POWER POLITICS: Lots of Trouble

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Over the sprawling war map of Asia last week the soldiers of the Emperor of Japan and the men of Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek fought on a hundred different fronts. While Chinese regulars tried to stave off further Japanese pushes to the West, guerrillas weaved in and out of Japanese lines, attacked isolated garrisons, cut railroad and telegraph lines.

But last week the "China incident," as the Japanese call the two-year-old war in China (see p.29) developed into more than a matter of yellow man killing yellow man. At the port of Tientsin, gateway to Peking and one of the first cities to fall to the Japanese, Japanese soldiers surrounded and blockaded an old British commercial colony. In that action the Japanese Empire not only came close to waging a bloodless war with the British Empire but again served dramatic notice that in her "holy mission" of building up a "new order" in Asia the entire West was in the way.

Blockade. A handy incident provided the excuse for the Japanese blockade. A Chinese customs official employed by Japan's puppet government at Peking was killed in the British Concession at Tientsin. Japanese military authorities at Tientsin named four Chinese as the murderers, demanded that they be handed over. The British asked for evidence; the Japanese produced none. While the British proposed that an arbitration board headed by a U. S. chairman mediate the matter, the Japanese talked of anti-Japanese terrorists being deliberately harbored in the Concession. At 6 a. m. one day last week they ended their talk by surrounding not only the British but the French Concession with their soldiers. The French Concession had to be included in the blockade, the Japanese lamented, because it adjoined the British Concession.

Traffic over the International Bridge between the French and Russian Concessions was stopped. Foreign ships were halted and forced to dock at Japanese wharves; only after four days of the blockade were two British ships finally allowed to come up the Hai River to the Concession docks. While most other Occidentals were comparatively unaffected by the blockade, the 1,500 British civilians of the Concession were stopped, questioned, stripped, manhandled. After a few such instances they kept to the Concession. For a few hours one day British machine-gunners and Japanese soldiers in tanks glowered at each other over sandbag barricades and through barbed wire entanglements. The British have 750 soldiers at Tientsin; the Japanese have hundreds of thousands in North China.

Business within the Concession stopped dead. Traffic was reduced to almost nothing. Chinese junks, which ply up & down the river bringing vegetables and fruit to the Concessions, feared to come near. Two Chinese vegetable vendors who did were shot. The Concession still had large stores of flour and rice, but perishables were almost gone. Milk had disappeared by week's end; the ice supply was low, and it was 100° in the shade. Even in the French Concession, where vegetables were still obtainable, prices tripled.