Historians of the future, writing of these fateful years in which we live, may well record that 1948 and 1949 disasters in China set the stage for disaster in the United States. We in the Navy, who must think not only of the United States and its coastline, but of the world seaways and air-seaways converging on our shores, have a particular interest in Asia. We have just completed the greatest naval war of history to destroy hostile dominion over China and southeast Asia. Are we losing today what only yesterday we expended billions of dollars, hosts of ships and airplanes, and thousands of lives to preserve?
Both Russia and the United States have long looked on China and the fabulous Indies to the south with the deepest interest. Before the present Communist regime, the Czars of Russia saw in the northern provinces of China opportunity for growth to the great seas denied them in Europe. The Communists see not only this opportunity but the greater opportunity of world communism. Each Communist expansion provides but a base for starting the next. “We are living not merely in a state,” says Stalin, quoting Lenin to reinforce his views, “but in a system of states, and it is inconceivable that the Soviet Republic should continue for a long period side by side with imperialistic states. Ultimately one or the other must conquer. Until that end, a series of terrible conflicts between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois States is inevitable.”1
According to the Committee of Foreign Affairs, 80th Congress, in the powerful document “Strategy and Tactics of World Communism,” compounded from the Communists’ own declarations, examination of these statements lead to some deeply disturbing conclusions:
(1) The Communists have one goal— world revolution.
(2) They assume that the revolution will be violent.
(3) They are incapable of accepting the idea that peace can endure from now on, and they expect one more catastrophic war.
(4) The Soviet Union is regarded as the main force of the revolution.2
China is important to the achievement of world communism, according to Lenin, for the “Far East is the back door of the capitalist and imperialist powers.”
While we strive to lock the front door in Europe, the house is being entered from the rear in Asia. As was written in the Confucian Analects two millenniums ago, “The days and months are passing away; the years do not wait for us.”
Columbus in search of the wealth of the Indies voyaged westward with no livelier hopes than have stirred the minds of Americans in every generation looking to Asia. Scarcely had our War of Independence ended when the 55-ton sloop Harriet, out of Boston, and the larger Empress of China, out of New York, sailed on trading ventures to China. There lay riches. There dwelt an ancient, cultured, and talented people who produced silks, “Nankins,” teas, lacquer, porcelain, carvings—all hungrily sought by Americans and gladly brought to them by American ships which, if fortune served them, might receive a quarter of a million dollars in a single voyage, from an investment in ship, outfit, and initial cargo of one-sixth that.
Changing times and the rapid industrial growth of western nations, including the United States, brought a decline in the relative importance of the China trade. Fabulous fortunes came to mariner merchantmen as late as the clipper ship era when on the wings of the sky such jewels as Flying Cloud, Romance op the Seas, and Great Republic raced around the Horn freighted with cargo for the gold fields of California and thence sped homeward by way of China. Fortunes continue to be made today, though on a lesser scale and with lesser romance than in the days of our stirring maritime youth. China in 1948 is of less importance to us commercially than she was a century ago. Tomorrow, with her vast population and boundless need for capital equipment, she could become in trade one of the most important areas to us on earth.
At times consciously, always unconsciously, America has realized what China means to her destiny. The Golden Land of Han was the dominant power in Asia when savage tribes still roamed most of Europe. She has given the West many inventions, including probably the mariner’s compass. She has demonstrated the possession of a mysterious formula that has bestowed upon her the power to live through a recurring cycle of greatness and decline. Other nations, like all living things, grow to maturity of greatness, then fade into death or permanent impotence. She alone holds the secret of finding in decay the spark that drives her upward again, youthful, vigorous, great.
Looked at in the dangerous short view, China is an industrially backward, disorganized, overpopulated, impoverished land, suffering many revolutions simultaneously, incapable of aiding us or harming us in this immediate time of peril. Looked at in the long view (and it may be much shorter than some think), after her necessary time of travail, accompanied by chaos and destruction, China will experience renascence once more, becoming, as for most of her long history, a decisive force in Asia.
There are few reasons why this rebirth should not come to China; many why it should. She holds in rich measure those elements which, woven together and fused by the flame of national purpose, shape national greatness. She is situated in the north temperate zone, in the climatic belt whence sprang our own European civilization and most of the other civilizations that man has shaped. She has an extensive coastline with some of the world’s first harbors on the world’s greatest ocean. Within her boundaries are such vast and fertile lands that some twenty per cent of earth’s population somehow find food, even though the farming is primitive and less productive than it might be made to become under a settled government with modern methods, machinery, and scientifically selected seed.
These 450,000,000 to 500,000,000 people— three times the population of the United States and more than twice that of Russia— have demonstrated a tenacity for living, a tireless energy in labor, a limitless skill in handicraft, and a social culture designed for everyday happiness in human contacts which have few if any peers in the records of other nations.
Anyone going to China and looking at superficial compares her very unfavorably with the United States. He sees incompetence in her dirt, her lack of hygiene, her scarcity of bathtubs, radios, television sets, telephones, and automobiles (which for some people are the measure of progress). He sees weakness in the illiteracy and poverty of much of her population, matched only in our own slums and tenant farms. He sees impotence in her deficiency in modern industry and her widespread canker of cumshaw and graft. He may come to a different conclusion, however, if he looks more closely at China of both today and yesterday, with her possibilities for tomorrow, and compares her with European nations of, say, a century or half century ago, in scientific and industrial development. Looking thus closely he may decide that the transformation that Japan accomplished in a generation and a half, and Russia in less than one, may well be accomplished even more speedily in China.
In their long history the Chinese have demonstrated remarkable skill in every field of human endeavor. Still today there is no nation that can match them in multiplicity of lovely handiwork: silks, embroideries, porcelain wares, jewelries, brasswork, artificial flowers, carved jade and ivory, wood and silver, lacquer, inlays, cloissone, furniture. To name Chinese handicrafts is to name beauty. A thousand generations of skill and culture animate their patient, tireless hands. They are creative masters.
Although they lack our scientific agricultural methods of this generation, the Chinese are masters, too, in farming, whether the measure be in quantity, variety of product, or the esthetic loveliness of a Chinese miniature garden with its dwarf trees and specially bred flowers. As merchants they combine skill in getting along with people and skill in merchandising to such a degree that they are the tradesmen of the Western Pacific from Singapore to Manila.
As voyagers they have conquered deserts, mountains, and sea. They are particularly able fishermen and seamen, as many in our Navy can testify after witnessing their junks ride out typhoons. Long before the Vikings dared their heroic voyages, the Chinese ventured on longer ones in equally tempestuous seas to southeast Asia and India. To make their wanderings safer, they early invented the double bottom for their junks, one of their several contributions to the ancient art of the sea.
In social ethics and the relationship of man to man they are still today, despite all the unrest and chaos and misery in the Land of Han, probably ahead of any other great people. Buddha, the Teacher of Contemplation, Mohammed, the Prophet of Paradise, Christ, the Prince of Peace (though Christians have attained little enough of it), all promise the blessed hereafter to the pilgrim who has trod well the stony and troubled way of earth. Confucius taught a way of life for life itself that man may make pleasant, peaceful, and happy daily contacts with other men. Once in answer to a question on the hereafter, Confucius replied, “Until you are able to serve man, how can you serve gods?”
The Golden Rule is a foundation stone of Christianity, but only one of many such, all directed to well deserved rewards in the land of golden streets. The Chinese on the other hand are educated in a semi-religious code of ethics which in some measure enters into every human relationship—imperfectly, of course, since the Chinese, too, are human. It enters strongly enough, however, so that though they may be callous to suffering and death of those not in their immediate family (a characteristic in varying degree of most human beings), they attain a higher degree of happiness in their daily face-to-face contacts than most peoples. The ready smile, the childlike curiosity, the lightness of heart, the philosophic poise of the average Chinese, however miserable his worldly lot, are real, not artificial. They come to him from an ancient philosophy woven into the fibers of his being.
“The superior man,” says Confucius, “holds righteousness to be of the highest importance. . . . He hates those who proclaim the evil of others. He hates the slanderer. The goal he sets for himself is perfect virtue, which is composed of gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness and kindness. He begins to learn in his earliest days that youth when at home should be filial, and abroad, respectful to his elders. He should be earnest and truthful. He should overflow in love to all, and cultivate the friendship of the good.”
Whatever their backwardness in scientific and engineering invention today, the Chinese have a proud record in the past that may be repeated in the future. Among their many gifts to the Western World appear certain ones that have revolutionized our lives: movable type, paper currency, gunpowder, probably the compass that made possible the age of great discoveries starting with de Gama and Columbus. They have contributed greatly in textiles, in handicrafts, in fruits of the soil.
Although far behind Occidental nations of this century in engineering works, China once led all nations. Her great canal network (some 40,000 miles of these waterways are still in use), her system of paved roads and couriers that equaled those of Rome in efficiency while surpassing them in mileage, her mammoth earthen dikes harnessing her rivers of sorrow, her Great Wall winding wide and sturdy over mountain, valley, and desert a distance equal to that from New York to San Francisco—these are not works of an ineffectual race. As someone has said, “The soul of China is a Titan. Dwarf trees grow in China, but not dwarf souls.” If anyone questions whether this tenacious skilful people can repeat such achievements, he has only to observe what they accomplished in the industrialization of Manchuria within a decade under a settled government and Japanese direction.
This statement leads us to some of the weaknesses of China. These exist partly in her graft ridden government, partly in the anarchic self-seeking of the privileged classes, partly in the impact of many revolutions striking her in the down curve of one of her ever repeating cycles of decay and growth, partly in a strange somnolence resulting in a measure from these observable forces, in other measure from unconscious realization that all this has been before and will be again, that human beings live and labor and die, that cycles rise and fall, that change comes inevitably, and that all flow on into eternity which ever appears different, ever remains the same.
“If the fleeting world is but a long dream,
It does not matter whether one is young or old,”
sighed Po Chu-i more than a thousand years ago. And a thousand years before him sang another poet in this ancient land of sun and sorrows,
“In infinite succession light and darkness shift
And years vanish like the morning dew . . .
Man’s days are but a brief sojourn.”
Men say the Chinese are not patriots. This cannot be true. One has only to talk with them to understand their deep love for China, their faith and culture rooted in centuries of greatness, their belief that the civilization of Cathay is the best that man has evolved, with more to give than to receive from the West. They serve their people ill politically, or not at all, in some degree because of an old custom. It is the custom to oppress financially, to graft and bribe. These faults, that exist in every country but are kept under control in our own, run wild in China today. The traditional habits of cumshaw or commission and devouring taxation have degenerated into a vicious drain on China’s strength, just as similar evils have degraded some of our own municipalities. They destroy like a malignant disease.
China’s citizens are not different today than in the past. Greed is an evil as old as Eden. Probably before the dawn of writing the Chinese had set down the duality of man in a proverb, the conflict of good and evil: “Prisons are shut day and night, yet they are always full. Temples are open day and night, yet they are always empty.” When controls are strong, evil is repressed; when weak, it gains ascendancy. Prominent in the controls is government, and, as Confucius noted, “Bad government is more destructive than tigers.”
Corruption in office, like many other state ills, spreads riotously under a weak national government. Without checks to keep the disease in bounds, it becomes an epidemic. The social creature, man, goes with the crowd. A wave of corruption is one expression of mob psychology. A human reaction is, “This corruption is wrong, but everybody is getting his, why shouldn’t I get mine?” Strong souls resist the tide. Weaker ones go along with it. They can be redeemed only by an equal wave of revulsion which may come from several causes, the most common and effective being the establishment of a strong central government which stamps out corruption by example and punishment. “It is the duty of the government,” said Gladstone, “to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.” “Advance the crooked and set aside the upright, then the people will not submit. . . . Advance the good and teach the incompetent, then they will eagerly seek to be virtuous,” observed Confucius; and at another time, “Let your evinced desires be for what is good and the people will be good.”
China has been sick throughout this century, and before. Two great men, Dr. Sun and Chiang Kai-shek, almost succeeded in lifting her the first step out of the quagmire. They would have succeeded had it not been for outside interference that has continued to this day. Just when Chiang had unified China and she showed promise of reviving strength, Japan struck, first in Manchuria, next in China proper. As for the Communists, like time they have worked ceaselessly to destroy through internal gnawing and external assault.
World War II, coming in part because of our failure to check Japan in Asia, in shaking the foundations of the world likewise aggravated China’s ills. Her problems became more acute. It is possible that Chiang Kai-shek could not have solved them in any event. It is certain that the solution became almost impossible when the Communists, with vast stores of Japanese arms, intensified their pressure and with the aid of their comrades across the border got control of the industrial empire of Manchuria which has no counterpart elsewhere in China. (Manchuria provided the Communists more manufacturing facilities, and denied them to the Nationalists, than Chiang had in the rest of China or was able to get from other countries.)
Chiang, tough, sincere patriot, and resolute in his mistrust of the Communists, may by some miracle and sufficient aid come back to provide the strong government which China needs, which she must have to start solving her problems and to become again a first power in the world.
Whatever Chiang Kai-shek may or may not accomplish, the Communists will provide the dictatorial government, direct and ruthless, that will solve the problems in the part of China they dominate. They know what to do, are doing it, and will continue to do it. Will they, in solving the problems and in bringing strength, bring blessings or otherwise to China and the world?
Some observers say that the Communists, like all past “conquerors” of China, will sink in the morass and be absorbed by the Chinese. In weighing this prophecy we must consider several differences between this conquest, if it may be called such, and those of the past. In the first place, this is not a subjugation by external armed forces, whatever the aid may be from outside, but a conquest from within, the conquest of an idea. This is true even though Moscow trained Communists lead and direct the fighting and subsequently the communization of the areas they take over.
Fragmentary evidence indicates that communization is proceeding at high speed following the fashion laboriously learned in Russia and recently perfected in central European countries. To begin with, workers and farmers are promised and given relief from taxes, and gain ownership of industry and land. Their most pressing problems are solved; they are given their heart’s material desires. Why not? All can be taken away later. Give anything. Temporize as necessary for the moment. When the hour is ripe, all can be undone. Meanwhile, to insure that the backing is there to undo it, training schools are established so that promising youths may immerse themselves in the Doctrine.
Regardless of the efficient direction from outside, the communization of China rolls on essentially as an internal change. Organized and controlled by a few, with the great mass (as in Russia 30 years ago) passively accepting because of promised and some immediate temporary benefits, this is conquest of China by her own people. A new dragon has risen from the fields and villages, hurling his coils around China. New masters take over from the old. Will they be less successful than native Communist dictators elsewhere, less cruel and ruthless and competent in bringing the masses into line? Will these few who merely displace, another few be less successful in enslaving the many?
A second difference over past conquests exists in the industrial potential of the two halves of China. Wars today depend predominantly upon coal, steel, other minerals, and large industrial plants. Whatever her latent resources, Nationalist China south of the Yangtze is a weakling today compared with North China and Manchuria, the Ruhr of Asia, which with outside aid early fell to the Communists and was only in small part and temporarily retrieved at highwater of Nationalist operations.
A third difference is that the Mongols and Manchus were a handful of rude nomads who rode in to establish themselves as rulers of a people not only far advanced over them in civilization but outnumbering them as the waves of the seashore outnumber footsteps on the sand and eventually obliterate all trace of them. The pressure of Soviet Communism, a powerful force in Chinese Communist victory over and above any direct aid being rendered, does not derive from scattered nomads. It bears down vast and overpowering with the weight of one of the world’s first nations back of it. Soviet Russia provides a base for Communism too extensive and powerful ever to be absorbed by even the tenacious culture of China. The python swallows the pig, and not the reverse.
Another group of prophets say the native Communists will not accomplish much because the Chinese lack organizing and administrative ability. All their past record negates this false concept. Their brilliant achievements, not in one period but in repeated golden ages of power, give promise of what they will do again. But more of this hereafter.
Still others say that China’s problems will weigh down the Communists as they have the Nationalists, or at any rate that their gravity and complexity will delay solution for a generation or longer. As they put it, “Let the Communists have the mess. It is good riddance from our shoulders. May it break their backs, and welcome to it.” They also add that the character of the Chinese and the nature of their civilization both oppose Communism. No, Communism cannot get control of China. This rationalization, too, must bear closer scrutiny, for if the proponents are wrong, the disaster of tomorrow will be no less terrible because of our deliberate self delusion. Indeed, in face of the great danger ahead of us we might do well to heed the Chinese proverb, “Let no man despise the snake which has no horns, for who can say it will not become a dragon.”
China’s problems press upon her with the weight of centuries. So did those of Japan in the 1880’s. So did Russia’s in 1917. The solution for the Chinese rests in a powerful central government that will harness and give direction to the immeasurably powerful forces that lie latent in them. The Communists will cut the Gordian knot as they did in Russia. They know and ruthlessly follow Napoleon’s dictum that “Exclusiveness of purpose is the secret of great success and great operations.”
It is profitable at this point to compare conditions in North China-Manchuria today after World War II with those in Russia in and after World War I. In 1917 there existed a number of Russian Communist leaders, toughly trained by years of revolutionary activity in prison and out. When the corrupt Czarist government collapsed, some of these leaders were underground in Russia, some like Stalin were in Siberian imprisonment, others like Lenin were in Switzerland whence they were transported by the Germans to Russia to accelerate the breakdown of Russian power. These leaders had some backing in the Russian universities and among the liberal elite. They had followers on a small scale in the four industrialized areas around Moscow and St. Petersburg and in the Donetz and Dnieper basins. The total number of Communists added up to only a few tens of thousands, was for many years under a million, and to this day amounts in party members to not over six million, only three per cent of the whole Russian population.
Russia was a great amorphous mass of many peoples speaking many languages. Sprawling across two continents, she had built some important railway lines, chief among them being the Trans-Siberian, but her railroads were then and are to this day but a beginning of what she needs. She had and still has few hard surfaced roads. As a consequence, internal transportation and communication are so difficult that they have been major handicaps in her development.
The picture so far sounds almost like China today. But we have more to add. Some eighty per cent of Russia’s population scratched a living out of the soil, as in China of 1948, though with less efficiency than the Chinese but with larger reserves of arable land and therefore with better chance of expanding output, though collectivization might produce some expansion in China. Russia’s basic industries were in their infancy, textiles alone having experienced considerable growth (as in China, and as in most countries in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution).
Records of 1917 list considerable mineral resources for Russia and some beginning at exploiting them in industry. Yet compared to what lay hidden, what was to be discovered and developed within 20 years, the known resources of 1917 were but the first buckets from a deep well.
Russia’s coal resources in 1917 appear as 130 billion tons, of which she mined about 29 million tons annually. In 1937 the resources had grown more than 10 times to 1654 billion tons, mostly in Asiatic Russia, with about 130 million tons mined that year. Iron ore reserves went up 5 times, copper more than 10 times, other minerals similarly.
At the start of World War I Russia mined 9.2 million tons of iron ore, producing from it some 4.2 million tons of pig iron and an equivalent amount of steel from the pig. By 1937 these figures had tripled and were on the way to quadrupling. In 1917 uranium (which my 1941 reference book prosaically lists as “a rare white metallic element”) was not dreamed of as a metal of world interest. Between then and 1937 Russia took sovereignty, previously loosely claimed by China, over the mountain girded land of Tannu Tuva, abutting the northwest tip of Mongolia. This land, little known to the outside world, is said to contain many mineral deposits, including possibly rich ones of that “rare white metallic element,” uranium.
“Disease,” say the Chinese, “can be cured, but not destiny.” Under a strong government vigorously pushing development, miraculous transformations of national power today can occur within a few swift years.
The picture of Russia in 1917-21 compares in many respects strikingly with that of China in 1945-49. There are the same groups of revolutionary leaders, long trained in sabotage, resistance, and revolt, but with the added strength of having been carefully schooled in tactics by successful masters of the art. There are the same small numbers of followers (small compared with the teeming millions of China) yet more dangerous and effective because they are relatively more numerous than they were in Russia and are tempered through decades of warfare. There are the same fears of Communism in outside nations which led the
Allies of 30 years ago to aid the White Russians with supplies and funds (on an ineffectual scale) and with military forces as well. The assistance this time to the anti-communists has been likewise inadequate. As for assistance to the Communists, there is a striking difference. They possess not only relatively greater numbers, but this time the whole outside world is not hostile. Backing them up to the north, aiding them along the thousands of miles of Russian-Chinese border, and pushing them on is one of the world’s great powers, mother of their ideology, openly professed base for world communism.
There exists the same nucleus of industrial proletariat, somewhat but not measurably smaller in North China-Manchuria than in Russia thirty years ago. There exists the same predominantly agricultural society, with the mass of the population peasant farmers filled with a mass land hunger, eager to swallow the bait of land riches for their initial support of Communism—and we have no reason to believe that millions will not die as they did in Russia nor that they will be more effective in resistance when the land is taken from them again.
In China we have likewise the same awakening of peoples in the early stages of the Industrial-Scientific Revolution, an awakening accompanied by the pull of powerful forces, of ideologies, of crumbling structures, of instability and fears and dark emotions which prepare a perfect setting for demagogues who would free a people from old slavery by crushing them under another more brutal and cruel.
Those who seek to persuade themselves that the disaster in China is not a disaster to us declare that there is one crucial difference (among others) between Russia of a generation ago and China of today. Russia has impressive mineral resources and an important start in the Industrial Revolution. China, they say, has neither. (It would be interesting to determine if the same people made the same remarks about Russia not being a danger just a generation ago.)
Earlier in these pages we have noted how in 20 years the known mineral resources and the heavy industrial production of Russia multiplied many fold. Strong evidence may be found that the same development can occur in North China-Manchuria. Indeed, we already have record of startling development in Manchuria alone under the Japanese within the amazingly brief span of 8 years.
Some 1500 years before coal was “discovered” in the United States, natives of Manchuria mined it for the manufacture of pottery. When Czarist Russia moved in during the last years of the nineteenth century building a railroad to Port Arthur, coal mining increased measurably. Other minerals attracted some interest. Practically all of the mining took place within a few miles of the railroad and its spurs.
The Chinese-Japanese war of 1894-95 and the Russian-Japanese war a decade later introduced the power politics struggles of this century for the material resources of Manchuria. Following the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905, and particularly in World War I, Japan made progress in developing this rich region, including discovery of many promising new mines. Subsequently, however, as Chiang Kai-shek gained strength and progressively extended his authority northward, Japan realized the approaching danger of losing her sphere of influence in Manchuria. At the time she was steadily expanding industrially and understood more than ever before what the wealth of Manchuria meant to her destiny. Thus there occurred the Mukden incident and in 1932 the establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo.
In the quarter of a century of Japanese paramount interest in Manchuria (but not the full control which began in 1932), she had extensively built up Dairen with its surrounding leased area of some 1200 square miles in Kwantung peninsula. To a lesser degree she had also developed the territory adjacent to the South Manchurian Railroad, expanding the production of the great Fushan open cut coal mine, for example, from about 200,000 tons annual output in the early 1900’s to over 3,000,000 tons twenty years later.
Yet the resources of this “Ruhr of Asia” and her industrial potentiality had scarcely been touched when the Japanese took over completely in 1932 ready for large scale development. Although varying figures exist, the most common estimate of Manchurian coal resources in the summer of 1932 is 4,800,000 metric tons. Seven portentous years later, after swift general surveys, with new discoveries still coming in, the estimated reserves had multiplied four times to 20,000,000 tons and were still rising. Coal mined likewise shot up, approaching twenty million tons in 1939 and over thirty million tons in the year of Pearl Harbor. Fushan alone, the world’s largest mine of its type, poured out a black torrent of over nine million tons annually, approximately one third of Manchuria’s total output (and incidentally one third of the total coal output all Russia had achieved in the last years under the Czars).
Anyone reading about China or her province of Manchuria in a book printed before the great world depression of the 1930’s will learn that Manchuria, in addition to coal, had considerable iron deposits. Unfortunately, however, these were of low grade and therefore not competitive on an equal cost basis. Undeterred, the industrious Japanese early built a large iron foundry on the South Manchurian Railroad at Anshan and developed a process for handling the ore. By 1932, the year they formed the puppet state, they were almost ready to commence making steel here, and subsequently did so on an increasing scale.
It is said in China that “The tiger cares nothing that the cow is lean.” The Japanese would have gone into Manchuria for what resources it was known to have. That these proved many times larger only shows the possibilities in other parts of China once a stable, vigorous government begins to push development.
In the 1920’s the total iron ore deposits of Manchuria, all of low grade, appeared to be something under 400,000,000 tons. In 1939 these reserves (with surveys still under way) had jumped eight times to over 3,000,000,000 tons. This total is a billion tons greater than the total reserves known to exist in all of Russia in 1917. An even more pleasing feature of the new discoveries were deposits amounting to 130,000,000 tons of rich ore containing sixty to sixty-five per cent iron. Much of this had been discovered in a single region along the Korean border, in the provinces of “Eastern Peace” and “Eastern Flower,” previously not considered of importance in mineral deposits.
In our great United States we accept as commonplace the need to ship ore long distances to smelting and refining plants. Iron, for example, travels from the Mesabi Range (whose rich ores today are approaching exhaustion) hundreds of miles to the lake ports and inland steel manufacturing areas. Or it may travel much greater distances over the high seas, from far away Brazil and other lands to Bethlehem’s plant in Baltimore. Copper ores may come to us from distant Chili. Some of our richer aluminum ores make the long sea journey from South America. It is sobering, therefore, to look on a mineral resource map of Manchuria of 1940 and to notice the mass of mineral symbols concentrated in the southeastern sector. There lie iron and coal side by side, and next to them limestone, magnesite, copper, aluminum. Zinc, lead, and oil shale also abound.
The Japanese were so excited over their rich finds “of huge underground deposits” that in 1937 they formed the Manchuria Development Corporation to push the expansion of heavy industry. By 1939 it had unified the important industrial companies operating in Manchuria, had organized many new ones, and had greatly expanded production. Establishing her Five Year Plans, in the latter part of 1938 she reached the rate of installing a new pig iron furnace at the Showa works every two months. In the early years of the war she had built up pig iron production in South Manchuria to almost 2 million tons, in addition to a million tons of steel—all this from a standing start ten years earlier.
In China’s province of Manchuria alone, then, we have one of the earth’s great industrial empires of the future; in fact, one that already has a long start. Taking our belt of great mining-industrial-agricultural states from Minnesota east to Pennsylvania and New York (which besides these three states includes Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey) and throwing in all of the New England states to boot, we obtain an area roughly the size of Manchuria. The natural wealth of this rich and populous section of the United States (something less than one half our population resides in this belt) may also be compared with the potential wealth of Manchuria which currently has a population of some 45 million. Under a powerful government, which the Communists should provide, there is every indication that the proved resources, the industrial capacity, and the population will all steadily increase.
This being the one area of China with a large agricultural surplus for export, and with lands still untilled, its population can increase to 70 million or more. One can easily understand why the Japanese so coveted Manchuria. It was rich, far richer than Japan, richer than their dreams or hopes. It provided not only the raw materials for the industrial empire on the home islands, but the possibility of a far more powerful empire on the great continent, leading Japan on to all Asia. Who now sees this dream of empire?
Such was Manchuria at the outbreak of World War II—a new center of world power, revealed in a few years under Japanese rule. What will happen under Communist direction not only in Manchuria but in the larger and more populous domain of North China, no one can prophesy. However, as the Chinese might say, “Long robes can hide heavy feet.”
The added possibility of industrial greatness resulting when we include North China with Manchuria is only a guess, but we can make at least a reasoned guess. No similar concentrated effort having been made to uncover hidden mineral wealth or to industrialize North China, it is impossible to say whether it will reveal similar resources to those of Manchuria (vast deposits of coal amounting to over 200 billion tons and some important deposits of iron ore are known to exist). Surveys and statistics indicate that a large expansion of known reserves will not occur. But for that matter they indicated the same results for Manchuria before the Japanese opened the secrets of the earth— secrets apparently not known to some of our current writers and speakers who still obtain their data from books that the passage of a few years has outmoded.
It would be folly to shut our eyes to the possibility of marked expansion of resources. To believe a business impossible is to make it so—for oneself, but not for the other fellow who does not so believe. Without attempting to investigate the possibilities in all minerals, we can take time to look at two in which impressive changes of estimated reserves have taken place quite recently.
Widespread surveys of China by Americans before World War I led to the conclusion that she had negligible oil resources. By 1937, however, estimates placed her oil reserves at 1,375,000,000 barrels. Explorations during the war uncovered other reserves including a claimed 400,000,000 barrels in Szechwan and lesser quantities in Sinkiang and Kansu, northern provinces that are inherently part of the Communist sphere. Oil shale has been known in Manchuria many years, but no evidence of petroleum in commercial quantities. Consequently the Japanese went ahead with construction of plants for extraction of oil from the rich deposits of over seven billion tons of shale. By 1936 they were producing 50,000 barrels of oil per month; by 1940, 250,000 barrels per month with a schedule doubling that rate to some six million barrels for the next year. That same year of 1940 they brought in an oil well in Jehol, southwestern province of Manchuria, portent perhaps of discoveries yet to come.
As late as 1934 able geographers and general authorities on China set forth her reserves of aluminum as small or “modest.” Within a year new discoveries and clearer knowledge of existing fields resulted in estimates of 188 million tons of aluminum ore in what are now Communist controlled Shantung and Manchuria, enough to supply the world for a hundred years at the then rate of consumption. Within ten years these estimates had shot up again several times, the holy province of Shantung alone being credited with 271 million tons.
The possibilities of industrial development, then, in North China and Manchuria combined are far greater than in Manchuria alone. Perhaps all of China will come under Communist domination, perhaps only the northern half we have considered in this discussion. If only the latter, the Communists will control a quarter of a billion Chinese with their many skills and ready adaptability to mass industrialization, as already demonstrated in Manchuria, whose population consists essentially of Chinese immigrants and their descendants from Hopeh and Shantung. Considering what the Communists accomplished in a brief span in Russia, and the Japanese in a briefer one in Manchuria, we may with reason conclude that the Communists can develop this north half of China into an industrial nation for peace or war comparable to Russia of today, by the mid 1960’s.
They will do it by the very means Stalin employed in Russia, as he himself related in a speech on February 9, 1946. After giving essentially the same industrial figures (brought up to 1940) as presented in the foregoing paragraphs on Russia, to demonstrate the major achievement of the Communists in preparing for World War II, he goes on to say that such an unprecedented leap from an agrarian to an industrial economy was achieved by forced industrialization and collectivization. In his words, “The Soviet method of industrializing the country differs radically from the capitalist method . . . (which) begins with light industry. Since in light industry smaller investments are required and there is more rapid turnover of capital, and since, furthermore, it is easier to make a profit there than in heavy industry, light industry serves as the first object of industrialization in these countries.”
After decades in which light industry accumulates capital, heavy industry gets its turn. Understanding this delay and understanding “that a war was coming, that the country could not be defended without heavy industry,” the Communists, to save the Soviet order from perishing, “began the work of industrializing the country by developing heavy industry. It was very difficult, but not impossible. A valuable aid in this work was the nationalization of industry and of banking, which made possible the rapid accumulation and transfer of funds to heavy industry.
“There can be no doubt that without this it would have been impossible to secure our country’s transformation into an industrial country in such a short time.”
As for collectivization, “In order to do away with our backwardness in agriculture and to provide the country with greater quantities of marketable grain, cotton, and so forth, it was essential to pass from small- scale peasant farming to large scale farming for only large scale farming can make use of new machinery, apply all the achievements of agronomical science, and yield greater quantities of marketable produce.”
Despite extensive resistance from “not only backward people,” but “Trotskyites and Rightists” of the party, the true believers carried on unswervingly to victory.
By the same methods can China be transformed within the next decade and a half.
This does not purport to be a prophecy. It is merely an effort to discover what might be accomplished in the great empire of China and what we might have to contend with. It is part of the estimate of the situation that any wise leader digests in his mind to determine what his various courses of action may be and which will most likely bring him to his objective. Those who have written off China’s problems as insoluble, who say that even the ruthless Communists will bog down in them, may be right. It may be that this disaster in China is not a disaster to our policy of containing world Communism with its oft announced purpose of destroying the United States and all our cherished democratic institutions.
It may not be. On the other hand, it may be a disaster of the first magnitude. Unless we are sure it is not, and pending the remorseless unrolling of the future to show us what it is in fact, we would be advised to consider the possibility of the worst.
“The dark of night is profound and in its midst each man is alone in perplexity,” says Lao Tze. The future in which we move is indeed dark and perplexing. However dark, our only salvation is in facing it with open eyes and without delusions. If there is a way through the darkness, only by looking carefully and preparing wisely shall we find it.
1. Letter to Comrade Ivanov, February 12, 1938.
2. House Document 619, page 4.