Only a few times have I been moved so deeply by the sight of land as I was when I saw China for the first time from the sky. As we descended from high altitude after flying over the Himalayas, I saw scarred land down below, showing every mark of human toil. Small blocked-off farms stood side by side, and every valley and hill, some steep and as high as mountains, was cultivated to the very top.
From the sky there was so much beauty on the face of the good earth that peasants tilled to make productive. Yet when I went out to visit the rice fields and farms around Kunming in the short time we stayed there during the early summer of 1944, I saw a picture of poverty and struggling humanity which in many ways made me recall the lean years we farmers spent on coffee farms in Kona.
But here the conditions were much worse, with a brutal sharecropping system where the landlords took from 50 to 60 per cent of the crop for land rent alone: I had little to do then so I watched the peasants! toil from early dawn to nightfall. When I went into the city of Kunming I saw pompous, porky and smooth-skinned landlords drinking and dining and wasting food.
All this reminded me of the feudal Japan which my parents had left to work in the sugar cane plantations in Hawaii as contract laborers. Mother frequently told us stories of planting rice in paddies, of the high land rent, of the teahouses which the well-to-do patronized and of the daughters of poor peasants who were sold to the teahouses so that the families would be able to pay their debts to landlords.
I thought of Georgia, too. Of its "Tobacco Road" where the poor whites were so undernourished that they were exhausted before they started the day. The Rev. Ira S. Caldwell, who had taken me around the white sharecroppers, asked me: "What can you expect when human beings have lived on corn bread for generations and this whenever they can get it?" And Mrs. Caldwell had told me that "Tobacco Road" is an international belt road for the poor.
Here in China was "Tobacco Road" and I asked myself, What was the solution? Just as in the sharecropping South, the problem in Asia was land tenancy. Among the hundreds of millions in Asia, easily 80 per cent lived directly off the land. The pressing issue was land reform. More than 20 years had passed since the great Dr. Sun Yat-sen had raised the slogan of "Land To the Tillers!" but Chiang Kai-shek had not carried out this program.
I Heard the Same Distressing Voices
I felt that being far away from home and looking at these problems in a most acute manner made me see conditions to Hawaii with better perspective. Thus, there were many occasions when I went over in my mind what general points I remembered of the speeches and writings of Hawaii's labor leaders and liberal politicians of the '30s who influenced my thinking in varying degrees.
There were times when I thought of the Crozier-brothers, Clarence and Willie, who lambasted the Territory's land monopolists during political elections. I could understand land monopoly quite well because I had suffered from it is a farmer.
In Kunming I heard the same distressing voices my ears had become so accustomed to in Colombo and India. On narrow, cobblestoned streets of Kunming I saw GIs hurrying away as emaciated, sore-covered beggars in tattered rags ran after them.
"Joe, no papa, no mama, no first sergeant," old Chinese who don't speak English said, in begging for money. Prostitutes limped up to touch GIs along dark streets, rasping "Hey, Joe! Hey, Joe!" Their vulgar, accented English, all that they knew, flowed with a mixture of cussing and swearing they had learned from GIs. Like souvenir peddlers and money changers and pimps, these prostitutes used the famed "battle cry of Kunming."
"You say how much!" they said with a strong challenge, if one even as much as paused or said a word to them. I
Part of the Whole Life and Death Struggle
All this was part of the whole life and death struggle going on everywhere. These people had been swept into the backwash of society. Some of them were ex-concubines who had been discarded by rich businessmen or landlords. They were like daughters of poor Japanese peasants who were sold to teahouses to pay off family debts.
I frequently heard GIs and officers say that there were too many Indians or Chinese. Their remarks were directed at the poor. If one went out to the countryside to investigate, he would have found that the poor in this semi-feudal economy actually produced the wealth and the rich took away the harvest of their hard toil. There were too many absentee landlords feasting in the cities. There weren't too many Chinese or too many Indians. There was not an equitable distribution of the fruits of labor.
Individual Advancement of Itself Means Nothing
In face of all this misery, I often thought to myself that individual advancement means nothing. An individual would play a constructive role by devoting his best efforts, although limited, to bettering the livelihood of the masses.
When we arrived in China, our limited troops at forward Chinese air bases were being evacuated as we gave up airfields in the face of Japanese attacks. We heard evacuated GIs grumbling that the American press did not give them the truth about the fighting in China. They told us that the Chinese Nationalists were not fighting and had been sitting out the war from about 1940.
This was unbelievable to almost every GI who arrived in China, because the American press had been playing up for years Nationalist resistance to beat the band. A few months later this news of non-resistance which had been suppressed by Chiang Kai-shek's government for about four years, shocked the American public.
Chiang's Officers Acted Worse Than the Routed British In Burma
A sergeant who was thoroughly disgusted, occupied a bunk next to mine at Kunming. He told me of the racketeering Chinese contractors who took American money to build airfields, conscripted peasant labor and paid them almost nothing. He said the peasants blamed the Americans for this treatment. And when the Japanese drove toward our air bases and bombed them at night, Chinese traitors lit fires to mark off target areas. The sergeant was aghast at the passive mood of Chinese commanders whose first concern was evacuation of family and loot on military vehicles and on wagons they stripped from the local peasantry. They acted like the British colonialists who frantically ran away from Burma, turning guns on. natives who wanted to use the roads, river barges and vehicles. Chiang Kai-shek's army did more — they looted.
So bad was the treatment of the local people by Chiang's' armies in Honan Province the peasants rose up with pitchforks, sickles and knives to attack General Tang En-po's few hundred thousand soldiers. The ired populace timed their uprising with a Japanese attack and shouted: "Better the Japanese than Tang Eri-po!" Three hundred thousand soldiers dropped their rifles and gladly fled. They probably went home to sharecropping, for they, too had come from farms and evidently appreciated the feelings, of the peasants.
Recruits Tied With Ropes To Prevent Escape
Many of them had been dragged into the army by local landlord elements, with hands bound so they could not escape. There were too, many recruits who were brought to the American training center in Kunming who had been impressed into military service in this manner.
But porky landlords' sons and young, slick-haired speculators in the cities were never drafted. Soldiering was the most degrading profession in China and the poorest were impressed into it.
What were they fighting for? Did they know? These and other questions made me observe the peasants in uniform closely.