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is an immense shortage of persons qualified to fill the professions; doctors, engineers, chemists, and even lawyers. In the interests of the future all students are automatically exempt from conscription; so are all those of whatever station in life who have escaped from Japanese occupied territory. There would be no inducement to escape otherwise. Under the circumstances we can appreciate the necessity for these exemptions. When recruits are required for the army, a quota is allocated to each district: the magistrate in turn calls for a levy from each village to fill his quota. Those with money or influence can buy off their sons; it is the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden who are taken. They are roped together, with a loop round the left forearm, so that they can still use the bamboo pole to carry a load, and marched off to the training centre. There many die, and others desert. Indeed, there is now a class of professional deserter. If recruiting is going on in a district, these men will turn up and offer to serve in the place of anyone who has the price. They collect their money, march off with the conscripts, and desert at the first opportunity, to repeat the performance elsewhere. There are means in China of tracing missing men back to their families, but amidst the confusion caused by years of war it is easy for the vagabond to give a false name and address.
There are so many millions of displaced, homeless, nameless people in China now; we should not be too critical of these methods. The wonder is that the Chinese government has been able to carry on at all under such immense difficulties. Instead of an insistence on saving face, and thus misleading world opinion, had there been a reasonable relaxation of the iron censorship in order that the world could learn of the prodigious efforts the Chinese have made, there would, I think, be a better understanding of, and greater sympathy for, China's problems.
The afternoon of the third day we rolled over the iron bridge that spans the North river, a tributary of the West river, into bomb-shattered Kukong. Here I waited for the train and was fortunate to find a carriage, which had been reserved for a party of British sailors from the crews of the gunboats at Hankow; they were being evacuated to Hongkong, and kindly made room for me in their compartment. The track near Canton had been broken during a recent raid. We had to alight there and make our way to the city as best we could; riding through in a rickshaw I had leisure to observe the extent of the