PAGE TWO
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN, LAWRENCE, KANSAS
SEPTEMBER 26,1945
China A Democracy? Maybe, In 50 Years
(Editor's note: This is a dispatch by a member of the United Press Washington staff who has returned from a six-week trip to the Pacific and Far East with a congressional investigating committee.)
By DEAN W. DITTMER (United Press Staff Correspondent)
Washington. (UP)—Pestilence, ignorance, graft, and confusion. Add to that a government on the brink of chaos and you get a rough idea of the situation in China.
If the economic and social condition of China is better now than it used to be, as some people say, then I'm glad I never saw it before.
You won't live long enough to see China become a democracy.
To put it as it was put to me:
The people are too ignorant. It will call for a long process of education.
The American officials are trying to bring about some semblance of peace and order. Some of them say it will take three or four generations to democratize China. Others say it will be at least 50 years.
T. V. Soong, a member of one of China's first families and chairman of the Chinese central executive committee, told some of us at a dinner at his home in Shanghai that China may some day have a democracy, but it will not be like that of the United States.
That's the opinion of U.S. government officials working their hearts out in Shanghai, Nanking, and Peiping.
He said the Chinese are not suited to our kind of democracy and probably wouldn't want our form of government if they had it. He never said just what form he thought Chinese democracy should take.
China's problems are the fundamental problems of all mankind—food, fuel, and shelter. China is short of all three. And there seems to be no immediate hope of improvement.
White Russian, French, and Chinese girls haunt the lobby of the army-controlled Cathay Mansions hotel in Shanghai, hoping to find some nasty officer or American civilian who will take them to the hotel dining room for a meal.
Of course, the girl hopes to be taken to breakfast in the morning, too. By providing meals and a place to sleep, a man can have a mistress as long as he wants.
The venereal disease rate among such women is about 90 per cent.
Shanghai's postwar population is so swollen that ricksha coolies sleep in their rickshas or simply lie down on the sidewalk. Looking out the hotel window early one morning, I counted 23 men and boys of various ages spread out on the sidewalk or curled up in rickshas. That was in one small area.
I told an army officer that I'd heard about people dying in the streets, but had not seen any bodies sorrowed out anywhere.
"If you've got a half hour to take a little walk with me I'll guarantee that you'll see at least 10," he answered.
But I took his word for it. I was on my way to breakfast.
There's more than one reason for Chinese dying in the streets. It's
supposed to bring bad luck to the family to have a Chinese die in the house; so when it appears that death is near the victim is carried into the street to meet his end.
With winter coming on, fuel has become a serious worry in metropolitan areas. Transportation of coal from the coal fields to the cities has been held up by the checker game being played by the Nationalist and communist armies.
There has not been much shooting between the two forces, but armies are scattered here and there throughout China, and the Communists' favorite trick is to take up sections of railroad tracks to prevent the nationalists from moving more troops.
This has been fairly successful. It
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The U.S. army has moved out of Shanghai, lock, stock, and barrel. Shanghai is more of an international settlement than it is Chinese and many of the people there don't like the Americans.
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Commercial interests want United States, ships out of the harbor so they can use it for business, and the nationals of other countries want to be let alone.
In Peiping and other cities, the Americans are liked and wanted. The people there still remember that the United States helped chase out the Japanese.
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