Oct, 20, The use of guerilla troops in plain clothes is, of course, something which every real soldier detests. Guerilla warfare is the first cousin to assassination, and is almost as: cordially despised in every. country but Red Russia. Our] very consistent readers may! remember a report that we had from Peking a little more than a year ago on Wu Pei-fu's reckless habit of sitting out on an open railway station platform that was passed every hour by third class trains and doing his clerical work within six or eight fect of thousands of persons who might easily have been potential assassins. Our correspondent then asked Marshal Wu if he [did not think this practice rather foolish, and the spectacular little man replied that such things did not happen in "our China." Memories of Chen Chi-mei and his alleged work in this }community rose up before us at! the time, and then the famous story of how Chang Chung-chang, now Governor of Shantung, arranged Chen Chi-m elimination for Yuan Shih-ka but we naturally did not challenge Marshal Wu on these points. Now, since this country has been blessed, or otherwise, several hundred Soviet "experts," we not only _have assassination revived as a feature in local polities but we have plain clothes "troops" fighting on a highly organized basis, Chinese warfare has never been noted for its immaculate character, but if guerilla tactics are come on top of bad discipline [within the ranks, banditry under military patronage, and gun practice by civilians in the streets, only those who get exhilaration out of being shot at and missed are going to be able to reside here.
We are moved to all these remarks by a report which we published yesterday about the Shansi guerillas with whom the Fengtien troops have had deal in the immediate vicinity lof Peking. Plain clothes men with arms have been caught in the neighbourhood of the metropolis and have been brought in to meet a fate which anyone can guess as well as we can, For this, we are perfectly certain, that we can thank the Red gentry who have attached themselves; to one or two of Yen Hsi-shan's senior commanders. The arming and training of civilian desperadoes is an essential feature in every Bolshevist campaign, As we have written before, local police now know fairly certainly that a goodly proportion of the incessant armed robberies are perpetrated by criminally incline ed folk who are being seasoned in criminal exploits by the Reds with a view to their future jin mob action. These Shan: men who had appeared in the environs. of Peking in plain clothes but with concealed weapons are, in our estimation, under Red instruction, We do not want to pat ourselves in a position where our readers will be inclined to think that we are always crying "wolf, wolf," nor that we see everything through red spectacles, but we cannot avoid our con clusions in this instance. We know that Feng Vu-hsiang still has Red agents with him. Tt ix true that Red Russian military men have nearly all gone from every Chinese camp in the but the subterranean "workers" have been fnereased in numbers and are being spurred by Moscow to fresh actitivities. We know also that they have been in close touch with Shang Chen, vid Ursa land Paotou, for over a year, [while from Captain Pick's letters; lon the system that was built-up] in Hankow we know how fond they are of organizing civilian shock organizations—ealled Chen in their revolutionary patois—for just such work as they are noy' trying to doin Peking. This is "much more pernicious than the sale of arms and munitions or the loan of fairly decent and self-respecting army officers to Chinese units, because it is setting a new fashion in the country which will bring this ghastly internecine warfare, with all its horrors, to a still lower level.
We sincerely hope that our local' Kuomintang people, who appear regard these northern operators under their flag as their! political kin and allies, will appreciate this, recognize the; Red finger in the pie and do what they can to discourage i The natural retort to this from larly Kuomintang military man is that it was not the southern-lers who set the fashion but a Fengtien man, Governor Li Ching-lin of Chihli, who in the spring of 1926 secreted several thousand men in plain clothes in the Tientsin concessions and turned them loose on the native city: after Feng Vu-hsiang's feat and retreat. This a to be perfectly true and is, far as we know, the first instance of guerilla work of that sort in modern China. But it must not be forgotten that Li Ching-lin was, at the outset, a party to the Kuo Sung-ling conspiracy, which was. largely engineered' by a Soviet agent who calls himself Grant, and that he had had a certain amount of instruction from these folk before he sud: denly made up his mind to swing back to the Fengtien colours and defend Tientsin against Feng Vu-hsiang's attempt to support Kuo Sung-ling. Banditry is tone thing and this use of armed civilians or soldiers in_ civilian clothes is another. Banditry, unfortunately, is only too well known to China, but this guerilla warfare is a_ new departure which is purely. Russian and should be recognized by all con-jeered as nothing else.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.