CHINESE AFFAIRS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXV, Issue 10713, 27 August 1913, Page 5

CHINESE AFFAIRS.

POSITION NOT ENCOURAGING. SCRAMBLE FOpTcONCESSIONS. 'Times'—'Sydney Sun' Special Cables. (Received Last Night, 6.15 o'clock.) LONDON, August 26. The Times' Pekin correspondent states that the situation is not encouraging at Nanking, and despite internal dissensions, resistance is still being offered the Government's armies. The flabbiness of the Provincial administration is encouraging isolated risings. The country is flooded with depreciated notes, and the scramble for concessions is re-com-mencing. Anyone possessing a little cash is able to obtain railway contracts and orders for war material. British enterprise is suffering.

THE BLUE BOOK'S TALE. NATION IN CHAOS. (Received Last Night, 10.10 o'clock.) LONDON, August 26. A blue book dealing with China in 1912, up to November, emphasises the bitterness of the Nationalist or Sun Yat Sen party against Presir dent Yuan Shih Kai and their equal hostility to foreign powers as shown by their persistent agitation against the recent foreign loan and their attempt to collect native subscriptions instead. The blue book shows that the failure of the'attempt was partly due* to patriotic subscribers contributing bad paper money, issued during the revolution and un-negotiable.

President Yuan Shih Kai estimates that a million unpaid and unemployable soldiery were left armgd after the revolution, arid distributed throughout China, with the result that a long series of mutinies, murders, and looting occurred. The report of the ;senior. British naval officer at Canton declares that Chinese patrols were invariably met, steaming as fast as possible away from any disturbance in th© West River.

The Chronicle commenting on .the blue book remarks that the sum total of human •misery in China, since the fall of the Manchus, is staggering. Although the Chinese are a clever race, the blue book shows them to be so steeped in the tradition, of dishonesty and individualism, as to be almost incapable of organising their chaos. No substitute has been found for the national unifying principle and religious respeet that was formerly paid to the Manchus.