In the following spring the number of coolies for Manchoukuo had again dropped very heavily. Those who still went there tried to overcome the remittance ban by buying goods in Manchoukuo and taking them back home with them, This, too, was stopped, and the coolies were deprived of their hard-earned purchases on the score of their being smuggled goods, This was the last straw.
The majority of labourers went to work in Manchoukuo for the sole purpose of supporting their families. Very few of them wanted either to settle—even supposing they had been able to comply with the thousand and one Japanese regul-tions in order to de so—or to gamble away all their earnings there. If they could not get their savings to the families, there was obviously no point in going there for work, As a result, the stream of labour immigrants continued to dry up until it became a mere trickle, The Manchoukuo authorities, seriously perturbed at last, after much trouble managed to persuade the Powers-that-be in Tokyo to agree to allow the Manchoukuo labourers to remit home at least a portion of their earnings. Butit was too late. The Chinese peasants have become suspicious, and the formerly so popular immigration has fallen into disfavour with them.
"For Benefit of the Chinese"
Some other Japanese controlling body—if not in repentant Manchoukuo, then in north China—was certain' to introduce some quite original restrictive and unreasonable measure, Better to stay at home, And who can say they are wrong, having regard to the entire lack of team-work among the thousand and one different Japanese ions, commissions, societies, monopolies, and what they all are, which claim to be controlling north China for the benefit of the Chinese Anyhow, this year the coolie the migration has fallen off' worse than plan. ever, although the Japanese in Manchoukuo actually require much more labour than in former days, The heavy industries alone claim to require ayer 1,000,000 labourers for their wonderful Five-Year Development Plan. They have been getting considerably less than one quarter of that number. In fact, the labour situation has become so alarming that the authorities have had to send a special delegation this month to Peiping, under the leadership of such an important person as the Japanese Minister of the Interior (for Manchoukuo).
The object of the delegation is to y and persuade the north China authorities to help them to round up the required number of coolies, At the same time it is also arranging to spread propaganda in the villages of the interior, Two propaganda groups are being sent during the next two months to tour the provinces of -Shantung and Hopei.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.