THE “ CHRISTIAN " GENERAL: CHINA'S MYSTERY MAN.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18889, 12 October 1929, Page 1

THE “ CHRISTIAN " GENERAL: CHINA'S MYSTERY MAN.

(From d Shanghai Correspondent.) The life story of the most amazing figure in Chinese politics, whose defection from the Nationalist Government has set China once more on the warpath. The “ Christian ” General has broken with the Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Government at Nanking, and a first-class civil war is under way. The fight between Feng and Chiang really is no such local pother as the si*3ge of Chefoo or the battling about Canton or the bloodless capture of Wuhan—it is a fight between the two strong men of the “ new ” China. Feng is perhaps the best known of China’s generals and the most mysterious. Men who have known him intimately almost cpme to blows arguing about him in Pekin, Shanghai and Canton. He has been allied with, and also against, every important figure in China. He is called a “ rice Christian.” a Bolshevik agent, a patriot, an ignoramus, a shrewd money-maker. For seven years he has been on the verge of decisive power in China, never quite dominant, never totally down and out. Possibly the key to Feng s character is that he is a peasant. He has not the traditional loyalty to a patronprotege of better education Chinese, and his heady ambition is untempered by learning. Courage is no virtue to him; discretion is. He never hesitates to retire in the face of danger, and. as a result he has survived where more gallant men would have gone down. When trouble looms he retires to the impenetrable mountains and empty spaces of .north-west China and sets his soldiers to farming. His Christianity, like his Russian sympathies is most evident when it is most likely to be useful to him. Innumerable are the stories told of Feng and of his second wife, who is a graduate of an American missionary college and a former Y.W.C.A. worker. Callers on Feng are likely, ushered into a bare room, to discover the marshal busily engaged in sweeping with his own broom. His detractors sneer at such stage play; his friends declare that, stage play or not, it marks a new era in Chinese militarism when a general ostentatiously performs menial labour and sets such an example. He serves his visitors the simplest rice gruel. Again, his enemies, assert that he retires to eat richer food alone, and his freinds again defend the demonstration.

He is a stern taskmaster. Most Chinese armies are followed by swarms of carry-coolies; Feng makes his troops carry their own luggage. He drills them to the tune of “ Onward, Christian Soldiers,” sung in a high Chinese falsetto, and his favourite form of drill if road-building. Wherever Feng’s armies have been there are good roads—that is one secret of the long, forced marches for wheih he is famous. When he discovered that his own son had been tasting the joys of night life in Pekin, Feng ordered the young man to the rock pile and kept him there for months of gruelling hard labour. His enemies say that his first wife died of overwork, and tell fantastic stories of the negotiations which preceded his second marriage. Feng heard of the efficient young lady who was working in a Pekin branch Y.W.C.A.. and made up his mind that she would be the ideal wife for him. But she had ideas of her own. She refused to go to meet him as a candidate, and he finally got an unauthorised glimpse of her only at a professorial tea. Furthermore, she had heard stories of his treatment of his first wife and set a long series of Occidental conditions before she consented to be wooed by the man who was then the first war lord of China Whatever the truth of these stories there is no doubt that the second Mrs Feng, like the second Mrs Chiang Kaishek—a University graduate, a poetess and a sister of Sun Yat-sen’s widow—is a remarkably able woman. She organised a Red Cross service with his armies which is said to be the nearest thing to an efficient military medical service in China.

Twelve years of undistinguished soldiering preceded Feng’s rise to fame He came into the limelight in 1922, when he saved Pekin for his chief, Wu Pei-fu, by a brilliant forced march out of remote Shensi. Almost his first act in Pekin was to quarrel with the President over the local revenues, and to force him into fight. Feng lost face in that quarrel, and made his first strategic retirement into the western hills, but he emerged as Wu’s leading subordinate. In October, 1924, being ordered to the Maqchurian battle front by Wu, he suddenly declared for peace, marched his army back to Pekin, 100 miles in thirty-six hours, leaving Wu almost a prisoner at the front. This time he spectacularly drove the boy Emperor out of his refuge in the old Imperial Palace. When clouds began to gather he staged another series of spectacular resignations. “I have wept so bitterly that my tears are exhausted,” he declared. Four times he resigned his offices, threatening even to

ommit suicide if the chief executive would not accept his withdrawal. The wily chief executive refused, but Feng did not kill himself; he sulked in the western hills, and came back when the stars seemed favourable. In 1925, again master of Pekin, he made war on the lord of Manchuria, and probably would have won the day but for Japanese intervention. Then he retired again, first to Paotu, on the edge of the Gobi Desert, then to Urga, in Mongolia, finally to Moscow. In the autumn of 1926 Feng returned from Moscow, with new hope and presumably, new funds. He reorganised his scattered armies, made an alliance with the rising Nationalist movement, straddled while Nanking and Hankow fought it out, and won as reward the title of Minister of War in the Nanking Government. But he was never given the territorial control that he wanted. He has remained cooped in the Northwest without a seaport or access to the outside world. Had he chosen at the time of the Wuhan revolt, a w months ago, to side actively with the Nanking Government, he might be master of Shantung to-day; instead he straddled again, negotiating with both sides, and thereby lost face in Nanking. It has long been felt that some day his ambition and that of Chiang Kaishek, the military genius who presides at Nanking, would have to clash openly. Both men stand head and shoulders above the ruck of Chinese generals —abler disciplinarians, abler strategists, abler administrators, more energetic and devoted to China. Neither is the type that lays up bank deposits abroad and flees to enjoy them when trouble looms. But both are ambitious. It is perhaps significant that C. T. Wang, the Yale graduate, who was long Feng’s chief adviser and on more than one occasion his Foreign Minister, has broken with his old chief and stands loyally with Nanking.

(Anglo-American N.S. Copyright). IlllininlUilUiUUUiUlUUUiUllUJlUlUlUllUiUlUlUllliUUtlU nillllllHUUlUlUH