Unorganized Pressure
The long one-party rule of the Kuomintang, now relaxed but not disestablished, has habituated the Chinese to the use of completely non-political groups—families and their connections; economic associations of various kinds; religious agencies—for political leverage. There are relatively few groups which possess clear public purposes and at the same time maintain unofficial status. Indeed, the stamp of quasi-official approval is so highly prized that many groups which seem to have no affiliation with the government are discovered to seek affiliation or to have acquired it roundabout.
Among the private or quasi-private groups which take most effect may be mentioned, however, the People’s Foreign Relations Association, the League of Nations Union, and the China Branch of the International Peace Campaign. The first of these publishes the useful quarterly, The China Herald. The Campaign, which was launched as a world-wide center-and-left drive for peace, was under respected European leadership, and was favored by a large labor bloc in England. In the United States it was associated in the minds of some people with the Stalinist fellow-travellers—the elements who sat in the councils of the temporarily-joined forces of anti-Fascism and pro-Stalinism, who organized the American League for Peace and Democracy (a Popular Front movement), the American Friends of the Chinese People, and who dominated groups such as the American Youth Congress. In China, contrariwise, the International Peace Campaign, fitting in with purposes of government and people, seemed to offer a world-wide sympathy for China’s anti-aggression activities. The China Branch was among the most effective organizations in the Campaign. It developed vitality in diffusing peace propaganda—that is, for peace after the war. There was no trace of defeatism, sabotage of national defense, or obstruction to defensive war. With the outbreak of the European war, the I.P.C. disappeared almost altogether from the Western scene, but continues in China. Finally, the China League of Nations Union publishes The China Forum, and carries on an educational campaign.
Christian activities have been extended and activized by war. Never before have the missions had as many opportunities for social and national service in China. Their schools are filled; their hospitals, crowded; their cause, related to America, to peace, and to a sane long view, is welcomed. The Chinese Y.M.C.A. has met the shock of war with extensive participation in relief, particularly among students and soldiers. Medical aid, tragically inadequate but infinitely better than nothing at all, is coming into China. The curtailment of mission activities in occupied China makes exploitation of the Christian field in the West even more desirable from the viewpoint of the Western churches. A recent work, by two Christians born in China, one American and the other Chinese, describes this situation clearly and significantly: China Rediscovers Her West.10
The other side of extra-political pressure comes in the form of class and regional interests. The phenomena of lobbying and special favor are less evident in Chungking than in previous governments of China. Special groups representing industries, areas, or vested interests do appear, but are apt to work through casual, untraceable patterns of personal relationships. There is no Chinese C.I.O., nor A. F. of L., but there is also no National Association of Manufacturers. The politics of economics gains by diffusion and absence of protest what it loses in sensitivity and explicitness. An economic group which feels itself outraged takes a long time to develop group consciousness; hence, it is less apt to feel outraged, and the generality of the people, the public, is often better off. There are undoubtedly scurrilous, politically vile, selfish advantages being taken in West China today; but the net outcome is counterbalanced by concrete improvement in the condition of the people as a whole, and the unquestionable morale of the leading and administrative classes.
Every government, where and however it may operate, has a double set of barriers which form its corridor of further existence: on the left it must meet the minimal needs of the governed, satisfy their physical and moral appetites sufficiently to keep itself from being ignored or overthrown; on the right it must compensate the persons who govern, and do so well enough to retain personnel adequate to government. The Marxians stress the former element; the Paretians, the latter. Both are visible in China. Had the exigencies of reform, social change, and military activity proved too sharp, too violent, too profitless, the personnel trained by experience and fitted by temperament to government might have gone over to Japan. The low caliber of Wang Ch’ing-wei and his clique is testimony to the élan of the West Chinese leaders. Chungking has ample reserves of administrative talent, military intelligence, and political acumen upon which to draw.
The last part of the picture is the most important: the lao-pai-hsing, the Old Hundred Names, the common people of China. They are the ultimate arbiters of this war, and of all future wars in East Asia: to this degree they are a superlative force in the world. Hundreds of millions strong, adept, flexible, trained in a culture which has flowed under (but not through) literacy for centuries, hard-working, patient, and physiologically sound, they are perhaps the greatest unified human group. Upon their anger against Japan depends the future of that Empire; if the lao-pai-hsing are determined to resist, Chiang could go, Chungking fall, the government scatter, the Communists collapse, and there would yet be war—restless, bitter, implacable, with the ferocity of a sane man employing violence as a last defense against violence not sane. Leaders exist aplenty in that sea of men, waiting for circumstance to cast them forth. Intelligence, information, cunning, power, and patience are all at hand.
The difference between a strange half-industrial modern Chinese Republic, striding toward the twenty-first century with seven-league boots of progress, and a Chinese chaos stinking with vice and disease under Japanese rule—this difference lies within the decision of the common people. The war has roused the workers, peasants, and petty townsmen. The Japanese bombers have carried ubiquitous messages of alarm. The Western world gasped when across the dusty plains of North China there rolled the tidal wave of Boxerism; but the I Ho Ch’üan of yesteryear is a passing fad in contrast to the bitterness and resolution of today’s common people. There is no defeat in most of the faces in Shanghai, no surrender in the eyes of men who live, and must keep on living, surrounded by enemy vainglory. The traitors are marked by their own behavior; they bear the stigmata of a surrender to vice. Yet even they cannot be trusted by Japan. One who has visited the sources and the mouths of the rivers, who has seen the free Yangtze pouring out of Tibet and the captive Yangtze ripple past the grey flanks of Imperial Japanese destroyers, can testify that the Chinese people are not beaten now. If they are ever going to be beaten, it will take a bigger force than Japan to do it—a morally greater, technically surer, politically wiser force.
The Chinese people know they are unconquered. They do not know it with their minds, despite hopeful calculations in terms of years and yen and reserves of oil. They do not even know it with a conscious assumption of faith, a fanatical determination to die for the new state. They know it just as men have always known the simplest things of life—things so simple that they may trouble the psychologist or elude the philosopher, and never even enter the vocabulary of political science. The Chinese sense of victory is like a reminiscent fragrance, a half-heard but poignant sound, a flash of inexpressible but profound meaning out of everyman’s irrecoverable past. This omnipresent sense of victory and freedom may be twisted. Weak and cunning men rationalize this sense of victory into self-deceiving subterfuges of boring from within; they accept Japanese salaries while promising themselves sometime, always tomorrow, to subvert Japan; but even they lack no assurance of ultimate Chinese victory.
The winning of that victory lies on the sweating backs of men—in paddy-fields, on flaring highways, on flagstone pathways across a world, or behind the adobe and lattice walls of China’s workshops. The war has conjured up an awareness of power. No one asks the lao-pai-hsing what they want; no ballots, no polls can reach them. But no people can hold such overt power and be unconscious of their own strength. China has awakened.
Footnotes
1 The China Information Committee, News Release, April 1, 1940.
2 The same, April 8, 1940. Minor changes in punctuation have been introduced.
3 The same, May 6, 1940.
4 Research Staff of the Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, Agrarian China, Selected Source Materials from Chinese Authors, Shanghai, 1938. A more Leftist and even gloomier view is taken by Chen Han-seng, Landlord and Peasant in China, New York, 1936, and the same author’s Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, A Study of the Livelihood of Chinese Tobacco Cultivators, Shanghai, 1939. Two general surveys of the Chinese economy are Condliffe, J. B., China Today: Economic, Boston, 1932, and Tawney, R. H., Land and Labour in China, New York, 1932. A significant hypothesis of the relations of economics, government, and culture in China is found in Lattimore, Owen, Inner Asian Frontiers of China, New York, 1940, Ch. III, esp. p. 39 ff.; this rests in part upon Wittfogel, Karl August, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas, Leipzig, 1931, the leading Marxian exposition of the subject.
5 Publicity release of Indusco, Inc., The American Committee in Aid of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, New York, January 1940 [1941]. This agency, exceedingly active in publicizing China’s cooperative progress, has released a great deal of up-to-date information on the movement. The Western literature on the C.I.C. has appeared mostly in popular sources, to which The Bulletin of Far Eastern Bibliography issued by the Committees on Far Eastern Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies, Washington, D. C., serves as a useful guide. The writings of Edgar Snow are of special value and vividness in treating this topic: articles in Asia, various dates; “China’s Blitzbuilder, Rewi Alley,” The Saturday Evening Post, Vol. 213, no. 32 (February 8, 1941); and his recent The Battle for Asia, New York, 1941, which appeared as this work was completed and sent to press. A convenient handbook is the anonymous The People Strike Back! or The Story of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, Shanghai, (1939?).
6 “The Movement in Action,” New Defense, A Journal of the 30,000 Industrial Cooperatives Movement in China (Chungking) Vol. I, no. 1 (April 1939), p. 5.
7 The China Information Committee, News Release, July 15, 1940. The article and tables have been somewhat abridged. The cooperatives spread so rapidly that figures are often obsolete before they are tabulated.
8 “Model Constitution for Chinese Cooperative Societies, Revised July 7th, 1940,” The China Information Committee, News Release, July 15, 1940.
9 Nevertheless, the rural cooperative movement must be counted in as having made some beginnings, despite the obstacles it has faced. More than seventy thousand credit and marketing cooperatives were in service last year. (The same, April 22, 1940.)
10 Wu Yi-fang and Price, Frank W., editors; New York, 1940.