INTERNATIONAL: Dictator Kidnapped

FOREIGN NEWS

The event of basic world importance which took place last week occurred in China. It was as if Hitler had been kidnapped by Goring or Stalin by Voroshilov. In fact the most powerful man in Eastern Asia had been kidnapped last week by one of his potent and ambitious countrymen, a Chinese who not many years ago was under treatment in the Rockefeller Hospital at Peiping for addiction to opium. Kidnappee was the Premier of China, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, the military conqueror of his country not many years ago (TIME, April 25, 1927). Kidnapper was “The Young Marshal,” Chang Hsueh-liang, son of the late great War Lord Chang Tso-lin who was assassinated by Japanese agents in their greatest mistake of this decade (TIME, July 2, 1928).

In China, nothing is ever exactly what it seems except an assassination, and the kidnapping of the greatest man in Eastern Asia, unless it should be followed by his assassination, lacked any quality of finality. It was considered by nearly all Chinese, when the staggering news broke, as open to the highly probable suspicion that the Premier of China had had himself kidnapped from the noblest of motives.

Sian, whence news of the kidnapping was flashed, is almost as remote and centrally located in China as though President Roosevelt were kidnapped among the Rocky Mountains. The kidnapper, Young Marshal Chang, sent out over his military telegraph lines the only account of how his soldiers had detached the Generalissimo from his soldiers, an operation involving treachery by numerous persons, if not hundreds, for all soldiers in China ought to be the Premier’s. If the Young Marshal had demanded say $50,000,000 ransom money, the whole thing would have been orthodox, for Mme Chiang is of China’s great financial family, the House of Soong, and if they have not got $50,000,000 they know how to raise it on a few hours’ notice “for the welfare of China” from the country’s richest class.

The ransom asked, however, was not money. The Young Marshal asked, with the obvious motive of Chinese filial piety, and perhaps with other motives too, that the Chinese Cabinet pay the ransom of declaring war on Japan “immediately,” and introducing these “reforms” :

1) Abandonment of the internal war waged by the Government against Communist bands for many years in China, and reorganization of the Kuomintang or Nationalist Party of the Premier to include Communists, as it did up to 1927. Up to that year the Kuomintang was subsidized openly direct from Moscow, and the generals who fought under the Generalissimo all had Soviet advisers and Communist propaganda staffs.

2) A formal pledge by the Government to reconquer from Japan the part of China once ruled by Old Chang the War Lord, and bequeathed by him to Young Chang, namely Manchuria proper or “Manchu-kuo.”

The son of Old Chang thus demanded vengeance in the form of war and by inference the restitution of his inheritance. Any not-too-well cured dope addict might have had this scarcely brilliant idea, but what about Reform No. 1 ? Who put pro-Red ideas into the noodle of the Kidnapper? Old Chang, when he held Peiping (TIME, June 27, 1927 et seq.) indulged his habit of doing something so fantastic that today only Adolf Hitler does it: he caused the heads of Communists to be actually chopped off and “roll in the sand.” Old Chang’s executioner with his great broad sword, and sometimes Old Chang with his gold-plated Mauser pistol, killed many more Reds than ever the Nazis have. He also, on his own responsibility as no gentleman and a War Lord, burst open Soviet Embassy offices at Peiping and filled the world for weeks with evidence of its machinations which Communists loudly called “forged.” It seemed last week entirely against the nature of Young Chang to have taken a proCommunist line.

Until facts should emerge, observers overseas could only cast about for a hypothesis which would fit the situation, and one lay ready to hand. It might be untrue but it was logical that Premier Chiang should have decided to enlist in a Chinese war against Japan the aid of that same Soviet Government which enabled him to conquer China in the first place and which only last fortnight received the slap in Moscow’s face of a Japanese-German accord against Communism (TIME, Dec. 7). No stranger things happen anywhere than among Chinese generals and there were a whole batch of them in Sian last week. They may or may not have said to themselves, “Our sorely exploited country must keep the goodwill of the good people of America and Europe and in those countries not impair our credit any more than can be helped. Bankers do not seem to like Moscow, but if the Premier of China is ‘forced’ against his will to fight the Japanese, whom he has been getting ready to fight anyhow, with Communist assistance, that will put a much better face on things. We can also tell the West that if we win this war with Moscow’s aid we will turn around afterward and ditch Moscow, just as we did before in 1927.”

Only the decisive assassination of Premier Chiang would raise his kidnapping much above this indicated status. Even then Young Chang might have in mind simply taking over the whole scheme, or one like it, and attempting to carry it through with a dope addict’s overweening confidence in himself. To frantic Mme Chiang, who was with great difficulty prevented from flying to Sian from Nanking, the gallant young Marshal telegraphed: “Before God, I swear I have not harmed anybody. Therefore you need not worry.”

In Nanking there were still plenty of Chinese generals left, and the Government bustled about getting off troop trains in the general direction of Sian. Ensuing dispatches grossly contradicted each other. In one of these the Young Marshal’s friends succeeded in kidnapping the Generalissimo’s wife and assassinated his trusted henchman General Chen Ta-chun.

In any case, the Young Marshal had rocked Eastern Asia by starting last week either a war between China and Japan or a much bigger civil war than has raged in China for some years. The famed “Christian Marshal,” Feng Yu-hsiang, who ranks as China’s most benevolent and adroit double-crosser, could hardly wait to get in on whatever was taking place at Sian. “I will fly thither at once,” roared the Christian Marshal, “and offer myself as a hostage to the Young Marshal for the safety of the Generalissimo!”