PRESENT CONDITION OF CHINA. [From the Observer, Dec. 21.]

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VI, Issue 522, 3 August 1850, Page 4

PRESENT CONDITION OF CHINA. [From the Observer, Dec. 21.]

A meeting of the Statistical Society was held on Monday, at which wss present Dr. Gutzlaff, the Chinese traveller, and now the chief interpreter attached to the British establishments in China. A memoir, drawn up by the learned gentleman, was read. The effect was the removal of nearly all apparent ground for the incredulity with which the accounts hitherto given of the population of China have been commonly received in Europe. The area of China Proper is, it seems, about 1,298,000 square miles, about threefifths of the extent of the Russian Empire, or two-fifths of the size of Australia. The population is said, at present, to amount to 367,000,000 ; and this it is that seem incredible to an European understanding. But, compared with the space which is occupied, it is not so excessive as, at first sight, it appears. It leaves room for about two and one-third j

acres of space to each living person ; and ii England and Wales the average is rather lesi — about two acres per head. It is true tba in some provinces of the empire the population returns give an average of more thai 700 persons to the square mile ; but by the last census, our own county of Lancaster had about 800 per square mile — not to speak oi Middlesex, which has an average of 5,000, or of Surrey, which has about 700 per square mile. It is also to be observed that these densely peopled parts of China are on the sea coast, have been penetrated by Europeans, and are well fitted to afford a large amount oi subsistence to their inhabitants. The Chinese returns of the land subject to tax as used in rice cultivation give nearly half an acre oi such land to each living person ; and we are assured that in the southern and well-watered provinces it is anything but uncommon to take two crops of rice, one of wheat, and one oi pulse, from the same land in a single season. Now, the whole arable surface of England and Wales is said not to exceed 10,500,000 acres, which gives little more than half an acre per head ; and we have also to provide for about 1,800,000 horses and cattle, and 8,000,000 of sheep and swine. In China they keep few horses, the rude labour being performed chiefly by men ; they have few cattle of any description ; even their dogs they make serviceable as food, and their swine are fed only on such garbage as even they cannot convert to human sustenance in any more direct manner. Dr. Gutzlaff's description of the financial affairs of the empire leads to the conclusion that China is approaching a crisis very similar to that which has again and again heralded the political revolutions of European states. It seems that the revenue is raised almost entirely by two taxes — those upon rice grounds and salt ; and that during the last six or seven years the produce of these taxes has fallen off to the extent of nearly one-third of its previous amount. Dr. Gutzlaff attributes this to the discontent of the people, a feeling which has existed to some extent, and has of late years been stimulated by the manifest inability of the government to protect its subjects from plunder, either by bands of robbers in the interior or by pirates on the coasts — but which was never openly and thus forcibly expressed in a refusal to pay the taxes wherever an overwhelming force was not at hand to compel payment, until after the issue of the war with England gave the people to understand that the Emperor was uot invincible. The deficit on the last budget was some £15,000,000 sterling; and as the government has no credit, having at various times illustrated the value of its paper promises to pay by answering " bearer on demand" with the paternal bamboo, the resources commonly resorted to in such cases in the western world are not available. Accordingly after making many efforts to get in the arrears of unpaid taxes, the Emperor has ordered the re-opening of mines of gold, silver, and copper worked some centuries ago by his predecessors, in the hope that he may thus make good the deficiency ; a hope apparently not very strongly founded. The most remarkable result of these financial difficulties and the consequent embarrassment of the government is the appearance of something very like a demociatic move- ' ment among the people. The municipal institutions of the country, resting upon groups of ten families, again grouped in hundreds, and in thousands, much resemble, in form, those common in this country a thousand years ago ; and it appears from Dr. Gutzlaff's statement that these have already been made the means of organising a systematic , local resistance to the decrees of the Emi peror, the " elders and gentry" of each district meeting in council, and acting in concert with like assemblages elsewhere, with a view to setting aside whatever imperial regulations they especially dislike. With this movement others, we are told, are also apparent, of a less regular and more dangerous character — communism being preached from the text so much affected by anarchists nearer home, that " the poor are getting poorer and the rich richer every day," and that all social ills are to be cured by the redistribution of the wealth of the community. In short, the politics of the Celestial Empire were described as now bearing a very close resemblance to those of other countries in which a central despotism has, under our own eyes, fallen into irretrievable ruin before a financial deficit.