Inside the Pale

Seventy-five miles north of the City of Peiping zigzags the Great Wall across China. Despite Japan's loud assurances to the world that their armies would stay north of it, they crossed it in March, feinted back fortnight ago toward the Russian border. At once Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek stampeded his soldiers into the empty villages the Japanese had evacuated. His 50,000 became "truculent," claimed a grand Chinese victory. Last week the Japanese Foreign Office called this situation "ambiguous," "intolerable." It announced Japan had already given "the only warnings that will be given of the outbreak of large scale hostilities immediately north of Peiping." Meanwhile the retreating Japanese had made a left swing, showed up north of Peiping. To squelch Chiang Kai-shek's soldiers the new advance will "probably be on a larger scale than heretofore, requiring the special sanction of the Emperor."

Sir Miles Middleman. This was bad news for British and French businessmen in North China. Their colleagues in Manchuria had got a taste of Japan's policy of a nominal "open door" with a thousand petty obstructions for foreign businessmen. Last week two of the oldest British firms in China (Jardine, Matheson & Co. and Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corp.) began to close their Manchurian branches. Fearing a duplication in North China, the British Minister to China, Sir Miles Wedderburn Lampson called on the Japanese Charge d'Affaires in Peiping, Shoichi Xakayama, and offered himself as middleman in direct negotiations between Japan and China. He made his old suggestion of a ten-mile neutral zone just south of the Wall to be closed to troops of both sides. Nakayama was cold to the /.one idea which would tie up Japan's long-range hope of cutting out of China an independent "buffer state"' between China and Manchukuo. He asked Sir Miles where was a Chinese with sufficient authority to negotiate for China. Sir Miles named the Chinese Foreign Minister Dr. Lo Wen-kan. Then he went to see Dr. Lo. To all this the Japanese Foreign Office remained lukewarm. It announced the Japanese drive might go "right down to Canton" some 1,200 miles south of Tientsin. Before it began dickering it wanted proof that China was "serious" about wanting to dicker. Meanwhile in the evacuated territory north of Tientsin the Chinese soldiers strutted like heroes for their brief moment.* Scamp Shot. A hint of Japan's real intentions in China exploded last week in Peiping's Grand Hotel des Wagon-Lits. An assassin shot and gravely wounded that thoroughgoing scamp General Chang Ching-yao, onetime military governor of Hunan Province. Police announced that Chang's mission was to set up a monarchy in northern China with Japanese money. Monarch was to be hollow-eyed Henry Pu Yi. now puppet chief of puppet Manchukuo. Chang is "one of the most notoriously disreputable of all China's war-lords." For killing a U. S. missionary in 1920 he was later "pardoned," by whom nobody knows. His most notable reputation is for cowardice. As Governor of Hunan he reduced the province to a state of beggary. Guam Outrage. Japanese newspapers last week noted a U. S. "outrage." To Guam Island six months ago came 112 Japanese laborers on six-month permits. When the permits ran out Guam's Governor, U. S. Navy Captain Edmund Spence Root, refused to renew them according to Tokyo's Kokumin Shimbnn. Somebody appealed to the Japanese Consul General at Manila. Nevertheless the 112 were deported on Governor Root's "outrageous order."

*A boost to Chinese morale was the energetically spread rumor that Germany's crack Drillmaster General Hans von Seeckt ("the man with the iron mask and the monocle") was coming to train Chinese armies. The old Junker who organized the Reichswehr. happened to be on a world tour of the Far Kast last week. Before he left Berlin he had left blanket denials that he was going anywhere to drill anybody.

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