Rotary International

Chunghking—Synonym for Courage

F'rom time to time as scraps of informa-
tion have come to the central office of the
secretariat from Rotary clubs in China, that
information has been relayed to Rotary
clubs through the News Letter, and to the
officers and committeemen of R.I. through
the Secretary’s letter. George Fitch, a Rotar-
ian for twenty years, formerly a member of
the Rotary Clubs of Shanghai and Nanking,

You may be surprised to see me,
an American, standing before you
as president of the Chungking club,
and may ask: “Why isn’t the presi-
dent a Chinese?” Our clubs over
there are all more or less interna-
tional in their membership, and it
has been the custom in most of them
to alternate Chinese with foreign—
American, British, or Dutch, or other
nationals—as president...

Incidentally, life in Free China
these days is not easy, nor does the
Rotary club find it easy to maintain
regular meetings. We know what it
is to have to rush out from a meet-
ing and take shelter in the caves
that honeycomb Chungking. We
have seen houses all about us col-
lapse as if they had been made: of
pasteboard. We have had thousands
and thousands killed or brutally
maimed almost at our side, and
sometimes it just hasn’t been possi-
ble to hold a meeting for weeks and
weeks on end.

There were months when the Jap-
anese came over day and night. I
remember one period when for eight
days and nights we had hardly any
sleep. To my mind it is amazing the
way that comparatively small hand-
ful of Rotarians in Chungking have
stuck by their guns. They are in-
spired by the principles, the ideals
of Rotary, the Chinese and foreign
group alike, and are determined
that, though Rotary has for the time
being been eclipsed in those great
coastal cities of China—they can no
longer function under Japanese rule
—they are determined that Rotary
shall not die in Free China...

Most of the buildings in Chung-
king have been destroyed. Many
have been rebuilt today, of course,
but one after another of the places
where we held our luncheon meet-

ings, or “tiffin” as we call it there,
were bombed out of existence, or so
seriously damaged that they could
not be used.

Sometimes we would meet in a
Chinese restaurant and have a Chi-
nese meal, only to find that the next
week it was gone ... Recently we
have been fortunate in being able to
have the main dining room of the
new Victory Hotel. The room will
seat only fifty people, the furnish-
ings are of the most primitive type...

Finances are one of our greatest
problems. The cost of living in
Chungking, in all West China, has
gone up from between sixty to sev-
enty-fold—not sixty to seventy per
cent but sixty to seventy-fold—six
thousand to seven thousand per
cent. And many of our members are
finding it extremely difficult just to
exist under those circumstances.
Most government offices, the banks
and some of the institutions, give
living allowances. Of course, that
helps their employees to ameliorate
this difficulty but even a vice cabinet
minister today receives so little in
comparison with what it costs to live
and support his family that he has
to count the pennies, and when he
has to pay out $35 in national cur-
rency—which is only $1.75 over here
—for luncheon, and a pretty light
luncheon at that, he has to think
twice before doing it.

Of our members, a few are in edu-
cational or mission work and they
are the most seriously affected. And
yet these men do so feel the impor-
tance of carrying on that many of
them, practically all of them, are
making great sacrifices in order to
attend those meetings regularly...

You can easily imagine life in a
city like Chungking, with refugees

“GS x

*

China, and in 1942-48, president of the Ro-
tary Club of Chungking, represented the
Rotary Club of Chungking at the St. Louis
convention. He attended the club presidents’
assembly and, at the invitation of the chair-
man, described how the Rotary Club of
Chungking is carrying on. Here are some
excerpts from his talk:

coming from the East, forced out as
they have been by the millions by
the Japanese. Between forty and fif-

' ty million Chinese have been forced

from their homes to wander, most of
them they know not where. Among
these are many of the very finest
type of people, university professors,
professional men, governmental offi-
cials, and others.

We have thousands of ‘“warphans”
as they call them, children who have
been made orphans by this war, and
over five million Chinese soldiers
have been killed in this terrible war.
We have our air raid victims. One of
the most serious disasters occurred
during eighteen hours of continu-
ous alert, when people were not al-
lowed to leave the shelters, these
underground caverns dug by human
hands out of the rock. The air natu-
rally gets bad, stifling, people be-
come sick, panic strikes into their
hearts as the bombs fall directly
overhead, and disaster occurs. Such
a disaster occurred only a little over
a year ago when more than two
thousand people were trampled to
death in a panic which ensued. So
our problem in that regard is in
gaining enough funds to be of as-
sistance, and I wish at this time to
thank those clubs here in America
which have remembered us and sent
funds to the Rotary Club of Chung-
king for distribution for these
worthy enterprises...

In spite of these things that we
face out there, Rotary in China still
carries on and is planning for ex-
pansion. A new club will shortly be
opened in that great city halfway
between Hongkong and Chungking
known as Kweilin, the halfway stop
on the old air route. And we are
looking to establish clubs in other
parts of that country.