Diplomatic Shut-Eye

When it is 3 a. m. in Washington, it is 9 a. m. in London and 5 the next afternoon in Tokyo. Last week at these simultaneous hours, in these respective capitals, the foreign ministers of three great nations announced that at last they were honoring China by raising their diplomatic representatives in Peiping from ministers to ambassadors. But Chinese were not to be fooled by any hocus-pocus of the diplomatic clock. They rendered thanks, not to Britain, not to their traditional friend the U. S., but to their recent enemy Japan. For Secretary Hull's State Department, though it might rise at 3 a. m. to issue an announcement, still slumbered at the diplomatic switch.

The U. S. had had years to honor its ancient friend China with an embassy, but refrained. In 1924 when the U. S. S. R. paid China the compliment of an embassy, in 1934 when Italy followed suit, the U. S. still refrained. But when Japan, discovering that China might be captured in the arms of . friendship more cheaply than by the arms of war. gave China an embassy, the U. S. and Britain hastily jumped upon the bandwagon, arranged a simultaneous announcement. The U. S. might as well have tagged along with Germany who acted a day later. To the Chinese, who are no fools, the score for the incident stood: for Japan's slogan Asia-for-the-Asiatics, one goal: for U. S.'s much protested friendship, zero.

Said the Chinese Foreign Office: "The energy and sincerity [Japanese Foreign Minister] Hirota showed . . . is well worthy of our admiration. . . . Today is, therefore, a very significant day in the history of Chino-Japanese relations."

Aggrieved must have been U. S. Minister Nelson Trusler Johnson, whose whole career has been spent in China, save when he served in the Far Eastern section of the State Department, who knows China from Szechwan to Kirin (California to Maine) and speaks Chinese as fluently as he speaks English. For he had long advocated giving China an embassy. Only consolation he had last week was that he would probably be upped from a $12,000 ministership to a $17,500 ambassadorship.

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