THAT EVENING WE reached Nanking.
Place-names lend a certain colour, a tang of actuality, to the discussion of international politics. When a man tells us that the Wilhelmstrasse is waiting for a lead from Warsaw, or that Tokyo has got her eyes on Moscow, it sounds rather grand and romantic. We are duly impressed by a hint that Rome is much nearer to Washington than she was a month ago, though the statement is on the face of it absurd. It is a harmless and even beneficent form of snobbery, this bandying of place-names by the world-minded, and it is effective for two reasons. In the first place, it fleetingly recalls the diplomatic world of Ouida and Oppenheim, that wonderful world where chancelleries are always tottering, and across which King’s Messengers post madly to and fro, hotly pursued by beautiful women with a penchant for wearing secret treaties next the skin. In the second place, the use of place-names puts the whole rather abstract discussion on a more concrete plane and often links us personally, though remotely, with its subject; for, whereas we find it quite impossible to visualize the Japanese Government, we have a cousin in Tokyo and only last week received a postcard from him. And in any case, however little we (or our cousins) have travelled, there is in our minds some visual image – the Kremlin, the Eiffel Tower, the Acropolis – associated with the name of every capital city.
Or rather, of almost every capital city. There are exceptions, and one important one. Nanking is the capital of a country with a population of 400 millions; but when anybody says, ‘Well, the next move must come from Nanking’, there arises in our minds none of those helpful little pictures of a building, or a monument, or a delicacy, or an exiled friend, which reinforce our interest in the policies of other capitals. Few foreigners go to Nanking, and fewer still stay there. It is indeed so little known that the producers of Shanghai Express were able with impunity to ignore not only the capital but the principal river of China; the latter must be crossed by ferry, and the former briefly visited, by all passengers on what the film portrayed as a through journey.
Nanking is far, though perhaps not very far, from deserving this obscurity. Of the old city, sacked in the Taiping Rebellion, little remains save the walls, breached, unkempt, no longer encircling. To-day the charm of the place lies in the contrast, sharply presented at a hundred points, between the old and the new, the real (one is tempted to say) and the unreal China.
The city is spacious. There is plenty of elbow room, and this is rare in China. On a piece of waste land, fronting an asphalt boulevard, stands a Government office, brand new, reasonably palatial, and still not quite completed. It is not very beautiful, but it looks business-like. The sentries at its gates wear smart yellow uniforms; in spite of the broiling sun they are in full marching order, with packs, blankets, mess-tins, and water-bottles, for this gives the whole building ‘face’. It is all very modern and progressive.
But behind the building there is a huddle of huts of mud and matting, and the thin blue smoke of economical cooking – fires, and a community of people whose life is as intricate and precarious as the patches on their clothes. The click of administrative typewriters is drowned by the cries of naked children escorting water-buffaloes to wallow in the numerous pools. Nine-tenths of the capital is a congeries of villages: the rest is a bold façade. When the seaplanes on the up-river service roar low overhead to land, trailing a white furrow on the yellow Yangtse, no one’s attention is distracted from a shrill, bitter, and inconsequently-ended quarrel between two sisters-in-law over ten coppers. In the evening the tall towers of the broadcasting station stand up against the sunset; but it is a professional story-teller, prattling and posturing in a dirty alley, who has the people’s ear.
For all this Nanking is a brave monument to progress, or to the wish for progress: a monument not without humorous decorations. There is the Stadium, where tier upon tier of empty seats rise about a sea of weeds, now so deep and dense that the cost of clearing it to hold an athletic meeting would be all but prohibitive. There is the Swimming Bath which, since it could only be filled by depriving the Orphanage of its water supply, has long since been cracked and fissured by the sun. There is the fine large building which is not quite so fine or so large as it should have been, because the contractor shrunk it, by knocking ten per cent off all the measurements, to make sure of his profit. There is the disposition of the Government offices which, in a town where distances are enormous and all business is transacted by committees, compels every public man to spend a quarter of his working day in his car.
Although Nanking is the capital of China, Russia is the only power which has transferred thither from Peking the official headquarters of her diplomatic representatives. In this country the question of moving the British Legation to Nanking is periodically mooted.
In China it is mooted seldom, and then in a more or less academic spirit. There are two main arguments in favour of the move – one (the ‘face’ argument) that it would enhance the prestige of the Nanking Government, and the other that it would enable the British Minister to keep in closer touch with the currents of Chinese politics. The first argument is unanswerable, the second valid with qualifications. Though neither is likely, at any rate for the next half century, to prevail against the fundamental considerations of expense, the second argument is worth examining.
The Councillor of the British Legation is – or has been for the last few years – stationed at Nanking almost ex officio. Also, Nanking is within two hours of Peking by air. It cannot therefore be argued that the diplomats at Peking are wholly, or anything like wholly, out of touch with the modern seat of government. Nor is the value of closer contact either overwhelmingly or continuously apparent. In the summer of 1933, for instance, there were three men who counted in Chinese administrative circles. One of these, Mr. T. V. Soong, was attending the World Economic Conference in London. Another, General Chiang Kai-shek, was up-river at Kuling or Nanchang, preparing for his anti-Communist campaign. Only the third, Mr. Wang Ching Wei, was in Nanking. Politics in China were as nearly at a standstill as they can be.
Peking is admittedly a backwater; but a costly and potentially insecure anchorage in midstream is not worth much if the current is liable at any moment to run, temporarily or permanently, in other channels.
I have said nothing of two other factors in the situation. One, the wishes of the diplomats themselves, who may be excused for preferring a post with many social, sporting, and climatic advantages to one without them. Two, the question of the Legation Guard, which, since the Boxer siege of 1901, has been established in the British Legation with three months’ supplies for the whole community contained within its walls, and which could not be transferred to Nanking without special treaty provision.
These factors are minor ones in a situation which is governed in the last analysis by considerations of economy. Money spent on moving our Legation to Nanking would be money well spent: but only moderately well spent, and only that in a period of exceptional prosperity.