Almond-Eyed Fascismo?

The only leader of modern China who has inherited his authority is the well-meaning, hollow-eyed young man known throughout China as "The Young Mar-shal," Chang Hsueh-liang. He is the deposed warlord of Manchuria and, until last week, ruler of Peiping and the surrounding province. Last week destiny caught up with him and with the rest of China. Chang Hsueh-liang is the son of Chang Tso-lin, one of the most picturesque Chinese characters to emerge since the death of that grand old lady, the Empress Dowager Tzu-hsi. Chang Tso-lin was a bandit who made himself master of Manchuria before the breakup of the Empire in 1911, and then developed streaks of patriotism. He was extremely proud of his nickname, "The Old Tiger," which originated in his drooping mustaches and his striped mandarin robes.* In the Tiger Room of his Mukden palace he kept enormous stuffed Manchurian tigers, served cups of what was supposed to be hot tigers' blood to his guests. More important, he was one of the shrewdest, wiliest politicians in the East. Secretly opposed to Japan, he hypnotized Japanese officials for years into keeping him in power in Manchuria. With other walrus-mustachioed brigands of the Manchurian steppes as his generals he built up a powerful army, built a tremendous arsenal at Mukden, extended his sway to Peiping (then Peking, the capital). To Japan, Manchuria represents her greatest source of raw materials and an outlet for her swarming population. "When we got Korea," admitted a frank Japanese official recently, "we found it was already full of Koreans." Crafty Chang Tso-lin accepted enormous "loans" from Japan, then used this money to spread anti-Japanese propaganda and to build railways competing with Japanese lines already in existence. In 1928 Japan finally saw through the Old Tiger. One June day he rode back to Mukden from Peking on his private train. There is a point on the outskirts of Mukden where the tracks of Chang's Peking-Mukden line pass under a bridge of the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway. Workmen were seen working on the under side of that bridge during the night. The only place where a lookout could have hidden was inside a Japanese sentry box. At the very instant when Chang's private train passed under the bridge an electrically wired bomb dropped down on his private car, blew the Old Tiger out of all consideration. Young Chang, inheritor of his father's great domain, had neither the force nor the ability to handle it. The best intentioned young man in the world, he is temperamentally unfitted to be a soldier and, despite painful efforts to break himself of the habit, he is a narcotics addict. Son Chang had a problem to face that the wily old Tiger was spared--the partially united China of the Nationalist government. Old Chang Tso-lin, living in the days of the great war lords, concentrated his intrigues on Manchuria, Northern China and Japan. When Japan invaded Manchuria and captured Mukden, Chang Hsueh-liang, the Young Marshal, was ruined. His arsenal and fortune were seized, his army was shattered, he lost face before all China. There still remained to him Peiping, and there until last week he remained. Now that Manchuria was lost he allied himself definitely with the Nationalist government of Chiang Kaishek. The Young Marshal was a broken reed, but on that reed the Nationalists leaned heavily because of Peiping. Despite the growth of Nanking and the commercial supremacy of Shanghai, Peiping still looks like the capital of China. It is one of the tourist centres of the world--more so than ever now that the vast, incredible Forbidden City with its acres of palaces beneath acres of yellow tile roofs has been opened to visitors. Manchuria may go to Japan, Canton and the south may secede, Outer Mongolia may be quietly absorbed by Russia, but so long as the central Nanking government has a semblance of control over Peiping they can claim with justice to be the government of China.

Fortnight ago the reed broke. Wang Ching-wei, Cantonese leader who joined his old enemy Chiang Kai-shek to oppose Japan at Shanghai, resigned as Premier of the Nanking government, dragging the entire cabinet with him and sending an acid note to Chiang Kai-shek complaining bitterly at the piffling resistance to Japan put up by Chang Hsueh-liang, the Young Marshal. Sick, discouraged, disgraced, the Young Marshal offered his resignation too (TIME, Aug. 15). All the pleading of Chiang Kai-shek could not make him withdraw it last week.

In any other country the consequence of such a move would have been immediate turmoil, but the body politic of China is so loosely articulated that it can lose an arm or a leg without feeling it for weeks. So China drifted along last week. Not so Chiang Kaishek. Night after night he was up all night. Airplanes -- several piloted by U. S. flyers -- roared out to Shanghai, Hankow, Peiping, carrying messages too secret to be telegraphed, even in code. Stubborn Wang remained in hiding in the French concession at Shanghai, refusing to withdraw his resignation or to stick so much as the top of his head out of his hole. All negotiations with Chiang's representatives he left to his small, sleek wife who rushed busily in a limousine from his hiding place to her hotel and back again. Soon correspondents thought they knew what Chiang Kai-shek was planning. In the past 50 years China has experimented with every sort of government known to the western world: absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, republicanism, communism, military dictatorship. With a Communist movement steadily growing in the upper Yangtze Valley (TIME, Aug. 15), the Nationalist government must do something about internal as well as external affairs. An opposite of Communism which China has not tried is Fascism, and last week Chiang Kai-shek was reported to be organizing a Chinese Fascismo with the 3,000 cadets of his Whampoa Military Academy as blackshirts and himself as an almond-eyed Mussolini. Even this would not work unless he could find someone to take young Marshal Chang's place at Peiping to hold the north for him. For days he bargained frantically with three possible candidates: Ho Ying-chin. Minister of War in the Wang Cabinet; Han Fu-chu, War Lord of Shantung; old Marshal Wu Pei-fu, the Scholar War Lord. The three candidates remained coy, having discovered two highly objectionable tin cans attached to this offer: 1) the new lord of Peiping can expect no subsidy from the Nationalist government; 2) he will be expected to take the blame for the apathetic Manchurian and Japanese policy which Chiang Kai-shek intends to pursue. Yakamashii. The Young Marshal's inherited province of Manchuria was definitely lost to him last week. At a dinner in New York for the Council on Foreign Relations U. S. Secretary of State Stimson had said:

"Moral disapproval, when it becomes the disapproval of the whole world, takes on a significance hitherto unknown in international law."

This struck the supersensitive skins of Japanese statesmen as a direct charge of aggression in Manchuria. Possibly organized by the Foreign Office, all Japanese newspapers commenced a great Yakamashii or "Big Noise." Above the Yakamashii a Foreign Office spokesman announced that Japan was just about to recognize formally the existence of her puppet state "Manchoukuo." As a practical step toward doing so General Nobuyoshi Muto replaced General Honjo as commander in Manchuria with the impressive titles of "Supreme Military and Commander," "Ambassador on Special Mission."

Adding to Manchuria's crown of sorrows the Sungari River rose in one of the worst floods in Manchurian memory. Harbin was under water. Some 30,000 people were reported drowned. Yellow bloated bodies bumped against the eaves in the lower part of the city, water was three feet deep in the National City Bank. In a refugee camp 22 people died of cholera. Starving parents offered their daughters at $13.

*Ex-Bandit Chang, of course, was no Mandarin, could scarcely read or write, a fact of which he did not like to be reminded. He swore: "If I find anyone from Peking or Canton saying I can't read and write I will send him home with his ears in his pocket."

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