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"After all, aren't we Chinese?" replied the wounded heroes. Yin meanwhile had completely disappeared, murdered, according to Chinese, by his own men, safe in hiding according to Japanese. The Yin regime had always been carefully described by Japanese as a strictly "spontaneous, autonomous state set up by Chinese"— but after "General" Yin vanished the Japanese commander in North China, Lieut. General Kiyoshi Kazuki, made no bones about officially appointing Yin's successor, put in an even more abject Chinese stoolpigeon for Japan, one Mr. Chi Tseng-mou.
Tientsin Shambles. General Kazuki meanwhile had blundered spectacularly at Tientsin, the teeming port through which during the past month Japan has poured an invading army (TIME, July 26). So deceptively abject were the local Chinese population, its coolies meekly unloading Japanese munitions and its Chinese officials blandly obliging, that General Kazuki did not bother to keep Tientsin heavily garrisoned, hurried almost all the Japanese troops he landed directly inland toward Peiping. Suddenly about 2 a. m. Chinese artillery secretly brought close to Tientsin started shelling the central and east railway stations used by the Japanese. Simultaneously Chinese snipers, evidently well organized on a citywide scale, began firing from the rooftops, hurling hand grenades. In the streets some Chinese soldiers attacked the Japanese. Others seized bargeloads of Japanese beer, burst into the offices of the Dairen Steamship Co. and stayed through the night, nonchalantly bibbing. Japanese aircraft did not go up until dawn but when they did General Kazuki systematically destroyed or set afire the principal structures in the Chinese quarters of Tientsin. By 10:20 a. m. what Associated Press called "the most destructive and longest aerial bombardment ever undertaken by Japanese Army"* fliers had ringed Tientsin's foreign concessions with dense smoke clouds belching up from the Chinese quarters. Cabled New York Times veteran Hallett Abend: "The Tientsin crisis is definitely over!" Nonetheless it had provided the unique spectacle of a commander forced to bomb the daylights out of a city he was using at the same time as his base for an invasion. In the harbor meanwhile a perky little Japanese armored launch chuffed up to a Chinese warship, took it away from its Chinese bluejacket crew without a fight.
"Brightness Itself." In Nanking last week the Dictator of China, wise and watchful Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, manifestoed: "China is determined to fight to the last man! . . . The policy of our Government has been consistent from beginning to end; namely, that we cannot surrender any territory or allow our sovereignty to be encroached upon. I call upon the Nation to mobilize our total resources and struggle hand-in-hand to save China!"