Reduced Target
The friendly mist which each winter enshrouds Chungking lifts and flows away each spring. This year it will doubtless be replaced by clouds of Japanese bombers. Anticipating severe air raids, authorities in China's provisional capital have been hurriedly evacuating nonessential personnel, by March 15 will have reduced Japan's target from 700,000 men, women and children to 350,000 Government employes and soldiers. To localize damage from incendiary bombs, every tenth building in crowded sections of the city is being torn down.
For the 350,000 remaining behind to man the provisional Government and run the city, subterranean air-raid shelters are being tunneled out of the city's rocky subsurface. Those who cannot crowd into these shelters will have to try to escape to the neighboring countryside over numerous new pontoon bridges thrown across the Yangtze and Kialing Rivers.
Profoundest Regrets
Life in the foreign concessions of China was upset last week by two lively international incidents. Incident No. i resulted from the bombing of Shum-Chun, near the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. A few of the bombs landed several hundred yards within British territory, hit a bridge and damaged a train. Tall, bespectacled Sir Robert Craigie, British Ambassador to Japan, registered the usual protests at Tokyo. Foreign Minister Hachiro Arita expressed the usual "profoundest regrets," declared the bombs a "mistake," promised to pay for the damage and punish the guilty fliers. Perhaps he will.
Incident No. 2 was a result of the Japanese being put on a spot when Chinese terrorists in Shanghai's International Settlement killed Marquis Li Kuo-chieh, wealthy Chinese industrialist. The Marquis, member of an aristocratic old Chinese family, had been a clandestine supporter of Japan's puppet Chinese Government at Nanking. He was the 16th prominent pro-Japanese Chinese to be killed in Shanghai since January 1. Thirteen others have been injured. Although only eleven of the attacks took place in areas policed by non-Japanese forces, Japanese blamed Shanghai's International Settlement Authorities for harboring the terrorists. The Japanese Consul General at Shanghai served Cornell S. Franklin, U. S. chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council, with a note demanding that terrorism be crushed and that Japan be given a larger share in the International Settlement Administration. There were even veiled threats that Japan might decide to take over the Settlement by force. The Council rejected the Japanese demands, strengthened its police force. Cold comfort it was last week to panic-stricken Chinese puppets that the Japanese proposed to pay their families from $1,500 to $15,000 in case of their assassination.