THE FIRST ASIATIC REPUBLIC

Greymouth Evening Star, 1 July 1912, Page 7

THE FIRST ASIATIC REPUBLIC

THE STRANGE STORY OF ZHELTUGA.

The world is staring with astonished eyes at the strange, vast shape of the republic which has arisen, phantom-like, in China —the first republic*; all the papers are saying, on which Asiatic skies have yet looked down. But China is not the first of Asiatic, republics. The first republic in the Far East qf which there is any record was established in northern Manchuria more than a quarter’of'-anicen-tury ago by Russian immigrants from Siberia, and the strange,story of its brief life and undeserved death is being told in the American papers. The Outlook gives a very interesting summary of the tale. In the year 1884 a wandering hunter, or fur trapper, accidentally discovered, on the Zheltnga, one of the Manehiiriavi tributaries of the Amur River, a gold placer of such extraordinary richness that it promised to rival even the famous Klondyke in Alaska. The news of the lucky find was not long in reaching Russian territory, and early the next spring there was a general rush of miners to this goldfield from, all parts of eastern Siberia. Before the end of the year the population of the Manchurian mining camp exceeded ten thousand, and comprised representatives of half a dozen different native tribes, and at least two distinct races. A majority of the goldseekers were Russian peasants, but in the heterogeneous minority- were Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, Buriats, and nearly four thousand runaway convicts from the Siberian penal settlcfents and mines. A PATCH OF. CHAOS.

As the Zheltnga place \.as sixty miles south of the Russian boundary, and was separated by hundreds of miles of impassable wilderness, from the nearest Chinese outpost, it was not subject to any law or any form of administrative control. Everyman fought for his own hand and the inviolability of his own claim, and for several months no organised attempt was made by the community to safeguard properly or life. At last robbery, claimjumping, murder, and crime of every sort became so prevalent that something had to be, done; and the non-criminal Russian peasants, who made up the larger and stronger part of the population, held a mass meeting for the purpose of considering and discussing a state of affairs that had become absolutely intolerable. 'i.bcjr finally decided to hold.an election, adopt a constitution, and organise a government which should be modelled after that of the United States, and should be known as the “Zheltnga Republic.” THE NEW REPUBLIC.

'i lie best educated man in thg Zheltnga camp, who has been graduated from a Russian high school, drew up the constitution and was chosen as the first President. and, with the aid of an elected council or cabinet, and an armed police force, he proceeded to reduce that population to order. The four thousand runaway convicts. who had always been accustomed io it despotism, and who were disposed to reggj'd an elected administration With contempt, paid little attention at first to a government whose officers were common peasants like themselves. But they soon discovered that peasants who were free to act as their judgment dictated, were not wt all like peasants cowed by bureaucratic authority and intimidated by the threat, of imprisonment or exile. The newly-elected President drew up a penal code and appointed « bench of judges. The code provided for only two forms of punishment—flogging and execution. The court, which was at the same time a court of first: instance and a supremo court, sat sixteen hours a day, and disposed every day of all the cases brought before it. If a man committed a crime, he had a trial within three hours, and, if found guilty,, went to the scaffold or the whipping post forthwith. There was no appeal, no recommendation to mercy-,-no commutation of sentence, no imprisonment, no delay.' Punishment followed crime with as ’much regularity and certainty us effect follows cause in the realm of natural lay. For a period of tiro weeks the officials of the Zheltugn Republic tried, flogged and banged day and night almost without intermission. At the end of that; time the mining camp was ns safe a residence as St. Petersburg, and in two weeks more it became as orderly as a well-managed Sunday school.

Merchants who visited it .declared that life and property were safer ip the Chinese Republic than in any city, town, or village in the whole Russian Empire- As soon as the population had been reduced to order, the President and his Cabinet organised ah internal revenue service, established a postal. ayatenre with a dally mail to and from the 'Siberian frontier, drew up a set.pf rules for sanitation, and erected a free. public, hpspffal. - Before the end of 18,8,6 the mining camp of the Zheltnga Republic was* probably the best governed place in Asia. (' WHY IT DIED. By that time, however) it was becoming an object-lesson te the. whole population of Asiatic Russia, and the Siberian peasants were, saying to one another: “See what we could.'do ,if we wore allowed to govern ourselves, without . interference, from St. Petersburg.” Finding .that the Zheltnga Republic was ' “exciting' the

minds” of the people in Siberia, the Russian Government determined to put an bud to its pernicious inbut-nce, ami a few months later the Governor-General oi Eastern Siberia established a military cordon along the whole Manchurian frontier north of the camp, for the purpose of cutting off its food supplies. The * Republic, of course, had' no agricultural lands: it could get nothing eatable from China, on account of the impassable wilderness that lay south of it ; and when it was deprived of access to the Siberian markets it quickly went to pieces. Most of the miners returned to Asiatic Russia, and when a Chinese military expedition, ■with the encouragement of the Russian -Government, came up the Amur River on the ice the following winter, to drive out invaders and take possession of the Tamp, it found only a few sick men in the hospital. The Chinese soldiers tied these men to trees, poured freezing water over them until they died, and then, in a tomepratnre far below zero, continued to your water on them until they were en cased in ice. Thus perished the last citizens of the first Chinese Republic.