CHINA: I Am Very Optimistic

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Victory finally came to China—a great double triumph in war and diplomacy. There were still uncertainties ahead—as there were uncertainties ahead of every power in the world, great and small. But never in modern times had the great nation of 450,000,000 people been so close to an era of peace and progress. After a century of foreign intervention and meddling western imperialism, China was mistress of her own house and her own destiny.

Back to Nanking. The big moment came at Chihkiang, a sun-baked Allied air base in Central China. A Japanese plane circled, then glided to a bumpy landing. Chinese officers waited.

No salutes were exchanged as the Japanese Deputy Chief of Staff in China, Major General Takeo Imai, his gloved hand resting on the jeweled hilt of his oversize samurai sword, stepped stiffly into a Chinese Army jeep. His six aides and their luggage (briefcases, tins of tea, fruit juices, U.S. crabmeat) followed.

Under a flowering cherry tree, the in scrutable Japs were served Chinese food by inscrutable Chinese waiters. Then they were summoned to headquarters of Lieut. General Hsiao Yu-shu, deputy of Chinese Chief of Staff General Ho Ying-chin.

General Hsiao did not rise as the enemy entered. In the background innumerable cups of tea were poured as the terms were outlined. When the enemy handed over a map showing the disposition of his 1,000,000 troops in China, General Hsiao’s aides broke their imperturbability, crowded for a jubilant look.

Two days later the Japanese Commander in Chief in China, Lieut. General Yasuji Okamura, agreed to surrender all his sea, air and ground forces, from Manchuria’s southern border to Formosa and northern Indo-China. Next day, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Central Government troops entered Nanking. They were back in China’s capital just seven years, nine months and five days since they had been forced to leave the city to a brutal fate that shook the world.

“Hao Hao!” At the temporary capital in Chungking the Generalissimo whirled through a week of high statesmanship. In a brief ceremony at the National Government building, he signed the United Nations Charter. When he put down his brush, he made his characteristic short, quick bow, murmured: “Hao hao, hao hao—very good, very good!” He looked deeply satisfied.

Before a joint session of the powerful National Defense Council and the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee, the Generalissimo delivered an epochal address on foreign policy. It was the logical sequence to the treaty of friendship and alliance negotiated in Moscow by his dynamic brother-in-law and trouble-shooter-in-chief, Premier T. V. Soong (see INTERNATIONAL).

In an interview with TIME Correspondent Annalee Jacoby, the Generalissimo voiced his own, and his nation’s high hopes. “I am very optimistic,” he said. On the eve of important talks with the Chinese Communists, he felt that a peaceful unity could be achieved. He was firm in his ruling on the Communist demand that the convocation of a National Assembly to launch constitutional government be postponed. “The National Assembly,”‘ said he, “will be convened as scheduled.”‘

The Generalissimo saw other domestic problems ahead, but none that was insurmountable. The return to normal conditions might take three to five years. But his mind was on the long-range question of China’s international position.

“To me,” he said, “victory means the beginning of real reconstruction—economic and political—free from outside interference.” His pride in China’s new sovereignty was clear in the emphasis he placed on “outside interference.”

Thoughts of Home. China’s little people, who had borne the bitter burden of resistance, heard the surrender news with heart-singing happiness. Yet it was hard to believe after so many dark years. A ricksha coolie spelled out the tidings before one of Chungking’s wet wall newspapers, then mumbled, “Japan is defeated. Can we go home now?” In the streets, markets, tea houses, Government corridors the refrain echoed and re-echoed: “Japan is defeated. Can we go home now?”

In all the hinterland, from Chungking to Kunming, China’s exiles were selling their makeshift furniture, preparing for the long trek home, for the sadly happy task of picking up the old threads again, however tangled and torn. Some gathered on the Yangtze banks, searching for rafts to float downstream. Others pushed carts and trudged by foot along the roads leading from the citadels of resistance. The tide of humanity, some 25,000,000 strong, which had flowed from the coast to the interior over an area half as big as the U.S., was rolling back again.

The prospect of peace was as diverse as the provinces of China (see map). Noodle-eating Northerners, the tall, rugged people of the Yellow River region, were going back to their cool villages and towns. In Peiping they would eat onions again, fondle walnuts in their palms, see the Temple of Heaven and the old lacquered palaces, bring their songbirds to street corners in the afternoons.

Rice-eating Southerners, the slim, shrewd sophisticates of Chekiang and Fukien, would go back to their poems, books and lotus seeds. Canton’s markets and midnight snackeries would be abuzz again. The Hangchow people would see their lovely lakes. The Soochow girls would croon their languid songs.

There would be duck dinners in Nanking and picnics among the pines above Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum. Shanghai’s famed Bund would start a new life. Centers of industry and trade—some of them, like Shanghai’s sprawling textile factories, relatively undamaged by war—would soon be at work. Everywhere outside the cities the largest number of self-respecting farmers in the world would tend their rice paddies, grain fields and vegetable plots, free at last from the alien taskmaster.

For a United Nation. The Government, too, prepared to go home. Home was 750 miles and eight exile years downriver from Chungking. Home was Nanking, chosen capital and symbol of republican China.

Clerks packed up documents for the return. Lights burned late as administrators wrestled with the problems of transport and relief, and with the larger problem of adjusting a nation to a new era. At the top of the pyramid of state moved the alert, taut, indefatigable Generalissimo, the first architect of victory and now the first hope of peace.

At 57, Chiang Kai-shek stood at one of the pinnacles of his own and his nation’s history. For a strong, free and united China, this Chekiang salt merchant’s son had cut off his teen-age pigtail, the symbol of subservience to the Manchus, and joined the revolutionary ranks under Sun Yatsen. For the cause, he had studied the trade of war in Tokyo’s Shinbo Gokyo (Military Academy). He had led the ragged, dare-to-die band of republicans who won Hangchow, first city taken in the seminal revolution of 1911.

In 1923, after a few months studying Red Army organization in Moscow, he had organized the Whampoa Military Academy at Canton. Then, with his cadets and Russian advisers, he had marched north, a hard-drinking, hard-driving young General with a golden ring in his ear lobe and destiny upon his shoulders. As the war lords toppled or joined his ranks, the China of his dream began to emerge.

He broke with the Communists and with his Russian mentors, sought internal unity with the sword. From 1928 to 1936 China made extraordinary progress, both moral and material. These were the years when the beautiful Madame Chiang, symbol and leader of the New Life Movement, gave enthusiastic leadership to every good cause. But Japan could not tolerate a resurgent China and struck.

With what he had, the Generalissimo fought back. He made peace with the Communists, traded space for time, spurned the enemy’s offers of a favorable peace, waited through blockade, inflation, economic paralysis, the corrosion of unrelieved struggle and near-despair for the Allies to range themselves at his side.

Tasks of Peace. Now, at long last, Chiang’s steadfastness and statesmanship had been vindicated. As the war ended, the great fact was clear: the Generalissimo had justified those who had long held that his Government was firmly embedded in popular support, and that given peace it could establish an effective administration in China.

After eight years of war, the challenges of peace were many and stern. China was not yet strong; China was not yet united. But on every hand China showed a greater measure of strength and unity than most of the outside world had been willing to believe.

Many of the bumptious propaganda claims of the Chinese Communists had melted in the face of facts. At week’s end it was a fact that the Communists had not taken one major city — not even in the Yellow River basin or the Shantung Pen insula, which they had so long claimed as their particular lairs. It was a fact that the Central Government had begun the occupation of Nanking, Canton, Hankow, Shanghai.

The Generalissimo’s troops had also moved into such inland railway hubs as Loyang and Taiyuan, both in the heart of what the Communists claimed as their own territory. The Japanese garrison in Peiping, key to North China, warned the Communists that “we Japanese are sur rendering to Chiang Kai-shek and not to you.” The Generalissimo had well-laid plans to send crack U.S. -trained China troops into the north, with the help of U.S. air transport, once the Japanese surrender was formally signed. Whatever military teeth the Communists once had, they seemed to have been drawn when Moscow withdrew its support.

Myth Dispelled. Propaganda could no longer conceal the fact that the Commu nist regime had relied for much of its strength on the prospect of Russian sup port. Despite its claims, Yenan controlled not more than a fifth of China and 70,000,000 Chinese. Even that control, in the sense of mass support, had yet to be impartially assessed. Its regular army did not exceed 450,000 men, and they had only 250,000 rifles.

They had stubborn leadership, personified by a veteran tactician of civil war and a veteran of the Comintern, tall, lumbering Mao Tse-tung, who in 1939 preached: “An important part of our political line is armed struggle . . . [to] convert an imperialistic war [so-called by all Communists, before the invasion of Russia] into a revolutionary civil war. . . .”

They had made some contribution to the Allied war effort by their guerrilla activities, though the brunt of Chinese resistance was borne by Chiang’s troops. They were dedicated to “bourgeois democracy” now, to Communism ultimately. Of Chungking they wanted a “coalition” government, a weird, hybrid sort of ad ministration in which they would share overall control but keep their army and state.

The Generalissimo was pledged to establish the social and humanistic democracy envisaged by Sun Yatsen. He no longer sought unity by the sword. In 1941 he had proclaimed: “At no future time could there conceivably be another campaign for the suppression of the Communists.” Last March he had reaffirmed his policy of seeking “a political solution” to the Communist problem.

Explicit Backing. The new Sino-Russian treaty in Chiang’s pocket, dropped there by Premier Soong’s masterly diplomacy in Moscow (and presumably by hardheaded Russian evaluation of Chinese Communist strength vis-a-vis Central Government strength), brought the “political solution” near realization.

Explicit in it was Russian backing for the Central Government. Without hope of future help from their Soviet comrades, the Chinese Communists might well be forced to surrender their separate army and administration and take their place as one of several political minorities in a united China. Yenan was struggling against such an outcome, but its leaders could see the handwriting on the wall.

Last week the Generalissimo sent his second telegram of invitation to Mao Tse-tung: “To achieve national reconstruction and reap the fruits of the war of resistance will depend to a great extent upon your coming to Chungking to discuss and jointly formulate our national policies. … I cannot but feel sorry you are delaying your departure. . . .”

Mao replied that he would send the No. 2 Communist and veteran negotiator, General Chou Enlai.

The Generalissimo sent a third telegram (in Chinese tradition, to invite thrice is to prove sincerity): “I must talk to you in person. … I have prepared a plane to bring you here. Please hasten.”

At week’s end Mao gave in, with Chinese punctilio: “Mr. Chiang Kai-shek … I appreciate your telegram. My humble self is most willing to come to Chungking. . . . Chou En-lai is leaving as soon as your plane arrives. Your younger brother is preparing to come in the immediate future. . . .” Chungking reported that U.S. Ambassador Patrick J. Hurley would go to Yenan to escort Mao to Chiang.

Internal Balance. As the Communist issue fell into its proper perspective, the great problem before China was to organize the peace. For almost every phase of peace the Central Government, if it did not yet have all the necessary means, had mature and carefully drawn plans.

In China’s provinces there are upwards of 2,000,000 puppet troops, an unknown number of other collaborationists. They occupy a delicate position in the country’s internal balance of power. These the Central Government’s Ministry of Justice will sort out. “Justice, not leniency,” it announced last week, “will be the guiding principle. . . . The test will be whether or not they were willing tools. All suspected of voluntary collaboration will have their turn before a court of law.”

A bulkier problem still was the return of China’s refugees to their homes. For transporting the 25,000,000, the Central Government had only 29 tiny river steamers, 10,000 wooden junks, 1,000 to 3,000 trucks in various stages of decrepitude, four CNAC passenger planes. “It will be like emptying a lake with teaspoons,” said a Chungking official. “We’ll be in luck if we all get back in ten years.”

First to go home will be military personnel. Then will come administrative officials to take over from the Japanese—and bank notes to restore economy. Then essential Government employes, teachers and factory workers; lastly, the millions of plain civilians. But no one doubted that the humble refugees who somehow had found their way into the hinterland would somehow find a way out again.

Hunger & Relief. There was still no comprehensive picture of what Japanese rule had done to China’s cities and countryside. Canton was all but moribund. Shanghai’s masses were desperately hungry; 1,500,000 of her workers were jobless, and 20,000 prostitutes prowled her streets. But Shanghai still had her factories; once their wheels rolled, the metropolis would hum again and Shanghai might well be the mirror of the nation’s revival.

UNRRA planned to bring in $900,000,000 worth of emergency food, medicines and textiles (to crack inflation). Given internal peace, China might suffer less even in the immediate future than many anticipated. In coastal Foochow, two months after liberation, Chinese industry and doggedness had already brought civilian life to prewar levels. Streets were repaved, sampan traffic resumed, trade restored. Everywhere in the countryside the harvest promised to be bountiful. In a nation overwhelmingly agricultural and simple, there was solid reason for hope of a quick return to peace.

Reconstruction. In 18 months, the planners at Chungking hoped, the pressing problems of remigration and relief would be reduced. Then China could truly launch her era of national reconstruction. The Kuomintang Congress of last May had laid down the broad principles:

“The industrial reconstruction of China will be based on an overall plan drawn up by the Government. … It is necessary to institute a state-owned enterprise system, but private enterprise will also be encouraged.

“State industry will be confined largely to heavy industries such as iron and steel, coal, copper, lead, zinc, electrical, chemical and cement . . . power and communications . . . and industries directly concerned with livelihood such as textiles, flour, leather. . . . Private and state enterprise of the same category will be given equal treatment … no discrimination against private industry. . . .

“The underlying idea is to develop an industrial base in order to realize the dual objective of national defense and people’s livelihood. . . .”

Plan for Progress. The overall plan stemmed from Sun Yat-sen’s famed Outline for Industrial Development. In the dark days at Chungking, when victory seemed so remote, planning had been the food of hope. Blueprints had been polished and refined. In 1941, the Generalissimo had distilled what will become China’s first long-range plan to transform herself into a modern industrial power.

There will be dams and power plants to stimulate great mining enterprises, steel and other metallurgical industries, increased food production and foreign trade; there will be 20,000 miles of new highways, 100.000 autos, 10,000,000 tons of shipping. The realization of all plans depends on unknown factors:

How soon will China have internal stability? What industry will be left intact? (Can the steel mills and railway shops of Manchuria be operated immediately? How long will it take to harness the textile factories of coastal China, with their 5,000,000 spindles compared to the 300,000 in the hinterland?) How much aid—in technical advice, credits and materials—will come from the U.S.?

Whatever the factors of uncertainty might be, the Generalissimo was determined to push national reconstruction. It was an indissoluble part of Chiang’s plan.