Advice from China

With the authority of one of the Allies' two greatest fighting leaders, in a fighter's forthright style, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek last week told Britain to quit stalling on the subject of India's political freedom. The Gissimo was still visiting in India (TIME, Feb. 23), where he had just talked with Mohandas Gandhi, but his words sounded to faraway London like a thunderclap.

I hope Britain, without waiting for any demand on the part of the Indian people, as speedily as possible will give them real political power so they will be in a position to develop further their spiritual and material strength. The Indian people thus would realize that their participation in the war was not merely to aid anti-aggression nations to secure victory, but also the turning point in their struggle for their own freedom.

These were the words of a man who does not propose to fight for white men's imperialism. He is not a white man himself. He has fought Japan for four and a half years to get political independence and strength for 425,000,000 yellow men. Now that he finds his cause involved in a desperate world war, he wants the full alliance of India's 352,000,000 brown men.

His talk with the most remarkable of them all could only have strengthened his desire. He met Mohandas Gandhi shortly after noon in the marbled and gilded Calcutta mansion of Gandhi's rich cotton-milling backer, Ghanshyamdas Birla. Throughout the conversations, Gandhi spun yarn on a charkha (hand spinning wheel). He talked with the Gissimo through an interpreter, with vivid Mme. Chiang in English. After 80 minutes the Chinese visitors dined, while the Mohandas, as usual, abstained from mid-day eating. The conference continued through Gandhi's evening meal of unleavened cakes, boiled vegetables, goat's milk and fruit. Gandhi gave the yarn he had spun to the Gissimo, the charkha to Mme. Chiang.

Action. The Gissimo's resounding statement on India pumped electricity into India's two greatest political parties, Gandhi's Indian National Congress and the Moslem League. A conference of Indian nonparty leaders, led by liberal Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, at once passed a resolution asking Britain to declare India's position "identical with those of other self-governing units of the British Commonwealth."

In London there were immediate hints that the British Government had understood, as well as heard, the Gissimo. Official circles were loud with rumors that Winston Churchill, who was at last paying considerable attention to his critics (see p. 27), would shortly move to increase India's autonomy. That was a job which, owing to the Hindu-Moslem conflict in India, as well as to Tory opposition at home, would call for real statesmanship. But, after the Gissimo's words, it seemed that Britain might tackle the job.

Asia for the Asiatics. Throughout the democratic world, in fact, there was a growing appreciation of the point of view eloquently expressed last week by U.S. Pundit Walter Lippmann:

"It has never seemed possible to the pre-Singapore British Government that it could apply the principles of the Atlantic Charter east of Suez. . . . The Western nations must now do what hitherto they lacked the will and the imagination to do: they must identify their cause with the freedom and the security of the peoples of the East, putting away the 'white man's burden' and purging themselves of the taint of an obsolete and obviously unworkable white man's imperialism.

"We are at war with Japan because we refuse to sell out China and make a deal with Japan. . . .

"We have reason to think that the peoples of Asia will believe us. ... The Filipinos know that under American law their own independence is assured to them. ... In this partnership now being demonstrated on the Bataan Peninsula there is no question of imperialism, of the white man's burden, of privileges and concessions. This is the only kind of partnership that deserves to work. It is the only kind of partnership that can work."

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