Manchuria Falls
The Nationalist debacle in Manchuria is complete and the main Communist forces may shortly be expected to advance south of the Great Wall. Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Government at Nanking has resigned. Foreign nationals are being advised to leave Peking and Tientsin—a step which the sturdier members of the British mercantile and missionary community may well decide not to take— and an American naval force is reported to be at Tsingtao, where it can hardly hope to exert much influence on the course of events. China faces a crisis from which, though Nanking refuses to recognise the fact, only she can extricate herself. For nearly twenty years, with interludes of uneasy truce, the Generalissimo has tried to defeat the Communists in the field. He ,has failed consistently. Now he cannot even maintain a ruinous and unconstructive stalemate. How- ever Sinophile a foreign policy the near future may bring to light in Washington, American aid, even if it is unstinted, cannot in practice make any material difference ; neither arms nor the ability to use them can win battles if the will to use them is not there. There have been times in the recent past when a compromise with the Communists was within reach, and a compromise is what is wanted now. Advice on these lines is the only form which intervention from outside can usefully take. A struggle which force has con- spicuously failed to end and which force never can end except perhaps, eventually, in the Communists' favour, should be resolved by less extreme and wasteful methods. To impose an indefinite cease-fire on a China divided into two armed camps is begging the ultimate question. What is wanted is to weld the two rival systems of government (which are not nearly as incompatible in practice as they appear on paper) into one. Chinese civilisation and the Chinese way of life are far more enduring than the various contending political theories which at one time or another have swayed the Chinese people, who are much too proud and independent to allow any foreign power to exert an undue influence on them. A broad- based Government in which the Communists were fully represented is not an impractical idea and would be far better for China, however jerkily it worked at first, than the present bloody and tragic muddle. To bring it into existence would be a task of immense difficulty ; but it is the only task worth attempting in China today.
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