CHINA: Immediate, Fundamental Change. . . .

Nothing so pleases a man who likes to beat his wife as a loud brawl among the neighbors, and last week Japan’s yellow men were elated as whites & blacks made front page war (see p. 19). Haggard old China has been due for another beating all summer, and spry Japan, while prepared to lay on the whangee anyhow, is well content that it should make only back-page news. Almost unnoticed last week, seven Japanese river gunboats steamed up the swirling, muddy Yangtze to put huge Hankow, the “Chicago of China,” at the mercy of Japanese shot and shell. Simultaneously in China’s far south, ten Japanese destroyers stuck their snouts into Swatow.

The river gunboats picked on Hankow last week because on the fourth anniversary of Japan’s seizure from China of Manchuria (TIME. Sept. 28. 1931 et seq.) posters were stuck up in Chinese barracks at Hankow and Wuchang reading simply “Remember Our Loss.” This, according to the cocky commander of Japan’s gunboats last week, “constitutes intolerable anti-Japanese propaganda for which the Imperial Japanese Government demands full satisfaction and punishment of the guilty Chinese.”

Even more intolerable declared the Japanese, was their discovery that Chinesesoldiers on shooting ranges had been sniping at Japanese flags, at dummies dressed as Japanese soldiers.

The trouble at Swatow began when a Chinese customs supervisor took an intolerable attitude toward Japanese smugglers who have been operating on so huge a scale that rice-tax receipts at Swatow have fallen from $400,000 per month to $12,000. Boldly the supervisor ordered seized vast quantities of smuggled Japanese and Korean imports, which include rice, bean-cake, bean-oil, cotton piece goods, sugar and cement. Last week the commander of the ten Japanese destroyers, which came zipping into Swatow and proceeded to indulge in spectacular searchlight drills every night, demanded that the smuggled goods be returned to the Japanese smugglers and that all Swatow duties on such goods be hereafter canceled. Chiang Goes West. With frightened local authorities at Hankow and Swatow obliged to accede to Japan’s demands, the National Government at Nanking clung like patriotic limpets to the position they have dexterously maintained for several years between the barbs of China’s excruciating dilemma. They might have bankrupt themselves and squandered Chinese blood in suicidal armed resistance to Japan. Or they might have made themselves what the Japanese Government would call a wholly satisfactory Chinese Government.

Instead, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek has pocketed pride to strive for the betterment and consolidation of Central China, not immediately menaced by Japan. Some 300 miles south of Nanking at Nanchang in the fastness of Kiangsi Province he also established one of the greatest fighting air bases in the Far East. Last week this seat of Chinese air power-aviation being the sole arm in which China begins to have strength-was being transferred 1,400 miles west to Chengtu in almost totally inaccessible Szechwan Province. This move by Generalissimo Chiang resembles that of Soviet Dictator Stalin in establishing strategic bases beyond the Ural Mountains too remote to be attacked by any European power. Szechwan Province, ringed by mountains and penetrated by no railway, will be developed by the Generalissimo, say his friends, into “a great, self-supporting and strategic unit.” Larger than France, it is also more populous, and so distant from, Japan as to be, at its farthest western tip, only 100 miles from India.

With the Generalissimo of China thus busy with matters more practical than fighting Japan, the Nanking Government has had to have a Premier whom Japanese would consider pro-Japanese, this remarkable Chinese being Mr. Wang Ching-wei. When he himself could no longer stomach his sickening role and resigned “because of my poor health, which is very real” (TIME, Aug. 26), the Japanese Government applied pressure which forced Generalissimo Chiang to oblige Mr. Wang to get well overnight and carry on as Premier. “Japan Is Fully Prepared.” Premier Wang and his Cabinet play their roles as a coop full of apparently chicken-hearted Chinese statesmen who have actually served champagne and drunk complimentary toasts with the Japanese Ambassador while Chinese troops were being mowed down by Japanese machine guns in North China (TIME, June 24). To their credit the Chinese Government have the magnificent negative achievement that they have not yet been forced to extend official diplomatic recognition to the puppet Empire of Manchukuo, carved by Japan out of part of North China beyond the Great Wall.

Of paramount importance last week, and liable to be seized by Japan while Italy distracts the world’s attention, was the remainder of North China. Last June efforts were made by Japan to cripple that part of this area within the Great Wall by demanding that its local Government, the Peiping Political Council, be abolished. Nanking could not refuse but the adroitness with which Premier Wang & Cabinet yielded caused Japan’s Military Attache in Peiping to exclaim in puzzlement: “I do not regret the abolition of the Council, but the Chinese did it suddenly, without talking to us in advance. That is not so kind. And apparently they did not decide who is going to be responsible in the Council’s place to negotiate with the Japanese Army.”

In such lack of decision and a thousand other bits of Chinese guile there has been enough to keep Japan preoccupied all summer, especially since a crisis was germinating simultaneously in the Japanese fighting service’s own high command at Tokyo. This crisis crystallized in the assassination of one of mild Japanese War Minister Senjuro Hayashi’s senior general staff officers (TIME, Aug. 26) and the emergence of new and more militant War Minister Yoshiyuki Kawashima. Last week the Tokyo sabre-rattlers were ready to give China what it takes to make an obstreperous wife or nation behave.

The Empire’s spokesman of last week, Japanese Military Attaché at Shanghai General Rensuke Isogai, began by saying: “I hope the Chinese people themselves will bring about all the changes necessary to produce a stable Chinese Government under a responsible leader with whom Japan can deal. . . . We believe that eventually China’s 400.000,000 people will arise and overthrow the present selfish regime. . . . However if a crisis arises, Japan is fully prepared to step in and make the necessary sacrifices to establish a stable regime. . . . Only two solutions are possible-either the Nanking Government and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek must immediately institute fundamental changes of policy, or the Five Northern Provinces must be entirely separated from the Nanking Government, establishing an independent administration.”

Piece of Pork. This Japanese Army pronouncement had the authentic ring of those which preceded Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and setting up of the puppet Empire of Manchukuo. Today the Nanking Government is already so pliant toward Japan that further acquiescence is well nigh impossible if the Government is to remain in any sense Chinese. Immediately ahead and prior to a Japanese armed advance seemed to lie a period of setting more and more venal Chinese upon North China’s seats of local power. Of these wretched creatures Japan’s favorite last week was the former Chinese Governor of Chahar, General Sung Cheh-yuan, who was cashiered by Nanking last spring, when he threatened to lead his troops against the advancing Japanese. This demotion caused General Sung abruptly to become pro-Japanese in all externals and last week, by Nanking’s appointment, he was the new Commander of the Peiping-Tientsin Chinese Garrisons. Smirked a high Japanese official: “We in-tend to keep offering General Sung every inducement to remain friendly.” In Shanghai last week the vernacular China Times likened the Italo-Ethiopian conflict to the World War, which Japan made the occasion for imposing upon China the notorious Twenty-One Demands. Warning its Chinese readers to expect redoubled harshness from Japan this time, the China Times declared in painful ideographs, “China is like a piece of pork on the kitchen table waiting to be carved.”

Americans “Washed Out.” Amid the present withdrawal of China’s air power to the West, leaving China’s East more than ever at Japan’s mercy, Generalissimo Chiang seemed last week to have made a most fateful decision in ridding himself of famed Colonel John Hamilton Jouett and the devoted little group of U. S. battle plane experts who have enabled China to create at Nanchang one of the great air bases of the Far East, climate or no climate. In Colonel Jouett’s Aviation School near Hangchow over 200 definitely top-notch Chinese fighting flyers were developed by intensive training and ruthless examinations which made enemies of many a Chinese general and politico whose air-ambitious son was flunked out. This year when Colonel Jouett’s contract expired, Generalissimo Chiang declined to renew it, has now turned his air force over to native officials and Italian experts under Rome’s suave General Lordi. This switch resulted directly from efforts by Benito Mussolini over a period of years. In 1934 II Duce flattered Generalissimo Chiang by accrediting to his Government an Ambassador-since when Japan, Great Britain, the U. S. and Germany have followed suit. Recently Generalissimo Chiang accepted an Italian bombing plane as a gift from Dictator Mussolini (TIME, June 24) and last week, with U. S. air advisers to China “all washed out,” some of Chiang’s best friends thought he had made the mistake of his life, ruined a magnificent training service which was just hitting its stride.