The sinister joke that the Reds in Canton have played upon Chang Fa-kuei and his col-Jeagues, whom they so recently used to supplant General Li Chi-hsin and his more conservative adjutants, conveys" many lessons that ought to be serious-studied here and quickly! applied, if such a coup as the Communists have carried through is not tp be repeated in Shanghai, There is no reason at present why such a Red revolt should not be undertaken at any moment in this community nor why it should not succeed, for the essential precautions that would discourage a rising' have not been taken and the community mind i not even in a state of preparedness. It is} hard to tell what the Bolsheviks would have to clu here, indeed, to rouse Shanghai interest in the imminent and almostly certainly disastrous general strike and reign of terror that they are preparing for us. They have done everything but post _proclamations to tells what, is coming, yet the Council has issued no warning, the Cham-bets of Commerce have made no public appeal for defence, and the taipans of the major British and American firms are as loth to advocate the closing of the enemy headquarters in Whangpoo Road, the re-erection of the barriers, or the establishment of the curfeye, as they would be to impeach the Council. Every one wants the damage done first] to prove jus ing up the attend: would be a reasonable attitude for propagandists with nothing at stake, who regard the worst the enemy can do as the helpful providing material for lurid pub-city, but one cannot see how! such an attitude can. be maintained by the custodians of huge investments, with families here, who are struggling to keep grip upon the remnants of trade that pass through this port.
When the Reds went into a decline this past summer and the Kuomintang disassociated itself from Communism, we pro-phossied on the strength of accurate information that the Sovist policy here would change and that the financing of chameleon generals and armies that would not stay bought would be abandoned for intensive ""subterranean" work and the perfection of semi-criminal, semipolitical organizations among the riff-raff. The latest coup in Canton is an excellent illus tion of new Soviet. methods they are directed from the Consulates. A few weeks ago General Chang Fa-kuei, who has! operated under Red tutelage] since the northern expedition, from Canton set out, and who is Red enough to have been denounced by local: Kuomintang! leaders as a Communist, overturned the more conservative Kuengsi regime at Soviet instiyation and set up an admin-presumably that he would receive!
.d|unstinted Rol: hevier support as His reward has organization of the rabble who were undoubtedly secretly armed and trained by Red agents. Soviet Russia has us. more money' to spend on the purchase of such military leaders -as Chang] Fa-kuei but, as the Peking documents have amply revealed, ix now ready to buy their ce fidence for a brief space so that} they may be the more readily undone and their armies used against them. This is som thing for the local "Nationalist chiefs to ponder upon when, in their conceit, they weigh the advantages of "using Russia. The Soviet, working along new and more desperate lines is going "used" by no militarist or cian except where the prospects are particularly good of bringing about the downfall, in a welter of violence and confusion, of the deluded individuals who think they are at once employing and swindling the Red: This situation in Canton ought} to impress upon every Chinese official that the Reds have losses of "face" in China to avenge which makes them much more rabidly anti-Kuomintang than they are anti-foreign, occasional paragraphs Moscow's official journals make very clear.
In an. article on the work of Boris Yulin, Secretary +of the Russian Communist Party and chief Soviet agent for South' China, which appeared in our} columns in July, after the nominal suppression of the Cum-munists in Canton, it was wri ten:
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.