CHINA: Pear Core & Principles

While the greatest of modern Chinese thinkers and philosophers, Dr. Hu Shih, Dean of the School of Literature at the National Peking University, was being feted last week at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria by the China Society of America and was toasting China’s increased political unity, in Shanghai some courageous Chinese cabaret reveler was throwing a pear core at a marching Japanese bluejacket and thus offending the dignity of the Imperial Japanese Navy. This culminated a series of “incidents” during the past two months. When mysterious individuals in Chinese costume, possibly disguised Japanese agents provocateurs, then fired from ambush in Shanghai, killing a Japanese sailor and wounding two others, the local Japanese war machine instantly went into action.

Within an hour the 2,000 Japanese Marines stationed in Shanghai had been increased by 100 more who occupied the Hongkew section of the International Settlement and brusquely arrested as “suspects” everyone they could lay hands on. Every corner of the night club from which the pear core had been thrown was meanwhile ransacked by Japanese military police who said they were looking for “traces of pear peelings.” Abjectly the Chinese night club proprietor made written apology to the Japanese, but by this time Rear-Admiral Eijiro Kondo, Commander of the Shanghai Special Japanese Marine Corps, was clearing his ships for action and in Tokyo the Emperor was closeted with Japanese Navy Minister Osami Nagano while the Government’s press spokesman cried: “Our indignation knows no bounds!”

Chinese Premier and Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, with his usual good fortune, happened to be 750 miles away in Canton and so did not immediately have to do or say anything in rebuttal to the Japanese. “My God, my God — this is terrible!” cried Chinese officials, while Cabinet members piled into planes, flew to Christian Premier Chiang, persuaded him to fly with them back to Nanking, his Capital.

Rear Admiral Osamu Sato, the highest Japanese Naval official in China who is stationed there as naval attaché, divulged to correspondents that the Japanese Government is now pressing the Chinese Government to accept “certain mild general principles” which are actually harsher than Japan’s notorious Twenty-One Demands of 1915. Under the first “mild” principle, each Chinese Government army campaigning against Chinese Communists in the interminable civil wars and skirmishes must have with it a Japanese army of equal numbers. Under the second “mild” principle, each official of the Chinese Government, including those of its defense forces as well as its civil bureaucracy, must have attached to him a Japanese adviser. Under the third Japanese “mild general principle” there must be “immediately created” an autonomous North China separate from the rest of China in every respect except that it may fly the Chinese flag while controlled by Japanese. Admiral Sato, when asked if Japan would enforce Chiang’s acceptance of these principles by a naval ultimatum, expressionlessly replied: “That may be the only way. It is the solution that first occurs to the simple military mind. If any civilian has a better suggestion, I hope he offers it.”