"Other People's Women. . . ."

For at least half a millennium no one has thought of Chinamen or Chinawomen as pioneers. They have chosen not the virile and womanly covered wagon, but the sendentary and exquisite silken robe. Today China has only one Daniel Boone --the great Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang. Last week he lectured Chinafolk severely for their timid sit-by-the-hearthishness and failure to pioneer. "Is it any wonder," he roared, "that we are laughed at by imperialist countries, who treat us contemptuously, as though we were their little grandsons? They do not even esteem us as much as their cats and dogs!"

On his large feet Marshal Feng stands a full,' massive six feet tall. He towered Gargantuanly, last week, during his address to slender, slant-eyed students of both sexes at the New Nationalist University in Nanking. The students barkened breathlessly, not only because Feng is China's heroic Daniel Boone, but because he is also War Minister of the new Chinese Nationalist State and moreover absolute master of a private and pioneering army of 150,000 men (TIME, Dec. 3).

"I am told," cried Feng sarcastically, "that when men in Honan desire to move to the adjoining province of Shensi in search of livelihood, their wives seize their gowns and sob, 'Ai-ya, my loved one, why will you go to that far-away place?'

"If we continue as spineless as this,

what is to become of us? Other people's

women spread their sails and travel ten

thousand miles to accomplish their pur-j pose. And we? We progress not a single inch in anything!"

Though his student audience began to mutter at such blanket flaying of all Chinese, forthright, Marshal Feng pressed straight on with his speech, smashing home each point with a sounding fist blow upon the rostrum.

"Here in the South we are overpopulated but in the Northwest are great spaces where one may travel for days and hardly meet a fellow traveler. There are wide stretches of fertile land around Ninghsia which were densely populated in the days of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-221 A.D.), which are now desolate. But in various sections of this area one may find foreigners entrenched--little, independent kingdoms with their own police, schools, hospitals and wide roads of their own construction.

"Who established these little kingdoms?

Let me tell you: it was foreign missionaries and merchants. They have broken much land, and often those in charge of such little kingdoms are only two or three foreign women!

"Now, think of it! The women of other countries dare the danger of the long journey to these far lands without a tremor, while, needless to say, our women sit idly at home, not so much as stepping outside their own front door. Even our men do not dare take one step toward an ambition to make a new home in distant parts.

"Shame upon China's cowards! We must have pioneers!"

From almost any other Chinaman such words would have provoked a student riot.

But Feng is Feng--and even Mrs. Feng is of the same pioneer stuff. He has never worn a silken robe that she could cling to, nor has she ever tried to restrain his bold and virile Daniel Booning. He leads and she presides over his private army--a band of 150,000 pioneering soldiers, each one of whom knows a trade.

Unlike all other Chinese forces, Feng's army has never lived by plunder. When a battalion marches into some remote, Ultima Thulish town and encamps for a few days or months, the soldiers practice shoe making, tinsmithing, weaving, carpentering and all manner of simple crafts. Delighted and dazzled, the local farmers are usually all too glad to barter rice and other produce for the soldier's work.

Mrs. Feng, omniscient housekeeper to an army, was one of the first young Chinawomen to become a Y.W.C.A. worker. As such she was wooed by her impetuous, ambitious husband, who was then and for years afterward a passionate Christian, in the Old Testament, Cromwellian fighting sense. Today the Marshal's state of grace is a trifle uncertain. He has cast in his lot with the studiously non-Christian Chinese Nationalist Party.

Continuing his lecture, last week, and speaking straight out of the background of his own deeds Marshal Feng said:

"I have just returned from this great Northwest. It is a wonderland of broad spaces and fertile fields. There melons grow to thirty or forty pounds. It is a land of opportunity. All the land to be opened to settlers is fertile land, capable of producing rice and with large trees whose girth would take three men to span.

"There are wells producing oil little inferior to that imported from abroad, and plenty of coal and 'iron.

"You see what a great land our ancestors have handed down to us and we who are their descendants have not made use of our inheritance. The wars of the Occident are all for the possession of just those minerals which we have in such abundance but which, for lack of communications and development, we leave buried in the ground.

"Our ancestors bequeathed to us these great rivers, these boundless hills. Shall we murmur at them for giving us too great an inheritance? No, let us blame ourselves, their unworthy children, that we do not rise up, we do not exert ourselves, we are not willing to endure hardship.

"Shame! Shame!"