Tientsin, Jan, 12, The departure of Cha: from Tientsin to Mukden is regarded by Chinese here as marking the end of the fourth step in cent pre-Anfu. Restoration and at the same time of Lu Yung-hsiang into Nanking, with the aid of Fengtien troops to mark the fulfilment of several pledges entered into by Tuan Chi-Jui, Chang Tso-lin and Sun Yat-sen when they set out to depose the Chihli party, The first step was the Kiangsu fighting last September, the second the defeat of Wu Pei-fu'by trickery, the third the restoration of the Anfu Party and the fourth the expulsion of Chi Hsieh-yuen by the person whom he expelled, Lu Yung-hsiang.
Details have not worked out so smoothly as anticipated but, least, they appear satisfactory on the " surface. Certain difficult are latent in Hupeh and around Peking, but at present they show no signs of creating unrest in the Fengtien-Anfu ranks; certainly not until winter is ov ie self-evident. It would seem ridiculous, on the face of it, for anyone to sell coal in Tientsin at alleged to exist, and sell it in Peking, where a '"coal our low prices, when they might
more a ton! where they could get several dollars As a matter of fact the shortage in Tientsin and Peking is due to the large drain upon normal coal supplies by the influx of 35,000 igtien troops who use it to heat their quarters and railway train camps and to keep engines in readiness for immediate use, Even tne Anfu Cabinet is responsible for th statement that coal is short la Peking because of a shortage of railway cars on the Peking-Hankow Railway. They failed to. mention, however, that along this line General Hu Ching-yi has been con-
Pei-fu and others at the direct hest of Tuan Chi-jui, and is using dozens of engines and hundreds of fears for that purpose, If there is ears and power ea Tuan Chi-jui is Rot anyone else.
Chang Tso-lin, therefore, can now Mukden as the Conquering Hero, having accomplished, apparently, all he set out to do. Some things are still neces-ary, of course, but time and the propaganda steam-roller is expected to effect most of them.
The Incaleulable Element But, as the Chinese observe, the burenucrat-tupan have not reckoned with the people of China, and if Tuan Chi-jui and his backers and satellites. think they can continue to hoodwink the people with reformation and redemarkation eyewash they are making a great mistake, The people were fooled with Re-unification-by-force, which, even without the ""foree* was' only another means of getting money to flow more freely into the Chihli war-chests. They are not going to be fooled by redemarkation flubdub, knowing as they do, that it is the Anfu scheme of splitting provineial opposition into ineffectual minor sections. They would rather have the provinces divided into smaller units that would quarrel among themselves, than to have the whole provincial units quarrelling with the Central Government. The Chinese see through this truly Machiavellian policy. Such a deimation would at once dispose of the problem of Provincial Autonomy, which, of all political forms in China, the Anfu party despises the most.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.