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PACIFICATION AND PEACE NEGOTIATIONS IN THE
NORTH:
[December 23, 1900.
THE HONGKONG WEEKLY PRESS AND
success. It is to be feared that many do not stand by experience the horrors which such share the Prime Minister's confidence in the a condition implies. It is fortunate that the Concert, while agreeing with him about the physical constitution of the Chinaman pre- date. Chinese procrastination, of course, is vents him from working himself up to the largely responsible for the delay, but it requisite state of excitement to begin any cannot be denied that if there had been more serious movement till the returning breath real unity among the Powers the obstinacy of spring has sufficiently thawed his blood; of the Chinese Government could not have and much may be done by the Germans succeeded so well in putting off the day of and English during the intermediate period; settlement. The word "Concert" of late but the danger is plainly in the front, and years has come to have rather an unedifying it would be unwise not to take precautions significance, and the present Concert seems against it in time. The recently published hardly likely to add to the good name of précis of the interview between Li and Count these international assemblies. If the re- VON WALDERSEE indicates that, although presentatives of Europe, the States, and the old Viceroy is as willing as ever to bow Japan employ their abundant time to ad- his head to the inevitable during the con- vantage, the delay may not be altogether tinuance of the blast, his heart is with the unprofitable. At any rate, there will be no ex-reactionary party, and no confidence is to cuse if the many questions at issue in China be placed in his professions. That he was are not well threshed out and the remedies intimately mixed up in the combination ultimately applied such as meet the ex- which suppressed the Emperor there is now igencies of the case.
little doubt; and there is as little that were he restored to power, the old system with all its abuses would rapidly be restored. On the other hand LI, notwithstanding his extraordinary vitality, is not likely to remain long in the way, but there is a danger that too much dependence may be placed on this factor. On the whole, while the present situation is favourable to the cause of order, it is necessary to be prepared for a renewal of trouble; and as a fair amount of co-opera- tion on the part of the Powers can moinen- tarily be brought to bear, it is to be hoped that good use will be made of the present calm to bring matters to an issue.
(Daily Press, 18th December.) It is plain from recent telegrams from North China that the province of Chihli is by no means cleared of Boxers and disor- ganised Chinese soldiery yet, in spite of the fact that some weeks have elapsed since we were informed that this was so. Two small fights in the centre of the province on the - 10th and the 12th instant were reported by the Ostasiatische Lloyd telegrams appearing in our local evening contemporary on Satur- day. The first was an engagement between a large body of Boxers and a picket of the allied troops near Hosiwu, which culminated next day in the defeat and dispersal of the Boxers by a strengthened force of Allies. The affair of the 12th instant was about twenty miles west of Peking. No details are to hand beyond the statement that the Boxers attacked a small British force. An- other battle is reported from Chihli, but the Chinese combatants in this case were not Boxers, but apparently regular troops. A Tientsin telegram, according to our Shang- hai correspondent, reported last week the rout by the Germans at Taangehou, to the south of Tientsin, of General MEI, the killing of forty-three of his men, and the looting of his baggage. It is also stated that his prisoners, certain notorious Boxers, were released a story which is incredible. The British are said to regret the attack on General MEI, who has opposed the Boxers and befriended missions. MEI, it will be remembered, was in command of a body of foreign-drilled troops during the previous Viceroyalty of LI HUNG-CHANG in Chihli. The story is a strange one, but as fuller details are not to hand yet the only course is to reserve our judgment. There is, how- ever, no doubt that Chihli is by no means in the quiet state in which we were led to believe it was. The flying excursions of the allied troops have not succeeded in reducing even the neighbourhoods of Peking and Tientsin to peace. Nor does the approach of winter appear to have frozen Boxer activity, though this activity manifests itself only in small guerilla warfare. It certainly seems curious that the Boxers have managed to resist all efforts to crush them in the pro- vince where the Allies have had so many men at their disposal. The name Boxer no doubt includes all the disbanded soldiery from the wreck of the Imperial troops who fought the Allies in August. The difference between the Boxer and the ordinary Chinese soldier, undisciplined by European drill, is little, and the remnants of the inferior troops no doubt have easily adopted Boxer garb and manners.
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Apart from these engagements, there is no news from the north. A correspondent writes to us from Tientsin and reports nothing stirring either there or at Peking. He had, moreover, the same story himself from a very well known correspondent a Peking. The protracted nature of the peace negotiations perhaps prevents the interest in them from becoming acute. Even the hitch over the Chinese representatives' credentials caused but little sensation. The difficulty has been easily solved, and those who took the opportunity to heap abuse on the "pretended peacemakers must now be engaged in explaining their remarks away. What new obstacles may arise to check the progress of negotiations it is impossible to foreseé. Lord SALISBURY cheerfully ob- served in the debate on the Address that he felt more confidence in the stability and success of the international Concert than he did regarding the date of the achievement of'
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THE POLICY OF PERSISTENCE IN CHINA.
(Daily Press, 20th December.) The policy of persistence is apparently be ginning to bear some fruit in China, not only with the Chinese but with foreign Powers like Russia and her follower France. For the Chinese at large, it is to their credit that they have commenced to perceive that they have egregiously stultified themselves, and the ebullition which Russia sought to arouse has not proved so dangerous or successful as those of her statesmen who have been working the issues expected or desired. The telegraphic sketches of Lord SALISBURY'S and Mr. MCKINLEY's speeches respectively turn out to have largely missed the point of the original, and it would seem that in the main the ideas at first promulgated as to the course negotiations were to take are being adhered to. These consist apparently in the unconditional return of the Emperor in person to Peking; and the intrusive Dowager, whose misconduct really caused all the trouble, is beginning to see that she has become de trop, and con- templates retiring into a wise seclusion. She is a woman, she has lost the confidence of all parties in the state, and personally she discovers that she has become but a puppet it the hands of ignorant and dangerous men such as TUNG FUHSIANG and It is improbable that, if she really and actually takes this course, and refrains from any attempt at interfering in affairs of state, there will be any attempt to bring her to a punishment, which, how. ever, she has abundantly earned. The attempt to rule China from Hsianfu has practically broken down, the Dowager's so- called Imperial Edicts have come to be so much waste paper; and little skilled as her reduced crew of satellites are in the arts of government, they cannot but feel that they are now helpless, and that the time has come when discretion is the best of policies. Meanwhile it is well to remember that this position is causing a state of tension throughout the Empire which its enfeebled constitution is hardly in a state to resist, and if matters are not advanced to a speedy issue, the feeble bonds which prevent the whole from falling into anarchy may any time be snapped. As at the close of the Yuan and Ming dynasties respectively, and as also happened in 1860-65, there are too many signs of the recrudescence of the spirit of
his crew.
mere
wanton plunder. Piracy is beginning to raise its head, not only in obscure localities but upon the highways and the coast, and those who visited the basin of the Yangtze during its occupation by the followers of HUNG SIUTSW'EN under-
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THE CHINESE AND RESPECT FOR ANTIQUITY.
(Daily Press, 15th December.) Although, compared with the old empires of Egypt and Babylon, China is but a thing of yesterday, she may yet claim a reasonable antiquity. It is true that the great Em- peror T8IN SHIHWANGTI first amalgamated the whole in'o a single state some two and a quarter centuries before the Christian era, but every schoolboy in China knows that for centuries antecedent there existed
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numerous kingdoms which, although not always in harmony, still claimed a common descent, and had in this a common bond of union like that that prevailed in old Greece when the curtain of history first opens, China possesses a literature claiming to be of ancient date, and there are undoubted fragments which go back as far as the times of HOMER, and which, though unfortunately overmuch "restored some two thousand years ago, do throw some light on the anti- quities of the land. In these respects China is to the historian fortunately situated when compared with Babylon and Egypt, or even old Greece. As a people the Chinese have, in outward show at least, an exalted rever- ence for antiquity, and quote as models of government in the present day facts and opinions alleged to be thousands of years old. WEN WANG, for instance, even then as shadowy a sovereign as VORTIGERN to the present generation of Englishmen, was boldly quoted by the sage MENCIus as an example of all that a monarch should be, and rules of governance within, and pre- cedents for foreign intercouse without, were drawn from his supposed administration of an assumed Empire. With all these things in view, we might with confi- dence expect to be able to turn to China as par excellence the land where an- tiquities were carefully guarded, and the highest respect was paid to the remains of antiquity. It is one of the most remarkable things connected with a remarkable people with whom duality is a primary instinct, that in nothing is the strange gulf which