WAR IN CHINA: Rubber-Band Tactics

The conflict between Japan's and China's armies has been the collision of a resistible force with a movable object. The battlefronts have been extremely elastic. Last week a Chinese military spokesman coined a new phrase for China's war plan: "rubber-band tactics"—let the Japanese stretch their various lines of advance until they are either snapped back or bound around. Last week the bands were being stretched and relaxed at the following points:

> In the Lushan Mountains, roughly 400 miles west of Shanghai, territory the Japanese have been fighting for since last summer, a fierce battle raged for nine hours. Afterward official Japanese dispatches claimed complete "annihilation" of 5,000 Chinese defending Kuling, the cool, hill-encircled summer resort where many foreigners used to escape down-country heat. Next day came the truth: Japanese troops had taken Kuling, but 2,500 Chinese defenders had broken through the Japanese lines and escaped.

> In Shanghai, Britain's Ambassador to China Sir Archibald John Kerr Clark Kerr chatted with Britain's Ambassador to Japan Sir Robert Leslie Craigie, presumably about trying to get Japan and China to stop fighting. Next day Sir Archibald went to China's capital, Sir Robert to Japan's. In Tokyo, Sir Robert was greeted by Foreign Minister Hachiro Arita with great politeness and greater vagueness. But in Chungking, as he stepped from the plane which had taken him there, Sir Archibald was handed a copy of an important declaration by Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek: "Our prolonged resistance, our policy of gaining time by sacrificing space and winning the final triumph through an accumulation of small victories, has reduced Japan to the position of a second-rate power. . . . We will not stop fighting. . . ."

> In the South China Sea, Japan extended her Spratly Island snatch (TIME, April 10), took a strategic series of reefs 300 miles long. A Japanese statesman said all Japan wanted there was guano (bird droppings used for fertilizer).

> Tsingtao, North China's biggest and most beautiful port, reported a new Japanese version of the Open Door in China—open for Japanese to enter, for foreigners to get out. Non-Japanese ships, said the report, are now obliged to anchor far out in the harbor; are kept waiting, sometimes for 24 hours, for port papers; are charged exorbitant lighter rates; have to discharge their passengers under conditions which are always unpleasant, sometimes (on stormy days) dangerous. There is always a mysterious shortage of coolies when loading-time comes.

> Meanwhile Chinese terrorism continued. In Shanghai, fortnight ago, the puppet secretary of the city's Japanese-controlled Police Bureau, Dr. Hsi Shih-tai, was assassinated as he walked in the street with his wife. This was the 17th political murder in Shanghai since January 1. In Tientsin the Chinese manager of the Japanese-owned Federal Reserve Bank was shot while watching others shot in the film Gunga Din. In Kaifeng, Chinese mercenary troops hired by the Japanese mutinied and murdered four puppet officials. All Japanese reports said: "Apparently something happened in Kaifeng."