Dr. Hu Shih's contributions to current political thought are always treated with respect, [Sometimes it would be more gratifying to find that the respect twere less marked than practical attention to his interpretation of the march of events. His international reputation must be cold comfort to one who finds that, in hhis own country, his power of guidance is limited to academic The striking article pen, translated elsewhere to-day, contains some Interesting revelations of the Inner working of the Govern-mind. He shows that, in the I been a complete change of attitude towards the communist problem. It is frankly recognise by General Chiang Kai-sh fat' least, as being mainly administrative and only in a limit ed. degree military, This been discernible in the provision made by General Chiang Kaishek for administrative experts to accompany the bandit-suppression troops with the object, of storing the civil organization in districts recovered from the Communists. Unfortunately the evea of recovery has been small. [Successes gained have been mainly in districts only recently overran and have been distinctly limited in scope. Untouched rein large areas, as in South jangsi, Hupeh and Anhui where so-called Soviet Governments as|have been estal How far Dr. Hu Shih is more|accurate in his appraisement of the completeness of the Soviet: feontrol, in definitely creating a. new system of land-ownership, must be left for speculation. Roughly he seems to divide the country into three categories: tareas. where the Communists have managed for a long time to sert their dominance, areas Where they have maintained a precarious footing and areas to Which their activities have, hitherto, not been applied. He rightly describes their methods fas including the complete elimination of the landowner and ithe destruction of the whole system of land-registration. Perhaps he takes too much for granted the theory that the Communists have actually created, fon anything like a large seal system of peasant-proprietor ip. That peasants have been given land and have been buoyed by promises of land-ownership admitted. Generally it would jem to have been the early. fof the Communist propagandist. Tt has not Insted. Return Goverament control. if it definitely implied more ordered conditions, would be warmly wel-feomed. But Dr. Hu Shih is right jin emphasising the impossibility of restoring land-ownership on the old lines in the districts [where complete destruction of records and administrative machinery has taken place. He is false right in indicating that the Government's attempt to proceed fon those lines would preclude a cessation of strife, for the peasants, in spite of their difficulties under the so-called Soviet regime, would look upon the Government as their enemies and the tool of the land-owners. Nothing shows more clearly the {tragic complexity of this problem than Dr, Hu Shih's dispassionate examination of it. Even he fuses to dogmatise on the methods to be employed for its solution, He hints, in fact, that different lines will' have. to be taken in different areas. He is emphatic however on one point: innless the Government reali acts up to General Chiang Kailshek's assertion that the Communist menace is the real problem of the day the whole of the rural economic life }of China will be destroyed, That disaster would be of far greater [significance than any further extension of Japanese aggression.
Once again the leaders at king are told that the chief of a Government, charged with responsibility ' for the destinies of an agricultural people, should be the rehabilitation of rural administration. Dr. {Hu Shih asserts that the Kuomintang creed comprises advocacy Jof peasant-ownership of land, as opposed to the public ownership lof the Communist theory. The Communists, adapting themselves to their environment, have adopted the idea of ownership and go stolen Kuomit tang thunder, Dr. Hu Shih's pr scription may be studied and left to speak for itself, His warning to the Government cannot be too strongly endorsed. While all the energies of the politicians land their leaders seem to be concentrated on the sound and fury generated by the Sino-Japanese clash, there is being fereated in effect a smoke-screen-behind which the "gradual lsapping of the strength of the country is inexorably proceeding. Events in the big cities are merely scratchings on the, sur-{faco of this huge country. They attain to an undeserved import-lance owing to the ease with which modern means of publicity can minister to their exposition, In the last resort the prosperity lof the cities depends on the solidarity and integrity of the real China, absorbed in the task lof wresting a livelihood from the oil. Tt is the real China which being subjected to attack, by the insidious advance of' an Jeconomic paralysis against which military dispositions alone are useless. In the face of it all Jother obsessions are negligible, The Government. which awake to that reality and act upon the revelation will deserve well of China and, having deserved, should, by' dint of appropriate remedies sagely applied, win the political asjeendancy necessary for a general recovery of initiative within and
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.