Week of the Winds

From Nanking, TIME Correspondent Frederick Gruin cabled this account of T. V. Soong's final days as Premier:

T.V. beat his way up to Nanking from Shanghai in a howling gale of antipathy and criticism. Huffiest & puffiest was still the wind of Fu Szu-nien. Chubby, nearsighted, greying Fu, respected scholar and independent liberal, had expanded his polemics against T.V. into three newspaper articles.

"We must rip aside the iron curtain of the Soongs and Kungs," he railed. He lashed at T.V. from every point of the pamphleteer's compass, denouncing not only his policies but his personality: "Haughty and taciturn. ... As for his knowledge of Chinese culture, even after chemists analyzed it down to the smallest fraction, one can hardly find any trace of it."

Instead of Tea. Thursday afternoon, in this atmosphere, T.V. invited all 30 members of the standing committee of the People's Political Council to the Executive Yuan for tea. But the implacable Fu led 17 fellow committeemen in a boycott of the Premier's party. Word went round that T.V. would have a rough time at the upcoming Legislative Yuan.

It was time to run before the wind.

Chiang Kai-shek sent word to Brother-in-Law Soong.

On Saturday morning, T.V. strode into the grey brick Legislative Yuan building. None of the waiting rank & file knew what was impending. T.V. took a seat facing them, in the center of a long curved table. He was hatless, but in the chilly hall he wore his overcoat and kept a blue-and-red muffler up to his chin. On the chairman's dais behind him sat rotund Sun Fo, Legislative Yuan president, and over Sun's head hung the inevitable portrait of the chairman's father, Sun Yatsen, with the words "Tien hsia wei kung" --Everything for the people.

T.V. read his resignation in a slow, composed voice, using the Shanghai dialect. "Three times during the course of the last year I submitted my resignation. . . . The Generalissimo has finally granted my request." Then he described how the national currency had been secured by silver specie until 1935, when the U.S. policy of high prices for silver drained China's reserves, forcing her to adopt managed currency. Managed currency depended on the people and Government "exercising self-restraint"; there had been too little self-restraint. "The managed-currency system that saved China contained in it the germs of the poison that the country is suffering now."

Instead of Peace. When expenditures outran receipts, T.V. went on, the only recourse was the printing press. But the course of inflation could have been stopped after the Japanese war--"if there had been internal peace. . . . Instead of peace and reconstruction, the country was plunged into war and destruction by the Communists . . . [whose] deliberate and conscious . . . aim was to destroy the economic system so that the Government would collapse."

"The truth," said T.V., "can be told in one sentence. The present economic crisis is the cumulative result of heavily unbalanced budgets carried through eight years of war and one year of illusory peace, accentuated to some degree by speculative activities."

When he was finished, the hecklers began their interpellations. They caustically indorsed the newspaper taunt: "The Premier's prestige has sunk down one thousand fathoms." Soong stared thoughtfully upward at the white Kuomintang sun in the ornate Chinese ceiling. He rose, spoke a few words of rebuttal, then turned to Yuan President Sun Fo on the dais behind him and said, "I have made my report. I had better go."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.