Again, War

China and the world awoke last week to the fact that war has been waging in serious proportions throughout Kiangsi Province these many months past. Able Finance Minister T. V. Soong of the Nationalist Government issued a statement confessing that "the Government has been entirely lacking in candor" regarding this war, but that now "the time has come to be frank with the people so that the Red danger will be realized." President Chiang Kai-shek himself took charge of the Kiangsi forces.

And while puzzled Chinese were trying to realize the trouble in the South, even more violent war broke out to the northward. The "Christian General" Feng Yu-hsiang and Northern Generals Shih Yu-san and Sun Tien-ying moved their combined forces (110,000 men) across Honan Province, threatening the juncture of the Lung-Hai and Peiping-Hankow railways, then started north through Hopei Province, apparently bound for the port of Tientsin. Nationalist Manchurian troops along this front were leaderless, since Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, Vice Commander-in-Chief of the Nationalist Army, Navy and Air Force, was in a Peiping hospital, officially with pneumonia, which was rumored to be really a bullet-hole inflicted by his own bodyguard, bought off by the Cantonese.

Still further trouble for the Nationalists arrived with the Japanese reply to a note protesting anti-Chinese riots in Korea. The reply was "unsatisfactory" to Chiang Kaishek. While drafting a second note and contemplating a Japanese boycott, the Nationalists were alarmed to hear that Rebel General Shih Yu-san was receiving advice from many a Japanese military specialist.

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