Pigmy Colossus

A short, frail-seeming, slender Chinese took national bulk and stature last week as the War Lord presumptive of half China. Within the space of two full moons his armies have swarmed up from the . South Chinese Bolshevik region of Canton and overwhelmed the whole Central Chinese Yangtze valley. Before he left Canton, War Lord Chang Kai-shek prophesied that he would capture the great industrial city of Wuchang on the Yangtze in time to celebrate there the 15th anniversary of the outbreak of the Chinese Republican Revolution. The city fell (TIME, Oct. 18) on the very day prophesied by Chang, and last week he meted out to the starvation-worn Wuchangese the quixotic terms of a typically Chinese peace.

Peace terms: 1) Each Wuchangese soldier who possesses a gun will be welcomed into the army of Chang Kaishek. 2) The merchants of Wuchang will be required to pay to Chang the "back pay" owed to these soldiers and their future maintenance in his armies.

The celestial irony of this arrangement arises from two facts:

1) The soldiers who defended themselves in Wuchang (and only incidentally defended Wuchang itself) seized the city in the first place as the hired mercenaries of War Lord Wu Pei-fu (now fled), who certainly owes them whatever "back pay" may be their due.

2) Though the Wuchangese merchants must pay to Chang Kaishek, the "wages" of soldiers whom they never hired, he will undoubtedly keep the "pay" of his new soldiers himself and encourage them to forage for themselves by looting in Wuchang and wherever else they may be quartered.

Mopping up. Of the two commanders who had defended Wuchang, General Liu Yu-chun was dragged from the house of Dr. A. M. Sherman, Principal of the Central China University, where he had taken refuge; and General Chen Kaimu, onetime Governor of Hupeh province was seized as he fled Wuchang in coolie garb. Though these captured commanders may well have expected that their heads would soon adorn two sharpened poles, they were merely imprisoned. As a mark of special consideration General Liu was supplied by his captors with opium to which he is addicted. Complacent, he dozed into sweet oblivion, careless of possible assassins.

The Chinese Red Cross proceeded speedily to bury 3,000 citizens of Wuchang who died of starvation during the siege. Contrary to rumor, the foreign population was found to have suffered no war casualties or deaths by starvation. Within the week Wuchang pulsed once more with normal industry, dozed behind its ancient walls.

Turncoats. Since success succeeds nowhere faster than in China, victorious Chang Kai-shek was kept busy receiving protestations of "loyalty" from the former subordinate generals of Wu Pei-fu. These gentry, stranded with their bands of mercenary soldiers, turned their coats with unction and alacrity. Among the first was General Yang Sen, until last week nominally subordinate to Wu Pei-fu, actually the petty despot of Wanhsien on the Yangtze, which leaped to international fame when Yang seized two British river steamers (TIME, Sept. 20) and was bombarded by British river warships for his pains.

Sun Eclipsed? Super-Tuchun Sun Chuan-feng of Shanghai, who only last spring proclaimed the Yangtze Valley an independent state in vassalage to himself, found his subordinates deserting to Chang Kai-shek in such numbers last week that even his supremacy in Shanghai seemed threatened. The armies of Chang Kai-shek will assumedly make Shanghai their next objective; and among both foreigners and Chinese in the city there was last week the most intense excitement. The final seal of success was put upon Chang Kai-shek's conquest when the great Super- Tuchun of Manchuria, Chang Tso-lin, telegraphed a proposal that the two Changs should divide China between themselves.

Siege raised. The far city of Sianfu, capital of Shensi province, besieged by an itinerant mercenary army for some months (TIME, Oct. 18 et ante) allegedly compromised with its besiegers last week, and as a result the 31 foreign missionaries shut up there since mid-April were able to depart last week. All left the city save the Rev. C. J. Jensen and his wife, and a number of Roman Catholic missionaries, who announced their intention of remaining indefinitely.

River Tragedy. One morning last week the Kuang Yuang, a river troopship loaded with munitions and 1,500 mercenaries lay at anchor off Kiukiang on the Yangtze. The soldiers, allegedly adherent to Sun Chuan-feng, dozed, gambled, chomped a frugal meal of rice, fired an occasional shot into the air or at a passing sampan to while away the time.

Suddenly a thudding, thudding, tearing explosion, welled from below decks. Detonating en masse the munitions cargo set the ship afire and blew it simultaneously to splinters. Within five minutes 1,200 of the 1,500 mercenaries perished in the deadly inferno. Three hundred, lucky, swam ashore.

Within the city a revolt was nearly launched last week by agitators in the pay of the Cantonese who were only checked when Major V. K. Ting of Shanghai discovered their plot and ordered cut the railway over which they expected to receive re-enforcements. These developments, adding to the fear of an immediate onslaught by Chang Kaishek, left foreigners and Chinese alike terror-stricken in Shanghai.