CHINA: Burma Dilemma

Within the compound of China’s Ministry of Information several short-wave radios are tuned in, day & night to each of the world capitals. Before each radio sits an alert operator, ready at a moment’s notice to translate a Russian, German, British or French flash and hurry it to the attention of Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek. One day last week the English-speaking operator was shocked into attention by a BBC commentator. The operator took some notes, then sent a courier to the Gissimo’s compound. The report:

In London, the Foreign Office defended the British acquiescence of Japan’s demand that the Burma road be closed to munitions traffic for China. The defense: Aside from the fact that China’s last ma jor supply line would be partially blocked by torrential rains in the next three months, Britain had acquired from Japan a guarantee that within those three months the Japanese would seek peace with China.

Though he is usually as sad and quiet as a Chinese willow, the Gissimo sometimes flies into sudden noisy furies. The BBC report threw him into a bad one. He immediately issued an angry statement: “Should Britain try to link the question of the Burma route with the question of peace between China and Japan, this would virtually amount to assisting Japan to bring China into submission.” He instructed Ambassador Quo Tai-chi to protest at the British Foreign Office. U. S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull issued an acid statement declaring that the closure was against U. S. interests in “open arteries of commerce.” In the House of Commons, a long-standing sympathizer with China, Liberal Geoffrey Mander, complained so bitterly about the smell of appeasement that Prime Minister Churchill was obliged to make his first Parliamentary statement on Far Eastern matters: In reaching this painful decision, said the Prime Minister, he had been guided by “the dominant fact that we ourselves are engaged in a life or death struggle. …”

The short-wave listener in Chungking heard the explanation put in blunter terms by BBC’s announcer: “You see,” he explained, “the man in the street has no time to think of the Japanese war of aggression against China these days.” Sadly realizing that being abandoned and forgotten by sorely-pressed Britons makes China’s future no less dependent on Britain’s, the short-wave listeners crouched around their speakers, fearing that awful thing which was so exclusively on the mind of the men in London’s streets.