CHINA: Trouble Brewing

Imperial Welcome. At Peking numerous imposing floral arches were hastily erected. Scampering coolies strewed the way toward these arches and the squares at which they stood with symbolically dyed golden sand. Proudly riding to meet one another at the focus of this gold-strewn floral mise en scène came the great Super-Tuchuns Wu Pei-fu and Chang Tso-lin.

The sword of Chang hangs over all Manchuria. The luxury of his robber-baron court is set off in opulent relief by the stark barbaric cruelty of his oppressive military régime. While the pen of Wu traces not seldom such poems as are expected from a Chinese gentleman, Chang scorns a lighter toy than his automatic pistol. He has been known to remark to a passing stranger: “Your face seems not unfamiliar. But I thought I ordered you beheaded last year.”

Wu maintains his enormous sphere of influence over Central China as the somewhat distrusted exponent of the old and vanished Chinese aristocracy. A cunning general, he is perhaps the most suavely mannered and custom abiding militarist in a country where law and order have long since conspicuously vanished.

Though Wu and Chang were notorious enemies even before Wu was defeated and forced into temporary eclipse by Chang (TIME,

Nov. 10, 1924), both Super-Tuchuns swore brotherly fealty, at Peking, last week and prepared to direct in concert the carrying through of their recently successful campaign against the armies of Super-Tuchun Feng Yu-hsiang (TIME, April 5 et seq.), who dominated Peking until its capture by subordinate generals of Chang and Wu (TIME, May 3).

Despatches told that Feng’s armies held last week, a line stretching roughly from Nankow to Yuchow, thus fending off their mountain sheltered base at Kalgan from the expected attack of Chang and Wu originating at Peking. General Tien Wei-chun was moving from Peking last week upon Nan-kow pass (26 miles northwest) ; and Marshal Chi Hsieh-yuan, Wu’s principal field commander, was preparing to advance upon Yuchow (100 miles west of Peking).

Wu established his personal headquarters last week upon an armored train near Peking. Chang, according to his wont, ensconced himself amid urban luxury. Barbarian that he is, he is said to treasure still a cheap Connecticut alarm clock, acquired in his youth under circumstances of good omen. Conferees Swelter. With the approach of Peking’s blistering summer the delegates of the nine Washington Treaty Powers, assembled at Peking (TIME, Nov. 2), grew not unnaturally restive last week. The Chang-Wu-fostered Premier of China, Dr. W. W. Yen (TIME, May 10), resigned early in the week, abandoned the farce of pretending that he and a handful of informal advisors constituted the Government of China. Why should the Nine-Power delegates to the Customs and extraterritoriality Conferences (TIME, Dec. 28, Feb. 1) swelter in Peking all summer, since there existed absolutely no government with whom they could deal?

Silas Strawn, able U. S. Customs Conference delegate, answered this question with a snap of his firm jaws. The U. S. delegations, he said, would stay and swelter indefinitely. Shrewd Mr. Strawn had caught the tenor of Japanese propaganda now being spread throughout China. It may be expressed in a sentence: the Occidental delegates are going to quitPeking because they are the enemies of China; but Japan, the friend of China, would otherwise have not only kept her delegates at the Conferences but would have championed China against the Occident.

Since Japan has pursued exactly an opposite course during the negotiations thus far, Mr. Strawn wisely deemed it expedient to encourage the continuance of the conferences by his example, lest the skillfully disseminated Japanese propaganda take effect.