The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1911. THE REVOLUTION IN CHINA.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 61, 26 October 1911, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1911. THE REVOLUTION IN CHINA.

Professor ,1. McMillan Brown contributes an interesting article to the Christchurch “Press” in which he deals at length with the outbreak in China. Ho expresses the view that the new feature of the movement is its deliberation and foresight, and goes on to say that China has moved by revolution and not by progress, and revolution starts in local or accidental rebellion, stimulated by famine or the misery arising from excess of official corruption. This rising was preceded by the usual famine that follows the failure of the annual rains in the rich plains of the east and north-east. But the singular thing is that it did not begin in the provinces that were famine-stricken to the ,north of the mouths of the Yangtse, but away in the mountains and rich plateaus and valleys of its upper course, in the province of Szu-chuan. What has occurred there it is difficult to say; for all our information has filtered through officialdom, and its natural habit, especially in China, is to conceal the' naked truth if unpleasant to it. The rising might bo due to the extension of the opium abolition crusade to a province that owes much of its prosperity to the growth of the poppy. But that could only have been the immediate occasion; for Szu-chuan is one of the few cattle-raising regions of China, and has many other sources of well-being. Like all the Yangtse provinces, it is crowded with population, having more than 400 to the .square mile. But its people have not the soft fibre that characterises, the farming communities of the great olains; they are hardly mountaineers, selected through thousands of years by a struggle with tiie forces of Nature; they have great independence of character and love of freedoom, and, thanks to their isolation from the rest of China by the Yangtse gorges, greatbodies of them, like the Lolos, remain subject to their own chiefs and free 'rom official interference. That the rising should have started amongst these hardy, prosperous, independent uountaineers, Professor Brown considers, reveals deliberate engineering, based mi full knowledge and keen foresight.