WAR IN CHINA: Bear's Paw

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One of the strangest newspapers in the world is edited in Lhasa, Tibet, by one Tharchin Baboo. The Tibetan News has a small circulation among an intellectual clientele of Tibetan lamas, some of whom pay for their subscriptions in yak butter. The paper contains cartoons, international news, and puzzles for the hours when the lamas' prayer wheels are idle. Recently readers of the News have been getting their yak butter's worth, for near-by—in China's Szechwan Province just to the east and Sinkiang Province just to the north—mysterious, important news was being made.

Large-scale new Soviet aid to China was reported to be pouring into China's most important area, Szechwan, through her northwesternmost area, Sinkiang. Nightly, said these dispatches, 300 trucks were arriving in Chengtu, Szechwan, loaded with arms and ammunition. Then they drove back to Sinkiang with silver bullion, silk, wood, oil, hides. Personnel of the Soviet trading agency in Chungking (China's capital, also in Szechwan) was said to have been increased to more than 300, and Soviet military advisers, aviators, and officers to more than 1,000.

Three weeks ago it was reported that 300,000 Russian troops had moved into Sinkiang. Last week Japanese sources reported that China's four northwestern-most provinces—Sinkiang, Kansu, Ning-shia, Shensi—from which the famed Communist Eighth Route Army has kept the Japanese, are being systematically Soviet-ized. And from Paris came word that Russia is to transfer tanks, howitzers, machine guns, anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns captured in Poland by both the Red and German Armies across Russia and into China.

Whether or not the details of these dispatches were accurate, they all added up to one conclusion: Russia was acting on some understanding with Germany to the effect that she should have a free hand aiding China against Germany's erstwhile partner. And they further suggested what Russia might be getting in return from China—political, economic, perhaps even territorial concessions in China's northwest.

Sinkiang Province (area: 705,769 sq. mi.; population: 4,360,000), sometimes called Chinese Turkestan, is a fairly rich, comparatively unexploited, thoroughly exotic area. Its principal exports have been wool, camel's-hair, sheep guts, gold, jade, fine horses, Chinese medicinal ingredients (elk horn, saiga antelope horn, bears' paws). The huge province has never been properly integrated with China, and since about 1930, Russian influence has almost amounted to domination. Since economically Sinkiang is already virtually a Russian province, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, no lover of Communists, may well have seen the sense of making concessions there for the sake of active aid on his own front.