CHINA: Stand Up & Fight

China’s slim, brisk Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek last week got the ominous news that four Japanese major generals were closeted in Dairen to draw up a “new policy” toward China. Unless Chiang’s Nationalist Kuomintang Party starts acting as if it were really pro-Japanese, Japan, according to the four major generals, will feel obliged to detach China’s five rich northern provinces from Nanking’s rule, set up puppet governors and collect revenues.

Briskly Chiang climbed into his personal plane, buzzed north to Shansi Province to talk things over with the key war lords in the endangered provinces. Then he turned, streaked back to Nanking, where last week, day after day, he conferred with his Kuomintang underlings.

How vital for China’s future are the fleets of the Western Powers was demonstrated last week in Southeast China, far from the land front of Japanese expansion but thoroughly vulnerable by sea. Three weeks ago the Japanese flagship Tatsuta and ten destroyers steamed into Swatow to force Chinese customs officials to yield up a seized Japanese cargo of rice on which petty provincial taxes had not been paid (TIME, Oct. 14). With set faces, the Japanese Navy officers demanded restitution, apologies, punishment of Canton customs men, abolition of the annoying duties and the right of Japanese to trade in the upriver country back of Swatow. Out of nearby British Hongkong, at that moment, sailed the British Asiatic Fleet, off for the Red Sea and European troubles. Then into Hongkong sailed part of the U. S. Asiatic Fleet on its way to the Philippines. A U. S. gunboat and a British warship put in at Swatow. Japanese abruptly dropped their demands. A “face-saving” sale of the sequestered rice cargo was arranged. The Japanese war boats rolled out of Swatow.

Canton’s head man, Marshal Chen Chi-tang, seized the moment to insult Nanking and Generalissimo Chiang: “The Southeast will never witness a duplication of the spectacle of more than 100,000 Chinese soldiers evacuating an immense area without firing a shot in obedience to demands of the heads of the Japanese Army. . . . If Nanking orders the Southeast to agree to any unreasonable Japanese demands, we would refuse to obey and would stand up and tight for China’s rights.”