Many Shall Come from the East

Extract

Our newspapers, which usually offer such scanty information about China, have lately been giving us intelligence of a civil war which has just broken out to add to the sorrows of that much-tried country. We read that the pro-Japanese, Chang-Tso-Lin, has moved south from Manchuria with his well-equipped troops, while the Nationalist, Wu-Pei-Fu, has gone north from the central provinces of Hupeh and Hunan, and that the rival armies have met and are fighting in the neighbourhood of Peking. Also we are told that the professional agitator and arch-plotter, Sun-Yat-Sen, has thrown in his lot with Chang-Tso-Lin, and is preparing to set his Cantonese army against the forces of Wu-Pei-Fu.

It is all very distressing, and not very intelligible to the uninitiated. A few years ago, Sun-Yat-Sen (then in Japan) issued a public letter advising his countrymen to put themselves under the protection of Japan. More recently he has been with his confederates in the south, professing to head a republic of his own, opposed to the Japanese influences dominant in the north. Yet now he returns to his former friends, and is ready to support Chang-Tso-Lin, supposed to be the tool of Dai Nippon. Why? We are not told, and the man in the street may justly be excused for his lack of interest in a country where the political moves are so confusing and so difficult to understand. For the voice of that great nation hardly reaches the West.