CHINA MAKING PROGRESS.

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 404, 4 February 1904, Page 6

CHINA MAKING PROGRESS.

laaoarrial and Commercial Growth of Asia's «r*ate»t Country la uiimreiTUns. Europeans and Americans who have lived long in China are quite unanimous in the opinion that the greatest country of Asia, taking account of area, population and natural resources, is making steady progress industrially and commercially, and the general belief is that more rapid gains are assured for the next few years. Statistics of exports and imports tell the same story. So does the development of railways and telegraph lines. The

World-wide importance of this progress is not easily exaggerated. It promises to insure the existence of the Chinese empire as an immense independent state, for it lessens the force cf such pretexts ss might hare been discovered or invented for dividing or seizing the country. It also makes the international importance of China so evident and so great that no one European power is Jtkely to find the way open for the absorption of so rich an empire, while the more progressive the Chinese become the less chance there will be for an agreement between the leading nations of the west as to the terms of a possible partitioning of the-mid-dle kingdom. e