"Pain in the Heart"

(See front cover)

On hundreds of millions of lips last week was the name of a most unhappy woman, Mme Chiang. Four hundred and fifty million Chinese could imagine nothing more poignant than the reported fainting and prostration of Dictator Chiang Kai-shek's wife as she sat beside a radio in her sumptuous Nanking home and heard her husband's kidnapper, the Young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang (TIME, Dec. 21) broadcast from Sian in central China that his men had not only kidnapped but also murdered China's Dictator.

The fact of Mme Chiang's having fainted passed the official Nanking censor of dispatches in English. The chief censor of such dispatches is normally Mme Chiang herself. A most charming, accomplished Wellesley graduate, the Dictator's wife makes the official English translations of his speeches. He consults her in all things and it was she who drew him into the Christian faith (TIME, Nov. 3, 1930). Last week Mme Chiang, her brother T. V. Soong, who is the financial kingpin of China, and her brother-in-law, Dr. H. H. Kung, who took on the functions of Premier in China's awful emergency, held the destiny of Eastern Asia in their hands. One false move, they knew, might alter the course of world history to China's disadvantage, and yet what moves could they make?

Presently the Nanking censor passed dispatches saying it was only the Japanese Domei News Agency which had invented "that appalling falsehood," the story of the broadcast from Sian having said the Dictator was dead. The kidnapper had indeed broadcast, said the Nanking Government, and the modern electrical transcription machinery of Nanking Central Broadcasting Co. had recorded what he actually said. Before quoting his words, the Government called the Young Marshal and his troops "mere bandits," declared it was beneath the Government's dignity to treat with young Chang, and clarioned that for him to be killed by a Chinese process of slow torture known as "the 10,000 Deaths" would be an insufficient expiation of his monstrous crime in kidnapping the Dictator. After this the Government released to China and the world its official recording and translation into English (presumably by Mme Chiang) of just what the Young Marshal had said. According to the Government he had NOT said the Dictator was dead, quite the contrary, and had then broadcast a concrete program of policy to be followed by China from now on. It was most significant that the Government, for reasons which presently appeared, went to the trouble of translating into English and officially releasing to the world a kidnapper's program.

The "Official" Program of Kidnapper Chang was as follows (full text): "The Central [Nanking] Government [of China] has not been sincere in carrying out resistance against Japan. This has been shown by lengthy negotiations and the suppression of patriotic movements. So we must gather our forces, overthrow the Central Government and expedite the national salvation.

"China should consider an immediate anti-Japanese military expedition her only national task at present. Therefore we could not wait longer. We want to fight.

"Sun Yat-sen in his will said that China should unite with peoples who treat us on a basis of equality. We must realize that union with Russia is the only course left in the sphere of international cooperation.

"In order to consolidate our strength we must unite all patriotic forces and public bodies in a common struggle against Japanese imperialism.

"Therefore, the leading political parties of China, namely, the Kuomintang [Government Party] and Communist parties, should unite for the common good.

"AntiCommunist military operations should be stopped and all the country's guns should be directed against Japan.

"A national defense government should be established for the purpose. The present Kuomintang Government should be abolished.

"It is regrettable that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek still opposes our ideas. So long as he remains opposed he shall remain at Sian in order to think it over at his leisure. I personally guarantee his safety and hope he will agree with our policy."

Japan Listens. If any such policy as the above had been broadcast to the Chinese people by their Government, except as a policy urged by a Chinese kidnapper meriting worse than death, it would have had to be considered in Tokyo by every Japanese from the Emperor down as the most extreme Chinese provocation and invitation to war.

This was clear enough to anyone who recalls what Japan has been putting over on China in recent years. In Shanghai the mere suspicion that a Chinese had thrown a pear core out the window of a restaurant at a Japanese sailor was taken by Japan as an excuse to land hundreds of marines, exact abject apologies from Chinese authorities (TIME, Oct. 5), and even now the Chinese restaurant proprietor is forced to call every day upon the Japanese marine commander in Shanghai and report what progress is being made in catching the Chinese thrower of that pear core.

The pear core incident is palatable news in any language, but only with the tedious figures of economists is it possible to show that Japan has been exacting for years from China concession after concession involving millions if not billions in tariff favors. The state railways of the Chinese Dictator have in certain instances run each day and for as many months as required, a special "smugglers' freight car" for the convenience of Japanese and Koreans engaged in systematically evading the customs duties of North China. One can buy Japanese goods openly in China today at prices less than the Chinese duty which should have been collected on them. The smugglers swagger about with pistols in their belts, and the Imperial Japanese Government has demanded with success that these "dangerous weapons" be not carried by Chinese customs guards at the frontier posts most convenient for smuggling, such as Shanhaikwan on the Great Wall.

In these circumstances, and especially since Dictator Chiang has dissolved in North China all local branches of the Nanking Government's own political party at the behest of Japan (TIME, Nov. 9), the Tokyo Cabinet last week would have been naive had they not listened with incredulity and anger to what was coming through the Nanking censor. Angry Japan (and Japan was also puzzled) took the precaution of ordering impressive Japanese military units in North China to move slowly, tentatively down the railway toward Nanking.

Japanese incredulity was based on years of painful experience in which it nearly always turns out that Chinese outsmart Japanese until the sons of Nippon bring up overwhelming force. Premier Koki Hirota of Japan has just had his Cabinet publicly spanked by the Privy Council for having baited Stalin and made a pact with Hitler (TIME. Dec. 7). Last week Mr. Hirota was able to advise the Son of Heaven that in China events were transpiring which could only mean that the Japanese Cabinet had been right and the Privy Council wrong. Nearly all Japanese were entirely convinced that what they heard from China last week was the rumble of thunder on the Left-- an inexorable warning that China, under no matter what leaders, was in course of shifting its political centre of gravity from Right to Left as the necessary prelude to enlisting Soviet aid for a Chinese war with Japan. The Young Marshal's broadcast was clearly a clarion call to 450,000,000 Chinese to rise against 84,000,000 Japanese, and it seemed to suit the Nanking Government that this tocsin should be sounded with loudest fanfare.

"Mr. Donald." This was not to say that Kidnappee Chiang, Kidnapper Chang, Financier Soong and Acting-Premier Kung were engaged in emulating the example set fortnight ago by the Rt. Hon. Stanley Baldwin when he eased King Edward from the Throne while loudly protesting that what he had done was to try to keep His Majesty on (see p. 16). In Britain it is the simple solution which is always sought and usually found. In China nothing so takes the bloom off a proposed solution, nothing makes a Chinese statesman so unwilling to bite on it, as simplicity. There could be in China last week no simple solution, and as usual the complex story was replete with curious characters.

Of these an Australian, Mr. William H. Donald, was in every sense news. Many years ago the health of his wife made it best for her to return to Australia, and in China her increasingly polished rough-diamond husband, as the years rolled on, perhaps killed more ladies (in the complimentary, Edwardian sense of "lady-killing") than any other man in China's swift, hard, cheap, international Shanghai-Peiping set. On being invited some years ago to a party in Peking for an appetizing blonde who had arrived bearing an introduction which she said was signed by the wealthiest U. S. newspaper publisher, Mr. Donald in his courtly way observed, "I must really decline, I am afraid. That kind scratches and bites."

Mr. Donald was employed by an English-language Chinese paper whose proprietor was subsequently secured by the Japanese. On receiving an order to take the pro-Chinese policy of this paper and make it pro-Japanese, Mr. Donald promptly printed his absent employer's order on the front cover of the next issue, together with his own resignation.

This was about the time of the Washington Conference, and the grateful Chinese Government decided to employ Mr. Donald at a reputed salary of $1,500 gold per month to issue economic bulletins. Many of these were excellent. He acquired perhaps the most sumptuous home in Peking, certainly the most artistic summer residence, in a magnificent abandoned temple. His collection of Chinese antiques, historical paraphernalia for opium-smoking, French wines, Scotch whiskeys and Cuban cigars was astounding for a man who himself never took a puff or a drop.

Some years later, when Chinese gratitude no longer supplied remuneration, Mr. Donald economized by renting his Peking house to a harum-scarum younger brother of the present Young Marshal Chang. With greatest abandon this youngster killed ladies of all colors (in the least complimentary sense of social "lady-killing") until Young Chang came down from Mukden to straighten the scalawag out. Mr. Donald had deplored the wear & tear on his fine rented house, and in him the Young Marshal found presently a friend who grew with the years. Today their relationship is almost that of father & son-- or son and Dutch uncle. It is a fact that, after Old Chang was slain, Young Chang was NOT cured of drug addiction in Peiping, for the reason that his concubines kept smuggling the stuff to him in the hospital. Dutch Uncle Donald then turned to that very good Chinese, Mr. T. V. Soong. Young Donald took Young Chang to the Shanghai home of a Seventh Day Adventist missionary doctor. Mr. Soong supplied Government troops which kept out the concubines, isolating the patient by force for the period of his cure. Afterward Young Chang made a grateful gift amounting to some $700,000 to Seventh Day Adventist charities, went to Italy, learned to pilot a plane not too disastrously, and (perhaps disastrously) drank deep of adoration for Benito Mussolini.

These are enough facts to reveal the importance to Eastern Asia last week of Uncle Donald, as that considerate lady-killer, whose temples are now turning grey, winged back & forth between Nanking and Sian in the sumptuous private airplane of the Young Marshal. Upon a wise, conciliatory solution of the crisis might depend China's whole future. Any sudden eruption of disunity would play into Japan's hands, might set back to zero the enormous progress China has made under her Dictator during the past decade. Uncle Donald had to preserve rather a "sealed lips" attitude, as did Baldwin the Magnificent recently in London (TIME, Dec. 14), but in a few judicious words he gave the world hints of the fascinating situation at Sian.

Episode at Sian. If these hints could be trusted the situation was as follows: On Saturday the Dictator, who was enjoying Sian's famed curative mineral baths, was taken at an undressed disadvantage by the Young Marshal and his men who had butchered Chiang's guards. For the rest of Saturday and on Sunday and on Monday morning, the kidnapped Dictator persisted in a stratagem characteristically Chinese: he maintained his lips closed and his expression unchanged. Anyone who has ever cured a dope fiend will realize how trying this conduct by the kidnappee was last week to the kidnapper in question. Young Chang fairly howled with anguish at his inability to get Dictator Chiang to enter into the sort of negotiation which any orthodox kidnappee is usually eager to undertake with an orthodox kidnapper.

Even the patience of Uncle Donald was sorely tried. He was said in some dispatches last week to have been for years mainly an adviser of Dictator Chiang but the facts are that his career has been as adviser to the Young Marshal, plus merely friendly relations with T. V. Soong who is the Dictator's brother-in-law, up to three years ago. He then attached himself to Chiang, while continuing to advise Chang. It was possible that at Sian wise Uncle Donald was trying to be as impartial and simply pro-Chinese as he knew how--but there are limits.

On Monday afternoon, fortunately, the Dictator who had been risking his life by his refusal to speak with desperate men, spoke--nay, he conversed. This conversation, like that of Mr. Baldwin and King Edward, was not so much about the tremendous issues at stake as about money. Of course Young Chang did not threaten to kill Dictator Chiang unless he was paid a given sum. That would have been nonsense. The position of each of these two Chinese was of such eminence and power that a few million dollars more or less was not to them what it is to the Duke of Windsor. By "money" they understood the unstinted millions which a Hitler or Stalin has at his command, plus unstinted hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers to give such money the reality of power If this was haggling, it was the haggling of two Caesars, one of whom, Chiang had conquered China and the other, Chang had inherited and lost Manchuria--today the Japanese-puppetized Empire of Manchukuo.

The Young Marshal, as his public demands indicated fortnight ago required as hls personal profit out of the transaction that China reconquer and restore to him his Empire, or equivalent. This personal demand was inextricably mixed up with the issue of Chinese national policy vis-`a-vis Japan.

Dictator Chiang has for so many years played such a tedious waiting game that the Young Marshal, when he publicly demanded as part of the "ransom" fortnight ago that the Nanking Government speed up and declare war on Japan, was voicing the aspiration of millions of Chinese The announced policy of the kidnapper is so exceedingly popular--even if it is an ex-dope's not too bright idea--that almost every Chinese inevitably must be more or less drawn to it, even Dictator Chian" who knows that he cannot procrastinate forever.

It was Chinese and it was masterly to put the whole program of war with Japan out officially from Nanking last week and see what would happen, especially what Japan would do. Japan had done so little up to this week, and Nanking had received so many telegrams of passionate loyalty to the Government from so many outlying Chinese military satraps that the kidnapping was going fine, even if somebody should get killed.

Kill Chiang? It was singular that Nanking-censored dispatches should carry reports that the Dictator's wife, Mme Chiang, was out of sympathy with the manner in which her brother-in-law, Acting Premier Kung, was handling the situation last week. He sent thousands of troops hurrying to attempt to encircle Sian, and he claimed there was extreme need of haste because Chinese Communist troops were dusting down from the interior toward Sian. The trouble with such Communists is that they are un-Chinese in important respects. If they ever laid hands on the Dictator, whose troops have killed thousands of Chinese Communists, they would not be troubled in the least by his refusal to say anything before they either chopped off his head or made him squeal by administering "the 10,000 Deaths."

Mme Chiang apparently was of the opinion that Dr. Kung, in trying to race the Communists to Sian with his Government troops, was likely to upset Kidnapper Chang so much that he would murder her husband instead of joining up with the Dictator in a deal to fight Japan. It was rather tactless for Dr. Kung to say of her husband in an official broadcast by the Acting Premier last week, "While we are all anxious that Generalissimo Chiang may be rescued . . . our attitude is that the personal safety of one man should not be allowed to interfere. . . . It gives one a pain in the heart that this extraordinary development should have taken place in Sian."

This speech, possibly heard by the kidnapped Dictator himself by radio, was followed by the arrival in Nanking of his most trusted adjutant with peremptory orders to Dr. Kung to halt his soldiers. Since Dr. Kung had just told everybody they would not be halted, this placed the Nanking Government in a dilemma calling for the talents of Brother T. V. Soong. Great Mr. Soong has been called "the Morgan of China," and it is stockbroker gossip in Shanghai that Brother Soong is not always on the best of terms with his little sister, Mme Chiang. The Soong family tie binds them, and it always will, but sometimes the bonds chafe.

It was debatable whether Dictator Chiang had procrastinated just long enough, not quite long enough, or too long and "the Morgan of China" (although his position actually is more like that of Dr. Schacht in Germany) is in a better position to gauge Chinese public opinion, world opinion and the situation in Japan than is almost any other Chinese, including Little Sister and her husband Chiang.

Bomb Tokyo? Lead China? Tokyo's queasiest fear this week was lest Mr. T. V. Soong should judge Japan to be in such an economic and political spot that now is actually the best time for China to go to war. Japanese respect the judgment of Mr. Soong and if he was for war then they could be sure they were hearing thunder on the Left, sure that Stalin was going to back China, panic-stricken lest at any hour Soviet air squadrons from Vladivostok appear and bomb Tokyo with no preliminary declaration of war. Japan played just that dirty trick on Tsar Nicholas at Port Arthur. Why should not Dictator Stalin play it now in Russian revenge on Japan?

The Imperial Japanese Government, sorely uncertain this week, resorted to bluster. Tokyo Foreign Minister Arita did his best to intimidate acting Premier Kung with threats to the effect that Japan "demanded" no terms be made with Kidnapper Chang of a nature unfavorable to Japan.

At latest reports from China, pretty much everyone as well as Japan was trying to horn in on the kidnapping, and Sian was becoming almost a forum. Expected momentarily by air was Mr. Soong. It was rumored that Mme Chiang was coming. The North China satrap Marshal Yen Hsi-shan was already represented. Other Chinese satraps were rushing their ''advisers" to Sian. If kidnapped Dictator Chiang was still alive, he had an unrivaled opportunity to show his prowess in Leadership.

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