THE H.B. TRIBUNE FRIDAY, JANUARY 6, 1928 CHAOTIC CHINA

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVIII, Issue 21, 6 January 1928, Page 4

THE H.B. TRIBUNE FRIDAY, JANUARY 6, 1928 CHAOTIC CHINA

with regard to the Communist rising in Canton about the middle of last month and its suppression, we have been getting singularly little news of any moment from China for a long while flow. This’ may mean either that owing to winter conditions there have been no military movements worth recording, or that affairs have fallen into such an utterly chaotic condition that any news that might be sent would have no definite significance. Yesterday, however, we had a message which may perhaps be taken as the herald of renewed military activity of a more important and positive character. It told us that General Chiang Kaishek had left Shanghai for Nanking to take over command of the Nationalist forces and supervise military activities in the North with a view to cementing the disrupted ranks. This being the case, it may be worth while trying to get some sort of idea as to how things probably stand at present.

How little chance there is of our securing any really clear understanding of them may be gathered from the answer which, some six or seven weeks ago, the Brlfcah Foreign Secretary gave to a question on the subject in the House of Commons. He had at the outset to confess that “in the present chaotic state of affairs in China, and among the complicated intrigues that are apparently taking place between the leaders of the various factions, it is impossible to give a clear summary as to the situation.” In the course of giving such information as he could Sir Austen Chamberlain spoke of four Nationalist organisations—the Hankow Government, with which he had been negotiating, the Government that set itself up at Shanghai in September, the Nanking Government, which was making war on that at Hankow, and a new “independent” Government which was being organised, at Canton. Writing a fortnight Later, however, the Peking correspondent of the “Times” said that not only were there two Nationalist camps in the Shanghai-Nanking area, near the mouth of the Yangtse, but in the other Nationalist centres of Wuhan (Hankow), far up the river, and Canton, in the far south, the division was equally marked. There were thus at least six factions within the party, and, furthermore, within each faction there was but little unity. “The Nationalist movement,” he went on, “reached its climax with Chiang Kai-shek’s occupation of Shanghai ; It has collapsed, not because Nationalism in the true sense is dead, but because the movement initiated from Canton was based on false principles and impure motives. The whole of the modern development of China arises out of the foreign connexion, and to plan to destroy that connexion -and to dispossess the foreigner was as dishonest as it was economically unsound. To have pandered to Bolshevism for the means to prosecute the antiforeign campaign was both disastrous and foolish.”

However, at the time of his writing, at the end of November, this correspondent was able to speak of something in the shape of a conference as being in progress at Shanghai among Nationalist leaders assembled there, though there did not then seem any very hopeful prospect of their arriving at any agreement for co-operation. But from the message quoted above it would seem as if there had at least been some under standing reached between the Shanghai and Nanking factions, and that Chiang Kai-shek had assumed the leadership of both combined. Chiang will be remembered as the popular idol who, starting from Canton, carried Nationalist victories right up to the Yangtze and established a central Nationalist Government at Hankow, now more often spoken of as Wuhan. Then came his split with his colleague Mr. Eugene Chen, whose submission to Borodin's Bolshevist dictates he disapproved. Chiang then set up a Government of his own at Shanghai, but for reasons that have never been made very clear here, he seems to have abandoned the Nationalist cause for a while and went abroad. His return to Shanghai was announced some two months or so ago, and it would now appear that he has, to some extent at least, regained his former dominant position among the Nationalists. How far he will succeed in reuniting the whole of the Nationalist forces so as to make them effective against the Manchurian leader Chang Tsolin, who still manages to hold the reins pretty firmly in the region north of the Yangtze, remains to be seen. Possibly his first move will be against the rival Nationalist Government at Wuhan.