138
might be more useful outside. The Japanese had not yet occupied all the coast; foreign ships were still sailing to the unoccupied ports. I slipped out to Ningpo, intending to remain a few days while watching to see which way the cat jumped: but instead of attacking Hongkong, the Japanese landed at Chinhai, at the mouth of the Ningpo river, and I was thus cut off. After a fortnight they withdrew, leaving guard ships to watch the approaches. In the meantime the Chinese had mined the Ningpo river to deny entry to Japanese ships.
I was shut in at Ningpo for three months during the heat of the summer. It was my first contact for two years with unoccupied China. With the restrictions imposed, first by the impediments arising from the Japanese war with China, and in the second place by the shortage of shipping and exports consequent on the war with Germany in Europe, British trade in the interior of China was at a standstill. The large British firms found it commercially unprofitable to keep their staff in many of the remaining treaty ports of free China, and withdrew them to Shanghai and Hongkong. British opinion thus, on the one hand, tended to lose touch with conditions in free China, while, on the other, was increasingly exposed to impression by the Japanese, who swarmed so actively in the occupied ports. The British were no more at fault than the Americans or the French, but for the Americans the balance was to some extent redressed by their larger and more vocal upcountry missionary organisation; as British interests out-numbered those of the other powers, so did the Chinese tend to concentrate criticism on them for continued failure to realise that China was fighting the battle of the democracies.
A particularly unfortunate failure was the continued indifference shewn to the Chinese Government at Chungking. While it was still in Nanking, with branch divisions in Shanghai, foreign firms had extensive contacts with all the various departments, but when the Government was driven first to Hankow, and then to Chungking, no attempt was made to follow and nurse those contacts. The Chinese Government in its extremity would have welcomed any display of sympathy and was affronted by this neglect, but the large firms continued to treat their business in the Capital at the level of the small and remote treaty port, which Chungking had been. One consequence, for instance, occurred in 1943, when the two leading British banks belatedly decided to open branches in Chungking. The Chinese kept them waiting six months on the doorstep.