Atop the frowning, canyon-like sides of the upper reaches of China's mighty Yangtze River a strange procession last week inched its way westward. Strung out for miles along the cliffs, with the river swirling over the rapids hundreds of feet below, 7,000 coolies pulled 7,000 jinrikishas, part of a stream of thousands of refugees who had chosen to flee Hankow rather than live under Japanese rule. Piled inside the tottering rikishas were all the manhole covers, sewer gratings and radiators the Chinese could gather before the Japanese captured the city on October 26. The destination of this scrap-iron convoy is Chungking, China's new capital 500 miles upriver from Hankow, where the junk will be converted into shrapnel.
Little did it matter to these refugees that it had taken two months of hardship to reach where they were last week, somewhere between Ichang and Chungking, that it probably would take them another month to scramble through the Yangtze gorges to their goal. They were on their way to China's "promised land" in the interior provinces, far from their enemies.
The "New China" that foreigners have known since 1927, when Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek took over the Government, was the China of the seaboard provinces. Most of it is now ruled by Japanese arms. Its capital, Nanking, centre of the web of roads, railways and airlines which Chiang Kai-shek spun across the map of China, fell to the Japanese a year ago last week. New China moved westward to Hankow and carried on. Two months ago advancing Japanese forces straddled both ends of the vital Canton-Hankow railway (completed in 1936) which skirted the western frontier of Chiang's original New China. Once again New China trekked westward—to a new place on the map.
New "New China." Many civilizations have spread but not since the fall of Constantinople in 1351 has there been such a striking example of a whole civilization pulling up its roots and moving elsewhere. The Government, the Army, much of China's cultural and industrial life and millions of refugees from the devastated eastern Yangtze valley set out to a new "New China" in the hinterland which had been frantically prepared during 18 months of war. The new "New China" is composed of the provinces of Yunnan, Kwangsi, Kweichow, Szechuan, Kangsu, Sikang, Tsinghai, and the Chinese Communist-held province of Shensi—places which two years ago seemed to most Chinese as remote as Alaska is to New Yorkers.
The heart of this new country is the mountain-girdled upper valley of the Yangtze, an area approximately 1,000 miles from East to West and 1,300 miles from North to South. Below it lie the steaming jungles of Burma and French Indo-China, west of it lie the mountain fastnesses of Tibet, northwestward the desert plateaus of Turkestan (Sinkiang) and Mongolia.
Here Chiang Kai-shek is trying to keep his nation together while he prepares to reconquer its old home by beating the Japanese. As he knew from the beginning the Japanese can be beaten only by exhaustion, and for that purpose he is training his troops in small mobile units for hit-&-run attacks on the Japanese lines and communications to the East.