Foreign News: Te & Confucius

Determined to consolidate each bit of North China as they nibble it off, the efficient Japanese last week set up the “South Chahar Autonomous Government,” with headquarters at Kalgan. This town, capital of Chahar Province, had been annexed by Japan eleven days before (TIME, Sept. 6), is on the Peiping-Suiyuan rail-road that sweeps through Nankow Pass, northern key to the fat, fertile plains that loop round the Shantung Peninsula. With Kalgan and the Nankow Pass already in their hands, the Japanese had only to capture the stretch of railroad from Kalgan to Suiyuan to find themselves with a stranglehold on North China.

In Kalgan, South Chahar’s “complete independence” from China was declared by “100 influential persons,” headed by bland, pigtailed, 36-year-old Prince Te, a pro-Japanese Mongolian, long head of the “Inner Mongolia for Inner Mongolians” movement (TIME, Oct. 23, 1933, et seq.). It was Prince Te with his Mongolian levies who helped the Japanese to take Kalgan. The highest position in Japan’s latest puppet state was to be his reward.

Meantime 100 mi. south in Peiping, captured month ago by Japan, Chinese Mayor Chiang Chao-sung was submissively taking his orders from, Tokyo. Wily Japanese scheme for China’s former “Northern Capital” was to reintroduce the Confucian rites of the old Imperial Court. Under the nationalist regime of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Christian, Wellesley-educated wife, Confucianism has practically disappeared from China, but there are many conservative Chinese who resented the change. In 1932 the Japanese found it a shrewd move to restore Confucian worship when they established the new state of Manchukuo where the population is 95% Chinese. Last week they hoped for similar success in Peiping.

The mayor of Peiping was ready to do Japan’s bidding, prepared for a Gilbert-&-Sullivan ceremony in the Confucian Hall of Perfection, rounded up 80 orphans to bleat traditional Confucian music, to watch him kowtow nine times to China’s sage.

There were other signs that the Japanese proposed to lord it permanently in Peiping. Though public primary and high schools should have prepared to open last week, they were kept closed until all anti-Japanese propaganda could be excised from the textbooks. One hundred and sixty hand-picked Chinese police began laboriously to learn the Japanese language. The Peiping Chamber of Commerce opened Japanese language classes to make it easier for Chinese shopkeepers to sell things to their “new masters.” There was even rumor that Japan would bring back to Peiping from his dragon-&-orchid throne in Manchukuo’s capital 31-year-old Emperor Kang Te, famed as “Mr. Henry Pu Yi,” last of China’s Manchu Emperors, who abdicated when the Republic was set up in 1912, was crowned Emperor of Manchukuo by Japan in 1934.