Stability amid Chaos

While China continued to welter, last week, in virtual anarchy, certain events emerged with significant stability from the general chaos.

P: The Nationalist Government at Nanking has obtained as its Foreign Minister the able and versatile General Huang-Fu. Some five years ago he administered this same post with marked success for what is now the rival reactionary Government at Peking. Later the facile General served as Chinese envoy to Germany, and more recently he was Mayor of the Chinese settlement at Shanghai. Last week he quietly put forward the Nationalist claims for revision of China's "unequal treaties" with the Powers but displayed in his statements to the press a healthy consciousness of realities and a willingness to bide his time.

P: The prestige of the Nationalist Government has recently been enhanced by visits to Nanking from the Japanese, British and French ministers accredited to Peking; and last week U. S. Minister John Van Antwerp MacMurray followed their lead and began a tour through Nationalist territory.

P: A reminder that Chinese are now prospering hugely in immigrant colonies on the Malay Peninsula and in Borneo & Java was put forward, last week, by U. S. Methodist Bishop Titus Lowe, as he arrived in Paris from his bishopric in Singapore. Said he: "The Chinese have invaded Malaysia by thousands. Not only do they supply men for day labor but they run banks, steamship lines and other great business undertakings."

Concluded the good Bishop with ardor: "The greatest single rubber operator in the world is a Chinese named Tan Kah-kee with headquarters in Singapore."

Manhattan rubbermen recalled that rubber tycoon Tan Kah-kee is a slender, old fashioned Chinaman some five feet two inches tall and about fifty years of age. He founded his rubber business in 1910 at Singapore, and now enjoys a. fabulous income which enables him to live luxuriously at Amoy, on the coast of Southern China. Uneducated in the western sense, and speaking only Chinese & Malayan, he has a passion for educational philanthropies and makes up each year the large deficit of a university which he founded at Amoy. He has several times visited Europe but professes an unalterable resolve not to set foot in the U. S., although much of his rubber dealing is done with U. S. firms. Although untutored, potent Tan Kah-kee has been elevated to the rank of Chief Justice of the British-fostered "Chinese Court" in Singapore.

P: Again came reports that Chinese tycoons are hurrying their money out of the country as fast as they can.

P: The re-emergence of Canton as a separate Chinese Government was signalized, last week, when the British Governor of Hongkong, Sir Cecil Clementi, received a visit from Dictator Li Chai-sum of Canton and accorded to him every honor. Sir Cecil then prepared to return the Dictator's visit by announcing that he would go himself in full & formal array to Canton.

P: From the remote interior tales continued to arrive of marauding bands formed by the desperately harassed farmers to combat the roving armies of the militarists. The latest of these Chinese Ku-Klux fellowships was reported, last week, as existing in remote Szechwan Province under the mystic name of Sen Bing or Ghost Soldiers. Attired in yellow with scarlet turbans and sashes, the leaders of Sen Bing are said to work "mighty incantations rendering their followers supremely brave and immune to Death."

P: All seemed quiet, last week at Peking, seat of the potent War Lord Chang Tso-lin, Dictator of North China. As an administrative measure he was reported to have transferred authority in Shantung Province from the notorious General Chang Tsung-chang (TIME, March 7, 1927) to another subordinate commander, Sun Chuan-fang, who not long ago held Shanghai in his own right of conquest (TIME, Oct. 4, 1926, et seq.). Nor did War Lord Chang abandon his smooth butcherings. Within the week one Kao Jen-shan, Columbia graduate and professor in Peking, was paraded in a cart and publicly shot. Others followed in the cart as thousands had preceded.