An Obelisk in Yunnan
By PETER FLEMING
THIS is a time of year at which, for reasons I forget, the Chinese fly kites ; and it was to indulge this agreeably philosophic pastime that, on a March afternoon in 1949, a number of the inhabitants of Kunming had ascended to a small park or garden which crowns an eminence just inside the ancient walls of that city. The wind from the mountains blew steadily through the trees which stood among the shrines and temples and the derelict emplacements for anti-aircraft guns ; and the gay paper birds and dragons dipped and strained and hovered in the blue sky while their controllers moved abstractedly back- wards and sideways on the worn turf, paying-out or reeling-in the gently humming strings.
I had no kite, but had gone up there for the ludicrous Occi- dental purpose of stretching my legs. The place did not seem to have changed much since I had first visited it in 1938 (I had been in Kunming several times during the war, but I seemed to remember that the little hill had been a prohibited area because of the gun-positions). But among the memorial arches and the strange stone beasts disposed about the cracked terraces and the dusty parterres there stood one monument which was obviously new. It was a tall obelisk, and when I asked about it I was mildly surprised to learn that it was a war memorial to the several thousand Chinese troops who fell fighting against the Japanese in Burma.
I don't really know why I should have been surprised, even mildly. I suppose I thought that the Chinese, who do not esteem the profession of arms as a glorious one ahd who regard casualty lists with more fatalism than we do, might have been expected to write off their losses in what was—from their point of view—a sideshow, and not a very successful one at that. In recent years so many thousands of Chinese soldiers have died, many of them at the hands of their own countrymen, without anyone putting up a memorial to them, that it seemed strange to finda proud, enduring tribute to the men who fell fighting, under foreign command, in an alien country where the outcome of the campaigns was only distantly and academically related to the Interests of China. And perhaps part of my surprise arose from the novelty (to me) of the whole conception of a Chinese expedi- tionary force. We think of the British Army as something which fights—which can only fight—abroad ; but the Chinese Army has always seemed to the traveller an inseparable part of the Chinese landscape, and although I had seen quite a lot of the Chinese in Burma (retreating in 1942 in looted British topees which were much too big for them, advancing through the northern jungles two years later in American steel helmets, looking, and indeed being, much more warlike), I had never, until I found the obelisk, thought of them as an expeditionary force or realised that, as such, they were a phenomenon with—in 1949—no precedent in recent history.
The other day, riding along the bottom of a valley, I saw a kite flying against the drab March sky from the brow of the hill above me, and for some reason the sight brought back that moment in Kunming, and I began to wonder whether Chinese expeditionary forces were going to become quite ordinary pheno- mena and not aberrations from the norm of national behaviour ; for there are now two in the field, though the Chinese themselves would doubtless argue that their army hibernating half-way along the difficult road to Lhasa is only carrying out internal security duties on Chinese territory. Both the Korean and the Tibetan expeditions are on quite a different footing from the Chinese effort in Burma, which—after the initial phase—was largely underwritten by foreigners, in that the troops involved were flown over the Hump to India where they were trained, equipped and—nominally at any rate—commanded by the Americans. The home-based Chinese armies in Yunnan, who were in contact with the Japanese on the Burma border, made little effort to exert pressure on their opponents, with whom in some sectors they were in close and advantageous commercial relations. The Chinese intervention in Korea may have been inspired by the Russians, but the campaign to which they are committed is a much more spontaneous and self-contained affair than the one in Burma.
In some respects the Chinese soldier is well-adapted for foreign service. Marching and counter-marching about his own exten- sive fatherland, whether at the behest of war-lords or of ideologists, he is preconditioned to many of the contingencies of foreign service. Changes in climate, in diet, in dialect, in currency he regards as all part of the game anyhow. His chances of serving in his own province have grown steadily smaller ever since centralised government was effectively established ; and Mao Tse-tung is not likely to grant any more opportunities than Chiang Kai-shek did for local separatist movements to be backed by locally-raised troops. So the Yunnanese is quite liable to find himself soldiering in Shantung and vice versa ; and to neither man will the idea of moving a little further still—into Korea or into Tibet—have those emotional implications which foreign service has for the American and even for the British soldier. The Chinese will not expect to be granted the equivalent of embarkation leave Or to be accompanied by mobile bath units or welfare officers or recreation centres. He will miss neither the stimulus of a hero's send-off nor the certainty that his ashes will he sent home in a casket if he is killed, both of which were important to the Japanese soldier. The Chinese soldier will go. with cheerful stoicism, wherever he is sent, and make the best of it when he gets there.
He made a very bad ambassador in Burma, and, though Communist discipline has no doubt improved his standards of conduct, I doubt if the North Korean civilians have much affection for him. No army is a welcome intruder anywhere, but a well-found army is a kind of sugar-daddy whose un- welcome attentions can be put up with at a pinch for the sake of the largesse that accompanies them. The Chinese Army is not that sort of army ; but, for all that, the virtues of the Chinese soldier as raw material for an expeditionary force easily outweigh—provided, of course, that he is well led—his disadvantages.
An expeditionary force, however, has its origins in policy, in strategy, to some extent in national outlook. Are the Chinese going to develop—or rather revert to—the habit of dispatching such forces into the territory of their neighbours? It is a question which the authorities in Saigon, in Bangkok and in Rangoon must be asking themselves. The answer to it may not yet be known in Peking. Among Mao Tse-tung's colleagues and advisers there must be many who initially opposed both the Korean and the Tibetan adventures, on the grounds that they represented ill-timed diversions of effort from the basic and urgent tasks of economic reconstruction ; and neither enterprise has turned out well. The advance upon Lhasa can presumably be resumed when the snows melt in the spring, and will pre- sumably be successful, for what it is worth ; but the destruction of a large part of the Manchurian armies, and the extrication of the remainder (for that seems the most likely outcome in the end), will not, in the eyes of the policy-makers in Peking, increase the attractions of this type of enterprise or the prestige of its Russian promoters. Although it is rash to prophesy, I shall be surprised if the current vogue for crusading persists in China. Officially, Formosa is the target for 1951, and perhaps Mao Tse- lung still means to have a crack at it. But even if he is successful, and certainly if he is not, I suspect that the Chinese will before long have had their fill of military adventures. War memorials are very inspiring objects in their way ; but kites are more graceful, and very much cheaper.
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