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Manifesto regarding the Shanghai Tragedy, from the Professors of the National University of Peking, June 9, 1925
The tragedy which has taken place in the International Settlement of Shanghai has filled the Chinese nation with horror and indignation. However, facts have been invariably distorted by different agencies for different purposes. Seeing that misrepresentations would not only aggravate the injustice done to the dead and the living, but may also tend to ferment other grave conflicts between the Chinese and foreigners, we feel it our duty to give the facts for the information of the world at large. Those who think with us that international harmony and justice are desirable will not fail, we trust, to pay due attention to the matter. The facts are clear enough. Strikes of Chinese workers, demanding the increase of wages, had been going on for some time in the Japanese cotton factories at Tsingtao and Shanghai, and a striker was shot and killed by the Japanese without any justifiable cause. Against this brutal act some Chinese students, who were merely young boys and girls, paraded as a manifestation of protest in the streets of Shanghai on May 30 last. They were armed with nothing more than pamphlets and handbills. The police of the International Settlement, who are practically under the complete control of British officials and Consul not only saw fit to prohibit the demonstration but also arrested a number of the students taking part in it. Then the rest of the students went to the police station demanding the release of their fellow-students. The police ordered the former to disperse. As they refused to go a British police inspector ordered "Shoot to kill." Six of the boys were killed on the spot and over forty seriously wounded. This did not, however, prevent the defenceless students from repeating their demonstration, so the firing of rifles and machine guns continued by the British controlled police for at least six days. The exact number of casualties is still unascertainable, but most reports show that at least seventy were killed and 800 wounded. They were all Chinese, and not a single British or any other national appears on the casualty list. Would any right-minded people regard these boys and girls as rioters and treat them with bullets and rounds of machine guns? Could their manifestation be reasonably interpreted as anti-foreign or "Bolshevised as some foreign-owned news agencies suggested? Were not the acts of the authorities deliberately committed, considering the fact that they did not cease for a period of six days? Why did not the British and Japanese Ministers in Peking give instructions to stop the killing immediately, if they did not approve or countenance it ? These are the questions we want only to submit and not to answer. People in Europe and America might think it unbelievable that officials of civilised Governments could ever commit or countenance such infernal acts, but explanations can be easily found if one realises that foreigners in China have long been privileged by stipulations of unjust treaties, and thereby have lost such sense of moral and legal responsibilities as their fellow-men hold in their home lands. Now bitter feelings prevail among all classes of the Chinese people; strikes in British and Japanese factories and boycotts against British and Japanese goods are spreading throughout the country. The Ministers and Consuls of Great Britain and Japan are still trying and may continue to try to uphold their prestige by their rifles and gunboats, but would their fellow men at home allow them to go on with this kind of atrocity? Would not the common conscience of mankind demand to have the wrongdoers punished and the wrongs righted?
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Reprinted from THE LABOUR MONTHLY,
"Face Pidgin"-The Chinese Struggle
By TIEN SEN SHIAO
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