Earthquake Man

Dr. Wong Wen-hao once wrote a book called Earthquake Regions of China. Last week he needed all his seismographic skill, for he was named Premier of the Chinese Republic--a vast earthquake region crumbling under the triple temblors of civil war, inflation and mass discontent.

Home to Mother. Dr. Wong is not physically impressive: he is under 5 ft. and weighs 90-odd pounds, and his homely face is scarred from an auto smashup 14 years ago. He has no political following: though a member of the Kuomintang, he is generally considered an independent. Most of his life has been passed in the relative obscurity of the Geological Institute and on university teaching staffs. He entered government service in 1935 at Chiang Kai-shek's repeated requests, rose rapidly to ministerial rank. Before becoming Premier his job was that of Minister of Economic Affairs.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek decided on Dr. Wong when his first two choices refused. Stocky Chang Chun, the Gimo's sworn brother and old comrade in arms, had been Premier during the military and economic disasters of the past year. Complaining of chronic bronchitis, chronic fatigue and chronic criticism, Chang said he had had enough. When the Gimo appealed to him in the name of their old friendship, asked him to continue as Premier, Chang answered: "Friendship is friendship, and business is business. This is business--and I can't bear it any longer." The following day he flew home to Chungking for a visit with his aged mother.

Next, the Gimo turned to General Ho Ying-chin, staunch antiCommunist, former war minister and chief of staff. While a Chinese representative at U.N. last year, General Ho had attended a Buchmanite meeting at Niagara Falls.* Friends said that he was a changed man. But, even fortified by moral rearmament, General Ho was not anxious for the headaches of the premiership.

No Fur Coat. The following day the job went to Wong. Nanking was startled. But, after chewing over the record of tiny, chain-smoking Geologist Wong, Chinese nodded their heads. The new Premier was transcendentally honest--in his first 20 years of public service he had never even owjied a fur coat. When, finally, he had bought a sheepskin one (with cat's-fur collar), he had kept it only two days, then given it to his father. And he was an able administrator.

Born in Chekiang, like the Gimo, Wong was educated at Belgium's Louvain University. He speaks fluent English and French, and is passionately devoted to improving China's productivity. By preference, he would leave the military and political problems to others, concentrate on what he calls "proper human organization of resources."

* Frank Buchman's "Oxford Group," which of late years has called itself MRA (Moral Rearmament), was apparently winning other pivotal Chinese adherents. In Nanking last week, Kuomintang Party Boss Chen Li-fu, a devoted Confucianist, said that he hoped very much to attend the Buchmanites' annual U.S. convention this month, in Hollywood.

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