"Deteriorating Conditions"

P: The Chinese engineer of the Hongkong-Canton Express kept it going full speed last week after fire broke out in the middle of the train. Three wooden rear cars burned down to their steel underframes and more than 100 Chinese passengers were roasted to death in the speeding pyre. Said the engineer when his train was finally stopped: "I didn't notice it had caught fire."

P: In Peiping, the public execution of five opium peddlers last week drew 50,000 spectators. Justifying in Washington the death penalty for dopes in China, Dr. C. S. Mei, director of the largest antiopium hospital in Shanghai, observed that an addict must be cured both physiologically and psychologically. "It takes too long a time and plenty of money," said Dr. Mei philosophically. "It is from this fact that you get the reasoning of the Chinese Government and its application of capital punishment. . . . It is China's only hope of saving the nation from the dope menace."

P: China's Premier & Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, having retired to his birthplace near the coast and refused to use the telephone or open letters or telegrams for a fortnight (TIME, Jan. 18), was joined last week by Young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang (who recently kidnapped the Premier and released him on Christmas Day) for nice long talks in which many Chinese generals joined. Thus the kidnappee & kidnapper sought to exercise in Chiang's village birthplace a joint moral and political leadership of China, seemingly with the intention that Chinese capitalists in the coastal cities and the more or less bureaucratic statesmen of the Government at Nanking should awaken to the "advantages" of teaming up with the potent Chinese bandit Communist armies for war with Japan.

Sian, the interior city in which the "kidnapping" and series of conferences with Communist leaders occurred (TIME, Dec. 21 et seq.), was lavishly hospitable, through its satrap, General Yang Hu-cheng, to arriving Communist leaders of varying importance and to U. S. Counselor of Embassy Willys Ruggles Peck who flew up from Nanking and dined festively. On flying back to Nanking, highly diplomatic Counselor Peck said it was "partly correct" that some 21 U. S. citizens in Sian were being "held as hostages" by the Reds, but that General Yang had been nice about saying he would arrange for them to leave by motor truck through Banditland or perhaps by airplane. Meanwhile huge U. S.-built Nanking Government planes, each capable of taking out a score of persons, flew back & forth between Nanking and Sian, each carrying one or two Chinese officers of low rank supposedly entrusted with the usual bribe money indispensable to settling a Chinese crisis. "Was I endangered in Sian?" said Counselor Peck, who knows his China, with a hearty laugh. "Of course not!"

Eleven prosperous Chinese, arriving in Nanking from Sian, said: "Conditions are deteriorating. Hundreds if not thousands of people have thought it best to leave Sian, even through the bandit-infested countryside and in bitter cold."

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