Mar, 12, For the first time, perhaps, since the death of Dr. Sun Yat-sen is it now possible to form a fair view of what he stood for.
Three years ago the atmosphere was heavily electric, with the storm that has sinc> convulsed China. We were also too near to the man. The impracticability of his.harbour.and.railway schemes was more conspicuous than the ideas which gave them birth. We could see that he had pulled down, but were, perhaps, too impatient to make enough allowance for the difficulties that blocked the path of building up. Even to-day the manifold inaccuracies and even absurdities of the "San Min Chui I" (the so-called "Three People's Principles") attracts more attention than the ideal which inspired it, By the Chinese, too, much that Dr.'Sun Yat-sen preached in his life-time begins to reveal itself as unfeasible. His followers are becoming more critical. In Canton Dr, Sun's political testament has been publicly denounced as a forgery. As time '008 on, the Nationalists will inevitably overhaul and revise his policy in some details, as they" are now revising "the organization' of the party he created, History abounds in si revisions, for the obvious jon of ordinary human fallibility, "But none the loss Dr. Sun Yat-sen was a great personality; he fired the imagination of his compatriots in all classes as perhaps no Chinese has ever done, and ho still fires How he did this, it is doubly important for foreigners to con~ alder, now when we are entering what truly may be a new eva in Chinese and foreign relation-hips. The only possible answer is that he found the materials ready to hand, He focussed and gave expression to feelings which had dean common to thinking Chinese for many years, All the history of China fine the Japanese war bears witness to a growing sense of Uiseontont which reached back Into the past and reinforced itself from incidents not openly resisted at the time but note the Teas resented. We cannot appreciate the meaning of the ery against "imperialism," nor how much it means for Ci more than the explosive antiforeignism which Moscow skilfully evoked, unless we accept it as standing for an accumula. tion of grievances that d from a very long way back. It is difficult for us foreigners to understand this feeling. We may justly contend that we have hrouzht the Chinese beter standards of living,—more piysienl comforts, better wroes and regular employment for thousands if not millions, ernment in the' districts minister superior to ani their own rulers ever 5 higher conception of public and private responsibility. All this true, But it leaves out the human equation. "History must he read from both points of view. We must bring ourselves to see that in Chinese eyes the foreigner enjoys privileges China to which other countries afford little parallel and that. in the Chinese way of thinks he has often exerciser privileges arrogantly. Posi an impartial observer, summing up the history of the pa hundred years, might give the balance of credit to the foreigner. The fact remains that the world is swayed not by logic but by illogic. No foreigner, of course, would question that China belongs to the Chinese. But the predominant grievance in the tind of every Chinese arises from his assumption that foreigners behave as if China belonged to them: and if we wish to live and do well in China, we are bound to take that fact into account. These the feelings and the aspirations which Dr. Sun Yat-sen came to represent and he does so yet. To some it appears pathetic that the Kuomintang must still cling so tightly to the skirts of a dead man, But the judgment is, perhaps, hasty, In England one may note that the prestige of Disraeli is to-day far greater than when he was alive and it continues to mould the thoughts of more and more Englishmen, Three years none too much in which to find leader capable of taking up the mantle of Sun Wen; and meanwhile, with their crusade still unfinished, the Kuomintang find, in his name and principles, a sure guard against the disruption which might' attack them, In his life-time Dr. Sun was misjudged by foreigners and their dealings with him were clumsy. That is not surprising. Revolutionaries are never easy people to handle; his own vather visionary nature made him doubly intractable and his movement had to be considered in relation to many other problems. Until the year 1924 we are ure Dr. Sun was not anti-foreign in the grosser sense of the word, His life had been saved by a British subject; he was educated in Hongkong and more than once he spoke of Hongkong with wistful admiration for what foreigners could do and Chinese seemingly could not, He even appealed to the British Government for support. Assuredly, too, the young Republic was not anti-foreign; on the contrary, it turned openly and eagerly to the West with enthusiasm and confidence. is, perhaps; too much to say that we lost an opportunity after the Manchus fell. The difficulties of the whole situation were great. To-day there ig an undoubted opportunity and the best reason for looking back into the past is that this one should not be missed. The welcome given to Sir Miles Lampson by the Chinese both in Canton and Shanghai goes deeper than mere conventional courtesy. There is a revulsion of feeling throughout the nation, which we must not under-estimate nor disregard. And in this connexion, it may be thought by some that too much stress is laid upon trade as our common interest and natural cause for agreement. Surely that, at the point we have now reached, is to begin at the wrong end, When a lover asks a lady to marry him, he does not explain that he wants some one to provide him with descendants is household, al-acting in him with unconscious force, It is the mental attitude of foreigners which Chinese feel to-day far more acutely than the big things of privileges and tre No sane Chinese, we fare sure, seeks, to destroy our interests. and possessions China. It is the little things that count, There are wrongs to be righted and it will take time to right them. Reparations may be slow in-coming, differences will still arise, infinite
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.