CONDITIONS IN CHINA

Evening Star, Issue 19019, 14 August 1925, Page 12

CONDITIONS IN CHINA

h CONSUL'S DISCLOSURES 'A vivid pen-picture of conditions today in China is contained in a report by the British Consul at Foochow (Mr W. J. denned) forwarded to the foreign Office. The report is in response to the Ministry of Labor’s request to the Foreign Office to know whether any steps had been taken in China to give effect to the draft conventions and recommendations of the International Labor ConforoQCOi , Mr Clennell says the preparation of the report for his district has “ led him over rather a wide field.” This is true. But he wields a graphic pen and discloses to Western imagination an araazing vision of existence in the twentieth century under conditions comparable with the worst that Europe knew in the Middle Ages. Take hia description of the lot of the average Chinese worker: — Anything he may have to _ put up with from a harsh or exacting employer or from the grinding toilsomeness of poorly-paid labor is a trifle beside the fact that he may any day be seized and dragged off by robbers to a lair in the hills, and shot or tortured by them if he does not work for them as a slave or produce for them a ransom from relatives whose homes these same robbers have very probably looted and outraged. If he escapes this fate it may only be to find himself pounced upon by a military press gang . . . and lucky if ho should be among the 50 per cent, or so of such pressed men that ever live to see their homes again. “ In large parts of Fukien,” says Mr Clennell, “ the most flourishing, or at any rate the most tempting, form of ‘industry ’ is to join the very remunerative trade of brigandage.” One of Fukien’s problems is a population that has outgrown the productive resources of the province. On this point the Consul saysi A recent Governor, General Li Houehi, told mo that Foochow is too crowded to provide a sufficiency for all. But he explained this by saying that, unlike most parts of China, there had been no massacre of the people here for over 1,000 years. I would not like to say that General Li implied that such massacre was now desirable, but I think he did look upon occasional weeding-out by massacre as the normal check imposed by Nature on over-population. Mr Clennell mentions portions of the province where whole villages live under one roof, in a sort of circular fort, with only a single door on the outside, and ** no other openings except such as are needed for firing at unwelcome visitors.” " There are at this moment,” he says, “ several extensive regions, of the size of English counties or larger, where the only effective authority is that of self-appointed bandit or 1 independent ’ chiefs, who levy contributions at will on the inhabitants and all traders.” Mr Clennell compares China’s state to-day with that of England in the reign of Stephen, with violence, lawlessness, and misery rampant. It was only last January, he says, that, certain villagers having ambushed a company of soldiers engaged in enforcing the payment of illegal opium tax, the local commander in Hui-an Hsien, ninety miles from Foochow, took his revenge by burning about 2,000 people, mostly women and children, to death In their cottages and in driving the people of about eighty villages out of house and home.

But, despite this welter of lawlessness, Mr Clennell sees hope for China, and mentions changes taking place thai, ♦‘hear a general likeness to those which transformed medieval into modern Europe.” He is not, however, “sanguine enough to anticipate that, anyone now living will see the economic condition of China very greatly altered.

“If this generation can raise the average level of China to the English average of 1450 or 1500 it will not have done badly,” is his comment.

The great hope of improvement lies in the spread of education, and ho notes a brisk demand for modern knowledge. Still, even in the towns a large majority of the people are wholly iuiterate, and the ‘‘student” movement Is “ marked by too much froth.” On the industrial side “mining might become important if intelligence and foreign capital could bo applied to it.”

The political revolution in the country is described as part of a more gradual. more profound revolution, which is " daily releasing forces of quite incalculable potency. *