Etiquette

Pride of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek are the series of great airports which his Nationalist Government is building across north and central China. A new one was nearing completion last week at Haichow, 250 miles north of Shanghai and at the very edge of the Japanese sphere of influence. Out to see the new airport went a trainload of tourists, among whom were 18 toothy, smiling little Japanese in civilian clothes. Sentries met them at the wire gates, guides were assigned to show them around. Hissing polite appreciation, the Japanese went everywhere, promptly unloaded a battery of cameras and began snapping souvenir snapshots in every direction.

In Germany they would have been sent to jail. In Russia they might have been shot. In Japan they would have had their passports snatched and lengthily detained. But in polite Haichow their cameras were merely smashed to bits and they were left free to continue sightseeing.

Meanwhile at Loyang in Central Honan Province an army of sweating, blue-clad coolies was busy as ants rolling, grading, carting dirt, dumping fill for another of the four key air bases in the Nationalist Government's plan. Not since the Middle Ages has the dilapidated mud-walled city of Loyang seen such activity. Beneath a row of dusty cliffs, Loyang, long before the Manchus glorified Peiping, was the capital of six dynasties of Chinese Emperors. There is nothing to show for it today but miles of imperial burial mounds and the hope that lies in the workshops and fields of the new airport.

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