The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 1929. THE FATE OF CHINA.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 83, 9 April 1929, Page 6

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 1929. THE FATE OF CHINA.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that toe oan do.

It is reported from Tokyo that the Nationalist Government of China, having no confidence in its ability to maintain order at Tsinan, lias suggested to the Japanese that it is advisable for them to withdraw all thencivilians irom the town within three months. It should be remembered that Tsinan is a town in Shantung, tho province from which the Japanese expelled the German forces during the Great War. When peace came the Japanese refused to retire from Shantung, and it was at Tsinan that they came into violent collision with the Nationalist troops last year. Since then Japan, induced in part by a trade boycott,, has removed her troops from Shantung. It is therefore a grave humiliation for the Nationalists to be compelled *<> notify Japan that they cannot protect foreigners in that province or enforce law and order among their own subjects. This interesting development may serve to throw a little light upon the true state of China. After the great and unexpected triumph of the South over the North last year, the Nationalist leaders declared that they controlled the whole vast country and that "China is unified for the first time since the Manchu fell." But the subsequent course of events has shown clearly that this loudly-advertised unification is after all superficial and incomplete. "On a short fringe of the coast and in the Treaty Ports a group of enthusiasts, some sincere, some very much the reverse, proclaim that they are the Government of China and that the millennium has descended. But a few miles out of range of their loud-speakers they have scarcely the power to remove a single soldier or tax-farmer." Over much of the greater part of a country as large as Europe "every vestige of systematic government has been shattered by the years of civil war and the greed of countless despoilers." The authority from whom we have quoted is the editor of the "North China Daily News," and he must be accepted as a competent and well-informed witness. In his opinion, China is bankrupt not so much in the financial sense as in regard to administrative capacity. The Nationalist Government is lavish with proclamations, including the most elaborate instructions for the moral and social "uplift" of the people; but it seems unable to effect anything practical. "Armies are disbanded, bandits are suppressed, hillsides afforested, tax bureaux abolished, opium smoking extinguished —all, alas! on paper." Brigands swarm throughout the land, looting and slaying, and the Government, unable to pay its own soldiers, cannot put them down. T!i£ misery of the people has been intensified over large areas by famine; and the condition of the whole country seems to be deplorable in the extreme. In the background an inscrutablo figure, Feng Yu-hsiang, the "Christian, 1 General, is watching the course of events and waiting his opportunity. But the real difficulty with the Chinese is that they have not yet learned to govern themselves, and until China evolves some political system "native to herself and responsive to her own instincts" she may wait in vain for unity, security and peace.