Homage By Reds

In no other country is Scholarship with a capital S so revered by all classes as in China, but this old land is changing fast and few expect bursts of scholarly observations in high classic style from a Chinese Communist leader in 1937. Last week as spring burgeoned, the Chinese people prepared to celebrate anew their Ching Ming or "Day of Spring Wind" Festival. The Nanking Government decided to invite various Chinese bigwigs on a nationalistic junket to the tomb at Chungpu of the legendary "First Chinese Emperor, Huang Ti." It was not expected that the semi-independent Chinese Communist regime headed by rough & ready General Mao Tse-tung would wish to send a Red to kowtow before the dust of the late Emperor, dead these 4,532 years. But some Nanking bureaucrat dispatched an invitation, just in case.

Red General Mao did nothing so risky as to come on the junket in person, but jouncing along in a motor truck over spring-breaking roads came Red Finance Commissar Lin Po-chu. It was as if Earl Browder should send one of his Communist henchmen on Washington's Birthday to honor the capitalist Father of His Country. Bland and self-possessed, Red Lin produced a scroll which he said was from the brush of Red Mao--as likely a story as though it should be claimed that Comrade Browder had written a speech in Chaucerian English or Attic Greek.

In lofty style Red Lin rolled off the speech--and no Chinese proletarian thought of holding against Red leaders the stuffy scholarship displayed. On the contrary this show of Scholarship was judged so likely to raise the kudos of Red Mao among the Chinese masses that strict censorship killed the story entirely out of all newsorgans controlled by the Nanking Government, and it was forbidden even to print that a Red had done anything so estimable as do homage to an Emperor of the glorious past. As a matter of curious Chinese fact, the Red Lin Po-chu of last week is the same Mr. Lin who in his youth had a job in the Imperial Manchu Government, is today a Red best fitted to do Emperor-homage in the way in which Chinese prefer in their hearts to do almost everything--the old way.

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