[Footnote 17: _The Far Eastern Survey_ keeps effectively up to date with all new developments in this field. An authoritative but understandable explanation of the work of the Ministry is found in H. H. K'ung, "Holding China's Financial Front," Ch. XI, work by Mme. Chiang K'ai-shek, cited above.] Subdivisions in the Ministry of Finance include sections for customs, salt gabelle, internal revenue, general taxation, public loans, currency, national treasury, accounting, and general affairs. Efforts are now in progress to consolidate all intragovernmental fiscal services, so that the budget shall cover the entire government, and separate agencies will no longer be able to make half-controlled collections and disbursements. The Ministry of Economic Affairs (_Ching-chi Pu_) is in general responsible for the industrialization of an area half the size of Europe with well over two hundred million inhabitants. No non-industrial state can defeat an industrial state unless it has access to the industrial resources of third parties. The Chinese, realizing this, have launched a modernization process unparalleled in modern history. The two greatest migrations of the twentieth century have occurred, most probably, in China: the first the settlement of Manchuria, and the second the flight to the West. In each case more than twenty million persons have been involved. The Ministry of Economic Affairs has transformed this rout into a pioneering advance. Refugees have been taught to bring their tools with them; when they had no tools their skills have been sought out and utilized. As the national armies and government retreated up the Yangtze and inward, they brought along the personnel of a modern economic system, and set an industrial society down in a world technologically backward. West-China modernization will probably be the most durable economic consequence of the war. Cities near the edge of Tibet have underground electric power and automatic telephone systems. Primitive salt-drying areas have been modernized; in one instance, steel pipe being lacking, bamboo pipelines, plastered and cemented for reinforcement, run cross-country. Filthy, tax-ridden, vicious little cities which had been the haunts of opium-sotted militarists are now given the double blessing of fair government and a business boom. (The author felt, when he returned to America in September 1940, that he was going from a new country to an old, leaving the hope, zest and high spirits of the Chinese frontier for the comfortable melancholy of American half-prosperity.)