"Lots of Trouble"

Over the sprawling war map of Asia last week the soldiers of the Emperor of Japan and the men of Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek fought on a hundred different fronts. While Chinese regulars tried to stave off further Japanese pushes to the West, guerrillas weaved in and out of Japanese lines, attacked isolated garrisons, cut railroad and telegraph lines.

But last week the "China incident," as the Japanese call the two-year-old war in China (see p.29) developed into more than a matter of yellow man killing yellow man. At the port of Tientsin, gateway to Peking and one of the first cities to fall to the Japanese, Japanese soldiers surrounded and blockaded an old British commercial colony. In that action the Japanese Empire not only came close to waging a bloodless war with the British Empire but again served dramatic notice that in her "holy mission" of building up a "new order" in Asia the entire West was in the way.

Blockade. A handy incident provided the excuse for the Japanese blockade. A Chinese customs official employed by Japan's puppet government at Peking was killed in the British Concession at Tientsin. Japanese military authorities at Tientsin named four Chinese as the murderers, demanded that they be handed over. The British asked for evidence; the Japanese produced none. While the British proposed that an arbitration board headed by a U. S. chairman mediate the matter, the Japanese talked of anti-Japanese terrorists being deliberately harbored in the Concession. At 6 a. m. one day last week they ended their talk by surrounding not only the British but the French Concession with their soldiers. The French Concession had to be included in the blockade, the Japanese lamented, because it adjoined the British Concession.

Traffic over the International Bridge between the French and Russian Concessions was stopped. Foreign ships were halted and forced to dock at Japanese wharves; only after four days of the blockade were two British ships finally allowed to come up the Hai River to the Concession docks. While most other Occidentals were comparatively unaffected by the blockade, the 1,500 British civilians of the Concession were stopped, questioned, stripped, manhandled. After a few such instances they kept to the Concession. For a few hours one day British machine-gunners and Japanese soldiers in tanks glowered at each other over sandbag barricades and through barbed wire entanglements. The British have 750 soldiers at Tientsin; the Japanese have hundreds of thousands in North China.

Business within the Concession stopped dead. Traffic was reduced to almost nothing. Chinese junks, which ply up & down the river bringing vegetables and fruit to the Concessions, feared to come near. Two Chinese vegetable vendors who did were shot. The Concession still had large stores of flour and rice, but perishables were almost gone. Milk had disappeared by week's end; the ice supply was low, and it was 100DEG in the shade. Even in the French Concession, where vegetables were still obtainable, prices tripled.

Demands. Meanwhile, the four Chinese "murderers" were all but forgotten as the Japanese military made it clear that they were out to eliminate British, and possibly other, interests in China. Hereafter, a military spokesman at Tientsin said, Britain must be prepared to "cooperate" with Japan in the Far East, must drop her "pro-Chiang Kaishek" policy.

Many times in the past the Japanese Government at Tokyo has been embarrassed by the situations created in China by Japanese military men, who are responsible to the sacred Emperor alone. This time there was every indication that the Tientsin military, although not acting with the foreknowledge of the Government, had its backing. The Domei News Agency said the Cabinet fully approved the action at Tientsin. The Foreign Office at Tokyo considered the incident a local one--i.e., one to be handled by the military.

Arriving in Hsinking, capital of Manchukuo, Japanese Foreign Office Spokesman Tatsuo Kawai outlined for correspondents Japan's program for dealing with Western powers in China: 1) elimination of all foreign Concessions; 2) reorganization of international settlements; 3) blotting out of all anti-Japanese activities in foreign areas. Elaborated Spokesman Kawai: "The days of foreign settlements in China are numbered."

Reprisals: In London, Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs R. A. Butler faced a House of Commons chagrined and angered by the blockade, announced the Government was considering "measures." The British Government issued a statement which still offered arbitration on the question of the four Chinese but which hinted darkly of possible reprisals if the Japanese refused to lift the blockade. The Cabinet met for two and a half hours, went over methods of economic retaliation. Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes called Japan's action a "declaration of war against the British Empire." The New York Herald Tribune editorialized that the Japanese blockade was an "act of war." The New York Daily News argued for a U. S.-British blockade of Japan.

In Paris, the French Government, although anxious to treat the matter as purely a local incident, was willing to go along with the British on whatever measures were agreed upon. But at week's end the British, involved up to their necks in building up a "Peace Front" to resist Adolf Hitler's aggressions in Europe, took no measures at all. The British felt that they could not fight the Japanese economically without U. S. aid, and last week the U. S. State Department kept noticeably quiet.

U. S. Toes. In choosing Tientsin for a trial of strength with the West the Japanese cleverly picked one of the foreign zones in China where the U. S. has least interests. In Tientsin there are two U. S. banks, 20 fur exporters, two real estate firms, two woolen mills and some U. S.-owned buildings, but the aggregate investment is computed at only about $1,700,000.

Moreover, the Japanese at Tientsin were more than careful not to step on U. S. toes last week. They were out to humiliate only the British. The uniforms of the 203 U. S. marines who live in barracks just outside the British Concession were in themselves a pass through the Japanese lines. The 400 U. S. citizens living in the British and French Concessions at Tientsin had only to show their passports to avoid being searched and questioned. U. S. Consul General John K. Caldwell reported to the State Department that the Japanese had put U. S. citizens in a "special category."

Even so, there were indications that this Japanese respect for U. S. uniforms and passports was not universal. At Amoy, in Southern China, the Japanese Navy, ever jealous of the Army's successes, carried out a blockade of its own, this one against the International Settlement at Kulangsu, a small zone in which the U. S., Britain, France and Japan share rights. The Navy did not bother to fabricate a precipitating incident. Month ago the Japanese, after making demands for a greater share of the zone's government and getting a blanket rejection, landed marines there. The U. S., Britain and France then landed a force of exactly the same number of men. Last week three warships prevented Chinese food junks from landing at the Settle ment's docks as the Japanese Navy obviously started a policy of trying to starve the settlement out. U. S. Consul Karl de G. MacVitty cabled Washington that while the Settlement still had lots of food it was running short of fuel.

Anti-Comintern. Japanese pressure on Western China appeared as only another instance of anti-Comintern diplomacy. It was feared that Japan had timed her blockade in the Far East to coincide with a diversion in Europe by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The Fascists and Nazis appeared delighted that the British were being attacked by Ally Japan. "The days are gone," chortled Dictator Benito Mussolini's Popolo d'ltalia, "when if any one knocked an Englishman's hat off a warship would be sent full steam to the place." In Germany, where Kaiser Wilhelm II used to prattle regularly about the "yellow peril," the Essener National-Zeitung jubilantly headlined: "THE ENCIRCLED ENCIRCLER."

The British Empire, faced with perils on many fronts, had been challenged to a showdown by the Land of the Rising Sun. Strongest warning from the Chinese came from Dr. V. K. Wellington Koo, Ambassador to France: "If Japan gets away with Tientsin, she will turn immediately to another Concession, for the recent history of both Europe and Asia shows beyond a doubt the futility of trying to turn a tiger into a kitten by giving it a dish of cream. . . ." Whatever the immediate outcome of the British-Japanese quarrel, there was in the U. S. last week one man who might have said "I told you so" to the British. In 1932, as Japan invaded Manchuria, U. S. Secretary of State Henry L.

Stimson offered Britain U. S. collaboration in stopping the Japanese. Sir John Simon, the British Foreign Secretary, not only turned the offer down, but later, at Geneva, argued for "realism" and "flexibility" in applying the League of Nations Covenant against Japan. What the British then hoped was that the Japanese would turn northward from Manchuria and clash with the Soviet Union, leaving their huge investments in China (said to be worth $1,410,000,000) alone. Instead the Japanese marched southward, and last week Britain's diplomatic chickens of 1932 had come home to roost. Small comfort it was to the British that outside their Tientsin Concession the Japanese military set up a loudspeaker system to "explain" their action to English-speaking passersby. Said the plaintive voice through the loudspeaker: "We are so sorry to be giving you lots of trouble."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.