Foreign News: Bare Fist, Gloved Fist

• Share

Soldiers demanded money-or-life from the Rev. John E. Williams of Nanking University and when he objected, they shot him, stripped him, and walked off (an eye-witness said) "chatting with each other as though they had shot only a pig or a dog." The body of Sergeant James B. Montague of the U. S. Marines was found shot and bloated in the Whangpoo River at Shanghai. Nanking's British Harbor Master was killed, too, and one French and one Italian Roman Catholic priest.

These things might have taken place in China last week, but they did not. They happened twelve years ago, in March 1927. For anti-foreignism is nothing new in East Asia; what is new is the reason for it. In 1927 China was becoming a unified nation for the first time in its 5,000-year history. A young General named Chiang Kaishek, though still hardly more than an ambitious warlord, was beginning to make his people realize that yellow skin was not necessarily synonymous with low estate. The Russians, to promote world revolution, were also urging a China for Chinese. The country burst into fire from within, like a haystack with rot in it.

The anti-foreign movement rampant in China last week was very different. It burned low, and from the outside. Even the stupidest coolie knew that its sole purpose was to drive out white foreigners so that yellow foreigners could inherit the fat of the land. In each of last week's anti-foreign incidents the Japanese mailed fist was either bare or clenched within a Chinese glove:

≫ In Swatow, the Japanese Consulate angrily demanded that British Consul H. D. Bryan "admit that British sailors [from the destroyer Tenedos] were involved in a riot" in which a Chinese was wounded, apologize, punish the sailors, guarantee that it would not happen again. The "riot" was a crowd of Chinese unenthusiastically shouting anti-British slogans and throwing stones at the British Consulate. Great Britain apologized.

≫On the Yangtze near Ichang (in free China, 485 miles upriver from Hankow), Japanese bombers returning from killing natives sank two foreign vessels, the Jardine, Matheson & Co. river boats Kiawo and Hsin Chang Wo, and narrowly missed the river gunboat Gannet. British naval authorities suspected a new Panay incident—a test of what Britain would do in answer to direct, unprovoked attack.

≫ The Japanese-controlled Provisional Government of Honan Province ordered expropriation of anthracite mines belonging to the Anglo-Chinese Finance & Trade Corp. This was the first instance of outright seizure, as distinct from calculated interference.

≫ The Chicago Daily News's dependable Archibald T. Steele told what had happened to a Canadian. While Canadian Missionary Minnie Shipley lay dying of typhus in a Canadian mission hospital in Changteh (Hunan), demonstrators drove away Chinese employes of the hospital, isolated the building until the patient died.