Mission Premises Which Magistrate Refuses to Allow Missionaries to Use: Home of a Communist School In spite of repeated assurances by officials of the loral government and Nanking that the Nyie Vang College and principal's house United Methodist Mission in Wenchow would be returned immediately to their rightful owners after having been occupied by a native school, strongly suspected of ce munism, for more than a year and a half, the premises are till held by Chinese, Orders have either been ignored of pretexts for continuing to occupy the premises have deen trumped up by the illegal possessors, apparently with the eon rivance of the local city magistrate Recent reports seem to show that the return of the property is as far away as ever.
year and a half ago the buildings were taken over without permission by the principal and members of a School known in Wenchow as "Ao Hae, whose communist activities have long been suspected. Near the end pf May, 1927, the school was raided by the military and half-a-dozen teachers avd Students were arrested as suspocted communists. One of these was executed the day following by the authorities, and the school disperse Communists Again in Possession In the early autumn of 1927 the school reopened, once again appro-printing the mission buildings, and since that time all efforts to have them ejected have been brought to nothing, mainly through the obstructive methods of the local istiate and the apparent of the Nationalist author ties to enforce their order that the In addition the scheat still sus. pected of being a hotbed of commun am, a Wenchow merchant declaring' that over 60 of the students fund teachers belonged to that sub: ver sive party. That the school is certainly inclined against law and order is shown by the reported declaration of the teachers of with him personally how and when the college would be returned.
And this in spite of orders from the Provincial Government at Hangchow and the Central Government at Nanking that the college was to be handed back immediatel; Bir. J. W. Heywood, chairman of the United Methodist mission, called upon the Magistrate, however, and failed to obtain any action." For more than an hour the official ignored the main issue, the return of the premises, and sought to extort a promise that the mission would consent to a continuance of the occupation of their premises. This, of course, was impossible, and the situation remained exactly as it was before.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.