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There are other elementary needs. Clothing is desperately short; raw cotton is needed for the surviving textile plants. Transport has to be repaired: river and coastal shipping is down to 100,000 tons from the prewar 1,500,000; railway coverage has shrunk to a fourth of the prewar meager 16,000 miles. Broken dikes must be mended, whole cities rehoused, chronic inflation checked.
Credits & Surpluses. Premier Soong has held out no prospect save the bitter one of higher taxes and continued shortages. Reparations in kind from Japan will eventually help. But Manchuria, once the white hope of China's reconstruction, has become a liability instead of an asset, thanks to Russian stripping of Japanese-built factories. A $33,000,000 cotton loan from the U.S. Export-Import Bank promises to ease the textile situation. Most effective will be UNRRA's $562,000,000 shot in China's economic arm, but this will only start the job of rehabilitation.
China needs credit—and lots of it—from the U.S. She hopes for a billion and a half, on long-range terms, from the World Bank. Beyond the financial helping hand, she needs a large share of the tremendous surplus property owned by the U.S. (particularly ships, trucks, locomotives, freight cars). Special Envoy Marshall pleaded last week for special priority for China.
U.S. military and naval personnel are helping train China's new army, but China also needs more U.S. technical help to teach her own people the skills of a mechanized age.
Ambition & Avarice. Having made his plea to the U.S. Government and the U.S. people, Special Envoy Marshall planned to return to China. The Chinese wanted him back; his presence, they felt, was the best assurance that his work would not be undone. Generalissimo Chiang spoke for his nation when he said last week: "Our confidence in him is unbounded." For George Marshall viewed China, the U.S. and the world much as they were viewed nearly 100 years ago by his distant kinsman, Humphrey Marshall, U.S. Commissioner to the Celestial Empire in 1853-54. Wrote Cousin Humphrey:
"Whenever the avarice or the ambition of Russia or Great Britain shall tempt them to make the prizes, the fate of Asia will be sealed, and the future Chinese relations of the United States may be considered as closed for the ages, unless now the United States shall foil the untoward result by adopting a sound policy. It is my opinion that the highest interests of the United States are involved in sustaining China . . . rather than see China become the theater of widespread anarchy, and ultimately the prey of European ambitions."
Cousin Humphrey italicized the word "now." As he went about Washington last week, stressing the importance of U.S. support for China, Cousin George was italicizing the same word.