Education: Civilization’s Retreat

Of pre-war China’s 457,000,000 people, only 32,000 were college students. But their importance was out of all proportion to their numbers. Like the graduates of Britain’s Oxford and Cambridge, China’s university men monopolized Government offices, ruled China’s millions. Active, patriotic, brave, they were the hope of the New China.

First victims of Japan’s invasion in the summer of 1937 were China’s universities. Concentrated along the coast, in Peking, Tientsin, Shanghai, Nanking, Hong Kong, Canton, they were at once Japan’s most dangerous foes and easiest targets. Japanese bombs completely destroyed Nankai University in Tientsin; not a book or piece of equipment was saved. Japanese soldiers looted National Peking University, sold its furniture for cigaret money. At Tsing Hua University, in Peking, Japanese smashed laboratories to bits, converted the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Gymnasium into a stable, the John Hay Memorial Library into a hospital.

As a third of China’s undergraduates rallied in the hills of North China and organized a guerrilla army, as China fought for its life, the Chinese Government calmly laid plans for China’s future. Of coolie cannon fodder it had a plenty, but in all China there were only a few hundred mechanics, a few dozen engineers, few doctors, few scientists. The hope of China’s survival lay in such trained men. In that first summer of the war, China’s Education Ministry secretly sent students to Tientsin, Peking, other university centres, through them transmitted instructions to the nation’s undergraduates. Some were to gather inland at Changsha, others were to filter through enemy lines to Sian. Thousands of students gathered at these rendezvous, made shift to study while they awaited further orders. In the spring of 1938 the orders came. Then began one of history’s strangest migrations-an orderly retreat of China’s civilization.

From Sian 1,500, including 300 girls, set out on foot. They trudged along the cavernous bed of the Han River, threaded dense forests, climbed by foot trails aver precipitous cliffs of the Tsingling Mountains. Chinese military authorities supplied them with food: rice, a few vegetables, hard wheat cakes. Three of them, a professor and two students-died of typhoid. But on the tenth day, after a 180-mile journey, they reached their destination, Hanchung. There and in nearby Chengku they started new universities.

The Changsha group had as their destination Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, in southwestern China. Some went by bus, some by junk and river steamer, some by rail, most on foot, in squads led by their professors. In Nanking, 1,086 students of National Central University, four times bombed, loaded boats with their books, laboratory equipment and machines from their shops, set out up the Yangtze. They arrived at Chungking, 1,000 miles away, after 43 days. (Their agricultural school’s herd of blooded cattle, driven along the river banks, got there a year later.) More spectacular still was the migration of Canton’s Sun Yat-sen University. Poling their sampans out of Canton just as Japanese entered it, Sun Yat-sen’s students pushed ahead by night, hid in the rushes of West River by day. (Biggest migration was not to a university but to a Communist school at Yenan, in northwest China. The roads from Hankow to Yenan were crowded for months with 40,000 youngsters traveling to training classes in propaganda and politics.)

By last week, having moved its universities 1,000 to 2,000 miles, beyond reach of Japanese guns, China had virtually completed its great trek. In Chungking, where Nankai University’s foresighted Chancellor Chang Poling had started to build several years before the Japanese invasion, were fully equipped, new greystone preparatory and postgraduate schools. At Kunming was great new Southwest Associated University, with 90 buildings. To these and other centres China had moved 77 universities all told. Out of its pre-war total of 108 colleges and universities, it has saved 91, added four new ones.

The new universities brought to western China-a wilderness before they arrived-medical facilities, new manners, new dress, new farming methods, reading and writing (since 1938 nearly 50,000,000 Chinese have been taught to read and write). Their students, of whom a third are entirely supported by the Government, live in bamboo and mud huts, 16 boys or eight girls sleeping in a single room. They eat boiled cabbage, bean soup, a few other vegetables, often suffer from acute undernourishment. They do their own laundry, are awakened by bugles at 5 a.m. in order to make the most of daylight, save electricity. Having given up tennis-dear to undergraduates’ hearts-because balls and rackets come high, they have adopted as favorite games Chinese boxing, soccer. And despite Japan and the hardships of the great migration, Chinese universities today have 40,000 students, biggest enrollment in China’s history.