JUNE
TWENTY-THIRD
THE TRUTH.
A violent riot by operatives in a Japanese-owned cotton mill at Shanghai, in May, 1925, resulted in the death of a Chinese workman who was killed by a Japanese overseer. The incident was fraught with misfortune. The events that followed were tinged with a bitterness out of all proportion to any real injury suffered. The occasion was seized for proclaiming as a shibboleth the new sentiment of patriotism or nationalism, which is being rigorously exploited by Russian Bolsheviks who, outwardly, are more blatant Chinese patriots than the Chinese themselves.
At Tsingtao, on the 29th May, 1925, the Japanese mills were attacked, and the Chinese gendarmerie at that place were unable to disperse the rioters without the effective use of firearms, two rioters being killed and several wounded. On May 30th occurred at Shanghai the regrettable incidents which put a match to elements already in a state of combustion. It almost seemed that the strange concatenation of events was brought about with the curious irrelevance of things prepared by an unkind Fate. At Louza Police Station, which was assaulted and burnt by a mob in 1995, was violently born a new order, spreading abroad a contagion of semi-hysterical excitement and hatred.
The news of that evil day, considerably exaggerated and distorted, spread rapidly up the Yangtze valley and down the
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