CHINA IN CONVULSION
[The writer of this narrative, the Rev. A. W. Loehead, has been a missionary in Honan for the past twenty-one years.] WHEN the Chinese Republic was established nearly fourteen years ago, someone asked a well-informed old China hand what he thought would be the outcome of the revolution in fifteen years. He replied : " One might put that question to three or four men who had been in China for forty years, and had intelligently followed the course of events, and each of them might state clearly just what he thought most likely to happen, and yet you might be sure that something altogether different and quite unexpected would happen." Who could have foretold that in 1925 the opium trade would be flourishing again, that railway construction would have long since ceased, that existing railways would have greatly deteriorated, that no elections of any kind would have been held for years, that the country would be overrun with bandits, while millions of men under arms would be throttling the life out of the country ? Who could have foretold that a Christian General with tens of thousands of baptized soldiers would be allied with the avowed enemies of Christ from a country that has been China's most consistent aggressor, and that this General would be the leader of a large number of the people who brave the moral judgment of the world with a hatred, virulence and mendacity scarcely surpassed by the Boxers, while the forces of law and order would be rallying round an ex-brigand chief from Manchuria ?
The Germans used to say, " If you want to put some- thing into the nation, put it into the schools." The Reds boast that they have captured all the Normal Schools of the country, and there is much to indicate that their boast has some foundation in fact. In North Honan I have had bitter personal experience that the Normal School is the centre of the most violent anti-foreign propaganda. I have heard that one hundred and twenty Middle School teachers in the province have. just been dismissed because they are not Red. It is well known that Peking University has been a centre of Red propa- ganda during the past year. More than eight months ago I got a letter from one of the most brilliant students in Ching Una College, Peking (where students are prepar- ing for study in the U.S.A.), which was largely a denuncia- tion of capitalism and imperialism. Comrade Karahan was invited to address the students of that institution a few months ago, and the American legation lodged a protest with the Government in Peking against prospective students to America being brought under such influence.
Ever since the Empress Dowager died in 1908 the Government of China has been very weak, and the students in nearly all Government schools have considered themselves above the law. Again and again they have gone to the magistrate's yamen, broken his windows, overturned his palequin, and cursed hith to his face.
They have driven their teachers and principals from the schools, and refused at other times to accept teachers who have been appointed. On May 9th the students in Peking mobbed the Minister of Education's residence and destroyed his furniture, because he had refused to allow the students a holiday for anti-Japanese propaganda.
Early in June they mobbed. the Foreign Minister's office and put him to flight. They have come to look upon such conditions as natural and right. A great price will have to be paid before the students can be brought under discipline again. It outraged the whole student com- munity in China when, In the Shanghai Settlement, riotous students were treated as being under the same laws as ordinary people.
One of the most strangest psychological and moral phenomena that I have ever observed is how the student patriots have been able to close their eyes to the great increase in the cultivation and use of opium in the country, to the bloodcurdling tragedies that are daily perpetrated by bandits, to the cruel oppression by the militarists, to the complete subordination of civil to military authority in all the provinces, and to turn all their powers of hatred against Japan, and now against Britain. One morning last week while student agitators were denouncing the hated British and Japanese dogs, four hundred bandits from Shantung passed through the west suburb of Weihwei with about one hundred wealthy captives whom they are holding to ransom. Not a word was raised in protest. There are some three thousand troops stationed at W.eihwei. The only thing that makes life tolerable for the country people in the robber-infested districts of North Honan is an organization called the Red Spear Society. They are organized in many hundreds of villages. They carry a spear ornamented with a red tassel. They go through certain incantations and contortions and exercises which make them " invulnerable." They write the character " Fu " (Buddha) on yellow paper, burn the paper and drink the ashes. They also carry a " Fu " character in the hand, and then rush with utter fearless- ness on the bandits. How easy it would be to turn these hordes of illiterate superstitious spearmen against the Christians ! This is not the China that the Chinese Ministers in Washington and London like to talk about.
During the last month the fury of indignation and hatred against the British for the shooting of Chinese citizens in Shanghai, Hankow and Canton has been somewhat tempered by the pleasure of seeing the weakness of the diplomatic body in Peking, the jealousy and division among the foreign Powers, and the general ineptitude with which the whole situation has been handled. Who could have thought that so many months would elapse before any judicial enquiry was started into the causes of the Shanghai riots ?
General.Feng Yu Hsiang has tried to make use of the emergency to regain his lost popularity. He has openly advocated war with Britain and has offered the lives of all his men as a willing sacrifice in resisting the bloodthirsty English. It is not his duty coldly to calculate the possibility of success or victory, but only to advocate righteousness 1 Has he not again and again declared that his men will not fight their Chinese brothers ? He can now go ahead with perfect hypocrisy and complete his preparations for war against Chang Tso Lin. He calls on all foreign missionaries to speak out and denounce the Shanghai murderers ; otherwise their day of reckoning is coming. General Feng has forbidden any foreigners to travel near Kalgan or in Mongolia as he fears that he eannot guarantee their safety from brigands, although he has perhaps 80,000 well disciplined troops under his command. This simply means that he is securing great quantities of munitions from Russia, and is receiving numbers of Bolshevik officers to train his men in modern warfare, and he does not want to have foreigners as witnesses of his perfidy. Considerable numbers of these officers are training the armies in Ronan. I met four of them on the street in Weihwei recently, and others have been seen in Kaifeng driving in the Governor's car. Feng, of course, is short of money and his- men's pay, is badly in arrears. How-is he to repay favours he receives from Russia but in allowing free opportunity to the Bolsheviks to propagate their political views in China ? Honan has gone thoroughly red. Two schoolboys and a schoolgirl came from Shanghai not long ago. They are said to have received money from the Military Governor of Honan to bring about a strike in the Peking Syndicate mines at Chiao Tso. They lived in the Normal School at Weihwei, and in a few days they succeeded in calling a strike, in carrying on a rigid boycott, and in rousing mob violence at the mines. The Brigand General Cheng at Weihwei asked me to write immediately to the manager of the mines saying that he would settle the strike in a day or two. When I received a reply from the manager I saw the General's only purpose was to secure a bribe from the Syndicate. Events moved too rapidly for him. The British staff was removed to Peking three days after the beginning of the strike. Strike pay has ceased, and the poor dupes of the students are starving. They are clamouring now to be allowed to go to work.
All student agitators have free passes on the Govern- ment railways. Recently a band of about one hundred schoolboys, in black clothes, came off the Peihan train and made the Normal School their headquarters. They inspected all the shops in the town and seized all the British and Japanese goods they found, destroyed the -cheaper stuff, and kept the more valuable for their own use. The General next day proceeded to fine the mer- chants.
At last threats, raids, and personal violence compelled us missionaries to escape to Kikungshan, into the domain of Hsiao Yao Nan where we are safe. Here hundreds of missionaries and their families are resting during the hot months, and awaiting developments.
The gravest criticism that the Chinese people have made against Christianity is that it is a foreign religion, that it is propagated by people who are the emissaries of powerfnl and aggressive foreign governments, that missionaries are under the protection of treaties which were extorted from China after military defeat, and that the Chinese Christians are unpatriotic and disloyal to their race. No doubt there is some degree of truth in parts of this criticism.. It would appear that the danger, however, is that now there should be a swing to the opposite extreme, that with the intense wave of patriotism that is sweeping over the country, the Church may become too nationalistic and -lose its catholic spirit ; that many of the Christians, joining in the anti-foreign agitation, may gain a repu- tation for patriotism by acting in a manner wholly opposed to the spirit of Christ.
A. W. LOCHEAD:
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