Aug. 29.
Wirt the publication to-day of our special correspondent's extra ordinarily interesting interview with Marshal Chi Hsieh-yuan of Nanking, there can be no Tonger any doubt as to where matters stand between Kiangsu and Chekiang. Marshal Chi has spoken with a. frankness and sincerity which admits no question of his meaning. He has, 80 to speak, pushed the peace-makers out of doors and is determined on action, For upwards of ten years, he says, we have been talking of unification by peace and nothing has come. of it but more disruption and disorder. "I am a man of peace, If we could unify China by peaceful methods, I should favour them. But one grows despairing as the years pass and th of the country becomes ly worse. The time comes when there must be action," In pursuance of this convietion Marshal Chi is concentrating an overwhelming force, which includes large numbers of Chili troops sent"to him by Marshal Wu Pei-fu, in the regions of Soochow and Quinsan. It appears that it is not his intention, hitherto supposed, to attack Chekiang from across the Taihu in the direction of Huchow and Kashing: in respect of these he stands strictly on the defensive, is great objective is Lunghua, the Arsenal, the whole of the Shanghai district: these, he says, are the cause of all friction and in them lies the success or failure of his plan It is no departure from the impartiality which we wish to preserve in the present conflict to say that there is much in what Mai ates. Let us, for one moment, emphasize that in this particular quarrel, it is especially the duty of foreigners to remain neutral. The relationships of Shanghai with Marshal Chi and Marshal Lu have always been most agreeably cordial; and among the rulers of provinces in China they hold a deservedly high reputation for enlightenment and administrative ability.—'Therefore, the only feeling of foreigners in this unhappy. crisis must be one of regret that the circumstances of China do not allow two such men to compound their differences for the benefit of the country otherwise than by force of arms. But without entering into the causes of the position, or expressing one, word of comment upon them, it is without dispute an anomaly that the istrict of Shanghai, the jewel jangsu, as Marshal Chi calls it, should be under the control of a ruler in whose domains it does. not lie. Furthermore, inasmuch as such a position cannot but cause perpetual friction, there is a great deal in the contention that if the question cannot be settled by peaceful means, it had better be fought out once for all than' continue to create a fresh scare every six months, The one point of doubt is whether the question will really be fought out. Wars in China have an unfruitful habit of continuing only up to a certain point and then fizzling out in a compromise which satisfies nobody. In the present instance if Marshal Chi's campaign succeeds, -and Marshal Lu, the last Anfu chieftain in Central China, is ousted from Chekiang, it appears inevitable that a mighty clash must With the advance of armies on Shangh ensue between Marshal Wu Pei fu and Marshal Chang Tso-lin. At present, the floods in north China are likely to. prevent the latter from moving. But it hardly believable that he would Jong endure the supremacy over all North and Central China of the man for whom he has so deep animosity. Are we really about to witness a fight to a finish at last, the final "'show-down" in China? If we venture, to express the hope that we are, it} is with full consciousness of the heavy toll which the conflict must impose on all the Chinese people. Surely it is a choice of evils, and nothing could well be worse than the continued—_lawlessness, brigandage, and personal suff ing, which now blights every home. and blocks every avenue of progress in China.
There is one aspect of what Marshal Chi says in which the foreigners of Shanghai are deep-' ly concerned and on which they' have a right to make their voices heard. Marshal Chi says, in effect, that Shanghai is a hotbed of political intrigue, which more than any other place contributes to keep China in a state of chaos. That is what the foreign community of Shanghai has long felt and the thing which it deeply. resents, while at the same time does not see how it may be prevented. It is probably no ex: aggeration to say that since the famous plottings of Huang Hsing, Chen Chi-mei, and Sun Yat-sen, which culminated in the Revolution of 1913, no important conspiracy or cabal has occurred in China which was not engineered from the asylum of Shangh and when the Kuomintang in Canton wrote to the Shanghai branch the manifesto which we published a few weeks ago, with the injunction under no conditions to make any trouble in Shanghai and emphasizing its perpetual desire to be on good terms with foreigners, the plain English of the statement was undoubtedly that if Kuomintang men made themselves obnoxious in Shanghai, they would promptly be pelled from it, and would find it most inconvenient to be deprived' of such excellent shelter for the: hatching of: their plots. Now it occupation gone may again be emphasized that Shanghai is a commercial community, founded for the purpose of commerce, and most anxious to avoid political complications. Our difficulty has been, and is, that in the present state of China we may hesitate to hand over the representatives of one Chinese political party to those of any other. So long as they behave themselves as peaceable citizens, we can no more interfere with their presence here, than with peaceful shopkeepers and ricsha coolies. If there were, however, government which all China upheld, the situation would be greatly simplified, and we do not! suppose that that government would find any reluctance Shanghai's part to assist it in the suppression of political con spiracy. As yet such a government does not appear. Is it possible that it lies at the end of the inter-provincial conflict which now occupies all thoughts?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.