Imperialist Piece

A smart way to get a book published well and cheaply is to hand the manuscript to Tokyo's Hokuseido Press which specializes in English editions of Lafcadio Hearn. Last week packing cases from Japan were opened in New York by G. E. Stechert & Co., Agents, and soon Manhattan literary circles buzzed excitedly over Adventures in Far Eastern Journalism by Henry George Wandesforde Woodhead, the British editor & publisher of Shanghai's monthly Oriental Affairs.

English journalism in China still keeps much of the gusto it has lost at home. For example, Mr. Woodhead, when he was editing the Peking & Tientsin Times, came forth with this amazing advertisement:

AUCTION. . . .

Rifles, Ammunition, Artillery, Limbers, Shells, etc. Imported direct from Italy. Now on view at the Old Manchu Arsenal, Sanchiatien.

COMPRISING:

44,000 Magazine Rifles; 30,000,300 Rounds of Small Arms Ammunition; 27.75 mm. Q. F. Field-guns with limbers, ammunition wagons &c. complete. . . .

An exceptional opportunity for securing complete Equipment for a Tuchnn's Division, or a Bandit Horde. . . .

Terms:--Ten per cent cash on fall of hammer. Balance to be paid within a month. Approved liens on lootable towns and villages will be accepted as security for balance.

Delivery:--F. O. B. Railway. Sanchiatien. A small extra charge, on a mileage basis, will be made for lots escorted to destination by Italian Marines.

ROMULUS & REMUS

Auctioneers

Tel. Address "Whitewolf, Sanchiatien"

Only troubles with this advertisement were that no arms were being exhibited for sale at the Old Manchu Arsenal, and that there were no such persons as Romulus & Remus, Auctioneers. Editor Woodhead was merely trying in his own resourceful way to stir up as much Chinese rumpus as possible and prevent some Italians from disposing secretly of a much smaller quantity of smuggled arms. Straightforward editorials in his best British vein had failed to get results. Therefore Editor Woodhead touched off his fake advertisement with volcanic results, as droves of Chinese police rushed about looking for "Lo Mi Su" and "Li Mu Su," the ideographs into which their superiors had translated Romulus & Remus.*

Pirates with Champagne. Another time Editor Woodhead had the myrmidons of Chinese justice hunting for that dangerous conspirator "Hans Andersen whose volume of Fairy Tales for the children may be purchased at a low price at the Tientsin Press." Although Chinese pride themselves on their own sense of humor, it never occurred to them that a scholarly British editor, who got out in English each year the fat, solemn, statistics-crammed China Year Book, could possibly have a sense of humor, fantasy and practical joking, too.

Among best bits in a book crammed with them is Editor Woodhead's account of piracy on the China Seas. Aboard a pirated steamer he kept English ladies judiciously supplied with champagne to preserve them from nervous breakdowns. On his exit from this tight squeeze he immediately dispatched his story of the piracy, later had it accepted in court as official record, but on reaching Tientsin was greeted by a delegation of British friends with humorous requests that he present them with gold watches all 'round out of what they jocularly assumed to be his cut of the pirates' loot.

Thoughts of an Emperor, Editor Woodhead enjoyed for some years the personal friendship of the Chinese who, as a baby, was the last Emperor of China, and today is the first Emperor of Manchukuo. While he was off one throne and not yet on another, Henry Pu Yi was the patron of a bridge club founded by Mr. Woodhead, genially loaned him a mastiff to service a bitch, and under the incognito of "Mr. Wang" attempted to visit his newspaper unobserved. "Master, master!" cried the Chinese office boy, bursting into Editor Woodhead's sanctum, "The Emperor has come!"

Later the present Emperor of Manchukuo received his British friend in the Capital of the new State, and blunt Editor Woodhead soon got around to asking His Majesty what a good many people would like to know: Does he feel like the puppet of Japan and is he happy?

"I said," writes Editor Woodhead, "that later I should like to put some formal questions to him for my newspaper articles. First, however, might I ask him a few personal questions as a friend? He replied that I could ask him any question I wished.

''I then said that it would interest his foreign and Chinese friends to know whether he was really happy in his present position. He replied emphatically that he was. He went on to say that he was kept busy, but not so busy as he had been when he first came to Changchun, as the administrative machinery was now better organized.

"Next I informed him that the general belief in China was that he had been coerced into his present position, and was not a free agent in any respect. He not only strongly denied this, but added that he would like to tell me why he had assumed his new office. He had been actuated by two motives--political and personal. First, as to the political. When the Manchu Dynasty abdicated it had been with the avowed intention of restoring the sovereignty to the people. But in the 20 years that had elapsed, what had happened? Political power had passed into the hands, not of the people, but of ambitious and grasping militarists. The welfare of the population had been entirely disregarded; they had been tyrannized over and oppressed. China's relations with the foreign Powers had grown steadily worse. And the pledge that absolute equality would be maintained between China's five races had been flagrantly violated.

"Secondly, he was prompted by personal motives. Manchuria was his ancestral home, and it was only natural that he should be specially interested in what was happening in this region. Moreover, every undertaking given to the Manchu Imperial Family in the Abdication Agreement had been wantonly violated. The pension to be paid to him by the Republic had been canceled. His private property had been confiscated. He had been treated with studied insolence by the Kuomintang. And the ancestral tombs had been violated and rifled, without any attempt to bring the perpetrators to book or to secure the recovery of the stolen treasures.

"It was only natural, then, that when trouble occurred in Manchuria he should follow developments with great attention, and wonder whether he was not destined to play some part in an attempt to improve the condition of his ancestral Provinces. Emissaries of the Separatist movement called upon him at Tientsin and urged him to proceed to Manchuria. And at last he felt that if he was ever to go. he must do so forthwith, or he might find it impossible to leave. . . .

" 'Then the current report that you were kidnapped and sent to Port Arthur under Japanese escort in a destroyer is not true?' I asked.

"He threw back his head and roared with laughter, repeating, in English; 'Kidnapped! Kidnapped! No! No!'':

Thus His Majesty the Emperor Kang Te of Manchukuo is happy in holding the thought that he was not set up by Japan as a puppet, but restored by loyal Chinese to a throne in the realm of his Manchu forefathers--a happy thought flatly contradicted by the facts.

Feng Flayed-- Members of the present Chinese Government cannot very well be taken to pieces by a Shanghai editor & publisher, but what Mr. Woodhead might have written can be surmised from his manner of cutting loose about recent Chinese leaders who are barely over the threshold of retirement, such as the famed "Christian General" Feng Yu-hsiang.

"A curious mixture was the Christian General," writes Editor Woodhead. "He was a man of violent temper. In February 1924, when he was on his way through the Legation Quarter to dine with the American Minister, the police attempted to stop his car, which was proceeding at excessive speed, with glaring headlights and armed guards on the footboards. The car stopped to avoid running over one of the police on point duty, and General Feng got out and ordered his bodyguard to kill the constable. Fortunately this order was not obeyed. He snatched the man's baton from him, and then resumed his breakneck career, his bodyguard hitting out at all other policemen they encountered en route.

"General Feng's army, the Kuominchun, was in its early days the best disciplined force in the Chinese Army. The men were not allowed to smoke or drink. And at one time all prostitutes and opium-dealers were expelled from any city in which they were stationed. This was not always the case, however, for a member of my staff who visited Kalgan during the Kuominchun occupation brought me back a packet of opium sealed with the official 'chop' of the Kuominchun tax-collecting bureau, and reported that a new method of dealing with houses of prostitution had been devised. They were compelled to display a Christian text in Chinese on each side of the door. The fee for each board was five dollars. And the texts had to be changed every month!"

Sun Scorched. Although the present Chinese Government professes to rule in the spirit of its late and sainted Dr. Sun Yat-sen's principles, not even Saint Sun's imposing granite tomb at Nanking nor the Saint's picture in every Chinese official's office deters Editor Woodhead from attempting to scorch Sun.

"I met Dr. Sun Yat-sen," he writes, "during his first visit to Peking . ... I was not greatly impressed. . . . It appears to be generally forgotten now that he left Canton for his last trip to the north in November 1924, thoroughly discredited. He had converted the most prosperous portion of that city into a charnel-house, and completely subordinated himself and the Kuomintang to Moscow Communists. He, who had owed his life on at least two occasions to British protection, and who, less than two years previously, had, in the course of an address to the students of Hongkong University, lauded the administration of the colony and urged his audience to learn the British example and 'carry the example of good government to all parts of China,' told Japanese interviewers, on his way to Tientsin, that he hated 'the Britishers' more than they hated him, that they were 'the worst lot imaginable.' and that they were 'a curse to China.' Borodin preceded him to Peking. Dr. Sun had hardly reached the northern port when two of his old followers publicly repudiated his leadership because of his subservience to Moscow. . . .

"During the final phase of a stormy career, Dr. Sun was thoroughly dis credited, and had a diminishing number of followers. Only after his death was he virtually canonized, and did his 'Three Principles' (San Min Chu I)-- which Borodin mocked at in his reports to Moscow-- become the gospel of the Kuomintang."

Imperialist Woodhead, Thus every page of Henry George Wandesforde Woodhead's memoirs carries the brisk imprint of the Imperialist, the white man of business who finds the Chinese "anti-foreign," and has a hankering sympathy for the Japanese because today they are a people with the virility and strength the White Race once showed in bursting into China, and establishing itself with special superior status in the "treaty ports." Not only does Editor Woodhead take many illustrious Chinese to task, but he relates a wealth of anecdotes. Of the humble Chinese family whose robber son was being strangled slowly by the local executioner, Imperialist Woodhead snorts :

"His relatives were actually exploiting his plight to raise money! They had covered his head with a dirty towel which was only removed, to give a glimpse of his face, on payment of ten cents. A larger fee was required to uncover his head long enough for a photo to be taken. The prisoner, who had evidently been drugged, put out his tongue, rolled his eyes, and reviled the spectators whenever his face was exposed." Perhaps not himself consciously anti-Chinese, robust Imperialist Woodhead provides a journalistic acid opposite to the alkali of Chinese censorship, which operates as effectively as German, Russian or Japanese censorship to prevent anything like an objective news picture from emerging. Between acid and alkali stands the actual Chinese Government of Generalissimo & Premier Chiang Kaishek, struggling manfully with Chinese Communism and Japanese Imperialism.

* In 1929 Benito Mussolini presented to Rome, Georgia a copy of Rome, Italy's famed statue of the Capitoline Wolf giving suck to Romulus & Remus. Last week, one of the suckling babes on Georgia's statue having been stolen by persons unknown, Il Duce ordered made in Italy for Georgia a new Romulus or Remus, for it has never been made known which is which.

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