_Manchuria, the Prize_
Manchuria is the home of the Manchus who conquered China and ruled
it until 1911. It is the Prize, the bone of contention over which
the bloodiest battles have been fought, and the one area in all Asia
without which neither the Communists nor the Nationalists could hope
to become a world power.
Studded with Japanese industrial plants, Manchuria is known as the
Pittsburgh of China, due to the fact that here both coal and iron
are mined close together. Here, also, is contained seventy per cent
of the industrial potential of all China. A rugged, windy land,
much like our American prairie states, it is one of the few places
in Asia that has a food surplus and serves as the granary of that
vast region. Farmers, using shaggy Mongol ponies, till broad fields
of soybeans, millet, corn, wheat and opium poppies. With the great
abundance of grain, the people are able to produce beef and mutton
for export.
Even before the Japanese occupation, Manchuria was a thriving center,
and the conquerors, with characteristic efficiency, speeded its
industrial and agricultural development during the fourteen years
of their occupation. They developed the largest coal, iron and gold
mines in Eastern Asia. From Manchuria alone they obtained more gold
than from any other source, in addition to five million tons of iron
and steel and thirty million tons of coal every year.
The great cities in Manchuria, of which Mukden is the capital,
were modernized. New railroad lines were built into the outlying
districts, and thousands of workers, heretofore purely agricultural,
were taught to work in factories. For the first time, modern hotels
and apartments covered city blocks, and Mukden undoubtedly boasted
more bathtubs, per capita, than any other city in Asia, with the
possible exception of Shanghai.
The Generalissimo had believed that Manchuria, when it was liberated,
would become a part of the Nationalist Government. He had sent
occupation troops there, had incorporated it into his rightful
territory, and at the end of the war had already started repairing
the damage caused by the final phase of the fighting. He was unaware
of the fact that Roosevelt had promised Manchuria to Russia as her
price for entering the war against Japan. He still firmly believed
in Roosevelt’s friendship, because Roosevelt had promised that _all_
Chinese territory liberated from the Japanese would be returned to
China.
Although Russia kept a tight rein on the Prize, she did everything
she could to help and encourage the Chinese Communists. Immediately
upon entering the war, she began to supply them with arms and
ammunition captured from the Japanese. At first this was done
stealthily by the simple ruse of allowing the Chinese Communists
to “find” these supplies themselves. After V-J Day Russia made no
attempt to hide from the world her interest in, and her support of,
the Chinese Communist regime. Besides supplying arms and propaganda
material, she assisted her lusty child by hampering, in every way,
the liberation of the Nationalist troops held by the Japanese. Since
then she has continued to work closely with the Chinese Reds. Li Li
San, the Kremlin’s Chinese agent, is in command. Russia, therefore,
takes everything she desires for herself, first.
Russian Armies in the East are composed of Asiatics, closely related
geographically, racially and politically to the Chinese Communists.
In behavior they are as clumsy and vindicative as their forebears
under Genghis Khan. Many peace-loving Chinese, after experiencing Red
domination, cried out, “Six months under the Communists are worse
than fourteen years under the Japs.”
As an example of what happens when these people overrun a country,
let us examine Manchuria at close range. Russian troops taking over
the country from the Japanese stripped nearly all the factories of
machinery, but with characteristic inefficiency. When a machine to
be sent to Russia was dismantled, no effort was made to keep the
pieces together in numbered crates so they could be reassembled in
another location. On the contrary, the machines were broken down in
mass and the jumbled parts loaded into trucks or freight cars with no
regard whatever to system. Where a machine could not be brought out
through doors or windows, the whole side of a wall was pushed out and
the rubble left where it fell. Completely ignorant of the delicate
mechanism of precision instruments, they permitted them to be left
out in the rain and snow to rust into utter uselessness. Somewhere
east of the Urals, the Russians must have a tremendous pile of scrap,
if it is not scattered along the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway.
This inability to appreciate and handle machinery may throw some
light on Russia’s frantic desire to acquire machine tools, at almost
any cost. Incidentally, the same wanton disregard of everything
technical applies to the looting of Eastern Europe.
Not only were Manchuria’s factories moved out bodily, piled onto
freight cars and, in a desultory manner, slowly moved into Siberia,
but what the troops were unable to take with them, they maliciously
destroyed. Aside from the Kremlin-activated seizure of the factories,
the primitive soldiers of the occupying forces, as well as just
common bandits, stripped Manchuria’s cities of everything that
could, by any remote chance, be useful to them. Both Chinese and
Russians followed the age old Mongolian custom and gleefully stole or
destroyed all personal property that they could get their hands on.
Even fixtures fastened to the walls were pulled out, and door knobs,
pipes and plumbing appliances were removed and turned over to the
government to be made into ammunition.
The Nationalist troops that the Generalissimo had moved in right
after V-J Day found it well-nigh impossible to defend Manchurian
property. The Chinese Communists used guerrilla warfare almost
exclusively against the villagers, their tactics being to terrorize,
kill and destroy before help could come from the Nationalist troops.
“Sack and pillage” kept the people in constant panic. In an endeavor
to isolate and defeat the Nationalists, the Communists tore up all
the railroads. Peasants were conscripted to dig up hundreds of miles
of railway track. They burned the ties, levelled the roadbeds, hid
or carried away the rails, and demolished the drainage structures.
Practically all the bridges were destroyed by explosives, all signal
towers and sidetrack mechanisms were wrecked, and every other
wanton damage that fiendish ingenuity could conceive or devise was
inflicted. As a final gesture of brutality, captured locomotive
engineers who were known to have Nationalist sympathies had their
hands cut off.
This kind of fighting completely destroyed the economy of Manchuria.
From being a food and industrial surplus area, she became
poverty-stricken. The people, living in barren houses without
furniture or utensils of any kind, were reduced to the level of
their primitive ancestors. Water became the scarcest of commodities
and, with the reservoirs destroyed, had to be brought up from the
dirty rivers in buckets. City transportation was at a premium. It
ranged from the luxury of a pedicab, to ancient carriage bodies
or automobile chassis, hauled by men, tiny ponies and dogs. A few
families found a new use for the bathtub which they had been able
to salvage. Mounted on rickety wheels, it was used as a public
conveyance, and men, women and children sat huddled together in it.
Sometimes a huge umbrella, Chinese or foreign, protected them from a
scorching sun or a driving rain. It made a grotesque picture indeed!
With the disruption of transportation and the commandeering of
much of the foodstuffs for the troops, obtaining food became the
major problem of the people of Manchuria. Starvation stalked the
cities. Mukden families were reduced to eating dung. So precious
was this commodity that every horse wore a contraption under his
tail resembling a large, crude dust pan to preserve even minute
droppings. The very poor mixed mud with the dung, and after baking
the concoction in the sun used it as food. Hawkers sold it on the
streets.
Just as the Mongols under Genghis Khan burned, looted and tortured
when they invaded Cathay, so the modern Mongols have behaved in
like manner. Some of the more decent among them were so outraged by
these tactics that they deserted and joined the Nationalists. One,
a Colonel, told how he had been ordered to round up bandits and
drive them at bayonet point into villages. Here they were allowed to
pillage, burn and rape to their hearts’ content. While this was being
done, the Communists would remain hidden a short distance away. After
the terror had subsided somewhat, when the village was reduced to
a shambles and the inhabitants were all but insane, the Communists
soldiers would rush in and shoot the bandits, ostensibly to rescue
the villagers. This technique seldom failed to swell the Communist
ranks. All who resisted conversion were, of course, subjected to more
drastic treatment.
Another ex-Communist told of teaching little boys of ten and twelve
to use knives and pistols to murder members of their own families
who refused to cooperate with the Reds. The child criminals became
fugitives and were forced to join the guerrillas in the hills.
Many of the well-to-do managed to get away, where, no one knew, but
the poor, aged and helpless were not exempt from the senseless fury
of the Mongol hordes. They were used at times as object lessons to
demonstrate the pitiless power of the Red Terror. According to an
eye witness, the hands of women and children were sometimes smashed
with mallets and left dangling like raw hamburgers. These utterly
miserable creatures wandered insanely through the streets, moaning
pitifully and gradually dying from loss of blood, infection and
unendurable pain.
At other times, the Communists tied bombs around the bodies of men
and women, carted them to thickly populated areas, lighted the fuses
and left them to explode. This invariably happened at night, when
the effect was more terrifying. These human torches were supposed
to be the unreliable Quislings. The method of their disposal by the
Reds shows how the latter are running true to form. In the days of
Genghis Khan a Quisling was despised. When he had served his purpose,
he was taken out and his throat was slit. As an example, there is
the story of the Battle of Samarkand, when thirty thousand Kankali
Turks, seeing that the victory was going against them, and hoping
to save their lives, deserted to the Mongols. They were received in
a friendly manner and shown every courtesy. Equipped with Mongol
military dress and weapons, they felt welcome and honored. But, alas,
after being royally wined and dined, they were massacred to a man.
Like Stalin, the Mongols had utter contempt for such people.
Conquering armies, however, sometimes get a dose of their own
medicine, and, when they do, it is apt to be fatal. At least it
proved so in the case of the forty Russian soldiers who looted a
Japanese hospital near Mukden. Finding a large vat of alcohol in the
basement, they spent a riotous night, drinking and carousing. The
next morning an officer found all forty of them dead. Evidently they
had never heard of “rubbing” alcohol.
Today, in Manchuria, the Chinese Communists, aided by Russian
technicians and advisors, are rebuilding the country for their
own advantage. It is said that Stalin will use Manchuria as an
experimental training station for Communism. He now controls the
reconstructed railways in and out of this highly strategic area and
requires banks to give them fifty to sixty per cent of their loans
for industrial developments. Some private businesses were told that
they would not be molested, provided they would do all they could to
boost production under Communist supervision. During the last three
years of civil war in China, the Manchurian farmers turned over
4,500,000 tons of grain to the Communists. In spite of this, they are
being urged to PRODUCE FOR THE PEOPLE!—to raise more and more grain
to be exported to Siberia. In Russia’s grandiose scheme of developing
Siberia with Chinese slave labor, the wealth of Manchuria is her
greatest industrial asset.
In contrast to Stalin’s close personal supervision of Manchuria,
experts seem agreed that he will leave China pretty much alone, for
the time being, and let Mao and other leaders of the moment believe
that they are solidifying their positions. Sometime within the next
one, two or three years, he may “liquidate” or “retire” them all and
replace them with the out-and-out Russian Commissars. How soon Stalin
will be able to accomplish this, time alone will tell.