Feb. 27.
From tim. to time we have mentioned pro, -als which have originated—and have done little else—for the amelioration of housing conditions among our foreign residents. To-day it is worth while noting that constructive minds among the Chinese are pursuing like ideas, and the similarity and variations. between the schemes are of no still interest. In the first place the thoughts of both turn to suburbia, and are faced with the problem of transport, but then comes a marked difference in the conception of a suburb. Naturally the foreigners want to live where they can draw upon all the conveniences of the Settle-
Tu all probability similar longings have arisen in the Chinese mind, but questions of finance are against their gratification. The project which has been under Chinese consideration for some time is to select a village already in existence some short distance away from Settlement limits, develop it by the addition of many houses into a kind of villadom, and then connect up with Shanghai by light railway, running trains with a frequency which would not discredit some of our Home systems. The latter part of the idea clearly bears the impress of a foreign-educated mind.
At present, of course, half the workers in Shanghai do not live here. They may lodge, or otherwise exist in the place, but what they mean by home may be in a locality as remote as Ningpo. Girls who work in the Yangtszepoo mills make light of a trudge of five miles over country paths twice a day. Then there is the great band of week-enders. They come from villages lying, for instance, along one of the sea walls on the Pootung littoral, and rumour has it that the steam launches carry two thousand human beings every day between there and Shanghai. It is fairly safe to conclude that none of the poorer classes who can avoid it live in Shanghai proper. Rents and the higher prices of food tend effectually to scare them aw: But: the spartan self-discipline which enabled a man to live for weeks and months without the joys of home relaxes and the Chinese above the mere labouring class is straining at his bonds. As finances do not allow him to support his family in comfort or luxury within the Settlement bounds, he is thinking of the next best thing, a suburb of his own.
That, after the conveniences of the Settlement, its admirable justice and order, the Chinese should seek one of their own poorly developed villages, is not due to atavism but merely a necessity of the times. The state of the country, in respect of brigandage, is probably worse today than when the Manchus ruled, as indeed is inevitable in any country where a process of transformation is taking place, and this explains the necessity for a village, as opposed to isolated houses. The robber bands are not remarkable for courage and, as they well know, were they to attack a village, the alarm gongs would be sounded and a pitched battle ensue, in which the robbers would probably have the worst of it. In an attack upon an isolated residence the chances are all against the inmates. Hence the notion of a village suburb, as a ente for high rents and overcrowding. How far the originators have gone to the perfection of their scheme we do not know, but it is certainly germinating.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.