December. When the Chinese government withdrew up the Yangtse River to Hankow, in the geographic center of China, the Japanese realized that they were in for a hard fight, but they pushed on and captured Hankow in October 1938. The indomitable Chinese then withdrew their government farther inland, past the rugged gorges of the Yangtse to Chungking, which lies in a great mountain-rimmed plain, almost impregnable to attack even by vastly superior military forces.
The Japanese now saw that their “incident” was becoming a protracted war. They held the cities and rail lines of most of northeastern China and Inner Mongolia, the major ports of the southern coast of China, and the great central cities along the Yangtse River, which constitutes the main artery of China’s trade and commerce. Yet the war had reached a stalemate because the Chinese, although pushed into the more remote and backward parts of the country and cut off from foreign aid and the industrial production of their own cities, simply refused to surrender.
Even so, the Chinese military and economic position appeared hopeless in the long run. The Japanese, holding the richest parts of China and strangling the rest of the land economically, decided to wait the Chinese out. Alternating between acts of terrorism and conciliatory gestures to the puppet government they had created at Nanking, the Japanese forces settled down to wait for the collapse of the Nationalist government.
But Japan had miscalculated again. The Chinese government did not collapse, and the fighting spirit of the supposedly pacifistic Chinese people fed upon the blunders the Japanese militarists themselves committed.