Man & Wife of the Year

(8 of 8)

This week Red Son Chiang was probably still with his mother, Miss Mao, but proverbially unreliable Chinese newspapers had him suddenly appearing in Suiyuan at the head of 100,000 Soviet Mongol troops.

Long Pull. During 1937 the beginning of the Japanese invasion found the Generalissimo then "the only man in China who did not think it best to fight." In his shrewd head Chiang Kai-shek knew better than anyone else that the New China was not yet ready to use her War Machine; that to fight would be to incur the catastrophic losses China has now suffered; that his Government would inevitably be driven from Nanking; that the hand of the Chinese Communists would be immensely strengthened—unless Japan's triumph should indeed be utter & complete. Knowing all this, Chiang Kai-shek up to the last possible moment counseled, as he had counseled for years, "any sacrifice should not be regarded as too costly!" providing it averted war with Japan.

The Generalissimo was overwhelmed and overruled by Chinese public opinion. He was obliged to lead China to certain defeat. Most amazing was the outward confidence of every public act and word of the Man & Wife of the Year—particularly the tone of her cables from Nanking to the U. S. press (TIME, Nov. 23). Until the evacuation of Nanking, Mme Chiang was writing about how "my air force" was going to bomb Tokyo, carefully sparing "the women and children."

The spot to which Generalissimo & Mme Chiang have fled was a military secret this week. Their job is now to wage against Japan such guerrilla warfare as General Sandino hurled from his Nicaraguan mountains against the forces of Calvin Coolidge. To such a resourceful man as Chiang the fight is not necessarily hopeless. Japan is not the U. S. Her resources have already been badly strained and it is conceivable that if the fight is sufficiently long and costly, it may break her economically. Nor is China Nicaragua. She is so large that any invader inevitably has long lines open to attack, and so populous that her resources of man power cannot soon be exhausted. Her greatest weakness has always been in will power. If Chiang Kai-shek and Mei-ling can maintain their will as China's will—the same will which said that "any sacrifice should not be regarded as too costly"—Chinese prospects are good. China's prospects now as they have been for 20 centuries are, however, only for the long pull.

This week an Associated Press correspondent "somewhere in the Yangtze Valley" with Generalissimo & Mme Chiang was permitted to flash that influenza had bedded the Wife of the Year, quoted the Man of the Year as saying: "Tell America to have complete confidence in us. The tide of battle is turning and victory eventually will be ours!"

*Larger than the continental U. S. A. exclusive of Alaska.

*On January 25, Houghton Mifflin will publish the first really good biography of China's Chiang: Strong Man of the East, by Robert Berkov, longtime United Press bureau manager at Shanghai.