Westward Ho!

Atop the frowning, canyon-like sides of the upper reaches of China's mighty Yangtze River a strange procession last week inched its way westward. Strung out for miles along the cliffs, with the river swirling over the rapids hundreds of feet below, 7,000 coolies pulled 7,000 jinrikishas, part of a stream of thousands of refugees who had chosen to flee Hankow rather than live under Japanese rule. Piled inside the tottering rikishas were all the manhole covers, sewer gratings and radiators the Chinese could gather before the Japanese captured the city on October 26. The destination of this scrap-iron convoy is Chungking, China's new capital 500 miles upriver from Hankow, where the junk will be converted into shrapnel.

Little did it matter to these refugees that it had taken two months of hardship to reach where they were last week, somewhere between Ichang and Chungking, that it probably would take them another month to scramble through the Yangtze gorges to their goal. They were on their way to China's "promised land" in the interior provinces, far from their enemies.

The "New China" that foreigners have known since 1927, when Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek took over the Government, was the China of the seaboard provinces. Most of it is now ruled by Japanese arms. Its capital, Nanking, centre of the web of roads, railways and airlines which Chiang Kai-shek spun across the map of China, fell to the Japanese a year ago last week. New China moved westward to Hankow and carried on. Two months ago advancing Japanese forces straddled both ends of the vital Canton-Hankow railway (completed in 1936) which skirted the western frontier of Chiang's original New China. Once again New China trekked westward--to a new place on the map.

New "New China." Many civilizations have spread but not since the fall of Constantinople in 1351 has there been such a striking example of a whole civilization pulling up its roots and moving elsewhere. The Government, the Army, much of China's cultural and industrial life and millions of refugees from the devastated eastern Yangtze valley set out to a new "New China" in the hinterland which had been frantically prepared during 18 months of war. The new "New China" is composed of the provinces of Yunnan, Kwangsi, Kweichow, Szechuan, Kangsu, Sikang, Tsinghai, and the Chinese Communist-held province of Shensi--places which two years ago seemed to most Chinese as remote as Alaska is to New Yorkers.

The heart of this new country is the mountain-girdled upper valley of the Yangtze, an area approximately 1,000 miles from East to West and 1,300 miles from North to South. Below it lie the steaming jungles of Burma and French Indo-China, west of it lie the mountain fastnesses of Tibet, northwestward the desert plateaus of Turkestan (Sinkiang) and Mongolia.

Here Chiang Kai-shek is trying to keep his nation together while he prepares to reconquer its old home by beating the Japanese. As he knew from the beginning the Japanese can be beaten only by exhaustion, and for that purpose he is training his troops in small mobile units for hit-&-run attacks on the Japanese lines and communications to the East.

His best aide on whom rests much of the responsibility for the success of this campaign of attrition is China's No. 1 Guerrilla Fighter, modest, crinkly-eyed Chu Teh, Commander of the 8th Route (former Communist) Army. Once hunted by the Generalissimo, with a price of $100,000 on his bullet-shaped head, while Chiang Kai-shek carried on his ten years of futile war against the Communists, Chu Teh now has under him a force of about 150,000 fervent Communist soldiers, another 300,000 embattled farmers, operating behind the Japanese front lines in Shansi and Shantung provinces.

Moving Day. A new nation cannot be built overnight. Driven by the whip of war, the life of China began to flee west ward soon after the first shots were fired at Peking 18 months ago. Students, long the spark plugs of China's national life, were among the first to go. Whole universities, libraries and laboratories moved bag & baggage, hundreds of miles, to regions which before the war had never seen books or schools. Several institutions were set up in the new capital Chungking (''Heavenly Residence"), others went to Chengtu, Sian, Changsha and far-off Kunming, capital of Szechwan Province.

Most fascinating of new "New China's" educational institutions are those now operating at Yenan, "capital" of the northern, Communist-held territory. At Yenan now are the Anti-Japanese University, the North Shensi Academy (training school for guerrilla-war organizers), the Marxist & Leninist University, the Lo Shun Art Academy, the School of Dramatic Art (directed by Shanghai's top-rank cinemactress). There were few buildings in Yenan to house the schools but in the hard-packed loess hillsides, students gouged cave classrooms and dormitories (see cut). There 4,000 men, 1,000 women, more than there are at Oxford, study Chinese Problems, Military Science, Guerrilla Warfare, listen to lectures on "The policy of the British Government toward Czecho-Slovakia," "The effect of Britain's financial policy on the French franc."

To provide food for the new land, fields of poppies were ploughed under and sown to rice. For raw materials engineers scoured the back country, opened up veins of coal, iron, copper, salt, many small oil wells.

Roads and Rails. Chief problem of the new "New China," almost completely cut off from the sea, is to keep open its routes to the outside world, to obtain supplies, trucks, motor parts, heavy machinery, oil, ammunition. While China's soldiers inched backward from the coastal provinces, China's coolies began the Herculean job of opening four main overland routes to western China.

First of these was the ancient Silk Road, running 2,000 miles from Sian through Sinkiang (once part of China proper but now almost completely under Soviet dominance) to the Russian centres of Alma Ata and Sergiopol, on Russia's new Turk-Sib railroad. Over this Silk Road, then called the Imperial Highway, some 2,000 years ago camel caravans, loaded with silk, jade and lacquer, plodded their way to Samarkand, where the goods were shipped to Byzantium, Tyre, Rome. Seven centuries ago Marco Polo pushed his way down the Silk Road from the West to reach the court of Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, and gazed upon a civilization which surpassed that of his native Venice. Year ago 700,000 coolies with new China fervor and old China tools set to work on the half-buried old Silk Road and today a fleet of 1,000 Russian trucks shuttle over it carrying supplies and munitions to the heart of China.

The other three routes, none as heavily-used as the Silk Road, are: 1) the 1,800-mile Sian-Urga motor road, once a caravan trail across the limitless sands of the Gobi Desert, 2) the 1,350-mile rail and road route from Kunming down to British Burma, and 3) the newly-built Chinese railroad from Kunming to Laokai, which connects with the French Indo-China railroad. Hundreds of miles of other new roads connecting these main routes to many parts of the new "New China" have also been built.

Month ago Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek issued a blunt warning to Great Britain that unless China received aid in the form of money or supplies, he would be forced to line up still closer with Soviet Russia. Last week this warning produced results. In Britain a bill was on its way through Parliament which will enable the Government to extend sizable export credits to China. From the U. S. also came a $25,000,000 loan (much of which undoubtedly will be used to buy U. S. trucks and motor parts) granted by the New Deal's Export-Import Bank--interpreted as the U. S. answer to Japan's slamming the once open door to U. S. commerce in the occupied regions. Another boost to China came in the form of 15 fighting planes contributed by sympathizers in the U. S., Canada and Cuba.

Russia's Battle? Not long ago a delegation from bleak and once-unfriendly Tibet* tramped to the Chinese military headquarters in Szechwan Province, there presented the Generalissimo with 10,000 sheepskins contributed by Tibetan monks, officials and peasants as "an expression of unity against the Japanese invasion." Through the Soviet-dominated territories of Sinkiang and Outer Mongolia, where before the war the Chinese Government had nothing but enemies, now come two of China's main supply lines.

If Chiang is driven from the upper Yangtze valley, he may eventually have to retire to the Soviet-controlled areas of Sinkiang and Outer Mongolia. Should that occur China's cause will necessarily become Russia's battle. For Russia cannot tolerate a Japanese threat to the long southern border of Siberia and the trans-Siberian railroad. But before that can happen Japan, which conquered one New China, will have to conquer still another New China not so strong in resources but much stronger in natural defenses.

* At Kangtse, just outside the border of Tibet, last week waited the Panchen Lama, Tibet's "Living Buddha," now very much dead. He died 13 months ago while attempting to regain his godly throne. Since for religious reasons he could not be embalmed, and for political reasons cannot be taken into Tibet, he is still sitting, wrapped in shrouds, surrounded by hundreds of flickering yak-butter lamps, guarded by 2,000 armed retainers, serenaded by a brass band of 40 instruments.

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