CHINA: Depression in Chungking

Chungking has never been a particularly happy city. It is at best a dark, damp, depressing place. But never before has there been such gloom as prevails this spring in China's capital.

Chungking is no longer a city of defiance, a place where men dream of their country's coming unity and progress, and act in the face of crisis. The inmates of Chungking—for many of them have come to feel like inmates rather than inhabitants—are gradually becoming spectators of the war rather than its combatants, and they are depressed by what they watch.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek is still a symbol and an inspiration. His prestige is still high. But his problems have never been greater.

After six years of war, blockaded China is weaker economically and militarily than at any stage of the conflict with Japan. The country is in the throes of the worst inflation since the Sung Dynasty—in the Twelfth Century, just before the invasion of Genghis Khan, when rocketing prices in Peking would change between morning and evening. Malnutrition and privation are slowly undermining the vitality not only of the Army, but of the many intellectuals and younger office holders on whom China's future leadership largely depends. Inadequate material help from America and continued delay in the only quick means of bringing that help — the reconquest of the Burma Road — have provoked a growing feeling of neglect and resentment among the Chinese people.

Although Chiang's bitterest enemies, the Communists, concede that he is the only possible wartime leader, his Army and theirs are still at odds.

Goods Cannot Move. Through no fault of its own, China is stagnant. Japan's very nearly total blockade has accomplished a kind of stillness inside China that looks to some Chinese like the stillness of death.

Until 1938 the main dependence of Free China for goods that gave her life —for trucks, tires, spare parts, lubricants, fuels, the things of mobility—was on the Hong Kong-Canton route of imports. Later, until 1940, it was on the roads and railway through Indo-China. Imports through Indo-China averaged 40,000 tons a month, and the Burma Road was an insignificant supplement—perhaps 3,000 tons a month. After the fall of France, the Burma Road was the only road into China, and imports over it were lifted to an unsatisfactory maximum of 14,000 tons in November 1941. Then it, too, was lost. Since then the air supply route "over the hump" from Assam has given China only a fraction of even the Burma Road's trickle.

The consequence has been that Free China has lost internal fluidity. There is almost no motion except on foot, on donkeyback, on carts with wooden wheels. In Chungking there is one dilapidated alcohol-burning bus line; otherwise rickshas and sedan chairs are the only means of transportation.

The freezing of movement has meant the freezing of things. Even if there are in one place and time plenty of blue coolie-cloth jackets, there is no easy way to move the jackets to those places where there are many bare backs.