INTERNATIONAL: Dictator Kidnapped

FOREIGN NEWS

The event of basic world importance which took place last week occurred in China. It was as if Hitler had been kidnapped by Goring or Stalin by Voroshilov. In fact the most powerful man in Eastern Asia had been kidnapped last week by one of his potent and ambitious countrymen, a Chinese who not many years ago was under treatment in the Rockefeller Hospital at Peiping for addiction to opium. Kidnappee was the Premier of China, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, the military conqueror of his country not many years ago (TIME, April 25, 1927). Kidnapper was "The Young Marshal," Chang Hsueh-liang, son of the late great War Lord Chang Tso-lin who was assassinated by Japanese agents in their greatest mistake of this decade (TIME, July 2, 1928).

In China, nothing is ever exactly what it seems except an assassination, and the kidnapping of the greatest man in Eastern Asia, unless it should be followed by his assassination, lacked any quality of finality. It was considered by nearly all Chinese, when the staggering news broke, as open to the highly probable suspicion that the Premier of China had had himself kidnapped from the noblest of motives.

Sian, whence news of the kidnapping was flashed, is almost as remote and centrally located in China as though President Roosevelt were kidnapped among the Rocky Mountains. The kidnapper, Young Marshal Chang, sent out over his military telegraph lines the only account of how his soldiers had detached the Generalissimo from his soldiers, an operation involving treachery by numerous persons, if not hundreds, for all soldiers in China ought to be the Premier's. If the Young Marshal had demanded say $50,000,000 ransom money, the whole thing would have been orthodox, for Mme Chiang is of China's great financial family, the House of Soong, and if they have not got $50,000,000 they know how to raise it on a few hours' notice "for the welfare of China" from the country's richest class.

The ransom asked, however, was not money. The Young Marshal asked, with the obvious motive of Chinese filial piety, and perhaps with other motives too, that the Chinese Cabinet pay the ransom of declaring war on Japan "immediately," and introducing these "reforms" :

1) Abandonment of the internal war waged by the Government against Communist bands for many years in China, and reorganization of the Kuomintang or Nationalist Party of the Premier to include Communists, as it did up to 1927. Up to that year the Kuomintang was subsidized openly direct from Moscow, and the generals who fought under the Generalissimo all had Soviet advisers and Communist propaganda staffs.

2) A formal pledge by the Government to reconquer from Japan the part of China once ruled by Old Chang the War Lord, and bequeathed by him to Young Chang, namely Manchuria proper or "Manchu-kuo."