CHINA-JAPAN: Hitler Touch

As sharp fighting raged between Japanese and Chinese last week in Tientsin worried U. S. citizens in this great Chinese city decided they would be safer if they showed the Stars & Stripes, discovered that the only purchasable U. S. flags in town were all stamped “Made in Japan” and offered by genial dealers who had jacked up the price of a small flag from $1 to $3—about the weekly wage of a Tientsin coolie.

President Roosevelt meanwhile was taking no chances with U. S. warships in Chinese waters. The U. S. S. Augusta, flagship of the Asiatic Fleet, was ordered out of Tsingtao and steamed rapidly to Vladivostok on a “goodwill” voyage to Soviet Russia. Even more pointedly the U. S. S. Tulsa, which was steaming toward Tientsin to give her gobs the pleasure of shore leave amid its Chinese night spots, was ordered to turn tail and steam for Chefoo.

In Tokyo members of the Japanese Parliament, when they anxiously inquired whether President Roosevelt was going to decide that a state of war existed in North China and invoke the Neutrality Act against both belligerents, were told by Foreign Minister Koki Hirota that “apparently” such is not his intention.

Peace Preservation Corps. Japanese never tire in their efforts to find Chinese who will act as trustworthy puppets, and in the past two years they have equipped with Japanese rifles, Japanese cartridges and even Japanese machine guns several thousand Chinese known as the Peace Preservation Corps of “General”‘ Yin Ju-keng (TIME, Dec. 2, 1935 et seq.). Toothy Mr. Yin, who looks most of the time like a startled rabbit, is a Chinese with a potent Japanese in-law who became a “general” overnight by so styling himself, and by the grace of Japanese bayonets. He was ruling uneventfully last week in his strategic bailiwick which lies close to Peiping on the north and east, when suddenly his Peace Preservation Corps, every man a Chinese, started using their Japanese weapons against the Japanese garrison at General Yin’s capital, Tungchow.

This “Chinese treachery,” as indignant Japanese at once branded it, was smartly timed. About 3,000 Japanese troops recently made up the garrison, but 2,900 had just marched away to help suppress “rebellious Chinese” trying to strike a blow for their country at nearby Nanyuan. It was all in the day’s work for the Japanese garrison of 100, although taken by surprise and outnumbered by 10-to-1, to stand off the Chinese. These peppered the Japanese barracks with their machine guns, then entrenched themselves in nearby cornfields over which four Japanese planes circled around & around, bombing the Chinese until Japanese re-enforcements rushed up to relieve the garrison. Meanwhile wounded Chinese had set off in rickshaws to receive treatment at Peiping, only a 14-mi. run for sturdy Chinese rickshaw coolies. Several of these wounded Peace Preservation Corps heroes were asked by correspondents. “But why did you turn against Yin? Aren’t you and he supposed to be pro-Japanese?”

“After all, aren’t we Chinese?” replied the wounded heroes. Yin meanwhile had completely disappeared, murdered, according to Chinese, by his own men, safe in hiding according to Japanese. The Yin regime had always been carefully described by Japanese as a strictly “spontaneous, autonomous state set up by Chinese”— but after “General” Yin vanished the Japanese commander in North China, Lieut. General Kiyoshi Kazuki, made no bones about officially appointing Yin’s successor, put in an even more abject Chinese stoolpigeon for Japan, one Mr. Chi Tseng-mou.

Tientsin Shambles. General Kazuki meanwhile had blundered spectacularly at Tientsin, the teeming port through which during the past month Japan has poured an invading army (TIME, July 26). So deceptively abject were the local Chinese population, its coolies meekly unloading Japanese munitions and its Chinese officials blandly obliging, that General Kazuki did not bother to keep Tientsin heavily garrisoned, hurried almost all the Japanese troops he landed directly inland toward Peiping. Suddenly about 2 a. m. Chinese artillery secretly brought close to Tientsin started shelling the central and east railway stations used by the Japanese. Simultaneously Chinese snipers, evidently well organized on a citywide scale, began firing from the rooftops, hurling hand grenades. In the streets some Chinese soldiers attacked the Japanese. Others seized bargeloads of Japanese beer, burst into the offices of the Dairen Steamship Co. and stayed through the night, nonchalantly bibbing. Japanese aircraft did not go up until dawn but when they did General Kazuki systematically destroyed or set afire the principal structures in the Chinese quarters of Tientsin. By 10:20 a. m. what Associated Press called “the most destructive and longest aerial bombardment ever undertaken by Japanese Army”* fliers had ringed Tientsin’s foreign concessions with dense smoke clouds belching up from the Chinese quarters. Cabled New York Times veteran Hallett Abend: “The Tientsin crisis is definitely over!” Nonetheless it had provided the unique spectacle of a commander forced to bomb the daylights out of a city he was using at the same time as his base for an invasion. In the harbor meanwhile a perky little Japanese armored launch chuffed up to a Chinese warship, took it away from its Chinese bluejacket crew without a fight.

“Brightness Itself.” In Nanking last week the Dictator of China, wise and watchful Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, manifestoed: “China is determined to fight to the last man! . . . The policy of our Government has been consistent from beginning to end; namely, that we cannot surrender any territory or allow our sovereignty to be encroached upon. I call upon the Nation to mobilize our total resources and struggle hand-in-hand to save China!”

Weeks had elapsed since the Generalissimo was reported to be actually sending units of China’s crack troops (“Chiang’s Own”) northward to throw the Japanese out of the Peiping area. Japanese airmen, still looking for these Chinese forces last week, flew 85 miles down the railway up which the Chinese were supposed to be coming and impudently bombed the important city of Paoting. In a further provoking challenge to Dictator Chiang, Japanese obtained the resignation of his subordinate commanding in North China, General Sung Cheh-yuan, and set up in his stead General Chang Tsu-chung. As mayor of Tientsin, he was approved by the Japanese and so far as Tokyo knows he is “loyal.” Thus last week a Chinese tool of Japan was set up in Peiping as the executive of a piece of China as large as Texas. After touring about Peiping, optimistic Japanese Colonel Takeo Imai, the Japanese Resident, crowed: “Everything is brightness itself! Not a single Chinese soldier remains in Peiping.” Japan’s Domei news agency added that “a stream of would-be-constructive Chinese statesmen is pouring into the offices of the Japanese Army’s Special Service Mission” —i.e., offering themselves as prospective cabinet ministers should North China presently be organized by the Japanese into “another kuo.”

Cooperation, Not Territory. In Tokyo, although the Imperial Government maintained their attitude of surprise that there has been any fighting in North China, the popular press prematurely told Japanese citizens how wonderful it is that an extension of Japanese influence which might have taken one to three months had been accomplished in as many weeks.

The official Japanese Foreign Office press spokesmen said flatly that Chinese were expected to organize spontaneously North China along much the lines of Manchukuo and that Japan of course could not and would not interfere in this “domestic Chinese affair.”

This blunt admission, distressingly crude, had its elegant Japanese counterpart in a speech to the Diet last week by Premier Prince Konoye. “I think there are many persons in the Chinese Government who understand Japan, including General Chiang Kai-shek,” purred the Premier. “I think it should be the basic keynote of Japan’s China policy to make the Chinese race and the Chinese Government return to their original nature as an Oriental people.” After explaining that Communism is un-Oriental. while tactfully omitting to mention that the Chinese Communists have now tentatively joined forces with the Chinese Government. Japan’s Premier blandly added: “For China to dance to such a [Communist] tune and bring on trouble in the Orient is tantamount to weakening the Orient by its own hands. I earnestly hope that the Chinese race will awaken as quickly as possible to realization of its nature as an Oriental race and that it will cooperate with the Japanese, who come of the same Oriental stock. . . . Japan wants not territory but cooperation. … If we had such designs, the entire territory of North China would have been seized by the invincible Imperial Army long ago.”

In this Japanese pronouncement connoisseurs observed the authentic Adolf Hitler touch, chalked it up to the German-Japanese Treaty signed last year for co-operation against Communism.

*It was the Navy which air-bombed Shanghai (TIME, Feb. 8, 1932 et seq.).