(5 of 8)
Behind the Front. But still unconquered are tens of thousands of square miles behind the Japanese lines, regions ruled by guerrilla bands of Chinese. Since they must keep an army of 475,000 in Manchukuo, as insurance against Russia, Japanese cannot afford the manpower necessary to garrison most Chinese villages in the occupied areas. So they have attempted to set up puppet Chinese governments. Where these governments are effective the Chinese are taxed to death; there is a tax on pigs, a tax on goods-in-stock, a tax on travel, and a, tax on the movement of all commodities. Farm animals have been seized, and the metal parts of tools confiscated. Finally, Japanese have at tempted to force their own currency and their own import prices on Chinese buyers and sellers in North China.
The Chinese, however, are by turns unbelievably bold and unbelievably ingenious in the ways of sabotaging the would be conqueror. They assassinate puppet officials. Throughout 150,000 square miles of territory in the rear of the Japanese Army they have organized "self-defense" governments. Some 75,000,000 people, almost as many as lived in pre-Munich Germany, help the Cooperative Committees and the Mobilization Committee of these governments. Boys between 14 and 16 years of age act as a special messenger service; farmers cooperate by cutting ditches and felling trees across roads to impede Japanese troop movements.
The Red Eighth Route Army harries the invader by guerrilla fighting throughout Shansi and Southern Hopei, and a "People's Self-Defense Army" of 50,000 mobile guerrilla units operates in central Hopei. By day a Chinese peasant, brown as the earth he tills, may placidly hoe his rows; by night he may be part of a guerrilla band that is chivying Japanese sentries; next day, when the Japanese start reprisals, he will be back on his acre, his gun and soldier's kit buried, a blank look on his face.
Peasants have other means of resistance. Unless it is tendered on the point of a bayonet, a Japanese yen-backed note from the new Japanese-dominated North China Federal Reserve Bank is not honored at face value. Last spring in the Japanese-occupied areas of North China, the Chinese mysteriously forgot to plant their usual cotton crop. Unless the Japanese can debauch the Chinese in captured sectors with opium, as they are trying to do, this sort of passive resistance might go on for decades.
The Money War. For years Chinese patriots denounced the "treaty ports" and the international settlement where foreign devils maintained their own "extraterritorial" courts and police power. But today were it not for these international areas the Chinese would not be able to carry on as well as they do against the Japanese. The political capital of Chiang's Government is now far-off Chungking but for Westerners its financial capital is in the foreign enclaves, particularly Hong Kong and Shanghai. The Japanese are bitterly aware of this. They have not yet dared seize the international settlement of Shang hai and other foreign areas of cities but they have tried gradual encroachment, and last week they tried something stronger, blockading the French and British concessions in Tientsin, thereby striking a blow where the U. S. has no direct territorial rights (see p. 21).