CHINA YESTERDAY AND TODAY
China Only Yesterday. By Innes Jackson. (Faber and Faber. 9s.) Chinese Evergreen. By Victor Purcell. (Michael Joseph. os. 6d.) Japan's Gamble in China. By Freda Utley. (Seeker and Warburg. 6s.)
Japan in China. Her Motives andAims. ByK. K. Kawakami. (John Murray. is.)
Japan in China. By T. A. Sisson. (Macmillan. 12s. 6d.)
WITH her centres of civilised life bombed into smithereens, her countryside " scorched " and her " intellectuals " wandering
like the Israelites in the desert, China can never hope to pick up again wholly the threads of her old existence. This thought adds a melancholy tinge to the otherwise unalloyed enjoyment that one gets from Miss Jackson's picture of China of yesterday.
It is the outcome of a year spent in China as a wandering scholar, and it owes its brilliance of colour to the scholar's keen sense of appreciation, abundance of human sympathy and delightfully unspoilt taste for novelty and petty adventure. Miss Jackson has a talent for living, humorous description and character sketching, which she applies to such diverse subjects as the street barbers of Shanghai, her university professors (she went to China partly to study Chinese poetry), third-class travel on Chinese railways, and the coming of spring at Nanking, when " the air is spongy and slightly scented. Little whirls of dust career merrily at the street corners ; shafts of sun fall on muddy house-yards and hairy pigs are seen comfortably asleep on the roadway, their sides beating with warmth."
Half of Miss Jackson's IVanderjahr was spent in attending courses at Chinese universities, the rest in travelling. Her travels took her to the top of two of China's famous Sacred Mountains. On one of these, Hengshan in the province of Hunan, she was treading the same ground as Mr. Purcell, who, in Chinese Evergreen, which is an account of a journey through the central Southern provinces, gives us another glimpse of pre-War China from a somewhat different standpoint. The difference is well illustrated in their respective accounts of a common experience. Miss Jackson strikes, as usual, the human and personal note, and gives us a living portrait of the " gentle-faced monk " in charge of the temple where you stay on the mountain summit and of " the two gentlemen from Yunnan " who were her fellow-guests. Mr. Purcell is, typically, inspired to a dissertation of his own on mountain worship and the catholicity of Buddhism. Throughout his book he uses the vicissitudes of travel to give rein to his own reflections on the history, literature and philosophy of the "Middle Kingdom " (he is, as he says of himself in the preface, " a naturally garrulous person "). In and between, however, we get some interesting sidelights on Chinese characteristics, and these include a nice example of the Chinese genius for avoiding unpleasant facts. To avoid admitting that, since the formation of the " National Front," the Government were still at arms drawn with the local Communists, the officials had taken to calling the latter " Trotskyites " !
Coming to the China of today, China in the throes of a struggle which threatens to blot out so much of the picture which our two travellers present, we have a trilogy of books dealing with the struggle from three separate angles. Miss Utley is the spokesman of the Left. Her book, Japan's Gamble in China, is open to several criticisms. Issues are over-simplified--it is a little misleading to say that " the prospect of China developing her own resources for her own benefit was the real cause of the present war " ; the author builds too much on the notori- ously sandy foundations of statistics, and there are occasions when she comes perilously near to a suggestio falsi. To give an instance of this, she asks one to credit a story reflecting on British policy which appeared in a Japanese monthly periodical, of which only a handful of Englishmen would be likely to have any knowledge, for no better reason than that " there were no denials in the British Press or Parliament." Allowing, however, for considerable parti pris wherever capitalism versus Communism comes into the question, and for a somewhat exaggerated insistence on the rottenness of the Japanese social and political systems, we have here a knowledgeable and well-documented statement of the case against Japan.
The reverse of the medal appears in Mr. Kawakami's ,japan in China. But what a poor impression it is ! What better proof of the weakness of Japan's case than the fact that her apologists base their excuse of her actions in China primarily on the assertion—and a contestable one at that—
that China was heading towards Communism. And as for the second pretext, China's " anti-Japonism," surely its instigation has come not so much from the Commintern, as Mr. Kawakami suggests, as from Japan herself. The book has, however, a value in calling attention to certain important movements, such as that of the " Blue Shirts," which are apt to be slurred over by pro-Chinese writers, and Mr. Kawakami should be read so that he may at least be given the chance of mitigating the complete condemnation of Japan which in this country is more or less universal.
The American writer of the last book on our list stands midway between the champions of the " Right " and the " Left." He is non-partisan and dispassionate, as befits the author of a study carried out under the aegis of the Rockefeller Foundation. This has unfortunately led to a colourlessness which makes the book heavy reading. If prepared to face this, the reader will find in Mr. Bisson's japan in China (he and his Japanese fellow-author have, it will be observed, hit on an identical title) a sound and scholarly appreciation of the principal factors in the Sino-Japanese conflict and, in the concluding chapter, a specially interesting account of the state of affairs in Manchukuo which, as the writer suggests, may become " a prototype for China." G. E. HUBBARD.
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