Scholar War Lord

To head the fast-growing Japanese-dominated "Autonomous Government" in North China headed by twerpish-looking Mr. Yin Ju-keng. who deceives nobody by styling himself "General,", a thumping Chinese Big Name was badly needed last week by Japan.

It was a grim joke to Chinese when Mr. Yin's hired Chinese mercenaries, escorted by Japanese troops, last week "captured" Tangku, port of Tientsin. If a renowned Chinese Marshal with a name the world knows had enjoyed the same success it would have been psychologically much greater. At week's end cables from Tientsin announced that the great "Scholar War Lord," Marshal Wu Pei-fu, had agreed to end eight years of erudite and pious seclusion in a Buddhist monastery to rule North China.

If this were true the crude, raw North Chinese militarists who for years have sat uneasy saddles, galloping for & against Japan but galloping chiefly for themselves, are in for a new regime at Peiping with every trapping of intellectual subtlety and elegance. Today Chinese students have less use for either than they had in the days when Wu Pei-fu was mastering scholarship and the composition of fragile poems on expensive paper with a jade-handled ink brush.

In their unphilosophic and unscholarly impatience 5,000 male & female students demonstrated against Japan last week in Peiping. Afterward over 100 were hospitalized as a result of severe beatings by Chinese police. One youngster offered his slim torso with the cry "Beat me more!" and was obliged.

U. S. funds support Peiping's famed Yenching University but its chancellor is a Chinese of wisdom, Luh Chai-wei. "If this goes on," he said, "I believe we will have to close Yenching. If the students demonstrate again in Peiping, I fear the police will shoot into their ranks."

In Nanking last week the Chinese Government, reorganized with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek as Premier, were in daily diplomatic, negotiation with the Japanese Government, trying to save what they could. It appeared certain that North China would not obey Nanking's order to ship all silver stocks to the Capital, because 1) Japan would not permit her prospective new puppet state to be drained of silver, and 2) North Chinese owners of silver prefer to keep it in North China, no matter who governs the area.

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