I
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Glove
507
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Financing Committee has been very anxious to get the Canton
Bankow Railway joined up with the Canton Kowloon Railway. Our Government has also agreed with this, but subject to one condition, that is, after the opening of Whampoa as a commercial
port. Until the opening of Whampos, Kowloon remains the
centre of communication in South China and will become the key of
South China, if the two railways are linked up. Therefore, ve
must wait until Whampoa has been turned into a commercial port,
when South China has no need to depend on Hong Kong direct for communications, but can make Whampoa her centre for railroad
traffic to Hunan, Hupeh and the Yangtaze. Thus the centre of
commication will not be in Kowloon but in Whampoa”.
6.
This lecture of Mr. Sun Fo is interesting in two ways. In the first place it is a striking confirmation of the statement in Sir FHMay's confidential despatch of "the 19th November,1912, that "the Chinese now appreciate quite
clearly how vital the connection is to this Colony and their
ambition is, as I think it has ever been, either to establish
a port which shall with the help denied to Hong Kong of
connection with the trunk railways of China kill the trade of this port, or (if that cannot be accomplished) then to regain possession of this Colony and ita dependencies as soon as possible”.
7.
In the next place, the occasion on which this lecture was delivered is unusually interesting. On the 22nd September,1925, Mr. Li Ch'eng-yi informed the Colonial Secretary of Hong Kong by a formal letter that he had been appointed as the acting Managing Director of the Chinese Section of the Kowloon Canton Railway, *vice Mr. Ven Teh- chang who is called to Peking under order of the Ministry of Communications". But Mr. Sun Fo now says that, after the establishment of the Nationalist Government at Canton in July 1925, the Bureau of Reconstruction of the Provincial
Government
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A