BUSY CHINESE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 3, 5 January 1938, Page 6

BUSY CHINESE.

AT WASHINGTON EMBASSY.

WANG HEADS LEGATION

(By BLAIR BOLLES.)

WASHINGTON, November 2.

The busiest Embassy in Washington is the Chinese, presided over by Ambassador Chenting Thomas Wang, Phi Beta Kappa, whose drinking capacity is almost legendary despite the fact that he" got his start in political and public life as a Y.M.C.A. secretary in his native land. Dr. Wang is also a master of oldfashioned oratory, and for years he was Governor of the 81st district of Rotary International, including China, Hongkong and the Philippines.

Cables come to the Chinese Embassy twenty-four hours a day relating the progress of war. The Ambassador has been making an average of two speeches a week since the Japanese drive began. A rain of letters, some offering advice on how to combat the invader, many sending money in sums from 50 cents to 500 dollars to finance Chinese defence, descends on the Embassy, and every volunteer adviser must 'be answered, no matter how impractical his suggestion, and every donor must be thanked.

In the "China Weekly Review's" "Who's Who in China," few men rate more inches of type than Dr. Wang, 55, whose English is fluent because he was educated at the University of Michigan and at Yale. To gain some idea of his prominence and importance it /night 'be wise to quote from the "Who's Who'":

.festively identified himself with the revolution in 1911, serving as President of the Senate in the first Parlia.ment and subsequently as Premier, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Finance, China's chief delegate to the Paris Peace Conference, director-general of the Shantung Rehabilitation Commission, Director-General of Preparations for SinoJapanese negotiations, director-general of the Lunghai Railway; is a member of the central executive committee of the Kuomintang, a member of the Central Political Council and chairman of its foreign affairs division; also president of the Chinese National University, president of the Liu Ho Kou Mining Company, president of the National Good Roads Association, president of the Chinese Red Cross Society."

Dr. Wang arrived in Washington on May 26 of this year. When he was ordered to the United States one of his hopes was that he might have time to study athletics. He is deeply interested ity sports and headed the Chinese delegation to the Olympics at Berlin in 1936, the first set of the Games in which China had participated. He likes to play tennis himself, but the more serious demands of war-time diplomatic activity have interfered with his investigation of athletics.

However, busy days have not interfered with his consumption of shaoshin, a rice wine made in the Chinese province of Chekiang, something like the white wine more familiar to Americans. Several years ago the Japanese Ambassador to Chir , Yoshiwara, challenged Dr. Wane to a shaoshin driking bee. Dr. Wang downed fifty demitasse cups and walked twice around the room. Ambassador Yoshiwara agreed that he had met a champion. Dr. Wang, though, does not let shaoshin interfere with work. He is on the go every minute in order to enlist United States sympathy for his eountrv.

As a talker, Dr. Wang is considered one of China's best. Twice he talked the Japanese Army out of Shantung, and. when he addressed the Rotary International Convention in Atlantic City, the delegates vowed they never had heard such a golden flow of words.

The fact that Dr. Wang is in the United States means that he is the smartest diplomat among the followers of Chiang Kai-shek. China always sends her best men to the Washington Embassy. When he was Premier and Foreign Minister he is credited with having done more to modernise China's treaties than any single man.

He talked several European and South American countries into relinquishing their treaty rights of extraterritoriality in China, and one of his chief hopes here is that he can convince the State Department it would be wise for the United States to make the same sort of relinquishment. (Countries enjoying extraterritorial rights are exempt from Chinese law.) —(N.A.N.A.)