CHINESE POLITICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 128, 8 September 1910, Page 4

CHINESE POLITICS.

It was recently cabled that terras are | being arranged for the return to power i' of Yuan-shih-kai, one. of the leading statesmen dismissed from office last year. Yuan ja an interesting character. : His dismissal was the result of an at- ' tempt by the M'anchus to regain the | ascendancy in the control of national j affairs. He -had 'been the right-hand man of the late Empress Dowager of China [ since the Boxer rebellion, succeeding to more than the .power of the late Li Hung Chang. A minor official, he first appealed to the. notice of the Empress Dowager by an act of treachery. When the late Emperor Kwangihsu asserted his power in 1898, and gathered round him a band of earnest reformers, Yuan-shih-kai was one of their number. The rapidity with which reform edicts issued from the Emperor alarmed the officials and. literati. Yuan-shih-kai, as events turned out, rightly guaged the strength of the movement, and determined to be traitor. When the Emperor prepared for his grand coup, the seizure of the Empress Dowager, he entrusted the details of it to Yuan-shih-kai. Instead of seizing the Empress Dowager, Yuan-shih-kai or4>S' .the bis who had been Viceroy of the Yang-tse provinces, known as Hu-kwang, c6mprisinsr Hu-pe and Honan, was appointed another. After that came news of the great man's downfall. Yuan-shih-kai was a moderate reformer. He woulfl not keep far ahead of what he judged the mn<?s of opinion in China would tolerate, tfnd in his relations with foreign Governments, while strenuously striving to keep China for the Chinese, and determined not to give away a foot of Chinese territory, !he stated exactly hifl opinion, neglecting the custom of Chinese diplomacy to becloud his meaning with a fog of words.