WAR IN CHINA: Wang, Wang

Two Wangs were fussing in China last week—one who wanted to be a puppet and one who was and didn't want to be.

China's onetime Premier Wang Ching-wei, who is hourly expected to bob up as head of a super-puppet government in Nanking, broadcast an appeal from Japanese-held Canton. He begged South China to break with the Central Government, make peace (under himself) with Japan. Wang sniped at his old rival Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, whose tremendous popularity, along with Wang's lack of it, has undoubtedly been the main incentive for the would-be-puppet's campaign. Himself a Cantonese, Wang subtly appealed to his fellow Southerners on the grounds that South China, in olden times, was independent. What took the sting out of his subtlety was the fact that South China, in not-so-olden times, was the birthplace of National Savior Sun Yat-sen and the cradle of New China.

While Wang Ching-wei was trying to get in down south, Wang Keh-min was trying to get out up north. Since early in 1938 the latter has been head of the North China Provisional Government in Peking. The perfect puppet, he was educated and served as a diplomat in Japan, had a long but never spectacular career as politician and financial manipulator under successive North China regimes. Decrepit at 60, he looks as if he had been made of cheap Japanese materials. For some time he has wanted desperately to resign. For several weeks he has refused even to pretend to work. But puppets do not resign; a string is pulled and they disappear. Last week the Northern Wang, jealous of the Southern Wang, whose super-puppet regime would eclipse his, was reported "in retirement" in the gorgeous Summer Palace of the C'hing Emperors.