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Soapboxer. Premier Wang's fine, sensitive and mobile face easily reflects a whole gamut of New Chinese emotions utterly strange to Old Chinese President Lin. Of the two, Premier Wang is by far the better educated by Western standards, but compared to President Lin, he makes the impression of a boy soapbox orator. This being the decade of glorified soapbox orators, supple extemporizers and disarming demagogs, China has in Mr. Wang a statesman several cuts above the accepted thing in an up-to-date Premier. For one thing, he not only obeys according to his lights the famed will of China's late, sainted Dr. Sun Yatsen, but he is more than suspected of having written his political Testament, read it to Sun upon the Saint's sickbed and obtained the August Signature none too soon.
The will of Saint Sun has definitely Communist leanings, enjoins China to cooperate with Soviet Russia and with Germany which Saint Sun expected to continue Socialist, not foreseeing Hitler. Last week famed Imperial German General Hans von Seeckt, he of the genial monocle and steel-trap brain, retired from China's service after putting Generalissimo Chiang's armies into the snappiest, most efficient shape ever attained by a Chinese force. Although von Seeckt leaves a junior German officer in China as his successor, Japan is strenuously pressing Premier Wang, who is also Foreign Minister, to clean out the Germans and appoint Japanese military advisers to China's Armies.
Reasons for Assassination. To one school of Chinese thought what Japan now proposes is tantamount to asking China to abdicate her sovereignty. Last week Chinese anxious to know the mettle of the Nanking Government might well conclude from a study of Premier Wang's career that he at least is of whalebone. He has always bent easily, but he has always snapped back. His philosophy of statecraft, ably summed up last year by Vice Minister of Foreign. Affairs Hsu Mo, is that colossal China can afford to take daring and dangerous risks in gambling with small Japan because "in the end China can't lose!"
Premier Wang, unlike most foreign-educated Chinese, has his cultural roots in French literature (he speaks no English) and he used to call himself "Henri Waung." In 1903 he graduated from Tokyo Law College and attached himself to Dr. Sun. In 1909 he rushed to Peking for a bold effort to assassinate Prince Regent Chun, father of the Boy-Emperor who was then China's Son-of-Heaven, now reigns as Manchukuo's puppet Emperor.
Nabbed by the Imperial police, who dragged him before the Prince Regent, Would-Be-Assassin Wang was asked by His Highness: "Why did you wish to take my life?"
Quick-witted, he replied: "There are so many reasons. With your permission I will write my answers." So decadent was the Manchu Court that audacious Wang, instead of being beheaded for the capital crime of attempting the life of the Prince Regent, was permitted to paint his reasons at such length and in such exquisite characters that His Highness was charmed, condemned Wang to mere life imprisonment from which he was soon released by the Chinese Revolution of 1911.