THE CRISIS IN CHINA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 11520, 3 November 1900, Page 5

THE CRISIS IN CHINA.

LOOTING AT PAOTINGFU. CONDUCT OF THE FOREIGN TROOPS. COMPLAINTS OF GERMAN SEVERITY. : By Telegraph.—Press Astociation.—Copyright. Hongkong, November 1. The French, German, and! Italian troops packed with loot the respective quarters they occupied at Paotingfu. The looting of the British quarter was forbidden. Complaints are made of the severity of the Germans at Pekin. By mistake they dragged Wang, President of the Treasury, through the streets, flogged him with a rope, and broke his nose before their error was discovered. Frequent disturbance} have occurred in the city owing to similar brutalities. THE RUSSIAN ATROCITIES IN MANCHURIA. Partial confirmation of the brief account given by the Moscow correspondent of the London Standard of the massacre of 5000 Chinese inhabitants of Blagovestchensk by Russians, as published in the Herald on Saturday, is contained in a more detailed recital of the event in a letter written to the Evening Post by Professor G. Frederick Wright, of Oberlin Theological Seminary, Ohio. Under date of Stretensk, Siberia, August 6, 1900, Mr. Wright describes the friendly relations existing between the Russians and Chinese along the railway line prior to the outbreak of anti-foreign disturbances, and continues: —

" But in the twinkling of an eye all this was changed. As soon as the Russian troops went down the river on transports (July 14), the fort at Aygun began, without warning, to fire upon passing steamboats, and on the 15th fire was opened upon Blagovestchensk, and some Russian, villages were burned opposite the fort. " The actual injury inflicted by the Chinese was slight; but the terror caused by it was indescribable, and it drove the Cossacks into a frenzy of rage. " The peaceable Chinese, to the number of three or four thousand in the city were expelled in great haste, and, being forced upon rafts entirely inadequate, were most of them drowned in attempting to cross the river. The stream was fairly black with their bodies. Three days after we counted hundreds of them in the water. " In our ride through the country to reach the city on Thursday, the 19th, we saw as. many as 30 villages and hamlets of the Chinese in flames. One of them was a city of eight or ten thousand inhabitants. We estimated that we saw the dwellings of twenty thousand peaceable Chinese in flames that awful day, while parties of Cossacks were scouring the fields to find Chinese and shooting them down at sight. What became of the women and children lib one knew, but there was apparently no way for them to escape to a place of safety. " On our way up the river for five hundred miles above the city every Chinese hamlet was a charred mass of ruins. The large village of Motcha was still smoking and we wire told that four thousand Chinese had been killed. " We do not mention these facts to excite prejudice against the Russian authorities or against the Cossacks. This work of devastation has not b.:en ordered by those high in authority. It is rather the result of mob violence such as instigated the promoters of lynch law in the Southern States, or, more •nearly, such as has from- time immemorial animated the pioneers in America against the Indians. The wholesale destruction of property and of life was thought to' be a military necessity." .