Eel. 6.
Tue dinner to which the Municipal Council entertained the Chinese Advisory Council on Wednesday evening should prove historic in years to come. The speeches exchanged were anything but conventional With his opening sentences Mr. Simms showed that he meant to go to the root of things, and Mr. Ziar appears to have replied with equal frankness. Plain speech has its'rewards, if sometimes disadvantages. If Wednesday's reunion does not lead to more of that spirit of cooperation in municipal affairs, of which, as Mr. Simms said with sad truth, ''we hear so much and see so little', the fault will not be that of the foreigners, who have shown plainly the road that they are ready to tread themselves and in Which they would have the Chinese travel also The Chinese Advisory Committee was born of the ratepayers' meeting of 1920, in a time of storm and angry feeling. It was admittedly a compromise between radical demand for full Chinese representation on. the Council and conservative insistance on the fact that Shanghai is a foreign settlement, whose administration is wholly vested in foreigners as all Chinese who choose to live here must be assumed to, understand. At the time of that agitation the ''North-China Daily News'' pressed strongly for two Chinese members of the Council, on the general grounds that the supposed objections to such an innovation were illusory and the gain from the satisfaction of Chinese. public ambition would be great. Whether that course would have succeeded is a matter of pure speculation. At least, of the failure, hitherto, of the Advisory Committee there is no doubt.
Months elapsed before the Chinese community took any steps towards electing representatives, who, when finally they did take their places on the committee, would seem to have felt themselves equally out of touch with both the Council and their own people. From every point of view that is a state of affairs that cannot be endured, and the Council ara to be congratulated on their efforts to find out, the cause of the failure and if possible to make a fresh start. Public recognition has been given before to the fact that, in due course, Chinese representatives will sit as equal colleagues of foreigners on the Council, but never, we think, with the same emphasis or with so much urgency that the Chinese shall be alert to fit themselves for that responsibility. A far wider vision is opened up by Mr. Simms's speech than anything that was contemplated in 1920 and it must be the earnest hope of all of us that the Chinese community will not fail in practical appreciation.
For that wider vision is dawning upon more and more of those who think seriously of Shanghai even as she is, still more as she must one day be. In a leader written last May we pictured her as a sort of protected state jointly administered by Chinese and foreigners and with boundaries befitting. her population and importance: and the picture got us into a good deal of hot water with the extreme nationalist section of Chinese—the kind who now want to build a road round Shanghai in order to thwart the foreigner and incidentally (though the agitators cannot see it) their own people aswell. If we imagine a Chinese colony, say, on the shores of Kent with which the British Government cannot in any way interfere, we are bound to admit that the Chinese nationalist antagonism to Shanghai is natural. But we would ask the nationalists to take a broader view, and just as the best foreign opinion recognizes that the old conception of Shanghai as an exclusively foreign-administered reservation cannot endure, so themselves to admit that foreign-and Chinese interests and ideas are so inextricably bound up in. Shanghai that the existing constitution cannot wholly be reversed without damage to all alike. The truth of the saying that it takes all kinds of men to make a nation is vividly exemplified in Shanghai and will be so still more as years pass. For if, in looking back, we are amazed at what Shanghai has'become, we may be sure that it is little compared with what she will one day be and it is no exaggeration to say that every foreigner who benefits himself benefits, directly and indirectly, ten thousands of Chinese.
A stupid policy of pinpricking mars the relations of Chinese and foreigner and cripples the de-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.