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fallen Commissioner, Mr. Ku.
4.
Another indication of the growing confidence
of General Li in his own position is a wholesale execution of "extremists", which was carried out on or about the 11th instant. The official statement put the number executed at five only, but press reports so consistently give a figure at least ten times as great that I hardly think the lesser total can be more than a polite fiction.
5.
Yet another gesture of self-confidence on the part of General Li is a notification abolishing the
Nationalist Army Headquarters at Canton. These Headquarters were left by Marshal Tseung Kai-shek in General Li's charge, when the latter departed for the Yangtsze, where in due course two fresh Headquarters came into being, one at Hankow and later another at Nanking. At the time of Marshal Tseung's retirement, the Nanking Government announced that the military affairs of the Kuomintang would be placed in the charge of a Military Council and General Li, taking this order as his text, has decreed the abolition of the Canton Headquarters as being a superfluity.
6.
Nevertheless General Li still pays lip- service to Nanking and even joins (as I believe hypocritic- ally) in appeals for the return of Marshal Tseung. It is, however, becoming more and more clear that in Kuangtung there is likely before long to be reversion to pure Tuchun rule.
Perhaps in time we may find that a Tuchun
7.
is easier to deal with than a bolshevized Chinese Soviet; but for the present both the officials and the press of Canton continue to indulge in most violent anti-British
diatribes