[Footnote 14: See below, p. 69. This is to be distinguished from the various constitutional conventions, the proposed national congress (_kuo-min ta-hui_) which exists only in contemplation of the constitutional drafters, and the Kuomintang Party Congress.]
While the Emergency Session of the Party Congress took these steps for further national defense, the Japanese were collecting a coterie of ex-politicians, friends of Japan, and old men to serve as the Reformed Government of the Republic of China at Nanking. They disregarded the anomaly of having two "Chinese" national governments--the Provisional Government in Peiping being undisturbed by these measures--and continued to seek the division of China, even on the level of the pro-Japanese States. The Reformed Government was established on March 27, 1938.
The autumn of 1938 brought another phase of discouragement. Relying on the prestige of British power and the nearness of Hong Kong, the Chinese were not watchful in the Canton area. The Japanese landed almost unopposed. Chinese negligence, corruption, and a little treachery worked in their favor. The landing forces performed almost superhuman feats of endurance in forced marches overland; on several occasions Japanese advance troops ran so far ahead of schedule that Japanese warplanes, thinking them disguised Chinese, strafed them![15] Canton fell without a major battle. Hankow, the great radical capital, scene of the 1926-27 Leftist upsurge and of the anti-Fascist enthusiasm of 1938, was entered by the Imperial Japanese army, and the entire Wu-han area was lost to China.
[Footnote 15: An engrossing first-hand account of this is to be found in Hino, Ashihei, _Sea and Soldiers_, Tokyo, 1940. This, with its three companion volumes, _Mud and Soldiers_, _Flower and Soldiers_, and _Barley and Soldiers_, Tokyo, 1939 and 1940, forms an eloquent, humane, sensitive narrative of a young Japanese writer serving with the Imperial forces in China. The series ranks with the great narratives of the European war of 1914-18, and expresses the Japanolatrist devoutness, the naïveté, and bewildering courage of much of the Japanese infantry, but does so through the medium of a literary craftsmanship rare in any army.]