RUSSIA-CHINA: ''Not One Square Inch!

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Victory. Soviet troops had advanced more than 200 miles into China's great Northern Province of Manchuria on two fronts (TIME, Dec. 2). Last week there should have been bonfires, triumphant parades, lusty bellowing of the Internationale in Moscow's vast Red Square. Instead, ghostly silence. Only the usual detail of Red Army sentries stood guard, their white breaths fuming in the frosty air, their close-fitting helmets exactly the shape of fat onions rampant, pointed upward. Suddenly the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, Comrade Alexis Rykov, appeared, striding across the Red Square in his old leather overcoat and shiny workman's cap. Yes, he had something to say to correspondents:

"Gentlemen, conquest is not our purpose. We will not keep one single square inch of Chinese territory. Good night."

Plucked to the Skin. Obeying orders from Moscow, the long grey Soviet armored trains which plunged their fangs into Manchuria last fortnight withdrew to their own frontiers last week. But in the areas they had raked and ravaged Chinese fright and confusion grew from panic to anarchy. Soldiers deserted their colors, looted indiscriminately. Hundreds of refugees who straggled into the larger Manchurian towns and Harbin, the capital, had been robbed of all their possessions by Chinese, not Soviet troops. Some were stark naked, plucked to the skin. As usual, a good many fingers had been cut off by Chinese soldiers impatient to snatch rings from old people with rheumatic knuckles.

Kick Out, Kick In. Louder than words the Soviet raids said: "We mean business. China must yield to our demands respecting the Chinese Eastern Railway (TIME, July 22, et seq.). Under the treaty of 1924 we have the right to keep Russian officials on that line. You kicked them off last July. We have demanded ever since that they be reinstated. Our rights date back to Tsarist times, when Russian money built the Chinese Eastern Railway across Manchuria. We are ready to strike again. We have proved that you cannot resist us, even for a day."

In Harbin last week, with naked refugees pouring in, the Soviet threat loomed so potent that Governor of Manchuria Chang Hsueh-Liang decided to make a separate peace with Russia, completely disregarding the Chinese Nationalist Government at Nanking, which urged him frantically not to yield.

Chang appointed as his peace emissary businesslike Mr. Li Shao-Kung, who was made general manager of the Chinese Eastern last July after the ousting of Soviet Manager Boris Emshanov. At no small personal risk, Mr. Li set out eastward from Harbin on his disputed railway last week, heading for Pogranichnaya, whence he would travel 500 miles north in remotest Siberia to meet the Soviet plenipotentiaries at Kobaronsk.