CHINESE COLONISTS

Evening Star, Issue 21749, 18 June 1934, Page 11

CHINESE COLONISTS

AND JAPANESE INVADERS

H. R. Erkins writes in the ‘ New York Times ’;— Around their yurt fires the Mongols are pondering gravely and with not a little worry the effect on their destiny of the unsolved problems confronting China and Japan and the nations of the West which have political, commercial, and territorial stakes in the Far East, and especially in Chinese Central Asia. And as the Mongols wonder whether they are to be pawns, or determining factors in their own destiny, one answer is furnished by the Chinese who are coming through mountain passes in a steady stream. Their answer is colonisation. To the vast, rolling Inner Mongolian plateau they ape moving with their challenge to the Mongols. I saw them painfully mounting the Kweiha Pass, their carts laden with farming implements, _ cooking utensils, and poles of wood with which to provide the frameworks for mud houses huddled behind mud walls. Conspicuous on the carts, drawn by ponies,' donkeys, or oxen, were coffins —evidence of the Chinese determination to colonise Mongolian grnaing lands as they have colonised the plains of Suiyuan and Chahar Provinces between the Great Wall of China and Ta Ch’ing Shan (the Great Clear Mountains), dividing Chinese Inner Mongolia from what remains of Mongol Inner Mongolia. “ We are bringing our coffins with

us! ” That is the Chinese response to the questions pondered by the Mongols as they squat before their yurt fires. For when a Chinese travels with his coffin it means that where .he, rests he will settle to stay. There will be no turning back to the ancestral homes in Shanshi, Shensi, Hopei, and Shantung Provinces. These migrants' are not traders. They are colonists, who believe that, the hardships of the unknown can be no worse than the horrors of famine, flood, banditry, plague, aiivil warfare, and ' oppression left behind them in the areas of unrest within the Groat Wall. THE MONGOL AT HOME. To talk with the Mongols and to hear their answers to the questions so prominent in Chinese Central Asia, 1 left the Peiping-Suiyuan railway line at Kweilin, adjacent to Suiyuan-cbang, the capital of the new Chines© province of Suiyuan, and travelled miles northward to Olan Nor, to sleep and eat in Mongol yurts, the felt tents in which the free men of the plateau have lived since the centuries of the true Tartar tribes. Olan Nor is a place, not a city. There is a cluster of Mongol yurts, and on all sides grazed the sheep, horses, and camels which are traded for gram to the Chinese at the post called Ch’ang Hsin-’tai, Your true Mongol is no tiller of the soil He leaves _ that to the Chinese. He can buy his grain with wool or with animals on the h6of; for him there is no sowing and no harvest. He pitches his yurt where the grazing is lushest and the hunting richest, and where nothing savours of urban life.

From the yurt of the chief cama 'Undur Bayir, the host and head man at Olan Nor Mis name means Elevated Bliss. This chocolate-coloured Mongol was a bandit leader notorious for cruelty and the variety of the tortures he was capable of devising until his own chief, the Erekjun, accepted tho profitable mandate to control the countryside. Undur Bayir proved theworth of Mongol hospitality. He set aside his opium pipe, ais women swept out a yurt, and the older sons chained their ferocious watch dogs, so that any of us leaving our yurt for'any reason could return in entirety. There was the inevitable milk, tea, and butter broth. • It was bitterly cold at this altitude of 4,000 f, but within the warm felt folds of the yurt, the blazing fire of sheep’s dung—precious fuel in a land lacking forests —provided warmth and much soothing, if acrid, smoke. There was more tea, and further exchanges or courtesies when we visited'the yurt ot Arash. a Mongpl lama who was a refugee from Sovietised Outer Mongolia* Arash was afield, but his woman,' Sereli, and his daughter, Khonkhor, cared for our needs. In each yurt we were careful to extend our earthened hearth, and not in the direction of the household god at the back of the round tent on a line with the low entrance.

THE ONLY PROPER EXISTENCE. The talk about the yurt fire always settled. back to what the Mongols would do now that they were at tha parting of the ways, courted by Chm* ese and Japanese alike. The older and ruling’ heads spoke; young Mongols listened attentively and nodded emphatic approval. It was agreed tht all the Mongol asks was “ deliverance from this eternal Chinese colonisation.” It is in such a spirit that the Mongols have sent, on invitation, their envoys to Nanking to plead for the right to live as free men. They argue that if the Chinese are to retain nominal control over Inner Mongolia, they must abandon hope of actual rule, preserve a pastoral life for the' Mongols, and sacrifice plans for agricultural development by Chinese colonists. The question arose at Olan Nor as to why the Mongols, seeing no end to the tide of colonisation, do not rise, proclaim their independence, and preserve their pastoral existence by their own efforts. I was told that where colonisation has not penetrated the Mongols are entirely autonomous, paying not a copper of tax to the Chinese. It was emphasised that in the. event’ of a proclamation of independence not even the largest and most efficient of Chinese armies could be other than swallowed up on the vast plateau, defeated by gruelling weather condition* and by men who are proud that always they have been warriors. But they have no leader. Consciousness of their own power was evident in the firelight of Undur Bayor’s yurt. After the dinner of jheep there came the Mongol singer. An elder, he sat and swayed_ as in a language replete with archaic words he chanted the tales of the days of Mongol glory when the horde under Genghis Khan battered its way even’to the very gates of Vienna. _ The Mongol believes still that re is superior to all other men, and that his mode of life is the_ only proper existence But the Chinese colonists are still pushing up Kweiha "Pass, "hey are sniffing., on t,o_ the Mongol plain and they are bringing their coffins with them.