CHINESE NATIONALISM

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 100, 30 April 1927, Page 20

CHINESE NATIONALISM

PERSONALITIES AND AIMS.

The several points of view within tlie i Chinese Nationalist movement are ana- i lysed dispassionaaely by Mr. B. P. Johnston in the "Quarterly ■ Eoview" for January. The Chinese attempt to understand the "West has been limited to trading methods and mechanical inventions. Progress has been quickened by some measure of understanding of the spiritual foundations of Western culture. But China has also,lcarned that Europe is not, as the Boxer rebellion eausedher to think, a family of nations, but that one nation can 100 played off against the other. The two 'lessons together have broken down the fatalist feeling of submissiveness to the "West. With tho war came two great grievances China was persuaded by vague promises of relief from various disabilities to declare war on Germany. None of those promises were redeemed. Extra territorially /as not abandoned, nor wore Customs restrictions; and w the midst of hostilities Japan presented he.r twenty-one demands. The anniversary of that day is still kept as a day of national humiliation. The boycott was • : discovered and used against Japan. On 16th June, 1919, the Chinese National Federation of Students was founded, and a nationwide system of propaganda came into being. The May day . demonstrations in Pekin and. Shanghai of 1920 disclosed a tendency to sympathetic contact b;, students and Labour organisations with Soviet Eusaia. The Shanghai shooting occurred on 30th May, 1925 and a new chapter was opened. Mr! Johnston .does not discuss its merits but he thinks that the British made a mistake in treating Shanghai too much as a Crown colony. It would have been better to officer the Police Force with th nationals of somo small Power such as Denmark. The Kuomintang, the political party with, which the Nationalist movement has associated itself, says Mr. John-1 ston, contains a moderate section and an extreme section, and the extreme section includes—perhaps it may be said more truly to,have been absorbed by—the Communists. To support the northern militarists would be to play into the hands of the Communists,' he thinks, but to further sympathetically the legitimate- aims of the Nationalists is_ t j; help the moderates. Among the military .governors, he says, perhaps the ablest : and most patriotic representa-. tive of-the party,, which is strongly Nationalistic, and yet is suspicious of the Bussians and antagonistic to Bolshevism, is Marshal Sun Chuan-fang. Sun's peculiar difficulty, according to Mr. Johnston, is that ho has even less sympathy with tho northern militarists than with the Kuomintang, and has tried unsuccessfully to come to an agreement with the southern general, Chiang Kai-shek, on the basis of the exclusion of the Communists. The northern leaders are hated by all China owing to the indiscipline of their armies. Wu Pei-fu, thinks Mr. Johnston, is sincere and conscientious, but politically, incapable. Sun himself seems to be .enlightened. Mr. Johnston quotes a speech: "When I. pass through, tho Foreign Settlement I always feel .a keen sense of humiliation, not because wo have lost our rights, but bocauso tho International Settlement*- in tho, hands of foreigners, is so superior to our Chinatown. For us to demand the restoration of tho foreign settlement would bo of; little.',avail. What wo must do is to improve our administration until it compares favourably with •the foreigners'," Bolshevik intrigue is rife in China, says Mr. Johnston. It is unscrupulous, and it is definitely anti-British. Nevertheless, it is not true to say that the Nationalist movement is Bolshevik.in origin, and tho oft-re-peated assertion that the.Chinese would never have thought' of demanding revision of the "unequal treaties" if Eussian agents had not put the idea into their heads is demonstrably false.