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Hokitika Guardian, 3 July 1928, Page 2

The conditions in China after the recent ebullitions appear to be quietening down more or less satisfactorily. Regarding the outstanding leader of the Northerners, an exchange remarks that: Chang Tso-liu is now officially reported "dead” at his capital and "conjecture may cease." A bandit, who rose to lie tho Governor of a great province, and for time veritable Dictator of Northern China, Chang Tso-liu was assuredly a very remarkable man. Like all such military adventurers, ho hail a careful eye to the main chance—as witness the fortune of £1,090.000 left to his son. But he was patriotic to the extent of striving to keep foreigners—and more especially Russians and Japanese—out of China, and ho declared towards tho close, of his life that ho was fully prepared to make terms with his Southern rivals on Nationalist lines and keep entirely to the large area over which ho already exorcised domination. It is quite likely that for the time being the Nationalists will leave his successor unmolested in Manchuria. But even if the disappearance of Chang Tso-lin may make little difference to Manchuria, it seems likely to inaugurate n now order of things for the whole of the vast country south of the Great Wall. The Nationalists are, of course, Southerners racially, and in their political outlook, and they evidently mean to have done for ever with the old ascendency of tho North. Peking is to lose entirely its political and administrative status, and though it will remain a centre of art and culture, it is to he completely superseded as the political capital of the Republic bv Nanking. Even tho names of the old capital and the surrounding province have been altered, and the Nationalists, having thus obliterated tho chief sign and symbol of Manchu monarchical ascendancy, can now at last begin to build from tho foundations upward a new political and administrative fabric, in all its elements and materials essentially Chinese.