Ting's Tenth

In Tokyo businesslike Bolsheviks offered for sale last week the romantic railroad spanning wild & woolly North Manchuria which was imperially and corruptly whelped at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II.

In 1891 while he was still Tsarevich, young Nicholas sailed with a gorgeous retinue into dazzled Vladivostok. This outpost of the Russian Empire he proclaimed --quite in the manner of Edward of Wales today--must be linked by rail with St. Petersburg. Preferably the line should run direct, cutting from Vladivostok straight across North Manchuria, then Chinese. Five years later China's wicked old Empress Dowager sent to Nicholas II's coronation an ancient Chinese with a world-great name and an itching palm, the Viceroy Li Hung-chang.

Half a million solid gold Russian rubles ($250,000) soothed Viceroy Li's palm before he consented to a means by which Russia might build her imperialistic railway across what was after all part of China. Created was a dummy Russo-Chinese Bank which built the railway chiefly frorn the proceeds of bonds sold to small, thrifty Frenchmen who, 37 years after, are still screaming for their money.

As eventually built, the railway not only spanned North Manchuria, but branched off from the Russian-built junction, Harbin, to traverse South Manchuria and end at Port Arthur. That fatal branch, the great Imperial Russian Minister, Count Witte, later admitted, largely provoked the Russo-Japanese war. Japan, when she had whipped the Russians, seized their southern branch from Port Arthur as far up as Changchun (140 miles below Harbin) and made it her own great, imperial iron road, the Japanese South Manchuria Railway.

Up to last week Russia had still clung, through a thousand skirmishes, intrigues and bandit wars, to her original line across North Manchuria, a road named the "Chinese Eastern Railway" in a deliberate attempt by tsarist statesmen to disguise its Russian character. Built on the extra wide five-ft. Russian gauge, the C. E. R. is more than 1,000 miles long and famed for its towering, broad-beamed cars. Manchuria n ponies scatter whinnying with terror at the vast clouds of smoke belched by wood-burning C. E. R. locomotives. Chinese bandits, observing a peculiar etiquet. never blow up a C. E. R. tunnel which might be too expensive to repair. Tearing up a bit of rail here & there, they rob only an occasional train, are careful not to kill the rail goose which lays so many golden eggs.

In the Tokyo haggling which began last week a pat question soon popped up: was the Soviet Union selling primarily its rights in a railway or was it selling diplomatic recognition to the purported purchaser. Japan's puppet state Manchukuo? Ostentatiously Japan pretended to have nothing to do with the deal.* Her suave, soft-voiced Foreign Minister Count Vasuya Uchida carefully withdrew from the haggling chamber, leaving behind him only two Japanese "advisers" to tell Manchukuo's General Ting Shih-yuan what to say & do. Perfectly understanding that he was dealing with a puppet, Comrade Benedict Kozlovsky, chief of the Soviet Foreign Office's Division of Far Eastern Affairs, put the tips of his stubby fingers together and named a staggering price. Japanese censorship was instantly clapped on. The world must not know what had been Russia's opening gambit.

Actually the world soon knew. Defying the Japanese, Comrade Kozlovsky told reporters that Russia asked 210,000,000 gold rubles ($140,700,000) as the price of the railway and the price of recognizing Manchukuo by signing the treaty which would bind the sale. Faced by this piece of open diplomacy, Japan advised Manchukuo's embarrassed General Ting to admit publicly that he was offering $14,000,000--less than a tenth of Russia's price. General Ting was not empowered to pay in gold. Japan, which would guarantee the payment, insisted that it be fixed in Japanese yen--constantly declining on international exchange. General Ting's offer looked silly.

Opinion differed as to whether the Soviet Union had really gone to sell, or merely to haggle. If skilfully protracted, such negotiations in an Oriental country may last years. Josef Stalin's great object is to keep Japan from trying to seize the railway, to delay proceedings until Russia, newly strengthened in the West by non-aggression pacts (see p. 20), can feel safe in opposing Japan in the East. Months ago, sly Russians sneaked most of their rolling stock, especially the locomotives, out of Manchuria and now hold them on Soviet soil. In reserve Russia holds the Amur River railway (the Far Eastern end of the Trans-Siberian), a great hoop of steel which circles clear around the northern frontier of Manchuria on Soviet soil, thus doubly connecting Moscow with Vladivostok.

Japanese strategists say that they could take even the Trans-Siberian. Russians retort that they have at Vladivostok a fleet of bombing planes which any day could make a shambles out of Tokyo.

*To keep out distracting side issues. Russia promptly apologized last week for the killing of three Japanese crab fishermen by Russian frontier guards (TIME, July 10). Japan apologized in return for a young Jap's sword-waving in the Tokyo office of the Russian commercial attache.

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