Triumphant Bumpkin

Other Chinese war lords and the Government fear him. Cultured Chinese statesmen, most of them proud of their foreign university degrees, call him a bumpkin and a clown. Perhaps no Chinese love him except the coarse, humble masses from which he sprang. Last week these chuckled as tall, mighty-bellied War Lord Feng Yu-hsiang returned with a broad, triumphal grin from his three-month military escapade in Chahar Province north of Peiping which nearly plunged Japan and China into fresh war (TIME, June 5, et seq.).

After capturing the outpost of Dolonnor from a mixed Manchukuo-Japanese garrison, smart Marshal Feng summoned all China to join his "struggle for righteousness." This crucially embarrassed the Chinese Government of wasp-waisted Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek who had made and is striving to keep a precarious peace with Japan. For weeks Chinese patriots sent fighting funds to War Lord Feng, who had fancy arm bands with fighting mottoes expensively stitched on his soldiers' sleeves, then suddenly announced, "I am going into retirement" (TIME, Aug. 14). Last week the Government of slim, shrill Generalissimo Chiang had to send a private train to bring huge, rumbling War Lord Feng triumphantly home from Chahar. He reached Peiping like a conqueror, traveling with an entire regiment as his bodyguard, grinning and cracking his barnyard jokes at "Chiang and his Government who think they can make themselves foreigners by putting on trousers, eating with knives and forks and leaping about on smooth dance floors clutching a woman!"

In Peiping jovial Feng flatly denied that Japanese with bombing planes have recaptured Dolonnor. "Lies! Lies!" he grinned when told that the recapture had just been confirmed by both Chinese Premier Wang Ching-wei and the Japanese War office. Still grinning and munching ripe fruit, War Lord Feng pulled out of Peiping on his special train for Tientsin. Half way there he and his regiment changed to an armored train sent up from Shantung Province by his fellow war lord Governor Han Fu-chu of Shantung whom he appears to trust. Under Han's protection Feng lived during the summer of 1932 on Taishan, the Sacred Mountain near Confucius' birthplace in Shantung, and proceeded to return there last week "as the climate is good for my asthma." Chinese expected Feng's "asthma"--a standing joke--to last until he sees a fresh chance to rush forth on another profitable military escapade. During his previous retirement the League of Nations Lytton Commission investigating Japan's seizure of Manchuria tried to consult Feng on Taishan, were turned away by the excuse that he was ill. "

I was not ill!" announced War Lord Feng unblushingly soon afterward. "I should have been humiliated to meet the League Commission. ... I am one of this country which, though it boasts a population of 450,000,000 cannot safeguard its territory or protect its people, but instead begs the League for assistance. If this is not disgrace then what is disgrace in this world? . . . Also it is to be regretted that the League Commission spent so much of its time sight-seeing instead of devoting itself to its mission."

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