RUSSIA-CHINA: Blucher v. Chiang

Blücher v. Chiang

Slim, wasp-waisted, high-strung President Chiang Kai-shek of China seemed to crack suddenly under the strain of the Sino-Russian crisis one day last week. At a meeting of the Cabinet at Nanking he wrung his small bony hands and wailed out despairingly one of the most remarkable speeches ever made by a Chief Executive on the eve of war. "Tell me the reason," began Chiang excitedly, "tell me why Soviet Russia can oppress our people!"

While Cabinet ministers looked bewilderedly at one another, President Chiang answered his own question with a torrent of shrill words. "We are not united! We do not work hard to make our country strong. . . . Not only Russia but all foreign countries do not give us due respect. . . . If we do not strive hard to make a great struggle we shall be finished. We must confess that even in Nanking, our capital, we can ask ourselves: how many military and civil officials of our General Staff can be favorably compared in spirit and energy with the foreigners? How many of us know even the scientific way of running our daily Government business?"

When the tirade was over and President Chiang had been calmed, officials close to him explained that he had been trying to rally the national patriotic spirit. Later the same day he continued "rallying" in an address to cadets of the Central Military Academy at Nanking:

"We are not yet dead! We still have a chance to prepare to fight and sacrifice ourselves for the nation. . . . The Soviet peoples believe that we Chinese are Utopians, meaning that we have no sense of order and discipline. That is why they browbeat us. . . . Hundreds of years of degenerate culture have made the Chinese an effete race. Intellectually and spiritually Utopian and physically weak—that is what the world at large considers us. ... Fortunately Russia is in no position to con-duct extensive armed aggression against us. . . . We must wait and be prepared!"

What was the reason for such frenzied Presidential "rallying"? Without presuming to guess, observers noted as significant that last week the supreme command of the Soviet forces threatening China was entrusted to a Comrade-Commander who, paradoxically, once served in the Chinese Revolution as staff adviser to Marshal (now President) Chiang Kaishek. The Comrade-Commander is Vassili Constan-tinovitch Blücher, onetime oiler of Tsarist locomotives, today the most important man in Asia.

During 1917-20, when the young Soviet Union was fighting for existence against White Russian Generals Kolchak and Wrangel, the spirit and energy of Comrade Vassili Constantinovitch Blücher four times won him the highest Soviet military decoration, "The Red Banner." Five years later the Soviet Government sent Comrade Blücher to Canton under the alias "General Galen." There he became military adviser to the Chinese revolutionaries who subsequently conquered all China and now constitute the Chinese Government headed by President Chiang Kaishek.