The Chinese are very fond, as everyone knows. of going to thei own long and fascinating h tory for precedents and, like rabid sectarians {in their reading of the Bible, they find "authority" for whatever the want to believe. To the impartial foreigner, however, Chinese history teaches very definite lessons on this matter of reunification by force which happen to coincide beautifully with foreign expert military opinion, Native Chinese conquerors of China have not been many and precedents established by alien it vaders are worthless in this instance, 80 one does not have to review many' cases. One would like therefore to invite the attention of the Chinese militarists who are sincere in their desire to reunify China by force, to] study the examples of Liu Pang, founder of the Han Dynasty, of the bandits who overthrow the' T'ang Dynasty without setting up a per: manent succession, and of Chu Yuan-chang, who founded the Ming Dynasty. The writer's reading of Chinese history has been general but of course superficial, s0 his conclusions are always subject to correct. tion by native scholars, but even from a superficial reading of Chinese history it appears that the fey El ese, who have conquered all of China fand brought order out of chaos, have all worked on the same general Compact and Merciless They delegated no authori trusted no one who was out of sight. They kept their armies in compact Bodies and their subordinates right! with them. They created no fiefs, and did not attempt to occupy territory until they had actually swept over it all, obliterating, enemy fes with a thoroughness which di couraged a revival of suppressed re-hellions. Their armies moved in a solid mass from province to province subduing one after the other without concern for flank attacks or rear attacks but only interested in the opposing force ahead. When a conquered area revolted after their Passage they turned in their tracks, went back and made an example of H—but they never split up and they. discouraged disloyalty by examples which would not meet with the approval of modern eivitized ations. Every job they undertook Tentless thoroughness, leaving all feneimies so completely broken that they were too busy licking their wounds for-the next decade to consider revenge and, by the tonic their wounds were healed, the same compact rigidly. disciplined: army was ok with bow bent anit dxe-Horsed'to ask what they had to say about it. Wherever they went they made the military profession so unpopular, except within their.own close ranks, that the most bellicose turned from the sight of a sword in disgust and, when the whole country was in this state of mind they mounted the throne and said: "Now let's have peace;" and they had Still the Only Way It seems fairly well agreed among foreign military students of the present situation in this country that if China can be reunited by force tunder modern conditions, it will be done by the man who has the sense to equip an army of less than 50,000 men properly, pay them well and keep moving, doing his work thoroughly wherever he goes and acknowledging the right of no other army to exist but his own, This theory might not apply in any other part of the world, but every one who knows China.and Chinese militarism thoroughly agrees that it would work here, The writer remembers hearing the late Mr. Roy Ahderson express this conviction many years ago and while Mr, Anderson was not a military expert, there was little that he did not know about the Chinese brand of human' mr is at least 90 per cent. "pseudo." put on a uniform in this country and swagger around in it do so because ft entitles them to loot their neigh-hours with a minimum of risk.
They do not like fighting and they do not propose to fight. Wherever serious fighting is in prospect the grey uniform is most unpopular most of those who wear it and they clamour to get back into "mufti" and return to honest pursuits. Tt may astonish some readers to know that the only way that a large proportion of this Shantung-Fengtien army north of Peking is held together is by withholding the soldiers' pay. With the prospect of 1 serious fight against the Kuominchun ahead of them a great proportion of the men in uniform would shed it and return to pacific pursuits in their home districts if they were ever given enough at one time to afford them travelling expenses or capital for a small trading venture. Their commanders do not withhold the money because they have not got it, nor always because they choose to devote it to their own personal enterprises, but because they would have no armies if they paid it out. Now, these same soldiery would yair' for their money to doff their uniforms if they knew that against them was coming a really businesslike force that was not content with lake-believe but really intended to fight seriously with superior modern jons, The highest Chinese auth-know for instance that their armies would scatter like sion or 80. of modern troops with all the modern accessories of war. Those who doubt this must remember how Kuo Sung-ling's army of 50,000 lost confidence and melted away before the first serious Fengtien assault after they had heard that Japan was moving 3,500 men in the South Sfanchurian railway zone. They had no reason whatever to believe that Japan was going to participate actively: but they could not be sure, they lost their nerve and quit.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.