AWFUL CARNAGE.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 258, 30 October 1926, Page 9

AWFUL CARNAGE.

ATROCITIES IN CHINA.

EXECUTIONS WITHOUT TRIAL BRIBERY THE ONLY SAVIOUR. REMINISCENT OF FRENCH REVOLUTION. (By Cable. —Press Association.—Copyright.) (Received I.SO p.m.) PEKING, October 29. With heads falling under the executioner's knife daily, suspected Cantonese agents marching shackled tlirough the streets to the native tribunal and dozens guilty of acts of treason facing firing squads in Shanghai native districts, the terrorisms of the Frenca revolution are recalled. The Chinese soldiery and police are unceasingly scouring and scouring th« territory adjoining the foreign concessions and hardly a day passes without dozens of suspected Kuomintung spies being executed. By day and night military patrols force their entry into Chinese homes, and drag suspects to the Military Court, and after a brief trial they are executed or released according to the ability of the prisoners to bribe the officials. The search of many houses revealed Kuomintung flags, pistols, bombs and Bolshevik literature, and this frequently caused the beheading of the occupants immediately without any trial. Their heads are stuck on telegraph posts.

The principal of Nanchang University, one of the leading colleges of China, was executed yesterday owing to his supposed encouragement of recruits for the military academy of Canton.

HAND OF MOSCOW. CONSPIRACY AGAINST CHANG. "RED" RULE AIMED AT. LONDON, October 22. The diplomatic correspondent of the "Daily Telegraph" reports that the hand of Moscow is behind the, present developments at Canton and ■on the Yangtse. When Marshal Feng was recently in the Soviet capital negotiations took .place between him, MM. Stalin and Tchitcherin, and agents of the "Red" Cantonese Government, the effect of these negotiations being to ensure the predominance of "Red" rule throughout China. Feng's Cantonese allies were to extend their autonomous Government northwards to the Yangtse, while Feng was to add Peking and some of the Central and North-Eastern provinces to his Mongolian dominions. The final move would consist in the eviction of Marshal Chang TSo-lin from Manchuria, and a corresponding decrease in Japanese influence there.

Feng and Moscow arc said to have been encouraged in their plans against Chang by reports that • the latter is "smoking himself to death" with opium. This, they consider, is the main reason for the recent decline in his powers both as a statesman and a strategist.

The Japanese general staff entertains no illusions about Chang Tso-lin's capacity as an army leader, any more than it does about Wu Pei-fu's or Feng's. Indeed, Japan's refusal, which events have fully vindicated, to repose confidence in Wii's general-hip, had wrongly earned for, the Japanese the mistrust and reproaches of VVu's American and European friends. The question is whether Feng and the Cantonese have failed to penetrate Moscow's motives in seeking to maintain the present division of China into three or four separate (Red) "Governments"— in order to control China's fate, thanks to this permanent disunion.

On the other hand Japanese realism does not view with much hope the idea, entertained by other Treaty Powers, that a solution of China's present troubles might be found in a round table conference of all the Chinese faction leaders, promoted by the diplomacy of the Powers. For the Chinese generals are little more than magnified bandit chiefs, and most of them do not know from one day to another what forces they control, or in whose cause they are actually fighting.

Except in Manchuria, there is no "Government" with any stability whatever. This being so, it is unlikely that Tokyo would countenance the early abrogation of extra-territorial rights, which is reported to be the aim of the American Delegation on the Commission now sitting at Peking.

There can no longer be any question of such a surrender on Great Britain's part. It is conceivable that the ExtraTerritorial Commission will feel constrained to issue majority arid minority reports.

The Chinese hankering after the abrogation of extra-territorial rights is, of course, no post-war novelty. A few Years before the Great War a Chinese delegation proceeded to Tokyo to seek Japanese support for this policy. At the Tokyo Foreisn Office it chanced t9 meet the then British adviser to that Ministry, Mr. Dennison, who remarked pointedly that in Japan's case the abrogation of extra-territorial rights had necessitated negotiations exterjdinover nearly fifteen years. In China's case, he intimated that the pourparlers to a similar effect micht la=t fifty years.