CHINA: Noble Experiment

While the spirited young Spanish people continued last week to exterminate each other , the Nanking Government of the venerable Chinese people commenced a bribery experiment noble in motive. That stanch Methodist, Premier & Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, turned his other cheek toward Mongol and Manchukuoan forces which have been invading Suiyuan, the strategic Chinese province north of the Great Wall. To those invaders who would transfer their allegiance to China, he publicly offered the following bribes, described with cultivated euphemism as “rewards”:

Private soldier: $3.

Captain: $600.

Major: $1,500.

Colonel: $3,000.

Pilot with plane: $6,000.

Brigadier General: $9,000.

Major General & Lieut.-General: $15,000.

Aviators of the invading forces complained that to desert with an airplane is certainly worth more than $6,000, but otherwise the scale of bribes was esteemed just. Another itemized scale announced that Premier Chiang will pay $3,000 for an anti-aircraft gun; $900 for a tank; $300 for a machine gun; $9 for a rifle and $6 for a pistol.

The Christian Premier anticipates that rivers of Chinese blood will remain unshed at an expense in silver dollars measurably less than what it would cost China to buy the weapons she requires direct from the rapacious West. In Nanking, placing the tips of their fingers calmly together, Chinese statesmen opined to fascinated white correspondents that it would surely be the part of wisdom for European nations, now so petulantly drifting into another War and with Munitions Broker Sir Basil Zaharoff dead, to buy each other off rather than blunder into the much greater expense of fighting.

But latest dispatches from Suiyuan this week reported the invaders still invading.