Minister Mobbed

"Fly, Master, fly for your life!" shrilled a good and faithful servant last week at Chinese Foreign Minister C. T. Wang, Yale 1910, Phi Beta Kappa. "I shall remain at my post and attend to my duties," boldly retorted Minister Wang. Crash, rip, zip, bang! A frenzied mob of students rushed the Foreign Office, burst through hastily locked doors, hurled chairs and toppled desks, charged in wild pandemonium for Mr. Wang. "Traitor!" they yelled. "You have betrayed China! Death, death to Wang!" Before defenseless Minister Wang could rise, a well hurled inkpot gashed his head. Mobsmen with clubs laid on. The Foreign Minister of China was almost beaten then and there to Death, would have been had not his loyal servants flying-wedged the mob. By fierce work and low punching they rescued Mr. Wang, rushed him bleeding to his home. Doctors said, "His wounds may be mortal." Blood on the League. Minister Wang's blood was spilled directly as a result of complete inaction by members of the Council of the League of Nations faced in Geneva last week by the Sino-Japanese crisis (TIME, Sept. 28). Facts were not in dispute. Japan by her own admission had put troops and airplanes into Manchuria (which is Chinese), and these Japanese forces had spilled Chinese blood. Such spilling is war. declared China's League Delegate, Dr. Alfred Sze, at Geneva last week, again demanding that the League intervene. Resolved to keep China's Sze and the Japanese delegate Kenkichi Yoshizawa from actually clawing each other's throats. League Secretary Sir Eric Drummond put the furious Orientals for a time in separate rooms. In a third room (while European members of the Council sat in a fourth) was the U. S. "observer," Minister to Switzerland Hugh R. Wilson. Mr. Wilson disagreed with Dr. Sze that Japan had violated the Kellogg Pact. The Council agreed with Mr. Yoshizawa that the matter was one for direct negotiation between Japan and China. "Particularly." soothed Britain's Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, "as Mr. Yoshizawa assures us that Japan is now withdrawing her troops. . . . I hope that these troops will be withdrawn as rapidly as possible." Dr. Sze could not even get the League to appoint a commission which would supervise the Japanese "withdrawal," if it was taking place. From Washington Hon. Henry L. Stimson sent notes to China and Japan urging them to confine military operations to "the requirements of international law," thus tacitly refusing to invoke the famed Kellogg Pact. Outside China all this seemed perhaps academic, dull. To Chinese "students," young firebrand-patriots who are the leaven in China's lump, it seemed: 1) that the Great Powers had betrayed China into Japan's hands; 2) that in appealing to the Powers gullible Chinese Foreign Minister C. T. Wang had made this betrayal possible. For him, Death! In the streets of Nanking, Shanghai, Peiping students saw, read, roared: "Dadjang! Dadjang!" (War! War!) Patriots Are Patriots. Precisely because China's patriots are growing so patriotic, Japan has invaded Manchuria "to protect Japanese lives & property." Japanese apologists last week likened to Moscow's Third International the Chinese Foreign Policy Association at Mukden. They claimed that it is flooding all Manchuria with "virulent anti-Japanese propaganda" which Japan has now ceased to tolerate. Painful no doubt to Japanese Foreign Minister Baron Shidehara, peace apostle, were the actions of the Japanese General Staff last week. Japanese planes not only bombed Chinese villages in Manchuria but ground-strafed a train on which, in his private car, rode indignant General Man ager J. G. Thomson of the Peiping-Mukden Railway, a British subject. Japanese troops if withdrawing at all from Manchuria were withdrawing last week very slowly. In British Hong Kong, Chinese mobs rushed the Japanese quarter, were restrained only by a bayonet charge of the Scotch Highlanders, kilts aflutter.

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