Turmoil in China.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18399, 4 June 1925, Page 8

Turmoil in China.

It is not in itself alarming that a few hundred student 3 in Shanghai have been distributing anti-foreign literature, inarching in solemn procession, and struggling hard to be real revolutionaries. The students of Shanghai are to the Chinese people as the Avon is to the Pacific, and there are in any. ease not many iu history of student-begun revolutions. There is, however, a possibility that what a few.

hundreds arc saying a few millions are thinking, and it is just as weli to ask •what the prospects of a bigger rising may bo now that Peking is in daily contact with .Moscow. There is no doubt at all that the Soviet agents in China have been successful in creating unrest, but it is almost equally certain that they h'avo made few Communists. Even Sun Yat-sen, though ho was called, and in a vague way called himself, a Bolshevik, was as far removed from the true Bolshevik faith as an English rationalist is from Christianity. And Sun Yat-sen had European culture, while the students of Shanghai are still Chinese in mind and heart, and incapable of absorbing ideas with which the race has never before been in contact. The nearest approach the Chinese have yet made to Bolshevism is their acceptance of a Soviet Ambassador, and their encouragement of propaganda against non-Eussian, and to a less extent non-German foreigners. In other words, Eussia and Germany are less unpopular than Britain, France, and America—Japan is in a class by herself—because the'y are understood vaguely to be enemies of those other threo Powers. What concerns the average Chinese is the presence and privileges of foreigners of all races, and what seems to be the progress of Bolshevism is merely the enthusiasm with which the more articulate classes have welcomed the drive against those foreigners who would obviously be the most difficult to push out. It is perhaps the general belief in New Zealand that the Boxer rising was the last of the possiblo attempts of the Chinese to throw off the yoke of foreigners 1 ' vi "et armis," but the opinion of observers on the spot is not quite so sanguine. No one has announced that a second rising is actually being prepared for, or even that it is regarded as inevitable sooner or later: though there is no doubt about tho aiiti-foreign sentiment, an anti-foreign movement on a threatening scale is rather outside the range of daily thought. But no one suggests now that tho memories of the Boxer rising are still painful enough to put a second rising out of the question if there were a sufficiently well organised agitation along national lines. After all, the Boxer outbreak took place a quarter of a century ago—before Shanghai's fifteen hundred students were bom.