Peking, May 24.
A great many Chinese of various parties and in all parts of China are impressed with the realization that this is an excellent opportunity to effect reunion. Wu Pei-fu is one of them and is perhaps as determined as any other to see that the people take full advantage of the opportunity. Even the neutral audience must grant that the stage is well set for reunion and for a fresh experiment in representative government.
Face to face with this imminent possibility, the professional politicians and political theorists are naturally very busy classifying the inevitable wen i... "Wen-ti' means literally subject, but in the parlance of the Republic it means a political problem. The word Tuchun has become firmly fixed in the Anglo-Chinese vocabulary, but "wen-t'i" is really a hundred times more essential. To those who pursue the fruitless, endless, futile but fascinating vocation of talking polities under the Republic it is indispensable. To the ordinary Chinese which you can learn from your servants you have only to add wen-t'i,"" and the words for '"'suprt," "oppose," "policy," "hua-tiou," which freely interpreted means scoundrel, to apply to political opponents, and a long list of the familiar names of highly placed personages, and you are equipped to talk enthrallingly with a Super-Tuchun for hours. At any rate the "wen-t'i" of reunification and the administration to follow are now very much the vogue.
In all political cliques outside of Wu Pei-fu's immediate personal following the one all-absorbing problem of reunification is Hsu Shih-chan's removal. 'n Wu__Pei-fu's immediate circle of advisers, the writer has been corrected when he tried to apply the term ''wen-t'i" to this issue. "Hsu Shih-chang's removal," said one, "is not and cannot become a wen-t'i' because it is a certainty. You cannot describe a certainty as a problem." Assuming therefore that this settles the matter (an assumption which the rest of the nation wil] not arrive at until it is a fait accompli), the politicians in the north are already anticipating events and passing on to other "wen-t'i," which, if reunification really comes, are really going to monopolize official conversations and Chinese newspaper space for many months. In the order of their importance in the Chinese mind and what will probably be the chronological order of their discussion, they are Finance, Disbandment, and the Constitution.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.