CHINA: Potent Hero

“One Brave Chinese. “Chang Tsung-chang, off to the Chinese battlefront, waves good-bye to 20 wives and concubines, promising to come back victorious. Anemic Westerners can only admire Chang’s courage and verve.

“Ladies whom he began marrying young, when he was a gang coolie, include Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Russians and Mongolians. Win or lose, that’s a brave Chinese.”

Thus exalted famed Hearst columnist-editor Arthur Brisbane, last week, when the notorious, cruel, rapacious General Chang Tsung-chang put his back to the Great Wall of China and prepared for a last stand against the immensely superior armies of the new Chinese Nationalist Government, which now claims to dominate all China (TIME, Aug. 13).

Within 72 hours Last Stander Chang’s army of 50,000 was put to absolute rout by Nationalist & Mohammedan General Pai Chung-hsi, who took 20,000 prisoners, and barely missed capturing Polygamist Chang as he fled to Manchuria. Rejoicing was general, for Chang Tsung-chang is brutal, a thief, a sadist who loves to lash his prisoners, an old-woman-beater and a young-woman-despoiler, a murderer, treacherous, outrageous, godless (TIME, March 7, 1927). But, as Columnist Brisbane remarked, Chang Tsung-chang has “verve”; and 20 wives and concubines have not rendered him “anemic.” As such he looms a potent Hearst hero.

…

Generally speaking, the new Nationalist State continued to make good its boast of ruling all China, except Manchuria, last week. The Manchurian War Lord, Chang Hsueh-liang continued unable to join the Nationalists because of his unwilling, enforced alliance with Japan.

The U. S., which was first of the Great Powers to recognize Nationalist China de facto (TIME, Aug. 6) set Oct. i, 1928 last week as the tentative date for ceremonies amounting to recognition de jure. On that day U. S. Rear Admiral Yates Stirling Jr. of the U. S. Yangtze River Patrol proposes to fire a salute, off Nanking, the Nationalist Capital, which will signify that the U. S. Consulate at Nanking has been reopened and normal Sino-U. S. relations resumed.

Last week a mixed commission was rapidly adjusting the total sum which Nationalist China must pay because her rash soldiery sacked the U. S. Consulate a year and a half ago (TIME, April 4, 1927); and there was every prospect that on Oct. i, 1928 the salute of U. S. gunboats will be returned with alacrity by the so-called “Chinese navy.”