TIRED OF WAR LORDS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18500, 12 September 1934, Page 13

TIRED OF WAR LORDS

OPPOSITION IN CHINA

HOPE FOR UNITY

SHANGHAI, Aug. 2

There is a gradual awakening in the circles of Chinese warlords and politicians to the fact that China cannot be made over, by edicts, nor by the domination of this or that clique or faction, and this realisation is slowly working for an approach to unity. This does not mean that the era of civil wars is at an end, but it does mean a slow growth of opposition to “ warlordism,” and this will result not only in a lack of support for fighting factions, but actual opposition, covert and open, from bankers, merchants and intellectuals. INTELLECTUAL MTNOBITY

The treaty ports are filled with thousands of returned students, masters of many foreign languages, and past-masters of modern theories of government and public administration. But these people are a trifling minority of the population, as are the 4,000,000 or 5,000,000; soldiers and armed bandits who live off the rest of the 450,000,000. The real China continues to be the tens of millions of industrious peasants, untouched by foreign influences, who work with primitive tools for inadequate returns, and bear intolerable burdens with amazing patience. Foreigners who “denounce Chinn” do not denounce these millions of toilers, rather the handful who exploit them. The economic standards ol China’s peasants and workers are those of the Middle Ages of Europe.