CHINA'S PATRIOTS

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 101, 26 October 1925, Page 3

CHINA'S PATRIOTS

CONTEST BETWEEN FENG AND CHANG

A BIG BID FOE POPULARITY.

The British population of the British Concession of Tientsin last month numbered 682, of whom 282 are men, states the Pekin correspondent of "The Times." The Chinese population in this same Concession number 33,000,0f whom 18,000, are men. Tientsin City has a Chinese population reputed to number a million, and there are villages all arouud the foreign Concessions numbering in same cases from 30,000 to 50,000 Chinese in each. The Chinese are as numerous here to-day in proportion to the foreigners as the Red Indians were to their "foreigners" in the early settlers' days. The Bed Indians were still fighting to exterminate the paleface till within the memory of living men. The same project is'ventilated in Chinese leaflets and pamphlets circulated here, but Feng Yu-hsiang takes the place of_ Sitting Bull, and he is out to win national support. He is making a great bid for popularity, which he has never yet enjoyed but will now attain if he keeps to his anti-foreign programme. There are others among the Chinese who prefer tho way of peace. Marshal Chang Tso-lin lias exercised a wonderfully steadying.influence at Tientsin. Had Feng Yu-hsiang been here, with his terrible temper, his Soviet affinities, and his homicidal patriotism, we could hardly have avoided slaughter in one direction or another. He is becoming the great hope of the new patriots, and tho new patriots are the rising hope of Feng Yu-hsiang. Though he owed much of his early Christian teaching to English and Canadian missionaries, he is bitterly anti-British, and bitterly anti-Japanese. It may be due to him as much as to the Shanghai riots that the present agitation is being made to assume ■ the form. of an anti-British and anti-Japanese movement. It cannot be long before the alliance between the now patriots and the Soviets, through the Christian general, stands revealed. Every one here feels that a further struggle is in store. When the cycle again comes round, it will still be going on. _ There will be no general rising against the foreigner, just now in this neighbourhood, so long as Marshal Chang is here, though there may be strikes, boycotts, and sporadic murders. The Pekin Government counts for nothing. The country has become accustomed to other rulers. The reign of the bandits was bad ; the struggles of the militarists were worse; but the reign of the new patriots backed by tho ' Soviets, with Feng Yu-hsiang at their head, will be worse than the other two together.