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Show cAmO tf/s~ WRITER VIEWS CHINA AS KEY TO PROSPERITY By ANNA LOUISE STRONG Author of "China's Millions/' "Red Star in Samarkand," and "The World's New West" The slickest way to beat the depression for at least another decade is to develop the interior of China. The four or five Southwestern provinces, where the Chinese Government is now located, are economically similar to the United States of 75 years ago-large, populous, energetic, but without the railroads, power plants, steel mills that America has today. To furnish those things would keep American industry busy with a minimum financial risk and without involving us in war. , The Chinese Government today is officially located at Chungking, 1400 miles up the Yangtze. River in Szechwan Province, beyond the famous Yangtze gorges, impassable to large war craft. Whenever in the past 2000 years China has been hard pressed by invaders, her ruling class, scholars, artists, and elite generally, have moved to this up-river province and held out there for a couple of hundred years. No Japanese statesman dares intimate that the Japanese armies will go up-river to Chungking. It can't be done. The best the Japanese can hope is to wear the Chinese out by holding j their access to. the sea, the Yangtze j mouth. But-that inland province is called ' by the Chinese the "Heavenly Resi- ; dence." It deserves the name. Every j variety of climate and crop is found ! at different altitudes. The famous '1 Red Basin is there, an irrigated j farm paradise producing two crops j annually-from wheat to luscious | oranges and sugar cane. It has a I population of 70,000.000 and a cli- j mate that combines the best features of California, Florida, Iowa and the Dakotas. SIX NEW HIGHWAYS In the past two years China has built six long highways, each connecting Szechwan with a different province. One runs down river to Hankow, one northeast to Shansi, others southeast, south and southwest to Hunan, Kweichow and Yunnan, and the last, still under construction, due west to the Sikong mountains and deserts. Another southwestern province, Kwangsi, has older means of communication, and is famous as China's best organized territory. These provinces, less populous than Szechwan, and permanently safe from Japanese invasion, contain the equivalent of America's population today. Millions of Chinese have followed their Government inland. Refugees from the coastal plains are eager for jobs in reclaiming lands and building highways. Skilled workers from the coastal factories bring with them modern outlook and modern methods. Intellectual leaders, too, have moved to the interior. Chengtu, in the Red Basin, has already replaced Peiping as China's university center. Famous universities, thousands of years old, packed up library, laboratories, students and faculty and went inland to continue their labors far from the flurry of war. From the "Heavenly Residence" you can look in all directions and see untapped, almost unprospected, wealth. The new roads open up territory much of which never saw a wheeled cart. Since 1929 Chinese geologists have invaded this 'unter-land; since the war they have been working with feverish haste. They have uncovered large quantities of minerals of all kinds. The latest discovery was oil. |