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Aside from war and politics, this movement—which at one stroke transplanted factories, colleges and Government to the heart of a primitive continent, may be a milestone in the history of Asiatic civilization. The migration was in the hands of the Minister of National Economy, Dr. Oong Wen-hao, a geologist and mining engineer who once studied at Louvain in Belgium. According to John Gunther, Dr. Oong had by the end of 1938 supervised the transportation of 64 machine shops, 18 electrical plants, 22 chemical plants, five glass factories, seven cotton mills, twelve printing plants, four dockyards (to build boats for use on the upper Yangtze). The weight of the machinery transported on coolie-back for hundreds of miles amounted to 25,000 tons. By U. S.
standards this amounted to a mere 500 freight car loads. By Asiatic standards it was an industrial revolution.
In Chungking, centre of the new industrial area, 140 factories — a third from Hankow, the majority from Shanghai —have been set up. Chinese universities have also moved inland. The Government is now organizing the western peasantry into producer cooperatives for tanning leather, building small boats, weaving and spinning textiles, mining coal and iron, milling flour, making sulfuric acid.
Two Civilizations. A struggle between a people capable of such a Homeric resistance and the Japanese is lopsided in both directions. Japan is a compact island king dom with a crowded rice-and-fish-fed population of 70,000,000. Two generations ago the Japanese people accepted a "westernization" that was dictated from the top down by the Emperor and leading feudal families.
The Japanese willingly follow their near-Fascist leaders, for they regard their Emperor Hirohito — always purblind and now rapidly growing pudgy — as a blend of divinity and family patriarch. They are strong as a people can be living under a quasi-totalitarian state, semi-totalitarian economy.
But seizing Formosa (as Japan did in 1895) and the South Manchurian Railway (as in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904) and Korea (1910) and Manchuria (1931-32) were all child's play compared to the tremendous job of subjugating the Chinese, who outnumber the Japanese six to one, and seizing China, a country of 4,000,000 square miles, larger than the U. S.
The Chinese are an easygoing people who do not like to fight or to prepare for fighting. For years before the Sun Yat-sen revolution of 1911 they permitted the Manchu Dowager Empress, Tzu Hsi ("Old Tiger" to her people), to pit firecrackers against Enfield rifles and sailing junks against armored cruisers. Western civilization has come to them, is coming to them, not by fiat, but by hit or miss infiltration —from contact with Occidental trade, from missionary schools, from Communist propaganda, from their enemies the Japanese, from their new nationalist leaders. They are strong as only a disorganized, individualistic people can be, for they have not been much more disorganized by invasion.
Having been conquered, they go on fighting.
To wipe out their guerrilla bands alone can easily be a man-sized, two-year job for a big army. The Japanese may or may not be equal to the task.