THE SITUATION IN CHINA.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIIC, Issue 14221, 10 June 1910, Page 2

THE SITUATION IN CHINA.

Disquieting news comes from China. There is no alarmist folly, remarked a London paper recently, "in saying that wo stand now at the opening of a period to which there is no visible end. A\ e need not concern ourselves with the nightmare of "the yellow peril": that is an affair of a still distant future. What threatens at this hour is a. revival, in unexampled fury, and in unexampled organisation and "strength, of purpose, of the anti-foreign crusading which has always been liable to break out in China, and of which the Boxer rising was the worst instance in recent years. The dream that a reawakened, reformed, and Europeanised China is going to be anything but fiercely and intolerantly national must go the way of the earlier dream that China was going to be "broken up" among the Western Powers. What was begun by the shock of her defeat at the hands of the despised Chinese was completed by the bitter humiliation of the Russo-Japanese war, when "both combatants violated the territory of Cliina as a matter of course, conducted the whole of their awful struggle in Manchuria, and fought one of the chief battles of the war over the sacred tombs of the Manehu Emperors. China cannot now be cowed; she cannot even be impressed. She knows her strength at last, and tho determination to learn how to use it is irrevocably taken.- The anti-foreign movements is no longer in the hands of fanatics and of the Tgnorant. It is directed by the new generation of Chinese students; it is covertly encouraged by the authorities. To call it a fully-organised camnaign would doubtless be to over-estimate the progress of China toward her new ideals of discipline and public action. But the point is that it is quite organised enough, and that nothing can ston it There are 400,000,000 of Chinese. That is the fact which dominates the situation.