THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1907. THE AWAKENING OF CHINA.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8547, 3 October 1907, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1907. THE AWAKENING OF CHINA.

It would be fatuous to regard the disorders in China, which have been marked within t'.ie past week by outbreaks in the provinces of Kiangsi and Kwangsi, as merely local disturbances due to temporary irritation against the Government and against the missionaries. From time im- . memorable it has been the custom of Chinese malcontents to protest against unpopular administration by riot and revolt; the Pekin Government in its turn having had the cooperating custom of beheading governors who could not keep order in their districts and replacing them by men who could. But though this has been the simple paternal method by which an absolute bureaucracy has managed to govern for thousands of years the greatest number of human beings ever gathered under any form of State authority, the impact of the West upon China has introduced factors which completely alter the old order of things. Europe had given to the Chinese a common hatred, a common grievance, and a common cause, wherefrom is being born a national spirit unknown in the long centuries through which the Flowery Kingdom appeared to its swarming millions as a world in itself. It has been very truly asserted by Europeans who know China, as well as any European can know it, that the sentiment of nationality, as it is felt by British, Americans, French, Germans, and others, is unknown to the peoples of the Chinese provinces. Nationality, however, is not instinctive in the human mind. It is a mode of thought produced by favourable environment the most prominent feature of such environment beingconsciousness of a dominating common interest. In France, as history teaches us, nationality arose when the loosely united provinces of the . French-speaking people were drawn I together in united resistance to Eng-

lish invasion and domination. That wonderful and heroic personage, Joan of Arc, was inspired by this new conception of French nationality, and, the time being ripe, was received as a national leader when she gave it utterance. The birth of English nationality itself is within the range of written history while that of Germany and of Ital> was seen by living men. It is therefore absurd to assume that though the Chinese have hitherto had no national consciousness, they are incapable of conceiving it or of being stirred by it. It is being awakened in them under our eyes and is unquestionably destined to alter the relations between China and Western Civilisation, just as the awakening of similar national consciousness altered the relations between France and England, between Italy and Austria, between Germany and her neighbours. China is being stirred from end to end by a deep sense of injury and wrong, made the more dangerous by the terrible struggle for existence induced by the inhuman crowding of her population upon their means of subsistence and by the vague hope of re--1 lief and escape embodied in the prospect of a successful assertion of Chinese superiority over the Western nations.