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troops, including the Russian-trained cadets from the Whampoa Military College, paraded down the Chinese esplanade facing the French and British Concessions on the island of Shameen. When the Chinese soldiers were opposite the island, they deliberately opened fire killing one Frenchman and wounding four British and one Frenchman. The fire was returned by the French and british and many casualties were inflicted on the Chinese, chiefly by the fire from a French machine gun. Consequent on this affair at Canton the strike of Chinese labourers in Hong Kong and the anti-British boycott in Kuang-tung was organized, not for industrial reasons, but as a patriotic protest against the unequal treaties which had been imposed on China by force.
8.
Japan, although the primary cause of the
Canton affair, was not directly concerned in it and
skilfully contrived so to use it as to direct Chinese
agitation away from herself. She settled the anti- Japanese strike in Shanghai in the following manner:- * On 12th
August the Japanese Consul General and the Chinese Commissioner for Foreign Affairs after protracted
negotiations signed an agreement by which the mill-owners
undertook to recognize the mill-hands' Union, when the
Chinese Government shall have produced and enforced labour
union regulations, and to make a charitable grant towards
the workers' losses during the strike, besides minor
concessions in the matter of pay and the powers of foremen.
By the end of August, some 50,000 employees of the Japanese
cotton mills had returned to work (Report on Foreign
Affairs, Vol. vi., No. 4, p.355).
9
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Since then the policy of Japan has inclined
to almost unreasonable patience in southern China and she
has studiously avoided any conflict either with the
Canton