WAR IN CHINA: Plain Talk

Last week Britain’s Ambassador to China, Sir Archibald John Kerr Clark Kerr, set out from Hong Kong to have a talk with Chiang Kaishek. That is not an easy thing to do nowadays. Sir Archibald had to hire an airplane, fly five or six hundred miles inland over a maze of twisting rivers and search out the Generalissimo “somewhere in Hunan Province.”

When proper Sir Archibald arrived at Shanghai he would say no more than that he had found Chiang “well—very fit and optimistic—serenely confident of ultimate victory.” What he did not say—and what officials in China’s new capital at Chung-king did say—was that the fit Generalissimo had just talked to the proper Ambassador more plainly than any big Chinese had ever talked to a big Britisher.

A month after the Munich agreement Prime Minister Chamberlain got a 345-to-138 vote of confidence from the Commons after outlining his revised foreign policy as follows. Britain must be prepared to accept almost unlimited extension of Germany’s influence in East Europe, Japan’s in East Asia. But, just as “there is room both for Germany and ourselves in the trade” with East Europe, there was room for Britain and Japan in China. “China,” said the Businessman Prime Minister, “cannot be developed into a real market without the influx of a great deal of capital, and the fact that so much capital is being destroyed during the war means that even more will have to be introduced after the war is over. It is quite certain that it cannot be supplied by Japan.”

In other words, over a period of years, British sterling would prove more effective in China than Japanese shrapnel.

But Chiang Kai-shek is fighting a war and he has less interest than Mr. Chamberlain in long-range economic ideas about China. The Generalissimo flatly told Ambassador Sir Archibald that the loss of Canton was attributable to China’s misplaced confidence in Britain.

Certain that Britain would not tolerate Japanese military operations in the area around the strategic, highly-fortified British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, 100 miles below Canton, Chinese military heads decided not to fortify the city, left it defended by untrained provincial troops. Japanese commanders decided on the South China campaign only after Britain’s capitulation at Munich convinced them that Britain had no stomach for a dispute in the Far East, Chiang insisted. In fact, Japanese troops were this week within half a mile of the borders of Hong Kong, inside which they accidentally popped a few shells, as Chinese regulars, out to recapture Canton, pushed their front to within 40 miles of the city.

Every mile that the Government of China is pushed westward pushes it nearer to Russia. From Russia now come most of the arms and experts that Chiang is using against the Japanese. Some of the best of Chiang’s troops are the Chinese Communist armies. If China wins the war, hinted Chiang last week, to Russia would naturally fall the trade position in China once held by Britain—unless Britain was soon able to match the U. S. S. R.’s friendly handouts. Britain could help China mightily with loans and shipments of munitions through British Burma, which would bulwark Chiang’s southern campaign.

Ambassador Sir Archibald was thus given something to take back to Hong Kong with him besides his brief case.