Another "Kuo"?

(see front cover)

A highly significant Chinese general today is moonfaced, bespectacled Yang Hu-cheng. As battle lines were drawn near Peiping last week and sporadic warfare crackled, General Yang was very far away, just landing in San Francisco with his tight-skinned little Chinese wife and their bright, button-eyed boy. Gesturing expansively with a pale Corona, General Yang welcomed alert California reporters. They wanted a good look at this celebrated Chinese commander who, when he found that another Chinese commander had kidnapped Chinese Dictator-&-Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, acted without a moment's hesitation and hijacked the kidnapping (TIME, Jan. 4, et ante).

This hijacked kidnapping was easily the most important event of the year in Eastern Asia. While the Generalissimo was held captive in Sian, a stronghold surrounded by Chinese Communist armies with whom General Yang was on amicable terms, Dictator Chiang decided to reverse a basic policy of his Nanking Government --its hostility to Chinese Communists. For nearly ten years Chiang had fought the Reds and avoided fighting Japan. His Government now made peace with the Communists, announced proudly the "unification of China," and ever since Nanking has been taking a more & more courageous line with Tokyo. What General Yang personally got out of the hijacked kidnapping was $300,000 and his present official assignment by the Nanking Government to spend a congenial year abroad, inspecting West Point and other military academies of the Great Powers. This week he heads for Washington, plans to call upon President Roosevelt.

The historic hijacking was last week smoothly called 'The Incident of 1936" by General Yang who explained in San Francisco: "It was to unite China--and it has!"

The reporters wanted to know whether General Yang thinks his onetime captive, Dictator Chiang, is really in earnest now about hurling Chinese might against Japan, or may have to be kidnapped again. "If the Generalissimo leads the country to put up a strong resistance, the whole country will support him!" firmly replied General Yang, adding softly after a puff at his cigar: "If the Generalissimo does not put up a strong resistance--in that event I am not sure what would happen to our great leader."

Bedseat Driving. Seated in his bed at Tokyo last week, the Premier of Japan, astute and cautious Prince Fumimaro Konoye, gave out that he was "suffering from insomnia." Actually he was conducting the difficult affairs of the Empire in a manner which afforded maximum protection from Japanese super-militarists, zealots of such stop-at-nothing kidney that they have murdered a total of three Premiers of Japan.

There was every reason for the wise

Premier to keep in Japan's background and pursue a policy of bedseat driving, for everything depended on whether China's Dictator was now ready at last to risk in war with Japan his fine fleet of U. S. and Italian fighting planes and the German-trained Chinese regiments called "Chiang's Own." All these China's Dictator withheld from action at the time

Japan bombarded and invaded Shanghai (TIME, Feb. 8, 1932 et seq.).

Dictator Chiang last week remained at the salubrious Chinese mountain resort of Ruling. His press spokesman in the Nanking Government's offices declared: "In case of need the Generalissimo will not hesitate to take command of his forces against the Japanese." Dispatches of the past fortnight in which Chinese had it that "Chiang's Own" were actually moving up from Nanking toward Peiping where the recent clashes began (TIME, July 19) were not confirmed last week. Apparently, if such forces had been sent, they had all stopped below the Yellow River. Unless they should cross that Rubicon, and unless Chiang began to behave more like Caesar, surely the best policy for Prince Konoye was bedseat driving.

Alarums and Statistics. While their Premier lay back last week, Japanese provincial governors were summoned to a great emergency conclave in Tokyo. The provincial governors of Korea met at Seoul and governors of Formosa at Tai-hoku. The Japanese Government feared for the first time that the Chinese Government might just possibly turn its aircraft loose. How would Japanese civilians react to being bombed? In a jittery radio broadcast, Japanese Vice-Minister for War Kiwashiro Kato was obviously talking about Chinese bombs when he said: "If the situation comes to the worst, the whole country will become a battlefield. . . . There is nothing to fear.''

Japan's provincial governors were not treated to anything so naive as this broadcast, but several Cabinet Ministers exhorted them to "see that the people behave in a calm manner befitting a great nation." Japanese Foreign Minister Koki Hirota told the governors: "I cannot assure you that the China situation will not become aggravated." Navy Minister Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai told them he was sending warships "for policing" not only to China's chief ports and river mouths but as far south as The Netherlands Indies and as far north as the coasts of Soviet Siberia. After referring to "the lawless, treacherous and provocative acts of the Chinese," Japanese War Minister General Sugiyama revealed that Japanese home troop divisions were being sent to the Chinese mainland for the first time in five years. Then he got considerably ahead of the news by shouting: "Now that the Chinese air units already have started moving, you provincial governors must facilitate full preparations for air defense by local citizens!"

Bedseat-driving Prince Konoye thus got a lot of steam blown off by truculent members of his Cabinet. Highly truculent Home Minister Eiichi Baba was chosen to read the Premier's speech to the governors, an oration several degrees milder than any speech Mr. Baba would have been apt to make himself, although it contained grandiose phrases about "Japan's duty to take measures not only for the peace of North China but for the peace of all Eastern Asia!"

Japan has about 1,200 first-line fighting planes, China about 400, and Japan's Premier well knew that China's Dictator knows well these significant statistics. Japanese equipment for motorized land warfare is infinitely superior to that of China which has scarcely any tanks; Japanese artillery is superior, although in this respect China comes nearer the mark. Nearly 7,000,000 civilian Japanese have received compulsory military training under Army instructors. China has no reserve of trained civilians. Her so-called "2,000,000 soldiers" are more than half nondescript rabble, miserably armed. Japan has 280,000 fully equipped, smartly trained soldiers. But China's ultimate resources in manpower and natural wealth are almost infinite, Japan's decidedly finite.

Fighting in China began last fortnight in the southwestern suburbs of Peiping between Japanese troops engaged in war games and the Chinese forces of General Sung Cheh-yuan (TIME, July 19). In a series of pitched battles at historic Marco Polo Bridge and among the hamlets clustered about Peiping, Chinese gave a spirited account of themselves, and last week in picturesquely worded communiques they "repulsed the barbarians who tried to cut off our garrison and airport at Nan-Yuan, driving them off with our broad-swords." During this engagement two small Japanese shells burst just inside Peiping's Yungting Gate, but panic-stricken Chinese peasants continued to flee in from the countryside.

Japanese troop trains by this time were arriving at Tientsin although Chinese troops of General Sung were mobilizing there simultaneously. In the same railway station one could see Japanese soldiers squatting in their trains on one railway siding while on another siding squatted Chinese troops. Japanese trains had Japanese engineers, crews and switchmen.

The two great Oriental races gave the. world a fine example of placidity as they waited about in Tientsin between the rounds of so-called "battles," amounting last week to little more than skirmishes.

Such conduct as this looked inexplicable to Western eyes lacking the historic focus of North China. Between 1931 and 1934 Japanese soldiers set up the genealogically ''legitimate heir" to the Throne of China as the Emperor of Manchukuo (see map), their puppet His Majesty Kang Te. The next logical step would be to seat this Manchu Emperor on the Dragon Throne of his ancestors at Peiping. To engineer such a coup, Japan sent to China her master schemer and spy, Major General Kenji Doihara who intrigued and bribed for the five North China provinces of Hopei, Chahar, Suiyuan, Shansi and Shantung to set themselves up as "autonomous" and independent of the rest of China (TIME, Nov. 25, 1935 et seq.). At about this time a Mr. Yin Ju-keng, a toothy and unappetizing Chinese with potent Japanese in-laws, was set up by Japanese soldiers as the satrap of a tiny strategic area adjoining Peiping and Tientsin which he still holds. General Doihara failed miserably so far as Suiyuan, Shansi and Shantung were concerned and returned to Japan in semi-disgrace. His intrigue had succeeded, however, in bringing into semi-autonomous existence a Chinese regime more or less under Japan's thumb which is now governing Hopei and Chahar. An able, ambiguous and shrewd Chinese, General Sung Cneh-yuan, heads this regime known as the "Hopei-Chahar Political Council," and it was his troops who last week fought with valiant "broadswords" in obscure villages and lolled about in Tientsin railway stations.

General Sung Cheh-Yuan himself was busy all week "negotiating" with Japanese Lieut. General Kiyoshi Kazuki. What the two of them were actually doing was waiting around to see whether General Sung's nominal superiors, the Nanking Government, were really sending north "Chiang's Own" and were in earnest about war with Japan or whether instead Nanking would tolerate the setting up of General Sung's territory as "another kuo," that is, as a Japanese puppet state, per-haps to be called Huapeikuo ("North China Country").

Neither a traitor nor a patriot but a Chinese realist, General Sung quite realized that he was at the mercy of General Kazuki unless Chinese Generalissimo Chiang should strongly back him, and this week Sung suddenly caved in, so Kazuki said. According to Japanese sources. General Sung made abject apologies for the recent fighting in North China, agreed to punish Chinese officers whose troops had fought, and confirmed that he always tries to stamp out "anti-Japanism." But all this from Sung was "verbal" and Chinese sources kept absolutely mum about what he had or had not promised Kazuki.

Significantly the Sung-Kazuki "verbal truce" as it was called, came just as the Nanking censor passed this Associated Press dispatch: "A survey of trustworthy information today indicated that the Chinese Central Government was making no real military dispositions to fight Japan in North China.

"The Chinese military machine still is far from, ready, in the view of non-Chinese military experts. Many of its parts do not fit together. German gun carriages do not go with Czechoslovak guns. French cartridges are useless with British rifles. Italian-trained aviators do not understand the American planes they are asked to fly.

"Russian-trained or Japanese-trained army officers do not understand the tactics or strategy that should be used in their own country. Personal jealousies permeate the high command. Few of the generals can think in terms of a coordinated campaign with units larger than a division.

"Foreigners with long experience in China termed erroneous the impression that apparently has gained currency abroad that China at last was ready to challenge Japan and fight a war in Hopei."

Roosevelt of Japan? If the Japanese thus had General Sung and North China at their mercy this week, just how merciful is Prince Konoye whose advent as Japan's Premier was hailed by the humanitarian London Times with the sub-headlines: "A MODERN-MINDED NOBLE."

Undergraduates at Princeton admire the Premier's son, Prince Fumitaka Konoye, so much that last spring he was elected captain of the University golf team. He is not only Princeton's golf champion but so "regular" that he plasters his dormitory room with racy cartoons from Esquire. Last week Son Konoye arrived in Tokyo on vacation, declared: "The Premier is more like a brother to me than a father!"

Music lovers throughout America and Europe have attended symphony concerts conducted by the Premier's most cultured younger brother, Viscount Hidemaro Konoye. Many of them know that when the Viscount was socially ostracized in Japan some years ago for "stooping to become a bandmaster," the Liberal Prince Konoye stood by him to such good purpose that today the "Imperial" Symphony Orchestra is almost as highly thought of in Tokyo as it is in Cleveland.

Moreover the West has heard that Premier Konoye has developed a radio personality comparable to President Roosevelt's. "WINS FRIENDS ON RADIO" headlined the New York Times last spring. The Prince has been snapped and publicized golfing, being barbered, and dressed up as Adolf Hitler at a Japanese fancy dress party. "My wife rules me with an iron hand" is one of the sayings of this Oriental which has startled and appealed to Occidentals. "She will not even let me have a cup of tea between meals. Such is the tyranny of being married!"

Would a Japanese like that want to gobble China? "My doctor warns me not to smoke, but he caught me the other day," chuckled the Liberal Prince for publication a few days after he formed his Cabinet. "I guess he is afraid to scold me, now that I am Premier!"

The Roosevelt Family, aristocratically "Old Dutch" though they are, scarcely compare with the House of Konoye. The latter is one of only five "Sacred Families" from which the Divine-Emperor may pick his Empress. The Premier is conceived to have the blood of the Japanese Gods in his veins and can thus dispense with the vanity in which so many Japanese statesmen indulge--such as showing off their culture by speaking in terms so archaic and high-flown that the Japanese masses often have no idea what they mean over the radio.*

Prince Konoye led a hot youth but was early marked for advancement by potent old Prince Saionji, now the 87-year-old Last of the Genro and chief adviser to the Throne. To the Versailles Peace Conference shrewd old Saionji took the then young Konoye, baptized him in diplomacy and statecraft. After revered Saionji returned to Japan he continued to groom the Prince with care, saw to it that Konoye at only 42 became President of the House of Peers, most of whose members are three decades older. It became a settled thing among Japanese insiders that he was one day to be Premier, and the Japanese public are charmed by his anecdotes of when he was poor and put-upon.

''When my father died," Prince Konoye affectingly relates, "men who had received favors from him seemed to forget those favors, and there were even some who demanded the repayment of loans they claimed to have made him. One, a wealthy notable, was particularly merciless. As we had no money, we sent him some of our valuable treasures, but he would accept nothing but cash. This and other pathetic incidents bred in my susceptible mind a hatred of injustice. I was a gloomy youth throughout my student days, with an inclination to read extremist literature from Western Europe."

Liberal Without Sacrilege-Last spring came the moment for which old Saionji had been grooming his protege. The Cabinet of Premier General Senjuro Hayashi was forced out and thereupon the Last of the Genro produced from his ample kimono sleeve the "Liberal Prince" to be Premier (TIME, June 14).

Sitting at a telephone, Prince Konoye quickly assembled what is still called "The Telephone Cabinet" and rates as one of the broadest assemblages of minds which ever comprised a Japanese Government. As was appropriate for a scion of one of the Godly Families, the Premier-Prince sought to unify the Empire, end party strife. "If I can make old enemies bury the hatchet and become friends," he said, "If I can weld the whole nation into one peaceful family with the Emperor as the father of the household, I shall be content."

It would be sacrilege for the head of one of the five Godly Families not to hope to see the blessed rule of the Son-of-Heaven extended over somewhat more of China. Manchukuo was "stolen" or "achieved" by his predecessors, according to the point of view. To say that the Prince is a "Liberal" means chiefly that he is not a frantic Japanese zealot who wants his country to bite off more of China than it can chew. To establish, as a sequel to "Manchukuo," another "kuo" of moderate size is Prince Konoye's idea of being Liberal.

In Tokyo the younger, more fanatic school of Japanese militarists fumed last week that their Empire ought to defeat Soviet Russia first, objected that the whole concept of dealing with Nanking before Moscow has been settled is strategically and politically unsound. This Japanese younger school sees Stalin as ultimately behind Chiang and wants to make an end of half measures, but Japanese "Liberals" like the Premier see more wisdom in taking any number of delicate bites at the Chinese cherry. If now Generalissimo Chiang, should really hurl China's whole force against Japan, with Russian cheers behind him, the bedseat-driving Premier would be genuinely dismayed. He hopes with "Liberal" fervor that he may enable the Son-of-Heaven to rise over North China without undue bloodshed and not upsettingly soon.

This week Chinese Dictator Chiang at last made his first public statement on the current Sino-Japanese crisis. "Japan will have to decide whether these clashes will result in a major war between Japan and China. If we allow one inch more of our territory to be lost we will be guilty of an unpardonable offense against our race!"

*Candid General Hayashi has even said that he could not himself understand parts of speech written for him when he was Premier. (TIME, Feb. 8 et seq.).

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