CHINA: He Who Has Reason

The Gissimo ran his ashen-yellow hand over his knobby, shaved head. He spoke as always, snapping out the long vowels and hissing sibilants of his native tongue with the impatience of rifle fire. It was fitting that he should speak now, at the weekly Sun Yat-sen memorial service. For Chiang Kaishek, like Sun Yatsen, realized that in the wild and mountainous provinces of the great Northwest, China had an undeveloped treasure house. More than that, it was the last link with the outside world and a refuge for Free China if Chinese and United Nations armies were ever disastrously defeated in Asia.

Only a one-line announcement in Chungking newspapers revealed that Chiang and the Missimo had been in the northwest provinces (Sinkiang, Kansu, Ningsia, Shensi, Chinghai) for several weeks. Whom they talked with and where they went was a wartime secret. Only after Chiang had spoken to his top officials for a full hour did some of the things that he and Mme. Chiang learned become known.

Two Routes. A surprise was the revelation that two new supply routes to replace the lost Burma Road were in “full readiness” to handle U.S. supplies for the Chinese armies. One route, covering 4,500 miles, uses a railroad from the U.S. air supply base at Karachi in India, winds north through Kabul in Afghanistan to Samarkand in Russia. From there goods will be sent along the central Asia plains on the Turkestan-Siberian railway to the Soviet terminus at Alma Ata. The final stage is via the highway the Chinese built along the old Marco Polo trade route through Sinkiang and Kansu provinces to Chungking. The other route leads from Bushire on the Persian Gulf across Iran and then by water to Krasnovodsk on the Caspian Sea. From there the goods will be shipped on to Alma Ata by rail.

Still the last stop on the milk route of United Nations supplies, China has been able to dominate her own skies this summer with the aid of a handful of U.S. planes and pilots. As the Japanese have spread their land forces all over Asia, Chiang’s armies have swept back with the tide. Last week they had thrown the Japs back in Chekiang province, were closing in on the last “bomb Tokyo” airfield in the province.

Two Plans. All this was good news to the Chinese. So were reports of oil discoveries “beyond expectations” in Kansu province and of economic, political and military cooperation which would have pleased Sun Yatsen. China’s first great republican leader envisioned the Northwest’s potentially rich 1,950,754 sq. mi. (pop. 21,000,000) as a new home for millions of Chinese from overpopulated areas. His San Min Chu I (principles of free government) have been brought by war to southern provinces once considered a political hinterland. So now night the northwest provinces be woven into the pattern of Chinese national unity.

Tiny, wizened statistically-minded Economics Minister Wong Wen-hao has for years kept charts and graphs of the Northwest’s natural resources. Armed with Wong’s charts and the Chiangs’ firsthand accounts of possibilities, a party of industrialists and engineers left on a survey trip. The Executive Yüan announced an appropriation of $100,000,000 (at the rate of $10,000,000 a year) for irrigation projects in Kansu and its jutting panhandle corridor between Mongolia and Tibet.

Two Warriors. But where tiny Wong has kept charts, the burly chieftains of the famed Ma clan of Moslem warriors have kept their own armies in the Northwest. (“Of ten Moslems, nine are Ma; he who is not a Ma is then surely a Ha.”) Most powerful and progressive of the clan is bushy-bearded General Ma Pufang, governor of the province of Chinghai, who has his own crack army of 50,000 men. The soldiers of his elder brother, General Ma Pu-ching, lord of the Kansu panhandle, completed the road to Russia in 1938, now are working on another in Tibet (TIME, July 27) which may shorten the new routes for supplies. Both men, dominating huge areas where the Moslems (onequarter of the population in the Northwest) have escaped the remarkable assimilative powers of the Chinese, are friendly with the Chiang government. With both, the Gissimo and his pretty wife presumably discussed national affairs.

Farther west, in Sinkiang, the Chiangs may have also discussed politics as well as transportation with the Russians who have dominated Sinkiang in the ten-year power play for influence (and buffer territories) between the Japanese, the Russians, the Moslems, the Chinese Communists and Chiang.

Two Hosts. Driven frantic by spiraling inflation, still far from driving the Japs into the sea, menaced by the turmoil in India, China still has many li to travel before achieving unity and victory. But it has been over a year since there were any serious clashes with Chinese Communists in the northeast and north. The far reaches of the nation in the great Northwest were apparently more secure than at any time since the Manchu empire. The Chiangs could be pleased. They awaited Wendell Willkie’s visit, remembering as they did on their own trip to the great Northwest that “he who has reason on his side need not speak in a loud voice.” Workmen completed carving a 3,200-ft. runway from the solid rock of Chungking’s mountains to accommodate Willkie’s four-motored bomber. The Chiangs visited the garden house set aside for their guest. The Missimo saw that it was properly decorated with new silk draperies, American daisies, ancient paintings and priceless porcelain ware.