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If they can permanently cut off Tientsin, the Japanese may be able to suppress one of the most troublesome of the black bourses where Japanese currency is bought and sold at a discount. This is not only an economic disadvantage but a loss of face. But even if the Japanese are able to clear the money-changers out of Tientsin, there remain Shanghai and the illegal black bourses in Tsingtao and other Chinese cities in which there are no foreign concessions or settlements. And if Shanghai were seized the legal black bourse could move to British-owned Hong Kong.
Some months ago the U. S. lent $25,000,000 to the Chinese Universal Trading Corp. to finance Chinese purchases in the U. S. Shortly afterward, Great Britain lent $25,000,000 to the Chinese to stabilize the Chinese dollar. With the Chinese treasury thus bolstered, the Japanese yen, whose value has been depreciated in the occupied areas for some time, actually sank below the value of the Chinese dollar. Moreover, the Japanese cannot get needed foreign exchange from China with which to buy planes, oil and scrap iron so long as deals on China's coastal soil are cleared through western treaty port banks.
Great Trek. With the fall last autumn of Hankow and Canton, the two ends of Chiang Kai-shek's railway supply line, the Chinese lost the route by which they were accustomed to receive munitions from British Hong Kong. This terrific blow caused western wiseacres to proclaim that Japan had won the war. But the capture of the Canton-Hankow railway terminals instituted a new period of Chinese resistance. With Chiang's capital removed to Chungking in interior Szechwan, a new motor road was completed across mountain ranges and torrid jungles to British Burma, which fronts on the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. Other routes have been kept open from Yunnan to French Indo-China, the old Imperial Highway rebuilt across the deserts of Sinkiang to the Soviet border.
The Interior provinces upon which Chiang's army must now rely are potentially wealthy. Szechwan, with an area of 155,000 square miles (approximately the area of California), is rich in gold and oil, and its 52,000,000 people produce four harvests a year. Rice, wheat, barley, millet, tobacco, sugar cane, corn, beans and cotton make up its harvests. Neighboring Yunnan has tin, copper, iron and coal, and its mulberry leaves are juicy enough to nourish a great silk industry. Kweichow is up-tilted country, good for cattle raising and orchards.
This wealth cannot make up for the loss of the industrialized China coast. Nor can enough war material reach China by difficult caravan routes across the great deserts from Soviet Asia. But under stress the newly nationalist Chinese have done what no other people have ever done: they have picked up their factories—as a Biblical character once picked up his bed—and walked. Industrial equipment valued at $100,000,000 Chinese (U. S. $3,448,275) was removed from Shanghai in the early days of the war. That was only a beginning of a great industrial and cultural migration.