Air Transport to China Advised

One hundred planes with a monthly carrying load of 9,000 tons would replace the loss of the Burma Road, writes H. D. Fong, Economic Expert in the Chinese Ministry of Economics. Mr. Fong was formerly Dean of Nankai University College of Commerce.

Mr. Fong's is an article in the Harvard Business Review which points out that Japan's economic reorganization of Occupied China has produced only limited gains, while China has greatly strengthened herself economically. In particular Japan has failed to make Occupied China a source of supply of foodstuffs and raw materials.

Mass resistance in Occupied China through substitution of subsistence for cash crops by the rural population has bitterly disappointed the Japanese military. In Free China, however, agriculture has prospered. Crop yields have increased 30 per cent, and cooperative societies have sprung up with 8,000,000 members. Villages that used to consider the semi-monthly slaughter of a pig an event now slaughter them daily.

While the Japanese have had some success in coordinating transportation in Occupied China, Free China under Chiang Kai Shek has built thousands of miles of roads, including the great Burma Road and the Chinese-Soviet highway, one of the world's longest.

Transportation in Free China is not a problem of lack of roads now, says Mr. Fong, but lack of equipment and gasoline. He cites cases, as in the Burma Road, where as high as 50 per cent of the trucks stood idle along the road because of lack of parts. Two out of three gallons of gasoline sent to Free China have been used up on the Burma Road.

Industrially, China lost to Japan early in the war, a large part of its consumer industries located on the coast. But now hundreds of factories and thousands of skilled workers have been relocated in Free China. Concerning this industrial growth, Mr. Fong writes:

"Modern industry, relatively unknown in this part of prewar China, has been successfully introduced under government leadership and encouragement. State ownership and operation of the heavy industries, private capitalism with government regulation for the light industries, and cooperation for small-scale, decentralized, handicraft industries, and agriculture-all of which develop rapidly in the course of war-promise to give now forms of economic organization that may be further developed in a post-war China."