March Counter March

The so-called Wuhan cities are those centering about Hankow, up river on the mighty Yangtze-kiang, while down river is the Chinese capital of Nanking, against the authority of whose President Chiang Kai-shek (see above) the Wuhan cities are in revolt. Military operations last week amounted to little more than the preliminary convergence of three Nanking Nationalist armies upon Hankow, where the Wuhan generals entrenched themselves and strung barbed wire.

Luckless merchants of Hankow were "assessed" (robbed) of $2,500,000 to be used by the Wuhan generals in carrying on their civil war. Before Marshal Chiang left Nanking he tapped the Nationalist treasury for $5,000,000. Prognostications were for a long-drawn war of skirmishes, possibly to be fought to a finish in the southern provinces near Canton, a region thus far comparatively unplundered by China's peripatetic militarists.

The great enigma continued to be Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang, master of the largest private army in the world (TIME, July 2). He recently resigned as Nationalist War Minister, but last week some of his well-drilled divisions advanced south against the rebels under the Nationalist banner, while the Marshal with his main army moved north into Shantung; seemingly with intent to vanquish the Marshal Chang Tsung-chang who had just captured Chefoo--where the hair nets come from.

A queer quirk in the whole situation was that Japan, which for months has stubbornly kept an interventionary force in Shantung, disregarding incessant Nationalist howls of protest, suddenly came to terms last week with the shaky and harassed Nationalist Government and entered into a signed agreement to withdraw her slit-eyed marines by June 1. It is common knowledge that Japan has financed and favored Marshal Chang, the captor of Chefoo, but it would be news indeed if the Imperial Government con- siders Chang already strong enough to see that Japanese interests and colonists in Shantung come to no harm during the present civil war.