ONE OF the most decisive battles of the Three Kingdom period (221-265 A.D.) was fought at Wu-chang, and it was won by China's most renowned strategist, Chu Ko-liang. Once again the attention of the world is riveted on this place in Central China, where Hankow, Wu-chang, and Han-yang form a triple settlement called the Wuhan cities. With the fall of An-king, capital of Anhui Province, on June 13, the Japanese advance against China's present national capital got under way.
Hankow, it was declared on several occasions, will be defended at all cost, and many observers look to the forthcoming battle as a decisive one. Certain is that the further spread of the Yellow River floods in Eastern
Honan have insured Hankow against any attack from the north and the north-west, leaving the Yangtze Valley as the only approach. But this course is fraught with dangers for the invader, whose fleet could be caught between two booms and whose land forces might find their communications cut off by the rising waters. It is therefore likely that the Japanese drive will be directed across Po-yang Lake towards Nan-chang, with the attempt to strike at the Hankow-Canton Railway south of Wuhan and thus cut off the latter from its main line of retreat. At the same time the Chinese troops, comprising Chang Fahkwei's famous "Ironsides," are offering a most stubborn resistance, and the Chinese air fleet during the month of July had the opportunity of causing considerable damage to the Japanese fleet concentrated in the River, proof of which was furnished by travellers who near Shanghai saw several warships, including a small aircraft carrier, being towed downstream.
Meanwhile the Japanese air force is continuing the bombing of Canton, Swatow and other Chinese cities, having recently added Kiu-kiang and Hankow to the list of its objectives.
The question "Has the Canton bombing been indiscriminate?" has been answered with "Yes" in a pamphlet issued recently by the Canton Committee for justice to China, in which it is stated that the bombing of power stations government offices, residences of government officials, as well as of cultural institutions and national monuments such as the Sun Yat Sen Memorial and the Sun Yat Sen University show a deliberate effort to paralyse the life of the civilian and not the military population.
In spite of the daily bombing, the Hankow-Canton Railway manages to maintain operations almost without interruption; it has shown a Ch.$4,060,000 profit for the first six months of this year, and recently announced the establishment of a bi-weekly through passenger train service between Kowloon and Hankow. By this railway twenty-six German military advisers, headed by General Von Falkenhausen, left Hankow on July 5 in obedience to the order of the German Government and 110 British Bluejackets left Hongkong for Hankow in order to reinforce the British garrison in the Wuhan cities.
The news from the battlefront "in the rear" indicate increasing organization and effectiveness of the guerilla warfare which is spreading in such widely separated places as the neighbourhood of Shanghai, Northern
Hopei, and even the South China coast. On the anniversary of the Lukouchiao incident the Japanese troops found themselves battling near the point where the opening shots of the present war had been fired. Japanese reports admit that the Eighth Route Army is extending its operations northward into East Hopei and Southern Jehol, and a Reuters despatch from Mukden early in July reported serious concern of the authorities over an unprecedented increase in large scale fires in a number of important Manchurian centres.
Hand in hand with the successes goes the tightening of the hold which the Red Nationalists are exerting on the central part of Hopei Province. A graphic account by W. B. Pennell in the July issue of Oriental Affairs admitted that "actually the Red Nationalists have beaten the Japanese to it . . . . No progress whatsoever has been made since the conference of the magistrates and officers of the Special Military Missions in their efforts to control the area beyond the railways, while the Reds have made extraordinary progress."
Missionaries coming out from this area confirm the facts that the territory is being run by keen and active young men who are doing a remarkably good job of rehabilitation and re-organization. They have
established hundreds of primary schools; several newspapers carry the latest news from Hankow and from the front; they have their own arsenals, an efficient propaganda corps, a strict passport system and a very elaborate spy organization. The problems tackled by them are not only political and administrative but also economic. They have vowed to attack any Japanese project in North China and for a beginning have ordered a reduction by no less than 90 per cent of the area planted with cotton, grain being now grown instead to insure self-sufficiency in foodstuffs.
Their sphere of power is not limited to Central Hopei but extends to Northern Shantung and to Northern and Southern Shansi. In the former province they are substituting for tobacco the planting of cereals and other foodstuffs. "In the whole of Shantung," writes Mr. Pennell, "east of the railway and north of the Yellow River there are no Japanese." In South Shansi, reports another correspondent, "five miles and less from the railway the Chinese forces are in possession, and it looks as though they could carry on the present guerrilla warfare indefinitely . . ."
It becomes more and more evident that, rapid as the Japanese advance had been in numerous instances, the area actually controlled by the Japanese forces is in many provinces smaller than it was earlier during the
hostilities; in other words, that while pushing forward their offensive on the main battle fronts they have been losing ground in the rear. Such tactics are dangerous, to say the least, and the question how they can be squared with the intention of developing and exploiting the occupied areas as a whole remains unanswerable. Military victories alone do not insure the victory in the war.
From China's South-west comes the announcement of the completion of the Yunnan-Burma highway, with the restriction, though, that most likely the road will not be in really fit condition before autumn. Its commercial and economic possibilities are now being canvassed, and there is much talk of undeveloped mineral resources the exploitation of which it will make possible. Work is being pushed on the new railway linking Chen-nan Kuan (on the border of Kuangsi and Indo-China) with Nan-ning and Kuei-lin, which is expected to be in operation by July 1939. Mills are being erected in Kuei-yang, Kun-ming and Chung-king.
More important, perhaps, than the construction of a new road or railway is the fact that China's culture 
has moved into the formerly despised interior. All accounts from the occupied areas, with the exception
of perhaps Tientsin and Peking, make it quite clear that by far the vast majority of the intelligentsia left before the occupation. (This fact alone is in part responsible for the inability of the Japanese to obtain the collaboration of Chinese of standing. China has discovered her West. Educators, engineers, writers, dramatists, painters, students and scholars, are all now working in the new inland centres of the country. Hand in hand with the economic reconstruction of this former "Wild West" goes a stirring-up of vast masses of peasantry who up to now had been content to lead the simple, circumscribed life of past centuries. Slowly, a new culture is in the making, and it is worthwhile for the world to watch what will eventually emerge from this long forgotten region.
