million Chinese emigrate to Malaysia. A hundred
thousand or more shift from North China to Man-
churia and Mongolia. The political control of these
territories may be temporarily in other hands, but
they are being peopled with Chinese.
The classic culture of China has dominated Asia
for twenty centuries. The basis of Japanese culture is
thoroughly and absolutely Chinese. The Chinese
people, though today ignorant and illiterate, are a
people of great potential mentality.
Physically the Chinese are the most virile mass in
the world. They have more endurance. They have
less ‘“‘nerves.” They undergo without serious or
long-standing results operations that would either
kill the Occidental or lay him up indefinitely. They
stand high fevers and recover from blood poisonings
of which white men die. Instances are recorded
where peasants from the fields, unaccustomed to
running, have carried chairs and burdens of one
~ hundred and ten pounds each forty miles across
two mountain ranges, between sunrise and sunset.
Factors IN CHINA'S IMPORTANCE
I IS becoming plainer every day that the Chinese
are a mass of people who must be reckoned with in
world affairs. Twenty years ago John Hay said:
“The storm-center of the world has gradually shifted
to China. . . . Whoever understands that mighty
empire socially, politically, economically, religiously,
has a key to world politics for the next five centuries.”
It has been well pointed out that it is not her
people alone who will make China the dominant
factor in world life tomor-
row. Three things about
China’s wealth must be re-
membered: First, a fifth of
her arable land is untilled.
Even so, her land base is
large enough to feed her
own people permanently,
provided she retains the art
of intensive agriculture. She
has not a science of agricul-
ture, but during forty cen-
turies the Chinese have
learned how to grow more
food for longer periods on
the same land, without
exhausting the soil, than
any other people. As China
expands westward towards
Europe she will, even with
another four hundred mil-
lion people, still be self-
contained.
Second, China has, with
the possible exception of
Africa, the largest undevel-
oped natural resources in
the world. She has not so
much iron as Brazil, but
APRIL, 1629
Herbert Photos, Inc.
a coin.
An American sailor gives a Chinese beggar
America has done much to help
China to its feet as a self-respecting nation
Brazil has no coal. China has ten thousand million
tons of both hard and soft coal, which are just be-
ginning to be touched. There are hard and soft coal
in every province in China. There is a sufficient
supply of all the useful metals. According to Julean
Arnold, our commercial attaché at Peking, the
Chinese consume one ton of coal to every twenty-
three persons, whereas in the United States six
tons are set to work to a person.
Third, China's rivers have never yet been utilized
for motive power. The unused water of the Yangtse-
kiang would do what the Mississippi and all the
rivers of the Atlantic seaboard do for the mills of
the United States. The Yangtse has the most
densely populated river valley in the world, and it
lies directly in one of the great east-west trading
routes of the present and of the future.
The man power of China is virile, industrious, and
full of a native capacity for understanding mechanics.
Instances are recorded of the skill of Chinese work-
men without experience who have repaired bicycles
and manufactured ball bearings. They have repro-
duced all manner of Western machines. A foreman
in a Shanghai shipyard that was building thirty
million dollars’ worth of ships for American interests,
said that Chinese mechanics, while slower than
English and American workmen, had an irdustrial
capacity that was 8o per cent of what the Western
nations had developed in a hundred years.
Give this people the use of steel and coal and
motive power, and China becomes the greatest
potential industrial country of the earth. She al-
ready exports nearly as
much silk as Japan, and
probably makes more than
Japan for her home con-
sumption.
NAPOLEON ON CHINA
CENTURY ago Na-
poleon said, ‘When
China is moved, she will
move the world.” Think
of the dreadful possibilities
involved when this nation,
with 62,000,000 men of
military age, is arrned with
modern weapons of destruc-
tion! And China’s millions
today are seething with
hatred against the nations
of the West.
China is one of ‘‘ the kings
from the sun rising,” who in
the final movements of
earth’s history will come to
participate in that greatest
conflict of all — the Arma-
geddon war of the great day
of God. (Revelation 16: 12-
16.) (Continued on page 31)
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