The Dragon Stirs (1941).Pdf

29441 Keep Your Card in This Pocket Boots -will be issued only on presentation of proper library carols. Unless labeled otherwise, books may be retained for two weeks. Borrowers ftndino: books marked, de- faoed or ro.i3.ti lated are expeo-faed to report saxne at lit>era.ry desk; oiiierwlse tih.e last borrower will be held responsible for all imperfectjons disoovered. The card holder is responsible for all books drawn on fh-fR oaaxi. Penalty for over-due books 2o a day p>ltas cost of notices. Lost cards and chano/e of residence must be re- ported promptly. Public Library Kansas City, Mo. Keep Your Card in This Pocket THE DRAGON STIRS A. Chinese jtm?^ at datvn on the broad THE DRAGON STIRS AN INTIMATE SKETCH-BOOK OF CIENA'S KUOMINTANG REVOLUTION 1927-29 By HENRY FRANCIS MISSELWITZ NEW YORK: HARBINGER HOUSE 1941 toy Henry Francis Misselwitz riglnts reserved. reproduction, in. wliole or in, part forbidden, except for slLort excerpts quoted, by revie-wers. Er>rrio3sr ENT TUES TJNITE3I3 STATES OF1 CONTENTS PREFACE 1 THE DRAGON STIRS 11 2 WHEN SHANGHAI FELL 18 3 THE "NANKING INCIDENT" 32 4 'WHY WE ARE IN CHINA" 52 5 IN THE VALLEY OF THE YANGTZE 65 6 RED RULE AT HANKOW 87 7 UP TO THE FRONT 103 8 THE RED FLAME FADES 121 9 "NINGPO MORE FAR" 132 10 A "NEW DEAL" FOR CHINA 144 11 CHIANG KAI-SHEK'S RETURN 157 12 RED REBELLION 167 13 CHRIST OF THE "CHINA ROAD" 174 14 THE MARINES GET GOING 186 15 THE END OF CHANG TSO-LIN 191 16 TOKYO'S DILEMMA 202 17 A DREAM THAT RIVALS GENGHIS KHAN 206 18 SOME AMERICANS WHO WERE THERE 215 19 THE DRAGON LEARNS TO FLY 229 20 BURIAL OF SUN YAT-SEN 239 21 PERSONAL PUBLICITY 248 22 THE "BoY EMPEROR" RULES AGAIN 262 23 THE ROAD AHEAD 276 INDEX 287 PREFACE The Chinese are united today temporarily. They were finally aroused, along with much of the rest of the world, by Japan's invasion of China. Smouldering coals of deep hatred against the Japanese burst into quenchless flames. Internal strife was forgotten in the white heat of a new menace from outside their Middle Kingdom, and the Chinese made peace at home for the moment there in the tinder- box of Asia against a common foe. The intolerable heat of their hatred of the invaders from tiny, insular Japan welded all China into one vast loathing, incoherent mass. One definite and significant result was the first faint sign of real unity among the many totally different types of Asiatic peoples in that broad, illiterate land. Japan's invasion of China did more to unite those peoples those restless sons of Han than any other one thing or any other leader had done since the revolution in 1911, which overthrew the craven, effete and criminally corrupt old Manchu Dy- nasty in Peking, the ancient Capital. It is the birth of a new China, as the Dragon stirs and awakes, with which we are concerned in the following pages, rather than another book on Japan's sanguinary "undeclared war" with an un- wieldy neighbor in the chaotic Orient. Here is a stirring cross-section of those vital days a few years ago, when China began fumbling for a national consciousness and took the first faltering steps upward toward unity. The Chinese were far from united when I first reached Shanghai, early in 1927. A deep-rooted uprising had begun far in the deep South of China, at Canton, and was convulsing all east Asia. It was the Kuomintang, or People's Party, against the war lords at Peking, in the North. The rebels from China's far South were led by Chiang Kai-shek, then a youthful commander who was to become their General- issimo. They swept swiftly northward, through the Yangtze Valley, seizing province after province in their relentless advance, and shout- ing : "Down with the Peking war lords !" and "Down with the Foreign de- Devils I" in their ruthless fury. Foreigners from the West were as leaders nounced to the people of China as their enemies then, now, by in the Kuomintang. It is this tense period, the dawn of the current era in the exotic Orient, which is discussed in this volume. No effort was made to write a "stop press" story of China, with bulletin-like accounts of her frenzied, heroic attempts to ward off the land-hungry Japanese with our financial and material aid. Rather, I have concentrated essentially on the beginnings of China's struggle toward unity as a nation, so very recently, while her soul-baring People's Revolution swept to victory around me. My name and a bit of personal history may be of interest. Missel- witz is an old German name, from Saxony on the border of Poland. I was born in Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1900, at the turn of the century. My father was born in New York eighty-two years ago, and he and my mother still live in Missouri. His father was born in Saxony, and fell in love with a German girl who had lived long in France. They fled Germany in the middle of the last century and settled first in New York. Shortly after my father was born there, the family moved to Philadelphia where he was reared. He, Herman Francis Misselwitz, became a Philadelphia lawyer; and about the time when Horace Greeley was telling young men in the growing nation, reunited following our Civil War, to "go west," he went west. There in Leavenworth, then a thriving trading post and jumping off place for the still none too safe journey across the continent to the West Coast and California, he hung out his shingle. And there this sandy haired, blue-eyed Saxon from Manhattan met my mother. She was a tiny young lady, not long from the blue grass country of her native Kentucky. Shy dark eyes, like caves of sunlight, shone from her delicate features beneath a cloud of jet black hair piled high in a pompadour, then fashionable. From them, I get my light brown hair and dark brown eyes. Mother was but 4 feet 11 inches tall. Her name then was Grace Ella Fields. She came of a mixture of English- Norman French on her father's side he was Henry Clay Fields, of our United States postal service and of Scotch and Dutch on her mother's side. Her mother was Laura Belle Embry, of Kentucky, who became an ardent temperance leader of the post-war (Civil War) era and one of the very early members of the Women's Christian Tern- perance Union headed by her friend and associate, the dynamic Frances Willard, in Wichita, Kansas. I was born as the twentieth century began, near the very heart of the United States. I asked a friend in Berlin a few years ago to look into the family name Misselwitz, and determine if I weren't at least partly Jewish so that, as I put it in a letter to him, I couldn't "be a genius, too/' like so many Jews are in music and the other arts, to say nothing of their success as bankers and in almost any kind of commerce or business My friend, a foreign correspondent originallv from New had the name Misselwitz looked after Orleans, La., up ; and an extensive search in the Reichstag library in Berlin and through a professional genealogist there, he wrote back to the effect that ''back to the year 800 A D. you're 100 per cent Aryan, and could even suit Hitler on that score ... so I'm very much afraid you can't become a genius in that way or I might add, in any other!" In recognition of their helpful services, which played a large part in making this book possible, thanks are due to several persons and organizations, including B. W Fleisher, publisher of The Japan Adver- tiser, an American daily morning newspaper printed in English in Tokyo, for whom I first went to the Far East in 1924. The Advertiser since has been sold to the Japanese government. Thanks and my appreciation likewise are due to the United Press, for giving me an assignment in Shanghai, early in 1927; to The New York Times, for appointing me their chief correspondent in China, later in the same year; to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Tunes, for telling me I could use material gathered for the paper while I was in China, as the basis for much of this book; and to Carroll Kenworthy, in Washington, DC., who as an expert on the Orient, did much to answer my queries or to get them answered at the Chinese and Japanese embassies while this was being written. H. F. M. February, 1941 Santa Monica, Calif. To MY MOTHER THE DRAGON STIRS Chinese had the first league of nations on earth. The idea THEworked smoothly for nearly three centuries, until the Dragon Throne in Peking was overthrown in 19 11. The machinery for this initial attempt at a league among men was set up when the Manchus swarmed south over the Great Wall of China and conquered half a continent. They took over the Middle Kingdom, as the Chinese themselves invariably call their country, and in 1644 inaugurated their autocratic rule over all the provinces. The Manchu regime had its capital at Peking, now Peiping. Like the Tartars, Mongols and others who have come into close contact with the Chinese races and there are many widely varied peoples in that land the Manchus in time were absorbed.

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