Japan & France

Baron Kijuro Shidehara sat in his sumptuous, high ceilinged office at the Japanese Foreign Ministry last week, seeking by every means to prevent a clash between Chinese and Japanese in China, and to persuade Great Britain and the U. S. not to follow up their shelling of Nanking (TIME, April 4), with still more vigorous measures to protect Occidental lives and property.

From Peking the U. S. Minister, John Van Antwerp MacMurray made a hurried trip to visit Baron Shidehara in Tokyo, endeavoring to convince the Japanese Foreign Minister of the soundness of his own views. What they said was naturally privy to themselves; but Mr. MacMurray is widely believed to favor much sterner measures toward China than are approved by President Coolidge; and consequently Baron Shidehara almost certainly was obliged to assume his most courteous, most waxlike smile.

Meanwhile, at Shanghai, the French Colony was displaying such complacence toward the new Chinese Nationalist Government that U. S. and British residents in the French quarter expressed uneasiness lest the French intended to allow Chiang Kaishek, the Chinese Nationalist Generalissimo, to assume control of the French Concession. Since U. S. and British marines were heaping up more sandbags and stringing more barbed wire every day to defend their quarter, the attitude of the French and Japanese caused extreme resentment among Anglo-Saxons at Shanghai.

Significance. The British are, at present, so thoroughly mistrusted if not actually detested by the Chinese Nationalists that strong British action cannot very well increase this hatred and may frighten the Chinese into making reparation for their seizure of the $60,000,000 British concession at Hankow (TIME, Jan. 17), and the shooting of two Britons at Nanking.

The French and Japanese, however, see that present Chinese resentment against Britain will almost certainly destroy the onetime superiority of Great Britain over all other nations in the amount of her exports to China.

Who will get the Chinese trade which Britain may lose? Japan and France want it. Therefore, the French avoided every clash with Chinese last week; and only as a matter of dire necessity did some Japanese Marines at Hankow unlimber their machine guns to disperse a Chinese mob which attempted to loot the Japanese concession there. Two Chinese were killed; but if Baron Shidehara can manage it, their blood will not be the beginning of red freshets on Japanese steel.

Shidehara. Foreign Minister Shidehara must have been speculating anxiously, last week, upon what attitude the U. S. would take toward intervention in China. Since Baron Shidehara was Counsellor of the Japanese Embassy at Washington in 1912, and Ambassador from 1919 to 1922, he is not ignorant of U. S. psychology; and he was aware of Calvin Coolidge as Vice President of the U. S.

Perhaps, last week, the Baron wished a little bitterly that he had taken more note of the Massachusetts lawyer who seemed in 1921 so dwarfed by Ohioan President Warren Gamaliel Harding. Last week Baron Shidehara knew that President Coolidge was receiving the very strongest British urging to intervene, backed by an appeal from the U. S. Chamber of Commerce at Shanghai to the same effect.