Shanghai. It was the unanimous opinion of the
foreign residents I met in China that the war had
gone further to cement the unity of China than the
twenty-five previous years of civil strife.

The loss of cherished provinces, of the new capi-
tal, Nanking, hardened the will to resistance. But
resistance so patently depended on unity around the
person of Chiang Kai-shek, that even those with the
least love for the somewhat domineering leader
publicly professed a hundred-per-cent loyalty to
him. Nor must it be forgotten that inevitably the
war process brought into places of authority more
and more of the Western trained, anti-traditionalist,
Chinese technicians who formed the kernel of the
nationalist movement.

In 1932 Mr. Sokolsky could close his book with
the statement: "Chiang Kai-shek almost alone has
grasped the essential struggle in China: it is be-

190 THE DRAGON WAKES

tween nationalism and communism." 4 Obviously
he did not foresee that in 1935 Stalin and Dimitroff
would swing the Communist Internationale squarely
behind democratic, nationalist movements wherever
communist cooperation was acceptable, that a com-
munist reconciliation with Chiang would be 1936*s
Christmas present to China, or that communists
and conservative Kuomintang leaders would fight
side by side against the Japanese tinder Chiang
Kai-shek, with small apparent friction. At Hankow,
in June, 1938, Chou En-lai, communist Vice-Di-
rector of the Political Department of the powerful
Military Council, solemnly assured me not only
that the communists were fighting against Japan
with their entire strength (a fact known to every
Chinese school child), but that they were receiving
complete cooperation and fair treatment from
Chiang himself, according to the unwritten pact of
Sian,

Everywhere I went, staunch partisans and former
opponents of Chinese unity under the Generalis-
simo went out of their way to convince me of their
complete cooperation with the man who had become
the undisputed symbol of national resistance to
Japan. The merest suspicion of willingness to pact
with the invaders, the veriest hint of willingness to
break the national unity, was the foulest charge that
could be flung at a Chinese general or politician or
bureaucrat.

4 The Tinder Box of Asia, p. 347.

E PLURIBUS UNUM 191

At Chengtu, I was waited upon by Bulson Chang,
secretary and translator to "Marshal" Yen Shi-shan,
former "model governor" of Shansi Province, and
then head of the Pacification Commission of the
same region, who was suspected of "too great im-
mobility."

Bulson Chang was, he informed me, a Christian
who told no lies. "Marshal" Yen had, it appeared,
been much disturbed by a broadcast made by a
Chinese in Peiping who had come from Shansi,
accusing the Chinese leader of having negotiated
with the Japanese for a separate peace. This rumor
had been repeated in the foreign press. Would I
not deny it? To test the solidity of the request, I
myself wrote the text of a denial and made it as
water-tight as a newspaper man can. If the marshal
would sign such a repudiation I would, I said, be
glad to publish it. Days passed and no answer came
from the "marshal's" headquarters at Sian. I re-
turned to Europe. But hardly had I reached Paris
when I received a message. It read simply. "O.K.
Bulson."

Foreigners in Szechwan and Yunnan insisted on
the fact that the members of the former "separatist"
or "autonomous" regimes were remaining in power
in both provinces. How could such people have
"changed their minds" so suddenly? Kwangtung
Province itself was showing a perplexing stubborn-
ness in holding out for its financial privileges. After
all, what were the provinces of Yunnan, Kwangsi

192 THE DRAGON WAKES

and Kwangtung still doing with currencies of their
own? The natives of Kunming showed a decided
preference for Yunnan dollars as against national
or "Shanghai" dollars. Why should Yunnan pos-
sess its own Foreign Office? Yet I could not doubt
the sincerity of Yun T. Miao, industrial magnate
and financial adviser to the Government of Yunnan,
who assured me of the absolute loyalty of the prov-
ince to Chiang Kai-shek and defied me to mention a
single national law or edict which Yunnan was not
applying, though sometimes slowly and with seem-
ing reluctance.

Clearly, China's unity was too new to inspire full
confidence even to Chiang himself. It was not
merely as a reserve against possible future isolation
from the outside world that the Generalissimo had
piled up vast reserves of war material in safe places
known best to himself. He intended to keep the
national regime as safe internally as it was proving
adamant against the Japanese. But among the for-
eigners in Hankow, there was none who believed
Chiang would have to use his reserves other than
against the foreign invaders. Unquestionably, cer-
tain people in Szechwan and Yunnan were none too
happy about the probability of a thoroughly united
China nor enjoying the prospect of being run over
by Chiang's army. Nor were all the foreigners in
these outlying provinces, many of whom had had
small contact with New China, convinced that such
was virtually inevitable.

E PLURIBUS UNUM 193

With one of these skeptical foreigners I had the
following conversation:

He: What makes you think that Yunnan autonomy
is virtually over?

/: What do you think? To me one of the follow-
ing alternatives seems almost sure: either Chiang
defeats the Japanese; or Chiang loses Hankow and
has to retreat into these remote mountainous prov-
inces. In the former case, he is left with such power
and prestige that Yunnan and Szechwan will never
dare even to try to oppose his victorious army;
in the latter, his very numerous retreating soldiers
will simply swarm all over the place and be in no
mood to stand for any nonsense. In either case, local
autonomy is gone. For China is bigger than Yunnan
or Szechwan or both together.

He: What makes you think Chiang will not pre-
fer to fall back upon Lanchow on the caravan trail
to Russia?

/: My own common sense. That would mean his
becoming the tool of Moscow whereas to-day he is
Moscow's independent ally. His own sense of self-
preservation and his dislike of communism will
cause him to choose Chungking, Chengtu and Kun-
ming as his new centers, if he loses Hankow.

He: You may he right so long as Chiang is in
power.

/; Do you see anyone in China who can drive
him out of power or who wants to, for that matter?

He: Chiang is not invulnerable. The loss of Han-

194 THE DRAGON WAKES

kow may shake China, even the New China you
apparently believe in, to its foundations. After that,
the landlords and bankers and merchants of the
occupied territory, who have often sold out their
country in the past, may decide that further resist-
ance is hopeless and cooperate with the Japanese.
Or the farmer boys in the army may get sick of
dying for a government that does so little for them,
and simply desert en masse.

I: So far as I could see from my contact with the
farmer soldiers, they are not fighting for love of
Chiang, though they trust him, but from hatred of
the Japanese and love of something we call China.

He: Then you exclude the fall of Chiang?

/: I do not know enough about Chinese affairs to
exclude anything. But Chiang Kai-shek seems to me
to enjoy a reputation and an authority in this coun-
try such as I have rarely seen given to a man. He
has a more sincere following than Hitler or Musso-
lini; his position resembles that of Pilsudski or
Kemal Atatiirk, or at least that of Clemenceau in
France during the latter part of the World War. So
long as, like Clemenceau, he answers all questions
about his intentions and activities with the single
phrase, "I am making war!" his position seems very
strong. But suppose he did fall, what then?

He: Then the secret ambitions of some in Szech-
wan and Yunnan might be realized. Cannot you
imagine a Southwestern Confederation of Chinese

E PLURIBUS UNUM 195

Provinces being formed out of Kwangsi, Kweichow,
Yunnan and Szechwan?

/; Only as a basis for further war; and under
Chiang Kai-shek.

He: No. I meant as something permanent,

/; And leave the Japs to stay in the north and in
the Yangtse Valley?

He: Precisely.

/; And who would take responsibility for such an
ignominious arrangement?

He: Who but your friend Pai (Pei) Hsung-chi,
the Kwangsi general? After all, in 1936 he was
fighting against Chiang Kai-shek.

/: Because Chiang would not resist the Japanese
and Pai wanted to. Of all the Chinese leaders I met,
Pai, after Chiang, impressed me the most. I simply
cannot see him doing anything like that.

He: Suppose China collapsed? Suppose it were
the best he could get? Suppose the independence of
the Southwestern Confederation were guaranteed
by France and Great Britain? What then?

/; Can you see public opinion in England and
France permitting their governments to connive at
the dismemberment of China?

He: It would not be put like that. They would be
told they were saving the remnant of Chinese inde-
pendence as the nucleus of some future China.
France and Great Britain would then arm, train,
and, if necessary, cooperate with the soldiers of the
Confederation in defending it and putting a limit to

196 THE DRAGON WAKES

the southern march of the Japanese. Such an Idea
might obtain the support of the Western business-
men.

/: Why should they support such a pitiful
"Rump 95 when they refuse help to a China that is
virtually intact?

He: You are innocent of the colonial mentality.
An intact victorious China could thumb its nose at
foreign business, the "Rump" would have to pur-
chase its independence by handing over its economic
riches for exploitation to the foreigners. Have you
not heard of a British scheme to build a railway
connecting Yunnan with the Burma system?

/: I see. France to get the tungsten; the British in
the Tin Pool to get the tin; perhaps an international
consortium for opening communications and ex-
ploiting the almost untouched and reputedly fabu-
lous resources of Szechwan, under threat of aban-
donment to the Japanese if the natives didn't like
the arrangement. A pretty scheme, but I doubt if it
can succeed.

He: What obstacles do you see?

/: In the first place, Chiang will probably not
fall.

He: But he might be killed, or succumb to illness.

/: Obviously. But even then, what you suggest
could not, I believe, occur so long as the average
intelligent Chinese was not convinced that Japan
had won the war. To-day he is convinced that China
is winning it. So long as this conviction holds, not

E PLURIBUS UNUM 197

Pal Hsung-chi, not the Generalissimo himself, could
consent to what would be called a dishonorable
peace.

He: I have not been out of this province since the
war started. Surely you are overstating.

/: Not at all. So far as I can learn, Chiang Kai-
shek helped make the rising wave of nationalism.
But to-day it is the rising wave that is making
Chiang. Businessman, mandarin, or general, with
popular feeling running as high as it does at pres-
ent, he would be a brave man or a lunatic who
would try to deliver China to Japan. For I would
not give two cents for his life. His own soldiers, his
wife, his servant, some student, would murder him.
And the war against Japan would go on. For either
I am an old shoe as well as an old newspaper man,
or China has been deeply bitten by the microbe of
nationalism. The Nineteenth Century and the early
Twentieth Century witnessed this thing in one na-
tion after another: Italy, Germany, Bulgaria, Rou-
mania, Serbia, the South American countries,
Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States. It is start-
ing to-day in the Ukraine. My point is that there is
no case where, once it has taken hold, this microbe
has been eliminated by oppression or violence. If
the analogy holds here, Chinese nationalism could
survive even a Japanese victory or a renewal of
Chinese civil war. But China is to-day united as
never before and there are no signs of dissension.
And without actual civil strife among the Chinese,

198 THE DRAGON WAKES

Japan, it would seem, has only a very small chance
of beating China. In any case the creation of New
China will continue*

He: Anyway, we agree that the China of the fu-
ture will be in the south and west, only you imagine
this as a nucleus of future growth, I, as the last
remnant of a decadent empire.

And here the conversation ended.

CHAPTER XI

THE IMPREGNABLE SOUTHWEST

WHY should we worry about loss of territory
when we have all Asia to retire into?"
The speaker was General Chen Cheng, Head of
the Military Council of China, Military Governor
of Hupei Province, and reputed choice of Chiang
Kai-shek as his successor in case "anything should
happen." Important people were hard to locate in
the Wuhan trio of cities astraddle the Yangtse. My
original appointment with the general was in Han-
kow; then it was shifted across the Yangtse to
Wuchang, but upon arriving there at ten on a hot
June evening, I was abruptly sent back to Hankow.
It was nearly midnight before we met in a charm-
ingly furnished reception room not far from the
Ministry of Publicity. All Chinese males are time-
less in appearance between the ages of eighteen and
fifty, but the general looked young even for China.
After we had been served those cups of pure hot
water which even the nerveless Chinese, under the
War strain, had begun to substitute for stimulating
tea, the conversation began. General Chen Cheng
was apparently more politically minded and cau-
tious than his colleague General Pai Hsung-chi,
the Kwangsi chief -of-staff, but he agreed with Mm

199

200 THE DRAGON WAKES

as to the number of Japanese involved in the China
war.

"In the eleven months the war has lasted/* he
said, using an interpreter, though I suspected he
spoke excellent English, "the Japanese have called
upon nearly a million and a half men. They are
using some thirty divisions. These divisions have
been reenforced to a strength of thirty-four thou-
sand men each. Add the replacements of the casual-
ties and the sick, and you reach the figure I stated.
No one can hold China with a million men, not as
long as we keep on fighting. Our production of war
material is steadily increasing. In addition to small
arms in abundance, we now produce some artillery
and within a short time will be making airplanes."

Now, excessive verbalization, the mistaking of
words and plans for reality, is a Chinese weakness.
Yet when I expressed a mild doubt as to whether
the "Rump" China left by the taking of Hankow
would suffice as a basis to carry on the war, the
general smiled with confidence.

"Go into the Southwest and see for yourself," he
said.

The term Southwest means in China the four
provinces of Kwangsi, Kweichow, Yunnan, and
Szechwan, with the possible addition of the big
southern coastal province of Kwangtung whose
capital is Canton, in which the British colony of
Hong Kong lies like a rough emerald in a red gold
setting. Kwangtung was in a sense the key to Chi-

THE IMPREGNABLE SOUTHWEST 201

nese resistance, for from Hong Kong northward
extends the precious railroad to Hankow. Without
a declaration of war, the British at Hong Kong saw
no reason to close their port to the passage of food
and war materials for China. The Japanese had,
therefore, either to declare war on China and
thereby cease to obtain any further supplies of war
material from the United States under the applica-
tion of the American neutrality legislation; or to
conquer Hong Kong; or to intimidate the British
into closing the port as they had partially in-
timidated the French in Indo-China further south;
or to land a new Expeditionary Force in southern
China and cut the railroad somewhere north of
Hong Kong territory; or to take Hankow and pro-
ceed five hundred miles southward along the rail-
road until they occupied it all as far as the giant
city of Canton. They apparently preferred the last
course.

Now, the Chinese are always incalculable and
often inefficient, but none can call them improvident.
Months in advance they foresaw and discounted a
Japanese occupation of Hankow. In August, 1937,
the National Resources Commission, set up by the
Generalissimo as his personal organ to supersede
the National Bureau of Economic Research founded
by T. V. Soong, proceeded to begin moving as much
of the industry as possible from the vulnerable
coastal area around Shanghai, where most of it
was located, into the remote interior. As the Japa-

202 THE DRAGON WAKES

nese advanced, one Chinese resettlement plan fol-
lowed another. The first had picked upon the prov-
inces of Hupei and Hunan as the best site. Japanese
military pressure on Hupei spoiled this. They next
foresaw the location of at least fifty per cent of the
transferred factories into remote Szechwan, deemed
inaccessible. But Szechwan turned out to be too
inaccessible, being reached only by die Yangtse
River and by one uncompleted highway over high
mountains from Changsha, on the Hankow-Hong
Kong Railroad. Highway and railroad terminated
at Chungking, in the extreme eastern part of Szech-
wan, and behind Chungking was but one decent
road, the stone-bedded but choppy highway to
Chengtu, capital of the province. A Japanese occu-
pation of Changsha, by no means out of the ques-
tion, would mean that industry located in Szechwan
was virtually marooned there and its products
could not easily be distributed through the other
inaccessible provinces, Kwangsi, Kweichow and
Yunnan, which the government had every reason to
believe it could hold. Therefore, a revised or third
plan provided for scattering factories over the en-
tire Rump China.

This was done. At least one hundred and fifty
larger factories were moved bodily. Fifteen thou-
sand tons of machinery reached Chungking by
small boats and were landed and carried up those
three hundred pitiless steps to the city by tireless
coolies. Since it did not care particularly about

THE IMPREGNABLE SOUTHWEST 203

having the reestablished factories bombed, the gov-
ernment was cagey about giving precise informa-
tion concerning their new location.

With the transfer of the industry to the west and
southwest, the stage was all set for a new war de-
velopment. Szechwan had long been known to be
among the richest parts of China. The construc-
tion of a railroad had even been begun between
Chungking and Chengtu, and then abandoned. The
province had set up a plan of economic develop-
ment before the Japanese invasion, when Szechwan,
under Marshal Liu-Siang, was still reluctant to ad-
mit itself an integral portion of the Chinese Repub-
lic of Nanking. A couple of model farms were
actually started. But the Szechwanese are an easy-
going lot. Though their plan for the economic re-
construction of the province included just about
everything, not very much was actually accom-
plished until the Japanese invasion shifted the na-
tional center of gravity.

For, along with the migration of Chinese facto-
ries, went a wholesale transfer of governmental of-
fices and institutions and, what was perhaps even
more important, of whole universities. The sys-
tematic bombing and destruction of any number of
Chinese educational institutions doubtless, in Jap-
anese eyes, went along with the forcible doping of
the population with narcotics. Just as in subjugated
Korea, the Chinese were to be deprived of learning,
health and will power, in order to make them docile

204 THE DRAGON WAKES

slaves of their Nipponese masters. Quite aside from
the fact that the Chinese are not Koreans, the de-
struction and driving out of the educational insti-
tutions were conceivably of immense benefit to
China. The number of universities, colleges and
professional schools was inevitably reduced, but
those that remained emigrated to the territories of
the west and south, where they brought the impact
of a new spirit, thereby preparing the way for the
rapid development of the backward provinces. Pro-
fessors and students submitted to the greatest priva-
tions rather than let the light of learning go out in
China. Young men walked hundreds and hundreds
of miles from the big centers, girls were sent out
of the country and then back in again by the French
Railway, in order to reach remote Yunnan, where
their new-fangled ways cause a wholesome scandal
among the ultra-conservatives, to whom opium
smoking was a harmless pastime compared with
destructive vices like modern dancing and rouging
the lips. The newcomers, government employees
and academic devotees, set to work. A single exile
like D. K. Lieu, Member of the National Resources
Commission, Director of the Bureau of Economic
Research and Member of the Military Council, was
a dynamo, for he brought with him a well-trained
mind with an immense respect for facts.

Kweichow and Kwangtung are rough country,
producing good soldiers and offering fine oppor-
tunity for resisting the Japanese. But from the

THE IMPREGNABLE SOUTHWEST 205

Chinese viewpoint they are sparsely inhabited, with
less than thirty million people between them. Their
resources are not large. Yunnan had the advantage
of even greater remoteness and considerable wealth
of valuable minerals, notably tungsten and tin.
Kwangsi and Yunnan shared the advantage of lying
contiguous to French Indo-China, with a railway
outlet to the sea through the neutral port of Haip-
hong. The shorter branch of this narrow-gauge line
entered Kwangsi at Lanson and, after a forty mile
continuation, stopped abruptly. But it was pro-
longed by a highway to Nanking and Changsha to
the east, and to Kweiyang in Kweichow, and to
Chungking in Szechwan. The longer westerly branch
terminated at Kunming, capital of Yunnan, where
a somewhat roundabout highway led to the Chang-
sha-Chungking road. The Japs might, by a miracle,
get into Kwangsi and Kweichow Provinces, but that
they could reach Kunming was beyond legitimate
imagining. The cutting of the Hong Kong port of
entry could not mean complete isolation from the
sea unless the French closed their railway to Chi-
nese traffic under Japanese threat of occupying the
Chinese Island of Hainan lying off the coast of
Indo-China. Such a threat was actually made. In
the first year of the Sino-Japanese war, the French
allowed very little war material to enter China over
their precious railway, and that only of French
manufacture, under the pretext that it had all "been
ordered" before hostilities started. Fearful of fur-

206 THE DRAGON WAKES

ther French connivance with Japan, which was what
the French tactics amounted to, the Chinese and the
British began paving the ancient caravan trail from
Yunnan across the mountains westward to Burma,
and by September, 1938, it was virtually completed.

Rump China was thus, under all circumstances,
in possession of two sure lines of communication
with the outside world, the Burma road in the south-
west, and the trail to Russia from Lanchow in the
northwest, long indeed but inaccessible to the Japa-
nese. Most of the government offices were trans-
planted from Hankow to one or other of the western
cities and the economic and cultural development
of the Rump, as a base for a "permanent" war with
Japan, could begin.

Kwangsi was producing some tin and an excess
of rice. The Yunnan tin production could be in j
creased to a fourth of the normal world demand.
Tungsten and antimony are both abundant and
there was some copper production. But the Gol-
conda of Rump China, relatively untapped but su-
preme in fertility, mineral wealth and potential
water power, was Szechwan, on whose eifective de-
velopment the viability of Rump China, in last
analysis, was bound to turn. In the course of my
visit to Chungking and Chengtu, I obtained from
General Ho Kwo-kwang and D. K. Lieu at Chung-
king, and from the Szechwan Reconstruction Com-
mission at Chengtu, the following data:

Agriculturally, Szechwan is incredibly fertile. It

THE IMPREGNABLE SOUTHWEST 207

produces two and more crops a year. The rice yield
is about ten per cent above the Chinese average and
greater than the dense Jocal population can con-
sume. Szechwan produces a vast amount of wood
(tung) oil, practically all of which, in normal
times, is available for export. The orange crop is
large and of good quality. The silk production is
splendid. A real boycott on Japanese silk in the
Western world could automatically make a place
for Szechwan silks, both raw and woven. The Chi-
nese Foreign Trade Commission undertook to sell
a certain amount of Szechwan silk on its own re-
sponsibility. I never saw finer material for shirt-
ings. There is some cotton and tobacco and sugar
cane. There is also an excellent hard wood called
nan-moo which is amazingly cheap and makes first-
class railway ties. There are plans for the opening
of several cotton mills at Peipei near Chungking.
The live stock of Szechwan amounted in 1937 to
about 4.5 million pigs, a quarter of a million cattle,
320 thousand water buffaloes, 435 thousand goats,
50 thousand sheep. The production of hides and
pig bristles is large. The suppression of opium cul-
tivation, if carried out anything like as thoroughly
as promised, could greatly increase the amount of
all other products available. John Lossing Buck,
greatest expert on Chinese agriculture, laid down
early in the war a set of slogans for all China which,
if applied in Szechwan alone, would go far toward
making Rump China independent of agricultural

208 THE DRAGON WAKES

Imports. These were: (I) plant crops producing
most food; (2) decrease area in non-food crops;
(3) cultivate new land; (4) grow more winter
crops (not applicable to Szechwan where they al-
ready existed) ; (5) fertilize crops heavily; (6)
use more organic matter; (7) cultivate crops better;
(8) control crop insects and diseases; (9) drain
lands properly; (10) protect and strengthen dykes;
(11) irrigate more land; (12) use more water in
irrigating; (13) give better care to store crops;
(14) protect your live stock from infection; (15)
grow more vegetables; (16) save food by eating
unpolished rice and coarse flour; (17) eat more
potatoes, corn (maize), soya beans, squash and
vegetables in place of rice and flour; (18) drink
less wine; (19) smoke less tobacco; (20) smoke no
opium; (21) serve less food at dinner parties; (22)
postpone purchases of new clothes and bedding.

Szechwan mineral wealth is even more striking.
There are fairly large deposits of iron and copper
and coal, some zinc and nickeL Forty thousand
ounces of gold annually are mined or taken from
the rivers not much, but easily doubled with more
modern methods. The salt domes of the province
are famous and, if exploited, capable of supplying
the normal needs of all China. Near the salt domes
are petroleum deposits. Borings were made in two
places, at Tseliuching near the salt domes, and at
Shiyukow near Chungking, with fair results.

A cement plant at Chungking, an acid factory at

THE IMPREGNABLE SOUTHWEST 209

Peipei, and numerous power plants completed the
picture. Any amount of still-available water power
could be obtained.

Granted two or three short railroads or some
other decent means of communication, and Szech-
wan could become an economic stronghold of the
highest importance. To build these quickly New
China, according to the Chinese* needed not only
more initiative than vouchsafed before, but prob-
ably foreign capital. During my trip, I learned
that several European groups were immediately
willing to buy in on the tin mines of Yunnan, but
that the Americans, preferred by the Yunnanites,
were curiously shy of investment. Foreigners
seemed increasingly interested in helping to develop
Szechwan; the risk of seizure by the Japanese
seemed, in view of the country's remoteness and
isolation, small indeed. In Yunnan I had seen a
German representative of Krupp, interested in the
tin, and an American mining engineer in the em-
ploy of the Chinese tin owners who was doing his
best to attract the attention of American statesmen.
For Yunnan tin offered an all but impregnable
supply of this precious metal to a maritime nation
in case of war. ... At Kunming I ran across the
traces of a representative of the French armament
firm of Schneider-Creusot. Obviously the Chinese
west was becoming of increasing interest to the
Occidental world. Why?

Obviously because the Japanese had fallen far

210 THE DRAGON WAKES

short of expectations in a military way. Their
strategy was defective, their tactics outworn. Only
their material was good and their courage constant.
By their military insolence, the shooting of their
"friend," the British Ambassador, Sir Hughe Mont-
gomery Knatchbull-Hugessen, their bombing of the
American gunboat Panay, they had brought about
the possibility of an Anglo-American combination
against them in the Pacific they were obviously far
too weak to face. By refusing to limit their military
operations against China to a reasonable area, they
were playing into the hands of Soviet Russia. Un-
questionably they were exhausting themselves eco-
nomically at the same time, and were in danger of
failing, not only in some future war with Russia,
but in their attempt to break the will of China.

For the Chinese had surprised everyone. Less,
to be sure, by their ability as sheer fighters. No, the
Chinese had surprised the world by their failure to
succumb to certain weaknesses reported traditional,
incompetence in the leaders, venality, lack of popu-
lar morale and patriotism, failure to show team
work. The China of 1938 was overcoming them all
to an increasing degree and, despite the depth of
Japanese military penetration, was stronger than
at the beginning of the war a year before.

In consequence, the foreigners were no longer
afraid of Japan and beginning to reckon with the
possibility of a successful China with which one had
better be on good terms. . . .

CHAPTER XII

MEDITATION WHILE FLYING
TO CHENGTU

I STOOD on the landing field of the airport at
Chungking and looked at the conveyance that
was to take me to Chengtu. Two hundred miles and
more in that thing! It might have been built by the
Wright brothers.

"After all," I reasoned, "it goes back and forth
on this line fairly regularly and nothing has hap-
pened yet."

On closer observation the thing looked more like
a gigantic box kite. "And the Chinese have always
been experts at flying kites/'

Reassurance was feeble. And then a miracle
happened. Out of the sky came the drone of ultra-
powerful motors and a few seconds later a modern
monoplane dropped on to the field and out stepped
two tall men in white ducks.

"Eating again," I heard one of them say to the
other in a slow mocking tone. "Say, if you were to
miss a meal you wouldn't have strength enough to
lift the oil can."

Fellow Americans, without the shadow of a doubt.
Incredible to find them here. The sequence was
even more theatrical. Chinese soldiers appeared and

211

212 THE DRAGON WAKES

surrounded the plane. And from a shed came a row
of coolies each carrying on his shoulder a sort of
cubic parcel, under the weight of which he stag-
gered. Now the average hundred-pound coolie can
sling a grand piano to each end of his bamboo pole
and walk away without a tremor. A parcel as small
as that which caused him to sway could contain
only one thing that was likely to be transported by
air. Some of the square packages were stowed away
in the baggage compartment of the big three-motor
machine and the rest were placed carefully on the
floor, one between each two passenger seats. When
the load was complete a single Chinese in a gray
robe entered the plane. Here was my chance. I
approached the pilot:

"Might I ask where you are going?"

"Chengtu."

"Is there any chance of a lift? I have a ticket
for the other plane over there, but somehow I seem
to prefer yours."

"Oh, you do? An American?"

"Yes. Newspaper man."

"O.K. As I don't see any other passengers, you
might as well come along with us. Just tell those
boys to move your stuff out of the other crate into
this one."

In five minutes I was settled comfortably back in
a cushioned front seat, the silent Chinese and I
alone with those heavy packages. With a roar the

MEDITATION WHILE FLYING TO CHENGTU 213

big machine rose from the mudflat field and pointed
to the east.

This airplane belonged to the Bank of China. It
was carrying gold. During the past month it had
brought as much as thirty-five million dollars of the
precious stuff from Hankow. From Chengtu the
gold went on to Lanchow by air. I did not myself
visit Lanchow, the great Russian base, at the eastern
end of the longest line of military communications
in the world. There was too little to be seen: an
airplane assembly station, a rather small base of
war supplies these are meager sights to justify
the long trip by air and road from Hankow. And
to reach Soviet territory takes the fleet of Russian
trucks days and even weeks. Clearly so long as
Hong Kong remained in touch with China, that
and not Lanchow would be China's greatest en-
trance for war supplies, regardless of their origin.
And, for the time being at least, the means of
payment was being found.

For how long? From the beginning of the war it
was clear that this might eventually become China's
major problem. At Hong Kong I had heard fears
expressed lest China's available supply of metal,
mostly silver deposited abroad, would soon peter
out. How could it be otherwise with the balance of
payments obviously unfavorable? China normally
imports food. In prosperous times, before the war,
China's unfavorable trade balance was compensated
by large and steady remittances from the thou-

214 THE DRAGON WAKES

sands and thousands of well-to-do Chinese living
abroad. During the war, despite the patriotism of
the expatriate Chinese, these remittances began to
run thin or to be sent, not to wealthy Canton, but
to British Hong Kong, in whose damp but relatively
secure premises a number of wealthy Chinese had
taken to living. To compensate for this loss China
could reduce its imports; increase its exports; re-
duce its payments to foreign creditors; render
difficult any conceivable flight of Chinese capital;
obtain credits or loans abroad.

None of these was easy. The Japanese occupa-
tion of so much of the Chinese coast and territory
might have brought about a reduction of imports.
But only if the Chinese Government would cast off
these territories financially by ceasing to supply
them with currency. And Chinese national unity
was too new and fragile a thing to warrant subject-
ing it to such a strain on loyalty to say nothing
of foreign objections. Moreover the control of im-
ports was rendered singularly difficult by the
presence of Foreign Concessions in so many places.
Merchandise could be brought to these Concessions
by foreigners, duty free, and from there it was
relatively easy matter to smuggle it into China
proper.

Nor did the increase of exports seem much
easier. The greatest obstacle was the continuance of
the world depression, particularly in the United
States, the consumer of most of China's principal

MEDITATION WHILE FLYING TO CHENGTU 215

export, wood oil, an essential to modern paint. But
the loss of Shanghai, site of no less than fifty per
cent of China's modern industry, was a hard blow.
The loss of Shantung gave over to the Japanese
the greatest silk-producing province, though for
years the Chinese silk production had been under-
cut by the thrifty Japanese. There remained the
possibility of reducing the payments to foreign
creditors, most of them British, but even including
some Japanese. Any other country in the circum-
stances of invaded China would have declared a
complete moratorium. But China was still some-
thing of a colonial country and its last hope might
lie in keeping the confidence of foreigners. There-
fore, the foreign payments must be made so long
as it was humanly possible.

Stopping the flight of Chinese capital abroad was
not so difficult. To obtain new private loans from
abroad was just about impossible so long as the
foreigners had not come to believe in an ultimate
Chinese victory. Any substantial new credits had to
be "political" that is, given or guaranteed by a
government. Exact information on this subject was
difficult to obtain at Hankow; the correspondent got
the impression that something had been given by
Russia (I do not speak of commodity exchanges of
the type China made with Germany and Czecho-
slovakia nor of the real credits obtained abroad just
before the war started), a trifle by France, a trickle
by British interests and nothing by the United States.

216 THE DRAGON WAKES

How then keep up at full volume the river of war
material necessary to equip China's millions of
soldiers?

That the balance of payments was unfavorable
was shown by the June, 1938, slump in the value of
the Chinese dollar. In Hong Kong and Hankow I
was assured in May that the already emaciated
dollar would henceforth be held stable. And then it
slumped again. There were rumors of sharp alterca-
tions between the Descendant of Confucius in the
Ministry of Finances and his fiery brother-in-law,
T. V. Soong, of the Bank of Canton, precisely over
this slump. But I had it on good authority that
henceforth the currency could be kept at its level,
some forty-five per cent below its value at the
beginning of the war. Well, maybe. But how hold
the currency stable with an unfavorable balance of
payments? How, that is, unless the Chinese could
cut themselves completely off from the world like
Germany and Italy, and support their money on
police force, with the penalty of decapitation for
currency smugglers or speculators? Decapitation
might prove possible. But what was the good of that
in one portion of China if in the regions occupied
by the Japanese, and in Shanghai and the other
incredibly numerous Foreign Concessions, the Chi-
nese currency must continue to circulate?

There was no way to escape the conclusion: To
save the financial and economic situation China
ought immediately to cast off responsibility for

MEDITATION WHILE FLYING TO CHENGTU 217

occupied China, stamp its notes and refuse to accept
unstamped ones, and clamp down a moratorium on
all former obligations abroad. The results: a howl
going up from the important British business inter-
ests centered in Hong Kong and Shanghai and
powerful enough even in London to swing the
wobbly British Cabinet; Sir Vandeleur Grayburn,
uncrowned King of Hong Kong, filling the economic
newspapers of the world with tales of inherent
Chinese dishonesty and ruining what chance there
might ultimately be for China to obtain real private
or governmental credits in some awakened democ-
racy abroad just as if Britain was not defaulting
on its debts to the United States in a period of rela-
tive British prosperity! But Britain, being a great
empire living on accumulated moral, political and
financial capital could afford to be shall we say
self-righteous? And New China, a still tiny growth
in the midst of an ancient decay, could not. There
was nothing for China to do but struggle along with
expedients. To find suitable ones was the task of
T. V. Soong, China's richest banker, for Finance
Minister Dr. H. H. Kung, for Arthur Young, the
American financial adviser, and for Cyril Rogers of
the Bank of England. But the British Prime Min-
ister had just refused Rogers a loan for the purpose
of stabilizing the Chinese currency. Would the
British lend money on a new railway concession in
Yunnan or on the Yunnan tin?

What else could China do? I might ask the Bank

218 THE DRAGON WAKES

of China representative across the aisle. He was
sleeping among his cubes of gold. That wasn't
prudent: how did he know I wouldn't profit by his
slumber to pitch one package overboard to some
confederate waiting down below on one of those
unbelievable plum-colored mountains of Central
Szechwan (if I could lift it)? I must wake him up
and warn him of the danger, as well as ask a ques-
tion or two. All to no purpose. Even awake he spoke
nothing that I could understand, for my knowledge
of Chinese was limited to the ability to choose be-
tween tea and hot water as a society drink. Uncon-
scious of my sinister imaginings, the Chinese
slumped lower into his gray robe and snored again.
Well, China could reduce its imports. By making
the consumption of unpolished rice obligatory it
could cut down its imports of food stuffs by a certain
important percentage. This problem was already
urgent in over-populated Kwangtung Province.
China could cut the imports of foreign manufac-
tured goods to the bare minimum of machinery and
war supplies. With the Japanese occupying most of
the cotton-growing provinces, China must dress
itself in the simplest way. Handsome and active
Madame Chiang Kai-shek was already busy with
the problem. She was arranging for the purchase of
seventy thousand hand-looms to give employment
to refugee women, as a beginning. And within a
year she promised a nation of formerly silken-clad

MEDITATION WHILE FLYING TO CHENGTU 219

women dressed uniformly in the simplest cotton
goods.

That was the way. The marvelous silks of Szech-
wan, almost unknown in the world, could be col-
lected and exported, if necessary at a financial
sacrifice. Wood-oil sales would revive if and when
American prosperity returned. The tin production
of Yunnan could quickly be doubled or tripled in
defiance of or in cooperation with the powerful
International Tin Committee, with its price fixing
and urge toward world monopoly.

Japan, too, was unhappy and without credit. A
poor nation lodging an eighteen-foot anaconda's
appetite in the body of a five-foot blacksnake. From
July, 1937, until April, 1938, the war was estimated
to have cost the Japanese four hundred million yen
a month, or forty per cent of the national income.
In 1918, at the height of the war strain, the United
States was spending only a quarter of its national
income. Already the island Imperialists were forced
into totalitarian control and complete economic
mobilization. Half of the gold reserve had already
evaporated. Just to conquer fat flabby China. Yet
this was the nation that dreamed of beating the
gigantic Soviet empire and wresting control of the
Pacific from the United States, France and Great
Britain! Probably a British and American embargo
on certain supplies, a further boycott of Japanese
goods, could break Japan within a year. Why
should not the American Government give China a

220 THE DRAGON WAKES

loan for the purchase of oil, food and cotton for the
suffering civilians? That at least would be no
violation of its "neutrality." . . .

Five thousand feet below, the deep purply hills
suddenly gave place to vast pale-green rice fields
and the plain of Szechwan spread before my eyes,
beautiful, potentially as rich as all Japan, but back-
ward, medieval, full of autonomous longings and
dulled with opium. . . .

Could China hold out financially and economi-
cally at least for another year that might bring a
diplomatic "break" in China's favor? (As the plane
slowed down and dropped on to the field at Chengtu,
the sleeping Chinese awoke with a start and looked
around at his precious consignment.)

The answer seemed to be clear: in last analysis
China's problems all boiled down to a moral prob-
lem. A renascent nation of over four hundred
million could do almost anything, provided it had
the guts to suffer, the patriotism to hold on and the
leadership to trust. The rest was technical, sec-
ondary, relatively simple.

CHAPTER XIII

DIALOGUE WITH MY CONSCIENCE

WHICH MAY BE OMITTED BY THE UNINTERESTED

THE single gas-driven "Micheline" car which,
jolting and swerving on its rubber tires over
the narrow-gauge rails, brings the traveler in a
single day from Kunming on the highlands to Yun-
nan down to swampy Laoki on the border of Indo-
China, probably started it. The air of Kunming
is far too serene for tortuous self -probing. But as
the train gradually creeps its twisting way down
the long hill, it passes through the tin-mining dis-
trict. And at this point its uncomfortable lurches
and jolts seem to insist on the stories one has heard
of the manner in which tin is mined in Yunnan.
Long narrow galleries, too small for a grown man,
are driven into the hills. Little boys go in on their
knees and stomachs, scrape down the ore and bring
it out on their backs. As there are no props, the
galleries are continually caving in. Sometimes on
the little miners. In which case, since the children
are probably dead anyway, the galleries are simply
filled up from the outside and kept shut until the
forces of nature have done away with the little
bodies. At the end of which period, the gallery is

221

222 THE DRAGON WAKES

again cleared of dirt and new little boys begin
again. . . .

At Kunming I had not so much minded. In a
normal vehicle I might never have remembered. But
the unsteady "Micheline" somehow hammered at
the sore spot. By evening in the most torrid jungle
at Laokai, I was angry with China. Why must the
friendly, likeable Chinese continue to perpetuate
such horrors? Why were they so obtuse to human
suffering? What about their general behavior?
What right did they have anyway to fill the world
with outcries against Japanese atrocities? As for
myself, was I really being objective in my favor-
able judgment of them? Had I got to the bottom of
their elusive Oriental temperament, at once so mild
and cruel? I stayed awake for a long time in the
sleeping car without being able to reach a conclu-
sion.

In the airplane, in the long trying hours of flying
anywhere between two and seventeen thousand feet
above sea level, even at night in such fascinating
places as Bangkok, Calcutta, Baghdad and Athens,
I still thought of the children deep in those ghastly
galleries, shrieking and dying asphyxiated while
men outside stopped up the exits. . . .

The more I wrote about China, the sharper the
twinges of scruple. And as I went along, day after
day, jotting down my memories and impressions of
the Far East, internal pressure grew. One morning

DIALOGUE WITH MY CONSCIENCE 223

the expected voice had become loud to the point of
hearing.

Conscience: Really I must congratulate you on
your new-found talent as a propagandist, Dr.
Goebbels!

Ego: Oh, there you are! You have been bother-
ing me now for some time. May I ask for just what
reason you presume to interfere with the honest
exercise of my profession?

Conscience: Honest exercise, did you say?

Ego: That was my word.

Conscience: Convenient idea of honesty you have.

Ego: What's eating you, anyway? Kindly lay
your finger on a single instance where I have con-
sciously stated something that is not so. Or else, be
quiet.

Conscience: As if that were the test! Yours is a
dishonesty of omission.

Ego: I could not write everything. Newspapers
are continually short of space. There is a great deal
going on in the world outside China, you know.
And my publishers wanted a little book.

Conscience: That's it, go right on equivocating.
As though lack of space were the reason for your
dishonesty.

Ego: Since you know so much, what was it then?

Conscience: Half -conscious desire to emulate Dr.
Goebbels, as I said at the beginning. You despise
Dr. Goebbels. But you want China to win the war.
You dislike the Japanese

224 THE DRAGON WAKES

Ego: Wrong. I dislike their politics. I favor a
world consciously ordered by what I call decent
people in accordance with certain ethical

Conscience: Principles! Quite so. And so you
want to induce your readers into a favorable atti-
tude toward China. To make it seem that the
Chinese respect these principles you omit certain
blemishes from your portrait of them. Not always
consciously, perhaps. But often deliberately, as in
the case of the children crushed or buried alive in
the tin mines of Yunnan.

Ego: I was not writing about Chinese methods of
industrial production. Naturally they are backward,
like nearly everything else in China. Nor was it my
task to describe the ancient rot so much as the new
growth that is appearing in the midst of it. I never
pretended to give a full length portrait of the
Chinese. For that I lack both the knowledge and
the time.

Conscience: But you invited your readers to con-
demn the Japanese for forcing narcotics on your
friends! Which is worse, to sell narcotics to foreign
adults or to asphyxiate one's own children out of
love of gain? At least, if you mention one, oughtn't
you to say something about the other?

Ego: Not unless it comes within my subject.
Poisoning the Chinese is a Japanese weapon in the
war; the death of Chinese children in the tin mines
preceded and is totally extraneous to the present
conflict.

DIALOGUE WITH MY CONSCIENCE 225

Conscience: If that is your criterion, why, having
mentioned Japanese atrocities, didn't you mention
how few Japanese prisoners ever reach Chinese
headquarters or how the Chinese generals offer
money just to have them brought in alive?

Ego: I thought I had. If not, I am quite willing
to. If this is all you have to reproach me for, you
had better see a psychoanalyst.

Conscience: You cannot escape by insulting me.
You dwelt on the Chinese absence of ambulances
and doctors. Did you describe how a wounded
Chinese with money could often get transportation
to a hospital while one without money must walk or
die by the wayside? Did you tell how you saw yes,
actually saw a Chinese officer drive common
soldiers off that telephone truck with a whip which
he obviously wasn't using for the first time? You
did not. It would not have fitted your picture of a
likeable people observant of humane principles.

Ego: I suspected this had become the exception.

Conscience: Oh, you did! Well, you saw for
yourself how opium growing and smoking was
going on despite the Chinese assurances to the
contrary

Ego: And I wrote about narcotics in Chengtu
and Kunming.

Conscience: But not that you were offered a pipe
of opium in Hankow itself, right under the eyes of
that convert to Methodism, Chiang Kai-shek.

226 THE DRAGON WAKES

Ego (triumphantly) : But that was in the French
Concession where Chiang has no power.

Conscience: You score your first point. Now let
us talk a little about these Soongs you so much
admire.

Ego: I cannot keep you silent if I would.

Conscience: In your description of the "Soong
Dynasty" you did not think it worth while men-
tioning the charges of corruption commonly made
against certain members. Is this your idea of intel-
lectual honesty?

Ego: Certainly I heard the stories as everyone in
China must, for they are told at dinner tables. But
since when do you expect me to repeat every bit of
scandal that I hear? Besides, true or false, I do not
think them very important. The Chinese have always
had lax notions about the legitimacy of using posi-
tion and power for personal benefit. I gathered that
there is less of this in China than before, not
more.

Conscience: But that is not the way you talked
to your young Chinese friends. To them you insisted
on the need for giving the common man a square
deal, which he is certainly not getting now, if his
morale is to be kept up. For after all it is the
common man who is carrying the weight of China's
war. You were told I was with you and heard it
how many Chinese still see the war in terms of per-
sonal profit; you know how many sons of good
families are being kept out of the struggle on princi-

DIALOGUE WITH MY CONSCIENCE 227

pie by their families; you cannot but have witnessed
the immense moral superiority of the common
soldier to the officer.

Ego: Come, come, be fair. I wrote that.

Conscience: But did not dwell upon it. Once
more you sought to paint the Chinese situation more
favorable than it really is.

Ego: Have you any more bile secreted some-
where?

Conscience: It was not I who solicited this dis-
cussion. You yourself kept dwelling on China until
I just had to recall you to complete sincerity.

Ego: Have you any more complaints?

Conscience (somewhat wearily) : Indeed I have!
You are a democrat: at least, I have heard you say
so often enough. You seek the triumph of democ-
racy. Can you believe that a Chinese victory over
Japan will strengthen democracy in the world? In
your opinion (and please remember that I can see
right to the bottom of you!) is Chiang Kai-shek a
democrat? Is T* V. Soong a democrat? Is your
friend the Kwangsi general Pai (Pei) Hsung-chi a
democrat? Or W. H. Donald? Or the "land-
reforming" communists, for that matter are they
democrats? Can you make a State democratic by
just saying so?

Ego: Hold on, hold on: why all the heat? Just
what difference does this make to us?

Conscience: It is not for me to choose between
political forms merely to keep you straight about

228 THE DRAGON WAKES

them. Can yon claim to have been straight about
China if you are afraid to answer them?

Ego: Very well, but one at a time, if you please.
China, you will admit, is at war

Conscience: Now none of that. It is you who are
on the dock, not I. Chiang was just as little demo-
cratic before the war started; he was reproached for
his high-handed ways by the "Young Marshal,"
Chang Hsueh-liang, as you can read in Chiang's own
diaries: "Chiang did not become autocratic owing
to any war need."

Ego: Have it your own way, but let us not mix
democracy and liberalism.

To return to other questions: Chiang, in my
opinion, is not a democrat. Neither was Alexander
Hamilton. But like Hamilton, Chiang is being im-
pelled by another man's philosophy namely Sun
Yat-sen's "Three Principles" and by his own utter-
ances to move toward democracy even though he
does not trust the people. That is why he convoked
the "People's Political Council" the other day.

Conscience: Oh, that thing! A false face! Didn't
it remind you of the Constitutional Convention you
saw in Moscow at the end of 1936 trained seals
waiting for their master to throw them a fish and
barking their gratitude when they get it?

Ego: It did not. I do not know whether it will be
possible ever to make democrats out of the Euro-
pean Russians; the Siberians as frontiersmen are

DIALOGUE WITH MY CONSCIENCE 229

admittedly another matter. But I sincerely believe
that China is moving toward a democracy

Conscience (ironically) : Basis of the State now
widened to include at least one whole family!

Ego: Shut up. Or else don't ask questions.
T. V. Soong is a democrat of a very peculiar sort.
I admitted that he was domineering just as able
people often are if they be not patient as well.

General Pai never made any claim to democracy
down in his native Kwangsi.

Communism in China has so far been primarily
a matter of land reform and opposing Japan: as the
doctrine fades out in Russia it is quite possible that
the Chinese sort of communism could come to pre-
vail. This sort is certainly not incompatible with real
democracy. I know nothing of Donald's political
views.

Conscience: This from you. . . . Have you for-
gotten Adolf Hitler's "German democracy" and
Stalin's new constitution, "a million times more
democratic than any other"? You might try to be
serious.

Ego: Very well. Call Chiang a Fuehrer. Admit
that government by one family is, in the long run,
the darkest medievalism. Call the present economic
organization of China feudal, proclaim the farmers
to be grossly oppressed, the Chinese bankers an in-
satiate lot of usurers. Do all these things. It none-
theless remains that a Chinese victory over Japan
would represent a triumph for democracy if only

230 THE DRAGON WAKES

because it would make the defense of democracy
In Europe and America so much easier.

Now are you satisfied?

Conscience: Relatively. Let us probe a little
deeper. Meanwhile you admit that China is not
actually a democracy?

Ego: Certainly. But I sincerely believe that its
fundamental trend is democratic, that no matter
how long it takes, the democratic instincts of the
Chinese masses will ultimately prevail and that in
the meantime a Chinese victory over Japan cannot
only help save democracy in the West but conceiv-
ably prevent the other predatory States, Germany
and Italy, from starting a new world war. There-
fore I am able whole-heart

Conscience: You cannot possibly be whole-
hearted about a State in which the principles of
liberalism and individualism are daily spat upon.

Ego: To what are you referring?

Conscience: Do you call Donald a liberal, with
his constant talk of "Shoot him! shoot him!" when-
ever any Chinese opposes Chiang or goes counter
to his ideas of how China should be run?

Ego: Donald has served China with complete
loyalty

Conscience: China as he conceives it. But a China
without any of that tolerance, that broad human
sympathy, that strictly formal justice alike for all
in short, that dwindling liberalism for which you
struggle every day of your life.

DIALOGUE WITH MY CONSCIENCE 231

Ego: It cannot come all at once. Liberalism and
law and tolerance can hardly be promulgated dur-
ing a great war among a people of illiterates who,
as you properly insisted, sell their children to die
in tin mines. Put it this way. By diminishing the
chances of a new war a Chinese victory could, at the
worst, bring about a fortification of Occidental
liberalism, for liberalism can, in the long run, only
flourish in peace. But not in a peace of servile
submission to violence or armed threats of violence.
By defying imperialist semi-fascist Japan, soft old
China has put itself in the category of Belgium in
1914. Attending the funeral of King Albert a few
years ago, I could not but contrast the universal
homage rendered to the man who defied the might
of Imperial Germany, with the all but universal
contempt felt for that militarist bully, the ex-
Kaiser. At its best, however, a Chinese victory can
mean the complete stopping of the present political
rot the tendency to return to the rule of the brute,
the maniac and the moron. Therefore it is eminently
proper to take a chance on China. Besides I have a
personal liking for the Chinese.

Conscience: If I am not mistaken, you also like
the Germans and the Italians. This eloquence of
yours cannot quite satisfy me : and until I am satis-
fied, please remember, you will remain uneasy

Ego (angrily) : Of course it does not satisfy me
either. But I make a distinction between the (to
me) failing of peoples who are really doing their

232 THE DRAGON WAKES

best, improving, growing, and those who are de-
teriorating and ought to know better.

(Conscience raises tired eyebrows . . . ?)
Ego: Take the Russians, for example. Unques-
tionably, for sheer frightfulness the Russians are
number one among great contemporary peoples.
Their inter-party purges, their massacres of here-
tics, cannot be matched for cold-blooded cruelty in
modern times. Cruelty, however, represents nothing
new in Russia, a country that has never had any
proper civilization. But cruelty is not made a prin-
ciple in Russia, though one might argue that it
follows inevitably from an attempt to fit men into
inhuman social forms. One might even say that the
Russians are seeking in theory, on a vast human
scale, a freedom entirely incompatible with their
economic premises and that their ruthlessness is the
logical result of disappointment. Moreover, owing
to a combination of anti-imperialistic theory and
vast area, Russia is no longer territorially aggres-
sive, while rising nationalism has blunted the point
of communist proselytism. On this account democ-
racy can, if alert, safely ally itself with the Soviets
in opposition to militant aggression.

Unhappily, in both Germany and Italy the situa-
tion is quite the reverse. Though the amount of
physical frightfulness is incomparably less, neither
of these countries has a valid excuse for its rever-
sion to barbarism. The Italians can look back upon
perhaps the most glorious past in Europe. Just

DIALOGUE WITH MY CONSCIENCE 233

before Mussolini there was in Italy a mild renas-
cence of spiritual vitality in science, letters and the
arts, as well as great technical ability. Mussolini
deliberately strangled this new flowering in order
to pursue the mirage of national glory on the cheap-
est plane, thereby preparing a new period of Italian
decadence*

In Germany the situation is even worse. While
unquestionably less profoundly civilized than the
Italians (owing to the lack of Mediterranean tradi-
tion and to conquest by Prussia), the Germans had
been one of the leading peoples of our time, a
source of unlimited promise. Nothing seemed be-
yond them. But they arrogantly challenged the
world, were defeated and lacked the courage to face
their own deficiencies. Instead of repenting the bru-
tal aggression of 1914 and repudiating the essen-
tially false philosophies of violence and immoral-
ism that led them into it, they preferred to follow
an Austrian "drummer" who laid the blame for
their misery elsewhere. It is no excuse to allege that
they came hungry and late to the imperialist ban-
quet; for the banquet itself was already souring in
the stomachs of the earlier guests. The proper line
for both Italy and Germany, to say nothing of
Japan, was not to dragoon their peoples into helotry
in a belated attempt to wrest colonial and other
possessions from their owners, but to champion
anti-imperialism; not to attempt by increased pop-
ulation and brutality to extend their frontiers, but

234 THE DRAGON WAKES

to help devaluate frontiers as such. Missing the
proper course they threw themselves into the arms
of charlatans who promised fulfillment through re-
gression. The Germans were poisoned by pride, the
Italians by wounded vanity. Thereby they and not
Russia became the primary contemporary enemies
of mankind. For whereas for a symbol for the Rus-
sian people one might select the uncouth figure of
some Caliban late wakened from the clay, for Italy
and Germany one is obliged to point to the example
of Judas. And like Judas they will hardly obtain,
or obtaining, enjoy, the reward of their betrayal.

In contrast with Russia, backward but facing the
light, Germany and Italy, though more advanced,
are deliberately struggling back into darkness.

China looks the same way as Russia. Though
traditionally perhaps the most advanced of peoples,
China had sunk into deliquescence. Out of this rank
disintegration the Chinese are obviously emerging.
Under the influence of nationalism, the same force
that is playing so much havoc in Italy and Germany
and Japan

Conscience: Precisely. You applaud in China
what you condemn in the European tyrannies.

Ego: Only to a superficial view. For whereas
China has had too little national conscience, Italy
and Germany and Japan are suffering from a fester-
ing excess of it, as the Pope pointed out the other
day. While Hitler and Mussolini are busy urging
the destruction of civilized values, the Chinese are

DIALOGUE WITH MY CONSCIENCE 235

turned in the direction of universality. Or so it
seems to me.

Conscience: What sober reason have you for be-
lieving that this New China, of which there is much
talk in your book, will not eventually turn into a
new and vaster imperialist empire, with even
mightier appetites than the States you so deplore,
constituting an even greater danger to what you
somewhat glibly call civilization; what guarantee is
offered that Chiang Kai-shek will not, if successful,
turn into another openly fascist leader, snatching
his country from the ranks of your friends over into
those of your enemies, as Pilsudski and his succes-
sor Beck did with renascent Poland?

Ego: I could allege several reasons; but funda-
mentally my confidence in the emergence of a demo-
cratic enlightened China is based upon an emo-
tional intuition. China simply does not feel fascist,
totalitarian, retrograde.

Conscience: Then you base an entire line of con-
duct, to say nothing of writing a book favorable
to China, on nothing more solid than a hunch?

Ego: Certainly not. Though I believe China to be
evolving in the right direction, I should support that
country even were I sure of later transformation
into fascism. For in thwarting the Japanese aggres-
sors, the Chinese will have hamstrung one of the
contemporary world's three Public Enemies. By
fighting and immobilizing one of them it has seri-
ously reduced the chance of successful aggression

236 THE DRAGON WAKES

elsewhere by the other two. After all, despite my
interest in China, for me the real battle is being
fought in the Occident, Already the Chinese are con-
ceivably saving the finest Occidental youth from
premature death, and the Continent of Europe from
devastation. And even supposing that, Japan once
thwarted and humbled, China should herself
emerge some ten or twenty years hence as a new
and more powerful aggressor, I would answer that
the danger to democracy is now, not in a decade or
two, when the wave of resurgent barbarism will
either have triumphed or passed. Since more de-
mocracy is an absolute essential to a higher civiliza*
tion or even to the preservation of the little that
exists, at this moment the Chinese are truly defend-
ing the future of civilized man.

Conscience: Well roared, Bottom. Yet the pre-
requisite of optimism is that the Chinese continue to
defend themselves. Having witnessed and described
the pitiful weakness of the Chinese armies, the rela-
tive inefficiency of Chinese methods, the generally
low level of the Chinese officers, can you continue
soberly to predict a Chinese success?

Ego: I can. Given adequate leadership, mainte-
nance of the present high morale and new found
unity, sufficient funds or credits, some economic
development of the Chinese Southwest, the pos-
sibility of obtaining regularly war material abroad
and, finally, an open line of communications for
the reception of this material, China ought not to

DIALOGUE WITH MY CONSCIENCE 237

be beaten- Sooner or later It will be up to Japan to
decide whether it wishes to limit its objectives and
withdraw to the north with considerable plunder
but great loss of face and the possibility of a new
and worse war on its hands five years thence; or
whether it prefers to continue an indecisive strug-
gle until forced by sheer exhaustion to clear out,
not only of occupied China, but conceivably from
stolen Manchuria as well. . . . Always supposing
there be no general war in the meantime. . . .

If this be propaganda, then, Conscience, make the
most of it. Conscience! Conscience! Where are you?

I listened. There was no answering voice. Bored
or satisfied, Conscience had gone to sleep.

THE END

INDEX

Able-bodied Youth Movement,
44, 136

Agriculture, 206-208

Airplanes, sale of American,
30, 41-42, 83-84; Chinese, 55-
56, 135436

Air raids, 41-42, 43, 92-94, 99-
100, 102, 112-113, 203

America. See United States.

Amoy, 44, 153

Anking, 158

Anti-communism, 11, 15, 163

Anti-Japanese University (Com-
munist), 174

Antimony deposits, 206

Arms and ammunition. See
Munitions.

Army, 73, 134ff., 138, 148, 154-
155, 175; German military ad-
visers, 4, 31, 44, 54, 59, 138,
143, 151, 152. See Army
corps.

Army corps: Fourth Route, 39;

Buck, John Lossing, 207
Burma road, 206

Canton, 31, 34-46, 152, 181, 201

Canton-Hankow Railway, 32,
39, 49, 147, 162, 201

Cash bonus system, 176

Cecil, Lord Robert, 79

Central government, Pekin, 11

Chahar, 145

Chang, Bulson, 191

Changsha-Chungking road, 205

Chen Cheng, General, 199-200

Chen Chen-sze, 102ff., 124

Chengchow, 94

Cheng Sheng, General, 100

Chengtu, 58, 60-68, 166, 183-
184, 206

Chiang Kai-shek, 12, 15, 17, 24,
38, 49, 66, 67, 73, 74, 77, 79,
80-82, 87, 90, 126, 127, 131,
138, 146ff., 158, 159, 163, 169,
189, 199

Eighth Route, 87, 137, 173; ^Chiang Kai-shek, Madame, 78,
Nineteenth Route, 12, 44, 8lT 79 t > 82-84, 86, 87, 91, 177, 180-

126; Twenty-seventh Route,
110; Sixtieth Route, 73
Arnold, Julian, quoted, 187-188
Association for War Support

Against the Enemy, 183
Association of Chinese Women
to Support the National De-
fense, 180

Bandits, 65

Berlin, Japanese support by, 31

Bolshevism, 13, 15, 16, 24, 26,

77, 87, 164
BomJbing raids, Japanese, 41,

42, 43, 92-94, 98, 99-100, 102,

112-113, 203
Boycotts, 165
Boy Scouts, 63
British Volunteer Corps, 32

181, 185, 218
China, Japan's invasion of, 7-19.

See New China.
China Defense League, 87
Chou En-lai, 173, 190
Chow, General, 44
Chu, Dr. K. T., 43
Chu Zho-hwa, 63, 184, 185
Chungking, 49, 55-59, 159, 160-

161, 202, 205, 208-209
Chungking University, 58
Coal deposits, 208
Communism, 11, 15, 87-88, 126,

137, 158, 173-175, 182-183, 190
Concessions, foreign, 9, 26, 47,

52-54
Conscription, introduction of,

238

INDEX

239

Consulates, Japanese interfer-
ence with, 27-28
Copper deposits, 206, 208
Cotton production, 27, 207
Credit, foreign, 213ff.

Defense decisions, 147
Doihara Division, operations

against, 94ff.
Donald, W. H., 86
Drama, propaganda, 166-169,

170471

Eden, Anthony, 18

Embargo, 165

England. See Great Britain.

Epidemic prevention, 43

Ethiopia, 14

Exports and imports, 213-215

Factories, Japanese destruction
of, 27; transference of, 201-
204

Falkenhausen, General von, 4,
31, 151, 152

Farmers' Education for Na-
tional Defense, 172

Fascism in China, 15, 77

Feminist movement, 177-186

Financial problems, 16, 26, 78,
90, 192, 213-220

First-aid groups, 181

Foreign missions. See Missions.

Foreign Trade Commission, 207

France, 9, 14, 15, 45, 47, 48,
163, 164

French Concession in Hankow,
47, 48

"French Railway," 41, 69-70,
163, 205

Germany, 9, 14, 15, 17, 22, 30,
42, 47, 163, 164; military ad-
visers from, 4, 31, 44, 54, 59,
138, 143, 151, 152

Girl Guides, 63, 182

Gold, transfer of, 212

Gold deposits, 208

Government offices, transfer of,
203, 206

Grayburn, Sir Vandeleur, 20, 23,
217

Great Britain, 7, 9, 13, 14, 15,
17, 20fL, 32, 41, 45, 47, 163,
164, 201

Guerrilla warfare, 25, 26, 137-
138, 154, 155, 159, 164, 184

Hainan, 205

Haip-hong, 205

Hankow, 22, 31, 44, 45, 47-54,

74, 151, 152, 153, 156, 158-161,

181, 200, 201, 206
"Highwaymen's Alliance," 163
Hitler, Adolf, 14
Ho Kwo-kwang, General, 58-59,

206

Home industries, 181
Hong Kong, 9, 20, 23, 27, 29,

30, 31-33, 39, 45, 159, 161,

163, 200-201, 205, 213
Hong Kong-Hankow Railway,

42
Hong Kong Volunteer Defense

Corps, 45

Hopei Province, 14
Hopei-Shahar Government, 16
Hospital organization, 43
Hsueh-yo, General, 101
Hu, Victor, 166

Huang, Major-General J. L., 176
Hull, Cordell, 41
Hunan Province, 202
Hupei Province, 202

Imperialism in China, Occiden-
tal colonial, 8fL

Imports and exports, 213-215

Indo-China railway (French),
41, 69-70, 163, 205

Industries, 27, 83, 177; trans-
ference of, 201

Institutions, transfer of, 203, 204

International Concessions, Jap-
anese attitude toward, 28

International Peace Campaign,
79

Iron deposits, 208

Italy, 23-13, 14, 15, 31, 42, 163,
164

Japan: aggressive policies of,
7ff., 144ff.; monopolistic ex-

240

INDEX

ploitation by, 22fL; inhuman
practices of, 24-25; ineffi-
ciency of army, 25, 54; losses
of, 154; weaknesses of, 209-
210
Jehol, Province of, 14, 145

Kaifeng, 98, 99, 154
Kellogg Peace Pact, 12
Knatchbull-Hugessen, Sir Hughe

Montgomery, 210
Kung, H. H., 78, 85, 217
Kung, Madame, 78, 84-85, 86, 87
Kunming, 68-75, 205
Kuomintang party, 11, 36, 37,

52, 74, 76, 77, 131, 173, 175,

190
Kwangsi Province, 4, 181, 191-

192, 200, 204, 205, 206
Kwangtung Province, 4, 38, 43-

44, 191-192, 204, 218
Kweichow Province, 200, 204,

205

Kweiteh, 154
Kweiyang, 205
Kwei Yung-chun, General, 110,

119, 120

Labor problems, 83

Lanchow, 206, 213

Lanfeng, 94ff., 154

Lanson, 205

Laval, Pierre, 14

League of Nations, 12, 13, 14,

15, 18, 79, 188
Lieu, D. K., 204, 206
Lingnan Missions University,

37,42

Li Tsung-yin, General, 153
Li Tsyng-jen, General, 100
Liu Siang, Marshal, 66, 203
Liu Wan-hwei, Marshal, 66
Live stock, 207
Loans, capital, 215
Long-yun, General, 71, 72
Lu Han, General, 73
Lunghai, 96, 97ff., 147, 153, 156,

157, 158
Lunghai Railway, 96, 97ff., 147,

153, 155, 156, 157, 158

Manchuria, 12, 14, 145

Marco Polo Bridge incident, 17,
38, 145, 172

Markets, Japanese occupation
of, 27

Mass Education Movement, 168,
171-172, 181

Miao, Yun T., 192

Military advisers, 4, 31, 44, 54,
59, 138, 143, 151, 152

Minerals, 205, 206, 207

Missionary West Union Univer-
sity, 62

Missions, 98, 99, 113, 114, 222

Mongokuo, 23

Mongolia, expedition into, 14

Moving pictures, patriotic, 169-
170

Munitions, 30, 83-84, 135-136

Mussolini, Benito, 14

Nakamura, Toyoishi, 22, 30
Nanking, 16, 25, 26, 45, 74, 149,

151, 171, 205
Nanking University, 59
Nan-moo, 207
Narcotics, 7, 17, 83, 148, 162,

189

National Army. See Army.
National Bureau of Economic

Research, 201, 204
National Chinese University, 63
National Government, 58, 66
Nationalism, growing sense of,

38, 126ff., 177-186
National Resources Commission,

201, 204

Naval Limitations Treaty, 11
New China, 29, 34, 67-68
New Life Movement. See Puri-
tan New Life Movement.
Nickel deposits, 208
Nine-Power Treaty, 11, 12
Northcote, Sir Geoffrey, 20, 45

Oi Kwan Hotel, Canton, 35
Open-door policy, 10, 23, 27
Opium, 63-64, 70, 73, 132, 203,

207

Orange crop, 207
Oriented Economist, quoted,

18-19

INDEX

241

Pacification Commission of
Szechwan and Sikiang Prov-
inces, 63, 66

Pai Hsung-chi, General, 138,
155, 199

Panay incident, 22, 112, 210

Patriotism. See Nationalism.

Peipei, 209

Peiping, 147, 148

Peiping-Hankow railway, 47, 49,
148

Petroleum deposits, 208

Pinghan railway, 92, 147, 156

Portugal, 9

Power plants, 209

Propaganda, 104, 112, 166ff.

Proverbs, quoted by Kunming,
74-75

Provincial Government,
Chengtu, 58

Provisional Government (Pei-
ping), 25. See "Puppet gov-
ernments."

"Puppet governments," 12, 23,
25, 146, 14S, 162, 189

Puritan New Life Movement,
77, 82, 87, 173, 175-176

Pu-yi, Emperor, 12

Railways, 32, 42, 147, 203, 205,
209, 221; Canton-Hankow, 32,
39, 49, 147, 162, 201; French
(Indo-China), 41, 69-70, 163,
205; Hong Kong-Hankow, 42;
Lunghai, 96, 97ff., 147, 153,
155, 156, 157, 158; Peiping-
Hankow, 47, 49, 148; Ping-
han, 92, 147, 156; Tsinpu,
152

Recruits, training, 44

Red Cross corps, 182

Refugees, 115-116, 176

Resources, natural, 206-209

Rice yield, 206, 207

Roadways, 205-206

Rogers, Cyril, 217

Rome-Berlin Axis, 15

Roosevelt, President, 84, 165

"Ruining China" campaign, 162-
163

"Rump" China, 200, 206, 207

Russia, 9, 10, 11, 12, 18, 24, 30,
47, 87, 157-158, 164. See
Soviet Rus

Salt domes, 208

Shahar Province, 14

Shameen, 35

Shanghai, 12, 20, 24, 27, 31, 145,

149-151, 201
Shanghai Expeditionary Force,

153
Shanghai "incident," 18, 22,

1495.

Shantung Province, 10, 11
Shiyukow, 208
Sian, 157-158, 190
Silk industry, 207, 219
Sokolsky, George, quoted, 9,

187, 189-190
Songs, war, 46

Soong Ai-ling. See Kung, Mad-
ame.

Soong, Charles Jones, 77, 78
Soong Ching-ling. See Sun Yat-

sen, Madame.

Soong family, 76ff., 131, 180
Soong Mei-ling. See Chiang Kai-
shek, Madame.
Soong, T. V., 12, 78-79, 85, 87,

88-90, 156, 201, 216, 217
Soviet Russia, 12, 24, 30, 87,

146, 161, 210
Spanish war, 15
Stimson, Secretary, 13
Stimson Doctrine, 14
Strategy, Chinese, 154-155
Suchow, 153
Sugar cane, 207
Suiyuan Province, 14
Sung, General, 16
Sun Yat-sen, 11, 34, 38, 76, 81,

90, 169

Sun Yat-sen, Madame, 77, 86-88
Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, 37
Sun Yat-sen Memorial Tower,

37

Sun Yat-sen University, 37, 42
Szechwan Province, 57, 59, 60-

68, 159-161, 191, 200, 203, 205,

206-211

242

INDEX

Szechwan Reconstruction Com-
mission, 206
Szechwan University, 62

Taierhchwang, victory of, 153

Tariffs, revision of, 28

Ten Chi-ho, Marshal, 6S

Textile problems, 83

Theatrical Troupe for the Pro-
motion of Resistance, 168

"Three Principles" doctrine,
76,90

Tieh-sua, Miss, 181

tin deposits, 70, 205, 206, 208,
209, 221

Ting-ling, Miss, 182

Tobacco production, 207

Tong, Hollington, 80

Tseliuching, 208

Tseng Yang-fu, 36, 41

Tsinpu Railway, 152

Tungmenhui, the, 76

Tungsten, 205, 206

"Twenty-one Demands," Japan's,
10

United States, 10-11, 13-14, 30,

164-165, 201
Universities, transfer of, 203,

204

War Area Service Corps, 176

Warships, British, 32

War songs, 46

War supplies. See Munitions.

Water power, 206, 209

Women, increasing importance

of, 177-186; industries for, 83,

177, 181

Women's Voice, 183
Wood oil, 207
Wuchang, 49
Wuhan Province, 47-54
Wu Te-chen, 36

Yang Chi-yi, Marshal, 63
Yangtse Valley, 145, 151
Yellow River, expedition, 91-

124; dykes, 97, 124, 154
Yen, Dr. Y. C. James, 171-172
Yenan, 174

Yen Shi-shan, Marshal, 191
Young, Arthur, 217
Yuan Shi-kai, 11
Yu Han-mo, General, 44
Yunnan Province, 68-75, 184-

186, 191-192, 200, 204, 206

Zinc deposits, 208

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