Squeeze Play?

A brave Chinese general is the one who defies Japan. Last week General Pai Tsung-hsi seemed to have qualified. Long rated in Canton as South China's ablest commander, doughty General Pai abruptly sent the South's armies marching northward "against the Japanese." Simultaneously he reviled Tokyo, also reviled the Chinese Nanking Government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek for having let Japan virtually seize North China, and proudly swelled his chest amid shrieking Cantonese plaudits. Only thing odd about all this was that there were no Japanese in the part of China into which General Pai sent troops "against the Japanese" and that news of their advance was printed in Tokyo papers days before it got under way.

According to Chinese news sources, about 1,000,000 Chinese soldiers were soon involved, the forces of General Pai advancing against positions held by troops of Generalissimo Chiang north of Canton. Pai's untrained soldiers really thought they were advancing "against the Japanese." When they found themselves facing fellow Chinese troops they stopped, camped, waited. Meanwhile at Nanking the Japanese Military Attache, Major General Seiichi Kita, spilled a great many beans by nervously observing that if it should be proved that Japan had sold munitions to General Pai there would be nothing irregular in that. Cried this dimwit Attache: "Japan of course sells munitions to whoever will pay for them."

Neutral observers could only conclude that the Japanese Government, needing a pretext for further armed encroachment upon China, had subsidized and provided ammunition for General Pai. The ruse continued to work to perfection. General Pai's blasts against Japan touched off all over South China precisely the sort of Chinese popular unrest and baiting of local Japanese needed by spunky little Japanese Premier Koki Hirota as an excuse to intervene. By his orders a Japanese cruiser and six destroyers soon slithered into Amoy "to protect Japanese lives and property." Added a Japanese destroyer officer, "We are ready to proceed to Canton at a moment's notice."

Should Japan obtain the whip hand in Canton and South China which she already holds in Peiping and North China, the so-called "National Government of the Republic of China" at Nanking would be squeezed between two red-hot tongs of Japanese Might. Last week's developments reduced to absurdity an edifying statement read to the House of Commons by Britain's polite Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, in which Japan was censured for abetting Japanese smugglers to evade the Chinese customs, at the expense of law-abiding British traders.

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