Letters From the Manchurian Border

APRIL 1932

VOLUME 149

BY NORA WALN

TIENTSIN, January 18, 1931. — Skating west from the Pa Li Tai Bridge yesterday morning, my daughter and I accepted a kind invitation to rest and take a cup of tea in the Hour of the Snake with some people named Wu — a family of emigrants on their way to Tientsin to board the train for Manchuria. They had had their pia-tzu (canal boat fitted with runners when the water is frozen over and propelled by metal-tipped staffs) pushed off the double-trace iceway into the wayside bay below the Village of the Fragrant Forest. There were thirty-seven in the family, counting the youngest girl, who had been born on the pia-tzu the previous afternoon. They were all of the same surname — agnatic descendants of the two eldest, a man and a woman who had celebrated six decades of marriage.

These Wus had come from ‘two moons down the Canal.’ They are farmers, descended from ‘ folk who have tilled the earth for generations beyond count.’ One of them was born with a club foot and apprenticed to a smith. He has forged farm tools in his home hamlet for thirty years and is now teaching his trade to a nine-year-old nephew who was shot in the hip last year by marauding soldiers. Another, who was stung blind by bees, was apprenticed to the Minstrel of the City of the Third Dike. He can play the moon guitar and sing songs from the ‘forty-six centuries of Chinese history to enlighten the family in times of darkness, because by examining the past we can understand the present and know the future.’ From external appearances and the acquaintance of an hour, I found all of the family selfrespecting, decent people — good citizens such as China needs just now. Yet they were leaving the homestead where they had dwelt for two centuries and going out beyond the Wall.

Copyright 1932, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. Allrights reserved.

They were dressed in clean, neat, warmly wadded cotton garments and homemade shoes. Before eating, they washed their faces and hands, calloused and thickened by honest toil, in basins of steaming water. In addition to good tea they had whole-grain flour noodles, grown and prepared at home before the journey, seasoned with fresh green onion tops bought from a passing farm boat. After the meal they scrubbed their strong white teeth with salt, washed their food bowls, chopsticks, and the cooking pot, then put out the charcoal fire in the cookstove, saving the bits of once-used fuel. Two of the women cracked walnuts for the mother of the newborn child, saying, ‘She has two to feed, so she must have something extra.’ The great-great-great-grandmother told me that rolled inside their bedding they each had a complete outfit of summer clothes, sewn before leaving their old homestead; when spring came they expected to be entirely occupied planting crops in new fields.

My daughter asked the Elder why he was leaving the fertile midlands, where the climate is kind, to farm northern fields where the cruel winter shortens the growing season to a scant portion of the year. In reply he said: ‘Thatch your roof before the rains; dig your well before you are thirsty. We flee from the wrath of the Three of the Midlands — the Yangtze, the Yellow River, and the Canal. Shamefully neglected for more than two decades, the Three are angry. They are not satisfied with a few bright toys flung into their waters to a mythical dragon at festival times. The historical annals from the most ancient days record more practical appeasement. In the past, engineers have coaxed the Three into good humor, returning to them part of the riches received from the midland harvests: they dredged channels, built and repaired dikes, and helped the Three control the summer rains. It is now twice ten years since the engineers went away, and we flee from the wrath to come.’

‘The ice level in the Canal is a finger length higher than ever before in my father’s lifetime,’ said the man who sat next to the Elder as he handed him the pipe he had lighted. ‘It is a warning to the House of Wu to move elsewhere, even though we have enjoyed two centuries of satisfaction in that place. Twenty years ago, in the first year of the Republic, we sent petitions to Peking concerning three weak places in the dikes above our fields that had been neglected by the previous government. Our cry was not heard. Four years ago we welcomed the Nationalists as saviors. We have reported the danger nine times to Nanking. Our nine cries are not heard. The places of weakness now number twenty. We have sent foot scouts to other farmers of the rich midlands. They have reported that it is common knowledge in hamlet, field, and village market place that at the next season of heavy rain the Three will sweep out, causing such devastation as has not previously been recorded in Chinese history. The midlands are the treasure chest of the National Government. Nanking, their capital, the Queen of the Three Valleys, sits at the place of threefold danger. Can we judge these new rulers wise men when they are now entirely occupied arguing among themselves about party discipline?’

We skated home with the sun on our backs.

II

There is no abatement in the activities of the Anti-Japanese Society. This morning I was in the shop of Ping on the Taku Road when a pretty little Chinese girl about four years old, dressed in pink silk trousers and coat lined with white rabbit, came in holding fast to her nurse’s hand. The child told Ping that her uncle had given her a dollar and she wanted to purchase a doll. She inspected Ping’s dolls and finally chose one with a chubby body which he assured her could be washed all over. It was without clothes, and the nurse recommended one in a blue dress, but the little girl said, ’I get a larger child for a dollar without clothes. You can dress it, please, just as I am dressed.’

Ping’s clerk was wrapping up the doll when two Anti-Japanese Scouts arrived. They were exceedingly selfassured schoolboys of perhaps fifteen or sixteen years. The elder took the parcel from the clerk, examined the doll, and said it was made in Japan. Then, despite the protests of the child and her nurse, he tucked it under his arm and joined his companion in pulling merchandise from cases and shelves. They pronounced this and that Japanese-made, and threw other goods carelessly on the floor, trampling over them so that Ping’s tidy shop was soon in a disgraceful state. Ping stood by, impassive. There was a policeman on duty at the corner; the shutters of the glass-fronted shop were down, so that he could easily see what was going on, but he did nothing.

When the Scouts had gathered together spoils enough to ‘teach a lesson,’ — cotton cloth, knitting wool, spools of thread, bath towels (which plainly bore the woven-in trade-mark of a local Chinese factory), candles, bedroom slippers, and two crates of Swedish matches, — they directed the frightened young clerk to pile the merchandise in a heap in the centre of the Taku Road. Traffic was diverted to make room for it. The elder Scout laid the doll on top of the pyre while the second set the whole mass ablaze by putting one of the lighted candles under each crate of matches. When I left, the child who had bought the doll was screaming and struggling to get away from her nurse so that she could fly at the vandals who had destroyed her treasure.

At the corner I asked the policeman why he had permitted the bonfire. He shuffled his feet uneasily, but remained silent. When I had repeated my question three times he replied, ‘As yet I have received no command to thwart anti-Japanese activities.’ These words were overheard by a coppersmith, an independent craftsman with a powerful guild behind him, who seized the occasion to lecture the policeman. A crowd came away from the bonfire to listen.

‘Six of our neighbors,’ said the coppersmith, ‘have been ruined in this street in nine moons. First the government collects taxes again after they have already been paid, then it lets these Anti-Japanese Scouts complete our ruin. I have not heard that the Nationalist Government has prohibited the importation of Japanese goods. Such merchandise pays import duty to get here; if it were forbidden, surely it would not be allowed to pass the customs. The merchants do not stock it just to be impudent. They would not have it on their shelves if the people did not want to buy it. Yet these schoolboys take it upon themselves to punish the merchants by seizing everything their fancy prompts them to pronounce Japanese-made, and they trample and spoil hundreds of dollars’ worth of Chinese-made goods as well. By neglecting to stop the foolishness of these students, who ought to be at their books, you police are thrusting your thumbs through your own paper lanterns. It is the merchants who pay the taxes and make possible the modern luxury of a policeman at every corner in a nice uniform — and when there are no more merchants, you will be out of a job!’

Farther down the street I saw a Japanese in military uniform photographing an anti-Japanese poster.

III

TIENTSIN,May 23, 1931. — Early in the month Sir Miles Lampson, the British Minister, came down to Tientsin and went on to Nanking in the lovely flagship Petersfield. M. Wilder, the French Minister, went down by train shortly afterward. A little later Mr. Johnson, the American Minister, took a plane and flew down. Soon the Italian Minister followed, and a representative came over from Tokyo to speak for Japan. As a result of these conferences the press has been filled with reports that the Nanking officials are demanding the surrender of all the foreign ‘concessions’ in China.

These concessions comprise only a few square acres, adding together the land at Shanghai, Canton, Chinkiang, Newchwang, and Tientsin. Originally they were districts set aside by the rulers of China for the segregation of Westerners, so that the Chinese would not be contaminated by them, but they no longer serve that purpose. To-day Westerners in China are not segregated. Though they may not own property outside of the concessions, they may live anywhere they can rent a residence. These areas, however, have become oases in this land of perpetual civil war which for the last twenty years has been torn by plots and counterplots, intrigues, riots, and sedition. Consequently large numbers of natives have taken refuge in the concessions, and the majority of the residents in them are now Chinese.

All the concessions stand on swamps. Only the most undesirable sites could be spared for the ‘barbarians’ who pushed into China to barter and trade despite every effort of the Son of Heaven to discourage them. On low taxes the swamps have been drained, filled in, and planted with trees so that they now present a handsome appearance. All roads in these areas, even the back streets, are well paved. All concessions have fine schoolhouses, adequate to educate all the children of the residents, and balances in their treasuries large enough to build on annexes and hire more teachers as they are needed. They have good hospitals, modern sewage-disposal systems, and furnish water and electricity at much lower rates than any other municipal government in China has been able to do. They are all crowded to their boundaries, for civil war halts at their borders.

I frequently hear it said, over teacups in Chinese courtyards, that since China is now proclaimed a democratic republic the fate of the concessions should not be autocratically decided by ministers and officials, but by a ballot of all the residents. The clear implication of this is that if the local Chinese were allowed a voice in the matter the concessions would remain as they now are.

Until recently the municipal bonds of the concessions have regularly paid 5 per cent and been counted giltedged investments. They have dropped alarmingly since it has become a possibility that these areas may come under the same government as the rest of China. The daughter of a Chinese banker noted for his shrewdness tells me that he is selling and advising all his relatives to sell British concession bonds for whatever they will bring, and is buying up French bonds. He interprets the briskness with which England turned over the Hankow concession and the administration of the fishing village of Wei-hai-wei as evidence that ‘the British of this generation are eager to relinquish their inherited responsibilities and glad to find sentimental reasons for handing things over.’

The countries in whose names these concessions are held reap no revenues from them. They are entirely selfsupporting except for the cost of sending out troops to gesture fighting away from their borders on those rare occasions when civil war presses too close. In spite of all this, the concessions remain a potential source of trouble in this disturbed land because modern Chinese politicians, with their insight into Western character acquired through their education in Europe and America, can always throw up the smoke screen of ‘foreign aggression.’

IV

As I look down from my sitting-room window, at which I am writing, I can see a little group of nine Chinese country people waiting, bewildered by motor traffic, for the policeman to signal them that it is safe to cross the street. Ever since I came to live here, in April 1927, there has been a steady flux of hardy, independent, goodnatured farm families passing through Tientsin en route to Manchuria beyond the Great Wall. There seem to be even more of them this spring than usual.

According to a census report which I heard a young Chinese economist deliver this week at Nankai University, there are now thirty million farmers spread sparsely over the 364,000 square miles of Manchuria. At the time Japan began to take an interest in the development of those generous empty acres, laying railways to induce settlers to open the virgin soil with the plough, there were only five million Chinese living in Manchuria. The Chinese Government w?as anxious lest overpopulous Japan should colonize in such numbers as to overshadow the Chinese, but events have proved this fear groundless. Twenty-seven million of the present population are Chinese.

‘China proper is not crowded,’ said the economist. ‘One may travel for weeks in our country through fertile, uncultivated acres. Foreigners think we are overpopulated because they only see a few cities. In peace time it would have been impossible to colonize Manchuria, but circumstances have accomplished what the government could never have brought about by direct efforts. Civil war in the eighteen provinces has driven the peace-loving farmers out to settle Manchuria even more effectively than the Japanese Government, with all its paternal coaxing, has been able to move the citizens of that crowded country. In 1927, the most turbulent year of the revolution, over a million Chinese went into Manchuria. In 1928 half a million more became farm proprietors there. In 1929 the emigrants numbered six hundred thousand, and in 1930 another half million joined them. In spite of the extreme difficulties encountered in that harsh climate, the Chinese farmer endures them with good spirit; he is unconcerned about hardship so long as he can plough, sow, and reap undisturbed.’

Large numbers of these migrating peasants pass through Tientsin by boat, by train, and on foot, according to the fullness of their purses. They travel in family groups. One sees babies in the arms of their parents, and aged folk, too weak to walk, riding astride the backs of their descendants. They have their ploughs, their seed, their kitchen gods, often even the hearthstone from their old homestead; along with their clothes, bedding, food, and incense to burn at wayside shrines, they often carry roots and cuttings from favorite rosebushes and shrubs.

Because heretofore I have always found the Chinese family firmly attached to its bit of home soil (all my friends and acquaintances, even my servants, speak quite casually of three or four centuries of residence on the same site), I often wander down the Willow Road to see the emigrant families who approach Tientsin on foot. I have been intensely curious to know what manner of people these were who had suddenly deserted the graves of their ancestors to seek the Promised Land outside the Wall. All of them to whom I have talked have shown themselves to be resolute, gallant folk ready to face a new life with courage and fortitude. They are all stoutly Chinese. Not one of them will concede that there is a race in the world equal in any respect to their own. They speak of all others as barbarians, except the Japanese, ‘our half-civilized cousins.’ They are firm in their conviction that the Chinese confer a benefit upon any place they enter. They are not at all concerned about matters of government. ‘We have had many dynasties and many governments,’ they say. ‘ Whatever the regulations, the farmers abide by them.’

When I have asked them about Manchuria, they replied: ‘We flee before the God of Civil War and the God of Flood. There is a King in Manchuria, but we can’t remember his name. We do not know whether he is Russian, British, as in Malaya, Japanese, Manchu, or Ming. What does it matter? We have assurance, from a member of our family sent to investigate, that he lets farmers settle there, and, beyond taking 20 per cent of the harvest, does not bother people.’

V

Our garden extends on the south to the Nuchang Road, where it faces the residence of Chang Hsueh-ming, the Mayor of Tientsin. He is the second son of the late Chang Tso-lin, whom the people called the King of Manchuria. The oldest son is Chang Hsueh-liang, who inherited his father’s rights to the dictatorship; he is young, ardent, and eager to rule well in Manchuria.

On the fourteenth, this older brother of our Mayor came to Tientsin and flew on down to Nanking to see if he could n’t patch up the serious differences within the Nationalist Party. These internal conflicts have made it impossible for the Nanking Government to give attention to the care of the people, although it is now four years since their flag was unfurled over all the provinces within the Wall. At his first meeting with Chiang Kai-shek, who is now head of the Nationalist Party, Chang Hsueh-liang was won to hero worship of the charming Southerner, whom he regarded as the ‘strong man’ under whom all other strong men of China should rally. The Elders of the Chang family tried to persuade him not to leave Mukden on such a mission. They considered the trip unwise because the Japanese authorities in Manchuria had already warned him against involving that region any further in the vortex of politics within the Wall. He went, however, in spite of everything they could say.

To-day his plane came back bearing him unconscious with typhoid fever. He is to be rushed to the Rockefeller Hospital at Peking by train to-night. Every effort has been made to keep his serious illness secret, since such incidents always cause political unrest and runs on the banks. But in that insidious way in which rumors run in China, hot-cake vendors, minstrels, and clerks in shops were spreading word yesterday, before the plane arrived, that Chang Hsueh-liang had been poisoned in Nanking.

The younger brother, the Mayor of Tientsin, has been giving us the best government we have had in the four years since we came here. Communists and labor agitators have miraculously disappeared, and robberies and kidnapings, previously frequent, have ceased. His men have done no looting; they are paid each month at their barracks with round silver dollars. Steam rollers, like those used on the roads in America, have appeared on our streets and are kept busy from sunrise until sunset crushing and leveling out the ruts.

The only disturbance in the spring peace is the puzzling continuance of activities by the Anti-Japanese Society. School-teachers complain that the students won’t stay in the classrooms and be taught, now that the government is paying their wages regularly. Not only the shops, but the bridges, the railway stations, and the roads, are infested by the Anti-Japanese Scouts. Most of them are freshfaced, impudent schoolboys, and schoolgirls as well, but in their ranks one also sees coarse ruffians from the lowest alleys in the city. They not only confiscate the merchants’ goods, but stop carriers and carters to rip open luggage and cases that have passed the customs, and they accost people in the street if they suspect them of wearing Japanese-made apparel.

I myself was recently accosted and had my blue-flowered scarf taken away. It was made in America, but the Scout who claimed it — he was a grown man — swore that it was made in Japan. Although it was faded and twice darned, I was annoyed to lose it. I argued and even appealed to the head priest of the temple I had been visiting, but a kindly Chinese gentleman in the crowd that had collected advised me to let it go. ‘One cannot blow out a fire with a rolling-pin,’ he remarked. Then a gentlewoman who had been praying at the shrine took my arm, saying, ‘Come away. It is best always to suit self to circumstance.’

While such things are going on, numbers of Japanese, both in civilian garb and in military uniform, may be observed everywhere, quietly but industriously photographing each new anti-Japanese poster as soon as it is pasted up.

VI

TIENTSIN, July 8, 1931. — Chang Hsueh-liang’s crusade to Nanking appears to have been futile. The feud between party chiefs, far from being ended, has mounted once more to the point of civil war. Sun-Fo and Wang Ching-wei, party veterans, have gone south and set the Canton arsenals to making cartridges, rifles, pistols, machine guns, and smokeless powder in day and night shifts in order to unseat President Chiang Kai-shek. Their confederate, C. C. Wu, has thereby been forced to resign his appointment as Minister to Washington. President Chiang Kai-shek has ridden continuous storms and remained in control of the government longer than any other ruler since the revolution, but he has been kept so busy raising armies to defend his position that he has had no time to do anything else.

Chang Hsueh-liang is still in the Rockefeller Hospital with typhoid, and bulletins reporting his progress are issued by the Mayor’s office here every day. In spite of them many people assert that he is dead, and shops refuse to accept money stamped with his likeness. Japanese military officers are now saying quite openly that if he is alive and recovers he can never return to Manchuria. They explain that his friendship with Chiang Kai-shek and his alliance with the Nationalist Party make his government unsuited to conditions in Manchuria, and as evidence of this they say that more than three hundred insults to Japan have occurred there. Moreover, they add, his brother, the Mayor of Tientsin, has made no effort to stop anti-Japanese activities here.

When the Japanese officials are asked who would be acceptable to them, they just smile and say nothing. Mr. Henry Pu-Yi, the ex-Emperor, has been approached unofficially by Japanese callers, as well as by his relatives, who work continuously for a monarchical restoration, and by anti-Chang-family Chinese, but he is anxious to keep free of all politics. He has grown into a nice young man, very like an American college boy of the quiet, studious type, with kindly and simple manners. Both he and his beautiful young wife accompanied me to the gate when I had tea there last, and said, ‘Do come again. We need our friends in these trying times.’

VII

The thermometer hovers around ninety in the shade, and we have had lots of rain. The crops in the surrounding countryside are coming on excellently — the corn shoulder high, the rice above level and well seeded, the winter wheat heavy with grain. I have seen the abundance on both sides of the river for many miles, for I have been a guest on an all-day picnic arranged by the River Commission aboard its launch. The picnic was not just to give officials and their wives and members of prominent Tientsin families a pleasant day; its object was to draw attention to the danger of flood.

We were asked to recall that our province is a flood plain, and that the Hai-ho River, curving in a restricted and narrow channel through and around Tientsin, is the only outlet to the sea. The complicated system of dikes and canals which for centuries have been used to draw off surplus water was reviewed, and the British, French, German, and Chinese engineers employed by the Commission emphasized the need of immediate improvements and repairs. History was quoted to remind us that Tientsin’s past has been checkered with devastating floods. Photographs of the two most recent catastrophes, in 1917 and 1924, were passed around so that people who were not then living here might see how the city suffered when rushing torrents, bearing farms and hamlets in their churning waters, came down upon it.

I remembered that the flood mark in our house, which stands in the most elevated section of Tientsin, is at the second landing of the stairs, and that the gateman had told me how the family then in residence dwelt safely above. The engineers say that the next flood will be worse. If so, we have a third story to retire to, but the average Chinese house has only one.

I concluded, however, before the picnic was over, that the government at Tientsin, like the governments in the Yangtze and the Yellow River and the Grand Canal valleys, has so many pressing demands on the treasury just now that the gods will have to be trusted not to send heavy rains this summer. The silted river channels, at the very places the engineers pointed out as most dangerous, are all mantled by the lovely lotus, now in bud.

TIENTSIN, September 6, 1931. — News of the Yangtze catastrophe, aggravated by fifteen breaks in the dikes of the Grand Canal, first reached us while we were at the seashore, when Mrs. Davis received a telegram from Hankow informing her that her piano had been moved to the upper floor of her house, which was then above water. I am thankful for the escape of the Wu family, whom I met while skating last winter. I am grateful, too, that we have not had such heavy rains in our province. It would be impossible to describe adequately the sad plight of the afflicted in this great disaster.

The Emperor of Japan has sent a personal gift of 100,000 yen (about $50,000 in American money) in addition to the sympathy donation for flood relief sent by the Japanese people. He also offered Japanese health experts to help cope with the problem of plague prevention. The Chinese Government immediately telegraphed grateful acceptance, and the health experts are now working in the Chinese medical corps.

VIII

Anti-Japanese incidents at Tientsin are more numerous now than they were before I went to the seashore. I have witnessed three to-day.

About nine this morning I saw the candy vendor accosted by a welldressed young man with a picket’s badge, who proceeded to examine the old man’s wares. I cannot imagine what the picket could have found, but he claimed that something was made in Japan and gave a lesson in ‘national loyalty’ by wrecking the portable cookstove and emptying the bamboo sugar jar over the candy man’s head.

At eleven I saw two little Japanese schoolgirls baited by impudent questions and pushed about by a mob of Chinese children. The sash of one Japanese child was pulled off and trampled, and excitement was running high when Tientsin’s most popular actor happened to peer out from his ‘To and From the World Door.’ He snatched the Japanese maids inside and bolted his gates in the astonished faces of their persecutors.

At four this afternoon pickets went down Shoe Street and commandeered all the cobblers’ Formosa snakeskin, which, among Chinese flappers, is the fashionable shoe material this autumn.

Last night the family of M. Samarq, the manager of the Crédit Foncier, who are neighbors of ours, moved up from their seaside home, arriving at the East Station at ten o’clock. They had with them the usual clothing, linen, silver, and household furnishings which we must all move to and from the sea each summer. They passed out of the station all right and were traveling homeward when they were stopped within five minutes’ distance of their town-house gate by Anti-Japanese Scouts, who demanded to go through their luggage. M. Samarq refused and attempted to go on, but the Scouts seized his bearers and whistled for reënforcements. They came in increasing numbers until there was a mob of them, mostly high-school and college students, with a few street ruffians — all of them wearing the Anti-Japanese badge. M. Samarq and his daughter’s fiancé, M. Ferrier, speak the local dialect fluently, and they appealed to the police. The police, however, stood quietly on duty and said it was not their affair.

Three hours passed in argument, which served to keep the boxes from being opened, but did not succeed in getting them moved, for the pickets sat upon them. The police change guard at twelve o’clock. Finally at one o’clock one of the policemen then on duty said it appeared to him that neither side was accomplishing anything, so he would suggest a compromise. He had had no orders to thwart AntiJapanese Scouts, but he saw that a Frenchman would not peacefully submit to having his bedding, his garments, and his private personal utensils exposed to public examination in the street. So, not as a policeman but as an individual, he would offer his courtyard, three streets away, for the inspection. The offer was accepted by both sides, and the luggage was carried there. After a lengthy opening of everything, nothing of Japanese manufacture was found. The French ConsulGeneral is protesting.

In addition to the pickets there are other Anti-Japanese Scouts who try to educate the people by street lectures. I have listened to several of them. They all informed the passing populace that every treaty with Japan is unfair because none of them confers mutual benefits, but only benefits to Japan. All the treaties have been signed under duress, they explain, and bear the signatures of Chinese politicians who were bribed to sell their country. I have secured and carefully read copies of all the Sino-Japanese treaties, and am tempted to believe that what the lecturers say is true. But after one of the orators had quoted the treaties and scolded the Street of Nine Blessings more than half an hour for its indifference, I heard a man hitched behind a mule in the drawing harness of a cart remark, ‘We might be more sensitive to the danger of Japanese vassalage if we had ever known anything except vassalage at home.’

Japanese and Chinese officials are still extremely polite to each other at dinner parties and social gatherings. It would still be a serious breach of good taste to invite one nationality and leave out the other ‘because they do not go well together.’ But over idle cups of tea in Chinese courtyards it is common talk that the two countries are on the eve of war.

(Further letters from the Manchurian border will be published next month)