Pressure

To stern U. S. demands that American businessmen and missionaries be allowed to reclaim their property,operate freely in the Japanese-controlled Lower Yangtze Valley, Japan last week had a pliant answer. In his stiff note Secretary of State Cordell Hull cited as an "illustrative case" the $1,000,000 Baptist-owned University of Shanghai, occupied since last August by the Mikado's troops, its campus turned into an airport. Day after the note's delivery, Baptists, a U. S. consular representative, Japanese military and consular authorities witnessed the return of two "middle schools" belonging to the Southern Baptist Mission. Japan also permitted ten missionaries to return to charred and raped Nanking, but gave no date when the $1,500,000 American-owned university there could be opened.

Of $200,000,000 invested in China by U. S. nationals, a large part is in the Yangtze Valley, only a conservatively estimated $41,904,889 is in missionary or philanthropic property. Chief U. S. complaint since the war has been that Japanese merchants operate freely in those areas, that in Nanking, for example, 800 Japanese nationals are reported to be in residence. Plain U. S. implication was that Japan was repeating her Manchurian policy of closing the Chinese "open door," was allowing her own businessmen to clean up in territory "unsafe" for U. S. salesmen and promoters.

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