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In addition to her internal difficulties, she was undergoing constant interference from without. It was only four years after the revolution began in 1911 that Japan tried to force on China the 21 demands which would have made China a vassal state. Four years later a group of four white men sitting at Versailles took Shantung, the sacred province of China, and tried to award it to Japan. Japan invaded that province again in 1927, took Manchuria in 1931, and bit off three other pieces of Chinese territory in the next six years before starting full-scale war in 1937. In addition, several other nations were meddling in China's affairs, trying to prevent her achieving real unity and strength. Naturally the Chinese were not able to get their revolution completed and a modern, efficient, unified, and democratic government set up.
Diseases of Defeat. Superimposed on the inevitable difficulties involved in carrying through a revolution, getting a new type of government established and the people organized and unified, is a third factor. China is suffering acutely from what Mr. Churchill has well called "the diseases of defeat."
Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt made the basic decision, right after Pearl Harbor, to hold defensively in the Pacific while disposing of Germany and Italy in Europe. The fundamental strategy was to concentrate on beating Hitler first. So we poured over 98% of our supplies into Europe, and sent less than 2% to east Asia and less than 10% of that went to the Chinese. Up until a few months ago when we finally began to consider the Chinese armies of sufficient importance to make an all-out effort to get more assistance to them, they had had only two-tenths of 1% of all the supplies that we sent abroad to our allies.
We and our Western allies made a decision which gave brilliant results in Europe. But that decision inevitably led to almost disastrous results in Asia. If we take the credit for good results in Europe, there is no way we can escape some of the responsibility for the bad results in Asia.
China lost her major railroads in the first few months of the war. She lost control of the Yangtze River Valley, which is far more important to her transportation than the whole Mississippi River Valley is to us. These things made it impossible to shift troops rapidly or to get food from the areas of plenty to those of acute deficiency.
You have read of Chinese soldiers foraging on the common people, and of Chinese peasants rising up against their own armies. You probably thought, "What kind of troops are these that take food from .their own citizens? What kind of allies are these that will not support their own armies?" But the soldiers simply have to live off the land at times, or starve. And I would remind you that the same thing happened in our Revolution. George Washington's men had to live off the land at times and they were royally hated and resisted by some of the Colonists because of that fact.
What are the diseases of defeat? First, there is physical deterioration. I was shocked last fall by the appearance of many Chinese, particularly among the soldiers. I had seen famine refugees in times past, and thought I was used to malnutrition, but this was even worse. The Chinese soldiers will have to have just