THE New Zealand herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, JANUARY 27, 1902.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 11873, 27 January 1902, Page 4

THE New Zealand herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, JANUARY 27, 1902.

Direct diplomatic relations between the European Ambassadors and the Chinese Court have at last been resumed. Superficially, conditions have been altogether reversed since the middle of 1900, when the foreign Ministers generally refused to leave the shelter of the Legations to meet the rulers of China at the famous palace and when Baron Von Ketteler ( paid with his life for his exceptional trust in Chinese honour. Since that momentous day, the Legations have withstood an attack unprecedented in the recorded history of the human race, have been relieved by a force representing all civilisation and have witnessed the flight of the Chinese Court and the occupation of Pekin by the allied army. Last week the foreign Ministers again met face to face the puppet who occupies the throne of the Celestial Kingdom and were themselves seen by the masterful woman who governs from behind a screen of political formalities. The Court is again in possession of its palaces, but the Legations are now an armed camp in the centre of the Imperial City. Under the name of Legation-guards a European army occupies a strategic position which commands Pekin. The fate of Von Ketteler is not ; likely to fall again upon a European envoy. But when we have said this > we have probably exhausted the tale of European victory. Only superficially are positions reversed. The Dowager-Empress has returned not only to her palaces but to her power. The European knife has gone into the Chinese cheese and has been withdrawn. Saving for the Legation-guards things are much as .they were before the Boxer atrocities filled civilisation with anger and horror. • This Chinese Catharine, gazing from behind her screen at the hated representatives of the hated for- - eigners, listening to their friendly I speeches and to their expressed [ hopes for better governance, doubtless laughed in her sleeve at the scene. She has seen the finish of the first test match between East and West, and although the West' is officially declared the victor the East has no reason to shrink from a second struggle. A few thousand coolies slain, a few prominent heads possibly the supposed ones , heaped in a charger, a few shekels looted, a few promissory notes signed, this is the utmost "penalty which the Allies have been able to inflict upon a Court which holds life as so much dust and promises as so many bubbles. With this petty loss and with the added prestige that the cosmopolitan army which fought its way into Pekin did not stay there — did not dare to stay there, the . Chinese will certainly say— Dowi ager-Empress has made a great and most successful recognisance-in-force. Doubtless, she hoped and expected to annihilate the foreigner and to free herself from foreign influence ; and in this she failed. But in failing she practically lost nothing and actually gained much. She is as strong to-day as she ever was and very much better informed as to the forces combined against her and as to the mutual animosities which they bear each other. It is humiliating to civilisation, if we face it fairly, i that this Boxer-queen should still sit in authority and should make mock of our councils as one who sees them brought to nought. It' is a danger to future peace that this woman, leader of a bitter and vindictive faction, should be in a position to weed out all lukewarm supporters or antagonists and to wreak her vengeance on all who questioned her : rule. We shall watch with anxious • interest the course of those Yang-tse-Kiang Viceroys who held their provinces in leash during the Boxer fury and of those liberal Chinese statesmen who have been so useful in smoothing all present difficulties. For we may take it for granted that the Dowager Empress is as unchanged as she is unpunished and that the fierce national feeling which she leads and uses is even more uncompromising than it was before we gave the sweetness and light of a civilised raid to the population of Chi-li. The lloman Catholic missionaries are generally well informed ' and their warning of coming disturb- , ance trips on the heels of the news of this Imperial audience to the foreign envoys. For the Legations we need hardly fear—thanks to the strong arms that ward them !—but we may expect to see the entire back-country gradually made impossible to the foreigner and the: convert and we are sure to see Chinese diplomacy continue the disruption of our-alliance and produce such a re-

arrangement of parties as will encourage the Chinese Court to again throw off the mask. As must have become apparent to every news-reader during the past two years, Chinese diplomacy has a tortuousness and subtlety beside which that of Russia is mere bluster and that of Machiavelli the wheedling of a child. We are therefore compelled always to judge Chinese policy not by what its statesmen say, nor even by what they do, but by wholly inductive methods, dismissing nothing as too extravagant or bizarre, an explanation which includes all the visible factors. If we do this, it looks very much as though China were working steadily and persistently to force Japan to combine with her in an offensive and defensive alliance, were bribing the Russian' with Manchuria and drawing Japan to her side through the Mikado's fears of Russian ascendency. Certainly the most marked and visible change which has taken place in the Far Eastern situation during the past two years is the growing understanding between China and Japan. The extent of this is shown by the knowledge that nobody would be surprised to read to-morrow that China and Japan had presented a joint note to Russia regarding Manchuria, or a joint protest to Washington and . London against American and Australasian exclusiveness. And while this new Turanian combination is being formed the Muscovite, as well as the Jap, has been divorced from the European Alliance. And the European Alliance has gone to pieces of its own weight, Anglo-Sa'xondom having little or no cohesion with the Continental nations. .Whatever else may befall, whichever nation may hereafter undertake the duty of enforcing a recognition of civilisation upon reluctant and rebellious China, it is safe to prophesy that the Alliance of 1900 will never repeat itself. Yet often cunning defeats itself and the crafty Dowager-Empress might fare worse at the hands of an -American army, whose members had no distrust of each other, than she has done at the hands of the forces of the Alliance wherein nearly every contingent was against its neighbour.