REFORMS IN CHINA.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 899, 19 August 1910, Page 5

REFORMS IN CHINA.

MANY SWEEPING CHANGES. PRINCE CHING VIGOROUS. Uy Telegro.plj-PreES Association-CnpyrigM. Peking, August 17. Router's correspondent at Peking states that sweeping changes in the methods of tho Chinese Government have been and are being made. He adds that these changes indicate that Prince Ching, father of the little Emperor,- and Regent of tho Chinese Empire, realises tho failure of the last eighteen months' policy. ■ Both foreigners and Chinese' are favourably impressed by the changes.

STILL IN THE OLD HUTS. Writing of tho situation in China, "The Times" said recently :—"The clamour of the younger generation for wholesale reforms at homo and for the enforcement of China's sovereign rights against the foreigner seems so far merely to have paralysed the machinery of government, without stimulating the older generation, which still controls the bureaucracy, to any practical elfort. Reform is, indeed, on everyone's lips, but, in spite of Imperial ' edicts and the labours, of official commissions, the whole system of internal administration is still sunk, in the old ruts of incompetency and corruption. The increasing pressuio of financial burdens has placed a new strain upon the relations • between the Central and the Provincial Governments, for which relief is vainly sought in expedients as ruinous as they aro ephemeral, whilst the situation has been complicated by the growtu of a whole network of foreign interests, in the shape of foreign loans and foreign railway and mining enterprises. "The Prince Regent is still an unknown quantity. He is credited with great personal integrity and patriotic intentions. According to some, he is, however, more impulsive than resolute. His dismissal of Yuan Shih-kai was undeniably an act of vigour, but it has remained, so far as internal policy is concerned, an isolated manifestation of that quality, and a manifestation of doubtful wisdom. Happily, in the domain of foreign affairs,his influence can be traced with far inoro satisfactory effect. "It is something that the Chinese should be at last aroused from their secular lethargy, and that there should be manifold indications of new patriotic aspirations, and even some isolated sigus of progress, which are not without promise for the future. But as a Stale, tho Chinese Empire' to-day is as helpless and as impotent as. it was ten years ago. Its administration is as corrupt and incompetent, its judicial system as barbarous, its . finances even more chaotic. It has no navy, and its land forces, though they include the nucleus of a fairly equipped'and disciplined army, aro still quite unequal to the demands of modern warfare. It has opened the door to Western education, but education can only bear.fruit in the fulness of time, and the fruit will probably not reach maturity until the present generation of rulers has passed away. Who can tell eveu whether the fruit will be good or evil ?";.