Foreign News: Pain in the Heart

• Share

(See front cover)

On hundreds of millions of lips last week was the name of a most unhappy woman, Mme Chiang. Four hundred and fifty million Chinese could imagine nothing more poignant than the reported fainting and prostration of Dictator Chiang Kai-shek's wife as she sat beside a radio in her sumptuous Nanking home and heard her husband's kidnapper, the Young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang (TIME, Dec. 21) broadcast from Sian in central China that his men had not only kidnapped but also murdered China's Dictator.

The fact of Mme Chiang's having fainted passed the official Nanking censor of dispatches in English. The chief censor of such dispatches is normally Mme Chiang herself. A most charming, accomplished Wellesley graduate, the Dictator's wife makes the official English translations of his speeches. He consults her in all things and it was she who drew him into the Christian faith (TIME, Nov. 3, 1930). Last week Mme Chiang, her brother T. V. Soong, who is the financial kingpin of China, and her brother-in-law, Dr. H. H. Kung, who took on the functions of Premier in China's awful emergency, held the destiny of Eastern Asia in their hands. One false move, they knew, might alter the course of world history to China's disadvantage, and yet what moves could they make?

Presently the Nanking censor passed dispatches saying it was only the Japanese Domei News Agency which had invented "that appalling falsehood," the story of the broadcast from Sian having said the Dictator was dead. The kidnapper had indeed broadcast, said the Nanking Government, and the modern electrical transcription machinery of Nanking Central Broadcasting Co. had recorded what he actually said. Before quoting his words, the Government called the Young Marshal and his troops "mere bandits," declared it was beneath the Government's dignity to treat with young Chang, and clarioned that for him to be killed by a Chinese process of slow torture known as "the 10,000 Deaths" would be an insufficient expiation of his monstrous crime in kidnapping the Dictator. After this the Government released to China and the world its official recording and translation into English (presumably by Mme Chiang) of just what the Young Marshal had said. According to the Government he had NOT said the Dictator was dead, quite the contrary, and had then broadcast a concrete program of policy to be followed by China from now on. It was most significant that the Government, for reasons which presently appeared, went to the trouble of translating into English and officially releasing to the world a kidnapper's program.

The "Official" Program of Kidnapper Chang was as follows (full text): "The Central [Nanking] Government [of China] has not been sincere in carrying out resistance against Japan. This has been shown by lengthy negotiations and the suppression of patriotic movements. So we must gather our forces, overthrow the Central Government and expedite the national salvation.

"China should consider an immediate anti-Japanese military expedition her only national task at present. Therefore we could not wait longer. We want to fight.