Aug. 1.
Wirxour further confirmation, not available at the time of writ-
Ing, it would hardly be safe to accept unreservedly the report that Dr. Sun Yat-sen and the British and French authorities at Canton have come to an agree ment settling the strike. We hope it may be so, provided there ig no loss of face for the foreign community of Shameen. For although there were features in the regulations, which caused the strike, not very wise, sufficient concession had been offered in respect of these by July 21 to satisfy Chinese amour propre; and in view of the general nature of the strike, it was of the utmost importance that the foreigners should stand firm. No one, whether Chinese or foreigner, in Canton is ignorant of the fact hat it is the Communist wing of the Kuomintang who are controlling the strike. The leaders of this section are a man named Wang Ching-wei, formerly a sident of Shanghai and with an attempted political assassination to his credit when he was only eighteen; and Tse Ying-po, a former school-master, described 'a5 a man of strong and ruthless character. The Communists were only admitted to the Kuomintang party some few months ago, but according to one good source of information, they already exe fa great deal of power and are said even to defy Dr. Sun Yat-sen himself, whose ascendancy generally and physical force personally fare reported to be not what they were. We may take it for granted that the Communists care nothing about the losses of Chin-so silk merchants arising from the strike. The question: of a settlement, therefore, is really an issue between Dr. Sun's per sonal prestige and the extent to which the Communists desire and are able to defy him.
One thing must clearly be borne in mind. The strike at Shameen is only in name a servants' strike. The boys, cooks and police are merely catspaws. The real quarrel is between the Chinese Communists and the foreigner, a repetition on a smaller scale of the Hongkong strike. The passport regulations question was settled so easily in the first negotiations, that it is quite clear they were not the 1 bone of contention. Indeed, had any warning been given of the strike and the Shameen authori ties been notified that this parcular regulation was obnoxious, we have good reason to know that it would have been withdrawn. The fact of the matter is that a great deal of bad blood was caused over the bomb out-}jxage xt the Hotel Victoria, the assumption by some foreigners that its author was a Chinese infuriated the Cantonese and the strike was, partly, their retaliation. That it has been kept going s0 long by the Communists is due simply to the fact that if they lean force Shameen to take back the police, they, the Communists, will be able to claim a great victory and much silver will flow into: their coffers.
It is also not unlikely that the Canton Government could have] stopped the strike at the beginning. Whether the Communists afterwards got beyond control is what we shall never know for certain. Chinese informants, referred to above, say that Dr. Sun can stop the strike whenever he pleases, and that as the houseboys and other servants are very tired of the fight, we are likely at any moment to get news that it is definitely over. But there remain good grounds for think ing that Dr. Sun's control over: the wilder elements of the party' is not what it was. He cannot altogether plead innocent to the: charge of having called those wild elements into being, He published, it will be recalled, a joint declaration with Comrade Joffe, the former Bolshevik envoy to China, expressing sympathy and fellowship. He harboured a Bolshevik agent in Canton for many months, and has more than once spoken as if Moscow and Canton were natural allies, with the world against them. Among the fiery peoples of the South, where political hotheads of all kinds find themselves in conveni surroundings, this is a dangerous: line to take, which may easily end in the creation of a Frankenstein's monster. The Cantonese Government did not attempt to check the Communists who ran the Hongkong strike, for which there was certainly no defence; they appear to have been equally tender towards that in Shameen.
So do the Communists sain strength and by and bye, when Canton wishes to suppress them, it may not 0 easily be able to do so. The fight around Shameen is really a demonstration by the! Bolsheviks against all lawfully constituted authority to test their strength; and it is no exaggeration to say that the Canton Gi ernment are hardly less concerned than the foreigners in seeing' that the agitators do not wi As regards the foreigners of Shameen, our hope that the'strike has been settled is equalled by our hope that there has been no surrender of their stronghold. They have settled down now to the irksomeness of doing their own! menial work and we are sure that! the overwhelming majority of them—we will say every man of them—would far rather yo on doing so than give in. To surrender now would merely mean renewal of the fight a little later under worse conditions. To Sha-moon the issue is vital. It is a little community, but with rights well established by many decades of treaty and old custom. fare no. believers in "gunboat policy;" we believe that more is to be done with the Chinese by conciliation than by pugnacity. But where just rights are concerned we hold that, in the present state of political flux and anarchy, the foreigner should be unyielding; and it is also well Known that where the masses of the Chinese know that the foreigner is within' his rights, they cannot easily be roused against him, Mistakes were made at the beginning by Shameen, but directly these were pointed out there was instant willingness to rectify them. In the latter stages Shameen has been fighting
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.