At Shanghai

P: General Li Pao-chang, Shanghai Commissioner of Defense, continued his attempts to break the general strike (TIME, Feb. 28) by ordering soldiers to march about the streets, cutting off the heads of alleged strikers and setting up these gory warnings upon poles.

P: Mr. Thomas Franklin Millard, long resident in China as the meticulous and widely quoted correspondent of the New York Times cabled a moving story: "A Chinese widow whose livelihood depends on a small flower shop in Bubbling Well Road, Shanghai, had one son, aged 14, who used a bicycle to deliver flowers to foreign residences outside the settlement. The boy was returning home when he picked up a poster, and was seized by soldiers and his head cut off instantly. Today the mother when she learned of it was prostrated with grief."

P: After five days of this wanton decapitation General Li Pao-chang posted up a bland proclamation: "I am touched by the numerous executions by my subordinates. They were prompted thereto by my orders to execute on the spot, without question and without trial. This order I now rescind."

P: Li's butchery had indeed caused about half the 110,000 strikers to return to work, but in London the Laborite Daily Herald pertinently exclaimed: "Had the Nationalists [Cantonese] done this, what a cry of horror and indignation would have been raised in this country, what a call for strong action! But this 'white terror's' victims are only trades unionists, so the author is 'the defender of Shanghai' to British Tories."

P: Adherents of the Nationalists (Cantonese) mutinied aboard two Chinese gunboats in Shanghai harbor last week, and began firing one-and-one-half-inch shells into the French concession at Shanghai. The firing soon ceased without doing any great damage and appeared to have been totally irresponsible.

P: Britons arriving at Shanghai from the North, last week, told how the great War Lord Chang Tso-lin recently sat in at a Mah Jong game at Peking for 37 consecutive hours, tired out three sets of opponents, and finished with approximately the same sum with which he had sat down to play. For a week thereafter, he was unapproachable, ordered cut off the heads of two of his own officers for the usually insignificant offense of forcing their way into a Peking theatre without paying for seats.

P: When the new War Lord of Shanghai, Chang Tsung-chang (see above) began to pour his troops into the city last week, the British landed 5,000 troops and encamped them two miles West of Shanghai ready for any emergency. Eleven thousand more British troops were aboard ships in the harbor, as were 3,000 U. S. marines and 600 Japanese troops.