Peking, Jan. 27.
It used to be comparatively easy for anyone who followed the Chinese press, consulted a fow Chinese official friends and picked up gossip from the hoards of travelling delegates that are always coming and going, to piece together a fairly good survey of Chinese nation-wide politics, allotting each prominent person to a certain military camp or a certain political party. All party lines have now broken down. The only compact group, smal] as it is, is the Kuomingtang. All that one can do now is to indicate a few striking examples of perfect confusion, and a few still more striking examples of strange bedfellows.
The Chihli party, for instance, is no longer compact. 'T'sao Jui, Eh Shih-yuan and Chang Shao-tseng, the present Premier, favour the election of Tsao Kun to the Presidency. Wu Pei-fu does not and Wu Pei-fu has no use for any of these three leaders. At the same time Chi Shih-yuan disowns association with Tsao Jui and de blores the fact that his name is constantly associated with Tsao's while the Premier has now. made it apparent that he is no longer a member of Tsao Jui's clique but a Cheng Hsueh Hui man. In the forming of his Cabinet he created a coalition of the Tsao! Jui_following and the Cheng Hsueh Hui and got both elements in Parliament to approve his appointees, presumably by compromise, but could not get enough votes for Alfred Sze, for the obvious reason that Tsao Jui is trying to include the so-called Christian party in his coalition and wants one of them, either Dr. C. 'T. Wang or Dr. W. W. Yen, in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.