Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING GISBORNE, TUESDAY, OCT. 27, 1931. THE FOREIGN SETTLEMENTS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17609, 27 October 1931, Page 6

Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING GISBORNE, TUESDAY, OCT. 27, 1931. THE FOREIGN SETTLEMENTS

While Japan has her own private dispute with China over Manchuria, there is an outstanding issue of much greater importance in which all the Powers arc concerned. This is the matter of the security and good government of the (Settlements, the live centres in which British and other foreigners have under treaty been allowed to live and trade, not. subject to Chinese law but only to their own as administered by their consuls and municipal councils, and there they thus acquired what are known as extra-territorial lights. Shanghai, principal of these, is one of the great trading ports of the East. For .1000 miles up the Yangt.se from Shanghai steamships collect the merchandise of one half of China proper and bring it. to the port. The foreign powers under the concessions granted them have vastly improved the port and built up a huge well-ordered city in which there is an overwhelming preponderance of Chinese residents, many of whom have come to seek peaceful existence free from the internecine strife common to the Chinese districts. Greater Shanghai covers .‘l2O square miles surrounding the port and has a population of over 3,000,000, parcelled out between three authorities, two European and one Chinese. Apart from the yield of their normal trade, wealth from all over China seeks the security of the Settlements, and where riches collect criminals also gather, giving baffling problems for the maintenance of order, Shanghai has been happy in the personal .integrity of its councillors and the enforcement of law has been well maintained both by the municipal police and by a citizen army in which foreigners of military age arc expected to serve, equipped with modern artillery, machine guns and armored cars, whilst warships of foreign nations lie moored in the river opposite the principal banks. Whenever serious danger has threatened Great Britain has sent forces strong enough to protect the Settlement, and others have followed her example. The Treaty Powers have thus shown their readiness to prevent the Settlements becoming the battleground of forces contending for the mastery of China. The rule of Jaw in these Settlements, we gather from a review of the Feethain report published in the Wound Table, is in fact the axis upon which the relations of China with the other three-quarters of humanity turn. Its removal would work serious injury to foreign trade, but to China itself ruin. Though the Chinese have now been admitted to a shave in the government of the Settlement they can never forget that the system was” forced upon China, and with the growth of a national spirit there is an insistent demand to get rid oi foreign authority. The one factor that unites the whole of China, North and South, is resentment against the “unequal treaties. ” It was this that started the Taiping rebellion, led to the Boxer rising in 1!)00, and in .1911 dethroned the Mauchu dynasty. It has enabled malevolent Russians to present to Chinese minds England as the arch-oppressor of weaker nations. The catastrophe came on May 30, 1925, when the police of the International Settlement opened lire on a mob of riotous students. The immediate result was a wave of resentment throughout China and n boycott which dealt a staggering blow to British trade. Through the good offices of the Institute of Pacific Relations conciliatory measures were initiated and as the result of the 1929 conference at Kyoto, the Municipal Council arranged through General Hortzog, of South Africa, to lend the services of Mr. Justice Fectham, who after 18 months of laborious investigation presented his report. He advises that the foreign 'Powers should at the outset recognise the goal to be aimed at in the rendition of the Settlement to the Chinese, “followed by a grant by the Chinese Government of a charter conferring rights of self-government-in the inhabitants, foreign and Chinese.” ,As steps to this ultimate goal he suggests various practical reforms, giving the Chinese greater representation, but adds mi impressive warning against, any attempt to lix in advance the period within which the goal of rendition can bo reached, pointing out that the Chinese courts are not yet in a position to maintain order and until lho rule of law lias been established in China in such a way as to safeguard effectively the ordinary citizen abolition of extraterritoriality would destroy the vitality of the present municipal institiP lions and be fraught with great danger to China as a whole. Britain in May last intimated its readiness to agree to the appointni'ent of a commission which would study this problem, but the Nanking Government, broke off negotiations and issued a mandate promulgating regulations under which it proposed next, year to assume jurisdiction over all foreigners. No one who has read the Fectham report can doubt that to abolish tho security against arbitrary misrule now provided by the Consular courts would ” undermine tho foundations of tho

system , under which Shanghai 'has been transformed from a mudflat into one of the great cities of China, the centre of Chinese trade, industry, and finauec, a great source of revenue for tho Chinese Government, and an island of safety in the chaos of contending factions. Its progress has been based on personal freedom and the rule of the law. The recent Thorbum case and other notorious cases have shown that there is not at present. a Government in China able to prevent or punish the most flagrant violations of law on the part of its own military authorities and the local party political associations. Nor is there any reason to expect that within the next few years there will be any Government to whom it would be safe to hand over the protection of those interests, moral as well as material, Chinese as well as foreign, for which in Shanghai tho Treaty Powers are at present the trustees. The tangle can only be unravelled by conference and it is in such conferences that foreign statesmen can best find how really to help the sorelystricken people of China to emerge from chaos and to achieve order by learning how to govern themselves.”