es | ce TT |

omy.

Pipe ow

ie : Pees is
anada |

flourish ng trade with other nations, but
this one example should suffice.

handicraft products. Soya beans, tea,
tung oil, hog bristles, and raw silk are

among her major exports. Tung oil
* and hog bristles are of particular value

China trade

and women to build Canadian bottoms

mean jobs — and peace, for as Leslie
for the China trade. Hale, a British MP, has said, “If you ;

Trade with People’s China, and the really want to get understanding, start
development of other markets, would trading. It’s the best way.”

How large a market could People’s
China provide?
An almost bottomless market.

At the beginning of 1953, People’s
China launched her first Five-Year Plan,
to commence, on a gigantic scale, the

_ industrialization of the whole country.
New railways are being built, hydro-elec-
tric plants erected, heavy industries
created. To ask if the Chinese are in
the market for materials and machines
at this time, is quite like asking a man
who is about to build a house if he
needs nails.

Just. what could Canada sell China?
_ One thing for certain; People’s China
is in need of all kinds of machinery.
Nan-Chen has said:

“China needs to buy from various
countries still more industrial mach-
inery, equipment, raw materials and
various industrial products as well as
all sorts of agricultural and livestock
products .. .”

Just what has People’s China to of-
fer in trade?

Chna has long been world-famous for
her abundant agricultural, mineral and

to western industry.

How can business be done with Peo-
pie’s China?

Businessmen may make direct con-
tact by mail with the China Committee
for Promotion of International Trade in
Peking or with that committee’s office in
Berlin, in Eastern Germany.
,And businessmen who are seriously in-
terested in trade with People’s China
may do what is customary when they

wish to trade with firms in other coun-'

tries: go to People’s China!

It was impressed upon us while. in
People’s China that Canadian trade dele-
gations, official or unofficial, would be
made most welcome.

*

We in Vancouver have a particular
stake in opening trade with People’s
China. It takes little imagination to
picture the prosperity it would bring
to the Vancouver waterfront.

On the strength of trade with People’s
China our merchant navy, now ongthe
verge of utter extinction, could be re-
built, giving employment to seamen now
on the beach. British Columbia ship-
yards could employ thousands of men

Miss Mary Jennison, secretary of the*Canadian Peace Congress,
pictured on her visit to People’s China last year.

By WALTER ILLSLEY

A hase idea of a Chinese engineer lean-
ing out of a locomotive window
m ght surprise many Westerners, so
deeply ingrained is our concept of
China as a bamboo-and-rice-growing,
rickshaw-pulling nation. All the
more surprising would be the sight
of Chinese steel mill workers hand-
ling red-hot railway rails, or. a Chi-
nese girl crane operator sitting high:
~ overhead, lowering the boiler of a
new locomotive onto its chassis.

Yet the new Chungking-Chengtu.
railway was supplied with rails from,
Chungking steel mills and even the
locomotives were built in China.

Although People’s China is not yet
an industrialized nation, the wide-
spread conception that the Chinese
people are unable to master indus-
& trial skills is quite erroneous. China’s
failure to develop modern industry
was due to social and political condi-
tions, not to technical ineptitude.

Ch'nese. workers amply demon-
strated their skill and ingenuity long
before the present drive toward in-
dustrialization. The ancient salt wells
of Szechuen, drilled 1,000 feet deep
with bamboo—not steel—cable, can.
command the respect of any Texas oil
dr ler.

The common cast-iron cooking
pots, up to four feet in diameter and
a foot deep but less than one-eighth
b of an inch thick would present a
' challenge to Western foundrymen
asked to pour them without blow-
holes or flaws. ,

service man would be hard put to it
if faced with a cylinder broken
through to the water jacket and asked
to build a furnace, melt his own
iron, pour new cylinder sleeves and
pistons and then machine them to
a precision fit on a hand-powered
lathe with tools he had to make him-
self, even to lathe bits, files, drills,
taps and calipers—and no micro-
meter.

Yet many a truck repair shop in
China, did all this and more, through
the years of struggle for survival
against the Japanese. Old gasoline

In a newer field, the best Cadillac ~

drums lined with fire clay were stan-
dard garage equpment for melting
iron, with charcoal or coke as- fuel.
Three or four percent of aluminum
salvaged from a wrecked plane was
usually added to improve the quality
of the castings, and old truck and

plane skeletons were picked over for’

the bits of alloy steel which were
forged, retempered and made into
files, drills and cutting tools.

An out-of-the-way repair shop
would rebuild batteries, rewind gen-
erators, babbit bearings, hand-file an
out-of-round crankshaft journal true
to one-thousandth of an inch, or even
cast and machine a new carburetor.

Today, thousands of these techni-
cians who had to improvise almost
everything they needed during the
war years are working in large shops
with excellent equipment, some im-

- ported from the USSR and Eastern
Europe, a little from the U.S. and
Brtain, and no small part from
China’s own rapidly expanding ma-
chine tool industry.

It goes without saying that these
workers are now applying their re-
sourcefulness on a much more ad-
vanced,and productive basis.

Their new equipment, though still
inadequate in quant ty, is impressive
for its range and quality. In one
plant we visited, where shapers and
heavy and light lathes are being
mass-produced, we saw four shops
(machine, forge and heat-treat, foun-
dry, assembly), each about 100 by 600
feet, and equipped with overhead
traveling cranes.

Many of the machine tools in these
shops were enormous Soviet models,
planers with multiple cutting tools
machining six 6-foot lathe beds at
once, vertical milling machines with
more than a 12-foot hor zontal travel,
12-foot radial drills, horizontal boring
mills with about a 10-foot mandrel
length and_ six-foot vertical range.
And on the railway siding was still
more equipment in crates.

®
The present number of veteran
technicians and skilled. workers is
far from sufficient to meet the grow-
ing demands of the country. Train-

ing programs are under way, there-
fore, for engineers, scientists and
skilled workers of all kinds.

In contrast to the scholar tradition
of old China, education is now in-
tensely practical. In two engineering
schools visited, one in Pek ng and
one in Tientsin, we saw row upon
row of men and women students
working at lathes, shapers, milling
machines, lay-out benches, and mak-
ing moulds in foundry shops, as well
as study ng in classrooms and libra-
ries. :

Engineering colleges take practi-
laboratories was excellent, almost all
newly-installed, and_ expensive. It
included 60,000-pound compression
and tension testing units from Ger-
many, Swiss, tension testing machines
and American fatigue, impact and
hardness machines.

Equipment in the material-testing
cal training several steps further
through close cooperation with the
state-operated factories. The univer-
sities ask these industries for pro-
duction problems on which they can
give assistance. In their second year,
all students spend up to two months
as ordinary workers in their special
fields; at the-end of the year they
work as foremen’s assistants and at
the end of their third year as en-
gineers’ assistants. In the half year
before graduation they do special
work on some industrial problem,
and after graduation they kept con-
tact with their university, for consul-
tation on \special problems.

The speeializatton possible under
the new system of training is an ad-
vantage, as it permits the freshman
to choose his course of study within
narrow limits. As he is assured of
employment in his chosen field upon
graduation, he is not compelled, as
are students in the West, to get as
broad a training as possible in order
to increase his chances of getting a
job. .

With as yet a comparatively small
number of machine tool plants and
technicians, People’s China today is
nevertheless producing a consider-

‘ able quantity of highly specialized in-

dustrial equipment. We saw the
looms and spindles in modern textile
mills, the new machinery in large pa-

New China’s growing industrial strength

per mills, modern printing presses
and automatic stocking knitting ma-
chines, all made in People’s China.

Seeing all this, we became more
than ever aware of the futility of the
U.S. blockade of China. The indus-
trialization of People’s China cannot
be stopped, since the country pos-
sesses all the essential requirements:

manpoyer, raw materials, initial ma-°

chine tool industry.

The U.S. does not own or control
the world supply of industrial equip-
ment, and thus cannot prevent Peo-
ple’s China obtaining it, as evidenced
by the excelient machinery we saw
from the USSR and Eastern Europe.

Another important factor operat-
-ng for the success of industrializa-
tion is the terrific determination on
the part of ordinary people to bring
it about. The people see in industry
their entire future, and, as with the
Buai River project, they know how
to accomplish tremendous tasks
through the organized effort of hun-
dreds of thousands.

None of the jobs being carried out
is as spectacular as the Huai project,
where one can see 60,000 at work:
but the aggregate accomplishment of
the groups of two, 10 or 100 in in-
dustry all over the country is perhaps
greater. :

The 10 men working in a Shanghai
welding shop on high-pressure steam
vessels for the manufacture of medi-
cines; the sheet metal workers labor-
iously hammering and shaping chem-
ical equipment out of copper sheet-
ing; the two mechanics who spend
a whole day with a hand saw cutting
off and eight-inch bar of steel needed
to make a new punch press—such
people all over People’s China are
working steadily and confidently to
supply the machinery and equipment
for the new industries they are de-
termined to have.

They will succeed, blockade or no
blockade, and sooner than _ anyone
might have believed possible.

@ Walter IIlsley, who wrote this ar-
ticle for China Monthly Review,
from which it is reprinted, is a
young American engineer who
worked for several years in China.
He was a member of the U.S. dele-
gation to the Asian and Pacific
Peace Conference last year.

eee

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — JULY 10, 1953 — PAGE 7

=e

ab ea Soares LL Re ec en Sanh SI a RS pis Se RES = =